How to Facilitate the Digital Dialog

 Dialogue architecture is grounded in the Enterprise Ecological Adaption school of thought.

Organizations (enterprises) are socially constructed realities that emerge from the "enactment" of the members considered within and outside of the organization. Consequently, organizations are social realities that emerge from the communication patterns of people. Communication, whether verbal, non-verbal or digital, "is" the coordination mechanism that makes organizations possible and keeps them "real".The point is how to EA or other tools to facilitate such increasingly complex digital dialog with enriched content and context today? 

 Dialogue architecture is grounded in the Enterprise Ecological Adaption school of thought; because of its focus on sense-making; it would be about fostering dialogues that enable innovation. The notion of "dialogue architecture" is a good characterization of how to re-think the discipline and practice for practitioners who wish to make the transition from EITA to EA. EA is, at large, the process of facilitating productive communication and dialogue between organizational decision-makers and thereby assist the organization in continuously designing and redesigning itself in pursuit of new and more viable strategies.

Coordination, expertise, responsibility are three building blocks of Business Architecture. Dialogue is a means of coordination based on expertise and responsibility. Dialogue is relevant when people can understand what is communicated and are able to translate it into action or expertise. The premise that information systems are a means for communication and coordination could be said that enterprise architecture should be about designing dialogues with consideration of cohort improvement factors. The outcome of any cohort effect depends on a) the size of the cohort, b) the goals and motivation of each member, c) interpersonal styles of the members, and d) the respective subconscious views of each about the other.

EA as dialog facilitator: An EA professional that adopts Enterprise Ecological Architecture will witness his/her worldview transform in multiple ways. Firstly, his/her "raison d'être" will shift from designing efficient IT platforms to sustainable organizations. Secondly, the way the EA professional frames his/her role in the context of "doing" EA will shift from that of Master Architecture/Engineering to Skillful Transformation designer/facilitator and coach. With this second transformation, the EA professional will pay great attention to communication patterns in the organization. An EA practitioner will be mainly concerned with "designing" an organization by "designing" the communication patterns from which it emerges. Given this focus, the EA practitioners must become knowledgeable about the theories, models, and techniques from organizational communication studies in order to guide his/her interventions. 

Though EA >= Dialogue Architecture, it can become an effective communication tool to facilitate multi-channel, content-enriched, and context-driven digital dialogue within a business ecosystem, and further enforce the three building blocks of BA: Coordination, expertise, responsibility

Posted in: Change Management,Digitalization,EA