Collaboration: key to EA success
Our previous article looked at the strategic considerations for any organisation’s Enterprise Architecture journey: ensuring the vision and strategy is defined, gaining the support of executives, and guarding against creating overly-conceptual ‘Ivory Towers’.This article explores the so-called “softer issues” relating to EA: collaboration and change leadership.CollaborationEA, like many emerging...
Strategy for EA Success
Our first article in this series introduced some of the most common reasons for the failure of EA practices. We explored issues relating to the Chief Architect, the core EA team, and the positioning of the EA function within the organisation. Now, we turn our attention to another consideration - that of strategy.EA vision, strategy and directionIf the guiding coalition fails to establish a...
Successful EA - the people aspect
Enterprise architecture (EA) is more relevant today than ever before. We’re seeing new technologies, new market forces, more competition, and rapidly changing business models coming to the fore.Together, these present a burning requirement for many organisations to ‘digitise the enterprise’. EA helps to do this by providing the organisation’s leadership with a complete view of its operating...
Making it stick
Shifting from a state of architecture execution to architecture leadership is the next step in the EA journey.Kotter’s final two stages guide an organisation on the optimum ways that change can be embedded, anchored and matured. From an Enterprise Architecture (EA) perspective, these phases relate to the ‘professionalising’ of the EA practice.Our previous article looked at generating tangible “...
Generating short-term wins
Quick wins, even on a small scale, become the catalyst to building momentum in enterprise architecture.By this point in the process of business transformation (see my previous Industry Insight), the company has established and communicated the vision for change, and then begun the process of empowering the right teams to start executing on that vision.Now, as it starts to package some of the...
Empowering EA
It is critical for the business to communicate the enterprise architecture vision of business transformation.Following the creation of the enterprise architecture (EA) vision – which I explored in my previous Industry Insight – I now turn to the crucial steps of communicating the vision of business transformation, and empowering broad-based action from the teams required to execute the vision....
Kotter's eight-stage journey continued
The third stage of the change management expedition encompasses the head and the heart.A shared vision A guiding coalitionIn my previous Industry Insight, I looked at the first two stages of John Kotter's eight stages of change management, exploring his timeless blueprint for effective change leadership.In Kotter's third stage – "developing a vision and strategy" – the guiding coalition sets to...
Beginning Kotter's eight-stage journey
This is the first in a series of Industry Insights that looks at John Kotter's eight stages of change management, and explores his timeless blueprint for effective change leadership. These change management principles can gel with an enterprise architecture (EA) roadmap to achieve business transformation. Establishing urgency (stage one) and creating a guiding coalition (stage two) set the...
