Enterprise Architecture as a Strategic Planning Tool

EA is both an input to strategy (business & IT) and an outcome from it.

One of the critical challenges of the modern organization is the need to respond in a high-velocity business environment -fast, dynamic, highly-changing/fluctuating. In such cases, the process of traditional ways of 'Strategic Planning' itself is taking a hit.

In such circumstances, how do you see the role of Enterprise Architecture as a Strategic Planning Tool for the company? How can EA help to discover business strategy? How should EA provide essential input to strategy, also capture outcome from it?

1. The capability of Enterprise Architecture practice is to support the changing needs of the business,: As we live in times where the businesses are constantly under pressure to re-evaluate their strategy. In traditional methods, strategy/planning & architecture decisions are made "upfront" considering the number of uncertainties was minimal or under control. However, this approach may not work anymore. EA practices should support the changing needs of the business. 

2. In effect, EA becomes a key player in an ongoing, dynamic 'strategic conversation' with and on behalf of many others in the organization or overall enterprise. However, EA is not the only player in that 'conversation'; and to support the dynamic nature of that conversation, the architecture needs to be much more versatile and describe much more than a single static 'future state'. 

3. Enterprise Architecture creates a platform that enables strategic planning efficiently. The biggest value proposition of EA is the integrated view of IT & business, further enabled by EA repository tool; it brings slicing and dicing capability that can provide tremendous inputs to IT Strategic Planning and can be leveraged further for the overall strategic planning of the organization. 

4. EA is both an input to strategy (business & IT) and an outcome from it. It's an outcome from strategy because just about any strategic change will require some kind of change of structure, policy or procedure - in other words, the 'content' modeled within the architecture. It's an input because it describes the structures and purpose of the enterprise, to guide strategic questions such as:
   - "Given this structure, what strategy can we support?"
   - "If we change our strategy, what structures do we need to change?"
   - "What new options exist in structures that could support new strategies?"
   - "Does this strategy align with the enterprise purpose?" 

5. Strategy and architecture are fundamentally different, in fact, are almost orthogonal: strategy provides decisions, architecture primarily provides decision-support. Often the boundaries between those two roles will blur, but we do need to be aware that there’re good reasons as to why they should overlap. 

5. Carefully differentiate between the Architecture Practice and the Engineering Practice: the architecture practice delivers meta-models. The engineering practice uses these meta-models to build/change the real thing. Architecture is abstract, meta-model driven, engineering is a concrete model-driven. The architecture delivers the meta-model for Engineering. The EA Practice builds a meta-model for enterprises. It is Enterprise Engineering that uses that meta-model to model the actual Enterprise. Part of the Enterprise Engineering goals is providing information for strategic planning.  

7. EA has the potential to provide direct as well as indirect value to stakeholders. At the high-level, an architect works primarily with patterns, but that isn't quite the same as a meta-model. The term "meta-model' has a very specific meaning, as defining the formal structure for a model. The scenario is: In order for architecture to become valuable, engineering has to follow, although EA need not necessarily depend on enterprise engineering efforts. Indeed, an effective Enterprise Architecture is a strategic planning tool in order to maximize the value being provided to the business. 

Read more about EA roles:
EA as Communication Glue

EA as Strategic Planning Tool

EA as Silo Integrator

EA as Problems Solver

EA as Governance Champion

EA as Complexity Master
EA as Process Conductor
EA as Capability Producer
EA as Change Agent
EA as Strategy Steward
EA as Innovation Enthusiast 

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CIO as Chief Inspection Officer: Five Perspectives upon Software Quality

Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements.

Every company desires to have 'quality software.' But the challenge is that many people struggle to provide a definition or rationale. It is an age-old adage that you can't nail software quality down to a single definition. And perhaps we try too hard to come up with one-size fits all into a single sentence. In fact, there are quite a few perspectives on quality software.

1. Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements. It is impossible to deliver an acceptable application to a business without a clear understanding of what is to be delivered. This is a simple idea, but capturing requirements at the level necessary to get it right the first time is difficult and potentially expensive.  

2. Easy to Use: A better user interface can make the high-quality software even more qualified, many times, lack of user adoption is one of the issues to fail new software apps. Design thinking is more critical than ever to today's customer, user-centric digital environment, as there are always alternatives and better solutions emerging from the market soon.  

3. Responsive - meets the needs of the business and doesn't waste time; something will change, and you want to cheaply and quickly confirm that the corresponding changes to the deployed software keep it working (something could be the requirements or any hardware or software component that is used by the software under consideration). 

4. Testability: if the requirements are not specified as [largely automated] tests, it's hard to know whether they've been met. Every $1 spent on requirements and specification and design testing is likely to result in $4 of cost avoidance later on. It's about moving the spending on testing to earlier in the life cycle where it costs less to fix problems, reduces the cost of development and results in increased quality. Regardless of what they deem as good quality, the challenge is in being able to measure that quality. Having the right process and tools to provide those key metrics is a fundamental requirement to then put in place actions to drive up quality 

5. Maintainable - Most systems cost more to maintain than build! Therefore, software quality is defined by a number of factors – it is having that capability to capture real metrics that often drives quality improvement initiatives. 

To use an old adage there’s no silver bullet- and to effectively lead an organization into good (not always best) practice to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization.

Read More about magic "I" in CIOs:

CIO as Chief Inspiration Officer

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer II

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer III

CIO as Chief Insight Officer

CIO as Chief Influence Officer

CIO as Chief Innovation Officer

CIO as Chief Intrapreneur Officer

CIO as Chief Integration Officer

CIO as Chief Intelligence Officer

CIO as Chief Information Officer

CIO as Chief Investigation Officer

CIO as Chief Investment Officer

CIO as Chief Interpretation Officer

CIO as Chief Inclusiveness Officer

CIO as Chief Imagination Officer

CIO as Change Agent

CIO as Governance Champion

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Top Ten Characteristics in "Ultra-Leadership"

“Wisdom begins in wonder.” Socrates

At the age of digitalization and knowledge economy, the business environment is much more dynamic and connected; things are moving or have moved from a "decisive and authoritative", “command & control” leadership style/engagement to a "participative, collaborative, social" leadership style/engagement. Thus, leaders and managers need to cultivate the new mindset/ skillset to make this paradigm shift smoothly. In order to lead today’s multi-generational, multicultural and hyper-connected workforce effectively, here are top ten "Ultra-leadership" characteristics.  

1.    Influence

“Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.” John Maxwell

Leadership is Influence: The leader’s influence is based on the courage to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridge. To "influence" means to be able to help shape other people's views or opinions towards one's own views or perspectives

High influence takes vision, confidence, insight, resource, optimism, creativity, etc.  It’s a skill to be learned, it's well blending of persuasive communication, exemplary leadership, and personal sacrifice, all held together by a collection of confidence. Great leadership influence is thought-provoking, insightful, and unimaginable, great leaders know it’s not about how successful they are, but how they can bring hope, value, and delight to the others.

2.    Trust

 “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.” George MacDonald

Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship/team. Without trust, you will never create a positive workplace environment. With trust, leaders must then have the integrity that is consistency in what you think, what you say and what you act. – Walking the Talk.

Trust is one of the key ingredients of future corporate leadership. To cope with an uncertain future, leaders need to enable trust. Trust is the only way to deal with uncertain situations; trust can be cultivated by giving the right advice, the right guidance, the right direction. Influence begins with trust, but influence does not necessarily come as a giving to a person with a high trust index.

3.    Innovation

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”  Steve Jobs 

Innovation is business’s strategic imperative today, it's the requirement for all leaders; not just entrepreneurs; creative leaders may have natural curiosity to dig through; innovative leadership will be a champion for the culture of innovation, enjoy divergent thinking and new ideas with openness; tolerate failure or reward the one who thinks differently.

Innovation is an adventure, it takes a vision to blueprint either future of the business or a better version of services, it takes leadership teams’ imagination and creativity, discipline, and process. Innovation also takes courage, courage to fail is critical and probably even more so is management acceptance to allow those failures and not penalize those that had a great plan to develop and execute but still failed.

4.    Love 

“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”  Thomas Carlyle 

Is Love an ingredient of leadership? Leadership is about believing in a better world, having a VISION and sharing it with others to make your dreams come true. That requires Faith AND LOVE. Faith without love is fanaticism; love makes leadership influence deeper and broader

What do leaders love? The vision?  The promise?  The belief? People or ideology?  For sure Leaders are driven by passion and love of something, true leadership's basis is freedom and liberty. True leadership comes from the heart:

-   'H' is the Heart of feelings, the confidence, purpose, drive

-   'E' is ego and empathy 

-  ' A' is your attitude toward your prospects and profession 

-   'R' is for physical, mental, and spiritual reserve 

-   'T' is for toughness – and the toughest thing is love

5.    Empathy 

“The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.” Mehmet Oz  

Many think empathy as one of the necessary ingredients for contemporary leadership, empathy is the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings; or the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.  

From leadership perception, if you can understand how people behave, what they desire and what their fears are, you are better armed to manage them in order to gain their support. Therefore, the heterogeneous leadership with the cognitive difference is needed in today’s dynamic working environment and diversified workforces

6.    Adaptability 

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”  ― Charles Darwin

The business and world become over-complex and hyper-connected than ever, effective leaders need to have the capability to deal with complexity: An intellectual understanding of the global business context—in other words, an ability to comprehend just how complex it can be to do business around the world. Therefore, corporate leadership faces adaptability imperatives. Leadership in the coming decade will need to be more adaptive and more distributed—the opposite of the command-and-control leadership that has dominated the twentieth century. The adaptive leaders today don’t issue orders so much as they exert their influence over diverse groups of talent.

Effective leaders should have the ability to adapt to changes, adaptive leaders will inspire crowdsourcing and crowd storming, and adaptive leadership teams comprising a diverse range of individuals with a cognitive difference will be able to draw on a wider set of experiences in order to inform their decision making. It’s meritocracy at its best – a highly diverse set of people collaborate seamlessly to represents the nature of how successful organizations work today.

7.    Balance

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.” -George Santayana 

Leaders need to cultivate the culture of balance --the collective mindset about how they do things here and balance the diversified viewpoints, creativity, and discipline; opportunity and risk,  the team's collective capabilities upon which strength & skills available, and balance of the long-term strategic goals with short-term tactical tasks.

The most important decisions for a leader are great people's decisions because a leader's success will be determined by the leader's people decisions. A leader must build a high-performance team with a balance of strength to gain a competitive advantage. Once you know the strengths of your team, these individuals should participate in deciding what is most important and how to achieve the needed goals. 

8.    Humility

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, When his/her work is done, his/her aim fulfilled. They will say: We did it ourselves." Lao-Tzu

 Leadership humility is more of a mindset, as the leader’s attitude of stewardship is a key enabler of a learning organization. Leadership in the future will be about listening, observing, encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding.

The emphasis on knowledge creates pressure for leaders to quite possibly be "the brightest person in the room" (not always the case today!) while the need to engage and enable others emphasizes characteristics like humility and inclusiveness. These characteristics don't always sit comfortably together, that’s why the leaders also need to learn how to lead from behind, with sound judgment in recognizing the best talent in the organization.

9.    Wisdom

“Wisdom begins in wonder.” Socrates 

Wisdom combines knowledge, reflection, and experience; a senior leader may lead from experience; a younger leader may lead from imitation, but an “ageless” wise leader will lead from reflection. A wise leader has the courage to break through barriers and constraints, but also has essential pieces of awareness, grows a depth of empathy and goes beyond smartness. 

A wise leader is a good communicator upon thinking deeper, rather than just speaking louder;  upon knowing when to voice out, when to keep silent; use fewer words to express more; master of crowd-sourcing and enjoying collective wisdom. A wiser leader can also be a good promoter, to sell the vision, failure, and wisdom, with crucial skills such as the creative ability to come up with fresh ideas, the analytic ability to recognize the truly good solutions and the practical ability to convince the value and gain support.

10.Maturity 

“Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values.”  Joshua L. Liebman 

Maturity is one of the essential ingredients of leadership. By using this word, it often means: Taking personal responsibility and not blaming others. Giving (or sharing) credit. Not taking credit for everything. Being open-minded. Being an independent thinker and unbiased communicator. 

Though maturity is not necessarily equal to emotional intelligence, it’s part of EQ, Emotional Intelligence as a Human quality has elements such as:

Self-awareness (knowing our strengths and weaknesses)

Self-regulation (controlling our emotions)

Empathy (understanding the emotions of others

Motivation (having a passion/drive for achievement & continuous improvement)

Social skills (building rapport with others and influencing others).  

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Ten Big Gaps in EA

EA brings more than just agreement or consensus. EA should be bringing understanding, including asking questions that may not otherwise be asked.

Many EA practices are still hidden in ivory towers.  What doesn't EA do well? What needs to be further refined and enhanced or extended to increase the value the EA offers to those enterprises which choose to invest in and use it? And where are the biggest gaps in EA?

1. The gap between the holistic promise of EA and the limited delivery scope and limited influence to only IT. The real problem is that EA being left outside is the narrow scope. That narrow scope is often defined by the frameworks and not what is needed by the enterprise. EA methods are too focused on (technical) architecture, and not enough on supporting capability management, innovation, continuous improvement, and measuring!  

2. Lack of common definition and understanding; Enterprise architecture is a way of thinking about structures, flows, and the relationships between them. EA is a mind-set, a way of thinking. The gap exists due to:
   Lack of common, clear purpose;
   Lack of clarity as a product;
   Lack of a well-understood set of deliverable components/products;
   Lack of perception of value to the business by all levels of the business;
   Lack of visibility to the business of a cohesive EA structure;
   Lack of modeling standards & consistency in leveling & presentation;
   Lack of traceability down the levels to implementations;
   lack of expertise.  

3. Another gap is the senior management support. This applies to all the C-level (including the CIO), SVPs and VPs in the organization. If senior management doesn't understand or believe in the business benefits EA can or should deliver, they'll likely not support it, or only give it half-baked support. And we all know what happens to half-baked ideas and initiatives.  

4. Another gap is Enterprise Architecture staffing. For many EA groups, they are staffed with IT techies who don't understand and don't care to understand how their companies make profits. The starting point is communications. It is important that EA practitioners improve their ability to communicate the value that they bring, or can bring to their organizations. 

5. There is a gap upon the organizational culture, which in many cases is tied directly to the gaps above. Culture has a way of restricting mindsets and staff selection - sometimes in good ways, sometimes in not so good ways, especially if it creates a drag on a company's ability to innovate and continuously improve. EA group can transition from this technical mentality to a more enterprise-focused mentality, especially when culture and mindsets may put a drag on change 

6. The Gaps between team silos. Where EA can take the lead (and add more value) is to break the silos between the different teams that all are involved in the management of individual IT portfolios including but not limited to application portfolio, technology portfolio, information portfolio, demand-portfolio, change / existing project portfolio, IT risk, IT finance, etc. Often these silos have their own tools, methodologies, frameworks, people, etc. To get the EA wheel running, organizations need to break the silos, improve reusability,  integrate the dots between the individual portfolios, implement automated workflows, etc ... 

7. EA is often left outside a business because it is reputed to BRING VALUE ONLY to COMPLEX problems or tamed issues. EA needs to have more business-focused methods
   * more reuse (and perhaps increased effort in refining reference models?)
   * More support for integration with other frameworks
   * More support for modeling enterprise structure
   * more clarity and simplicity - value and content
   * increased competency
   * more business prioritization on where EA resources are directed
   * more management support
   * more maturity
   * more focus on silo breaking
   * more delivery on promises/value/fulfillment of objectives and expectations  

8. EA speaks its own language, neither business language nor IT language. EA creates another layer of the silo. In order to bridge the gap,
   --EA should help to bridge the multitude of viewpoint
   --EA should help to manage multi-disciplinary knowledge
   --EA should help to leverage multi-choice of strategy
   --EA should help to balance multi-facet of facts and data.

9. The Gap exists perhaps because EA is not engaged enough. EA brings more than just agreement or consensus. EA should be bringing understanding, including asking questions that may not otherwise be asked. EA should also include the past experience to help avoid pitfalls that may be common without that understanding. In all of these cases, EA methodology brings valid tests to target the mentioned scenario, even if the person applying those practices is less familiar with the EA process than a practiced architect. 

10. What may be another underlying cause of these gaps is the overall EA group's maturity. There are many reasons for that, including changes in business leadership, reorganization of business teams or units or accountabilities, and difficulties in getting visibility. Some of the major EA frameworks get too overwhelming; they are so general that they become overly abstract, making it difficult to actually map one's reality

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What're the most Effective Strategic Tools for CIOs?

The "strategic" part of the planning process is the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment.

Strategic planning identifies where the organization wants to be at some point in the future and how it is going to get there. Although typical strategy sessions are an annual, week-long event, the strategy should be 30-40% of any C-level executive's job in their actions and plans, on an ongoing basis, albeit far more informal than the annual event. What’re the most effective strategic tools for CIOs? IT Roadmap or Enterprise Architecture?

 As in reality, most of the IT strategic plans are built based more on an empiric approach, and many IT strategic plans are either disconnect from business strategy or failure to execute effectively. In addition, should CIOs simply develop IT plans to support existing business strategy or should CIOs, in addition, be working in the business to identify areas where IT can make a positive contribution to the bottom line?

1. An Effective IT Strategic Planning is Critical to the Long-term Organizational Success

The "strategic" part of the planning process is the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. Skills in strategic planning are critical to the long-term success of your organization.

• The form of planning includes: 
  a) Taking a wide look around at what's going on outside the organization and how it might affect the organization (an environmental scan), and identifying opportunities and threats
  b) Taking a hard look at what's going on inside the organization, including its strengths and weaknesses (perhaps doing a SWOT analysis)
  c) Establishing statements of mission, vision, and values (some prefer to do that as the first step in planning)
  d) Establishing goals to accomplish over the next (usually) three years or so, as a result of what's going on inside and outside the organization
  e) Identifying how those goals will be reached (strategies, objectives, responsibilities, and timelines). 

• There is a set of goals associated with each strategy - typically a balanced scorecard view - and all strategic execution subordinate functions, contribute to those goals. The WHY (strategy) is potentially satisfied by a set of WHATs (business initiatives) that are executed by a set of HOWs (project efforts). Projects have elements in multiple functional organizations, including IT, so the IT strategy is satisfied just through the WHAT-HOW transitions from corporate strategy. This does not preclude another level of WHAT-HOW transitions within any functional organization, including IT - in fact, it is recommended. Two key points to remember while proceeding through this module are:
  a) The planning process is at least as important as the planning document itself
  b) The planning process is never "done" -- the planning process is a continuous cycle that's part of the management process itself 

• The IT strategic plan needs to be a community effort, not something the IT team does alone in a corner. You need to talk to the business people, find out what their key initiatives are, and discuss how IT can facilitate, enable or support their initiatives. Talk about shared goals, and shared risks. Discuss timelines and milestones. Identify metrics and KPIs that will be shared across teams, and talk about funding and resource commitments. In many cases, the non-IT players at the big table do not know what IT is capable of providing. Getting engaged at the strategy level communication, if possible, allows far more robust business initiative definition, potentially leveraging the capabilities of IT. This, by itself, will start to ingrain IT into the business more closely. 
  

2. The "Business Strategic Plan" is one of the best strategic tools for IT

 IT strategic plan must be closely tied to that of the business. At the same time, it must be crafted in such a way that it matches (or enhances) the maturity level of the organization. It must also be compelling so that it does not simply sit on the shelf after it is developed. 

• IT strategic planning is a necessary process that parallels or follows a business strategic planning process. But largely a process that cuts across all of IT and hopefully Business. First does you organization have a Strategic Business Plan and is you IT strategy part of that. Do you have an IT Strategy that links to the Business Strategy? Take care to not distance yourself from directly linked business value - that is a sure way to become a commodity, and for your business to not be able to realize all the great benefits that integral IT can provide. Take Business strategy as the basis. Then carry-out an As-is assessment of the IT environment and create IT strategy accordingly 

• Once you've established the action point, you can translate those strategic imperatives into IT initiatives. Whether you do this exercise through roadmaps, "strategy" documents, EA, or smoke signals is irrelevant as long as you ensure IT reflects where the business is going. ? For IT to be effective, you need to accomplish three things:
  1) Get the "utility" aspect of IT solidified
  2) Build your staff into capable business experts rather than inflexible technicians
  3) Learn your business, and its strategic imperatives  

• On of the key ways that a CIO can become a business leader (and not just a technology leader) is to become connected at the hip with the business. WHAT are you going to do to enable each and every business initiative defined in corporate strategy (assuming you have a corporate strategy that is not just a 3-5 year financial plan, and actually has strategy efforts defined). Then within the IT ranks, you can take each of these WHATs, and figure out the HOW that will implement and execute the strategy effectively. Back this up with descriptions of the projects, portfolio cost, benefit and outline approach, technology, aggregate risk, dependencies and organizational structure changes. 

3. EA as IT Strategic Tool

Enterprise Architecture (not IT architecture with an E in front of it) is the cross-functional governance entity that facilitates effective enterprise-holistic decision-making aligned with each strategy and the inter-dependencies of these strategies. EA can be used very well for not only IT Strategic road mapping and planning but also business planning and road mapping. In some mature organizations, it’s happening already. And they are reaping the results.

• EA is, in fact, a key mechanism in strategic planning; but it should be a strategic tool not only for the CIO but for the whole organization. In the ideal world, EA contributes to the IT strategic planning in various ways and forms, but IT planning would be only one of EA’s core processes and duties - can be its most important in some organizations. An IT roadmap could be well a result of applying an EA approach in IT strategic planning process. EA is the structured approach to designing a target environment. The Roadmap is how to get there. Both are two sides of the same coin. 

• How can EA frameworks be used to develop IT Strategy for the enterprise? EA frameworks probably should help to put questions intelligently at least on Strategic Business direction of the IT. If you believe IT Strategy is set of initiatives [with budget, capabilities] which can help the organization move from point A to Point B, then EA framework can help.

a - Identify current process, standards, practices of IT in the organization
b - Create a road map for 5 yrs for IT in the organization
c - Do a Gap analysis
d - Propose the IT strategy. 

e-Create Vision, IT Principles
f-Do the Current analysis [this need to be scoped. or else it might take ages to complete]
g-Define target State [this need to be scoped. or else it might take ages to complete]
h-Do Gap and document assumptions.
i-Create Roadmap.

• Start with Survey, Create business model [identify what- business functions and sub functions], create organization chart [Who, department, structure], Create matrix of the business model and org structure. you will understand who to talk to, do some study on the interview questions- they should generally seek the functional goals and objectives. pain points, areas of improvement, IT expectations etc., applying WHY model and WHAT model are very useful for the top executives of the large organizations. When talking about the business model, you need to differentiate WHAT business model you are talking about or HOW business model you intend to implement. This is important to differentiate. 

• A lot of EA fails because of rigidity, and duration. The Enterprise Architecture is a critical framework that should support the requirements of the business and will need to be adjusted periodically... We no longer live in the world that runs in years, but one that runs in minutes. Define the business outcomes to be achieved first and reverse engineer the execution, planning, business& technology architecture to then define strategy. This clearly provides alignment between outcome and strategy. Because as the expression goes, life happens between plans. By creating the alignment between outcome and strategy, and the synergy between operating units, much of the resistance, complexity, cost and time to value are removed. Enterprise Architecture also assists in the governance of the synergistic capabilities required to deliver strategically defined business initiatives - and weed out the ones that are not. PROGRAM (vs. Project) Management assists in the governance of synergistic resource capacity in supporting a governance model for execution of strategy.  

As old saying, plan is useless until it's planning, strategic planning is the dynamic process which needs to navigate full sets of Ws: Why, What, How, Who, When and Where., etc, to reflect organization's competitive portfolio, business capabilities, Project Investment Priority, GRC, and talent Development planning., etc, the Strategic Planning Methodology needs to be hybrid, to integrate the valuable industrial models and analytics. The key is: keep it simple and keep it executable

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What is more Respected: Job Title or Job Responsibility?

There is a blend of multiple elements to get respected, some are hard competencies; some are soft leadership touches. 

Ideally, job title and job responsibility should match to reflect one's professional reputation both inside-out and outside in. 

A good title is like nice suit, does bring some first impressions. However, an effective leader takes more than title to get respected and make positive influence.

 

1. What Gets More Respected

What is more respected, inside the company, it maybe the responsibility, while outside, it’s perhaps title. In the long run both external and internal entities will respect the person who make influence and gets results. That often depends on your power base and responsibilities

• There are three powers either as visible or invisible hands in organization: Structural power (position with the organizational hierarchy), expert power (business and technical knowledge), and prestige power (connections) impact the corporate relationship. If one gets three powers on the row, perhaps they can get respect inside out, and outside in, well, it's not easy.  

• The title can amplify influence effect; the talent does need to have more leadership substances to build up reputation for long run. If one only has position power such as the managers with certain title practice command and control leadership style at industrial paradigm can only obtain compliance from people. Leadership is what will draw out a person's best work contributions, including their creativity, initiative, influence, collaboration, and other "taking extra mile" attitude & behaviors necessary in today's economy with the power of pull. 

• Job Responsibility - but that HAS to be followed with a consistent execution of those responsibilities, otherwise the respect goes away, and that is a much more difficult thing to regain. In any organization, opinions of a person do not just weigh on titles, but how effective a person is in their respective role within the organization. More responsibility doesn't always mean to keep your hands full, or keep your schedule extremely busy, tactical performance at the operational level is very much different from strategic practices at the higher strata. What works for one may not be as effective for the other. 

2. Five Ways to Win Respect  

Respect may have nothing to do with either title or responsibility - you get respected in an organization for your work ethic and your ability to deliver or being the "go-to" person. Weather getting respected or not also depends on how you follow principles, make fair judgment, do right things. There are quite a few ways to get respected such as:

• Character: People admire/respect those who have courage to do things majority of people can't, either break down the ceilings or overcome the bias, etc.

• Vision: People admire/respect those who can see further than most, zoom in the future to share with others. 

• Creativity: People admire/respect those who can think or design something uniquely to enchant others. etc. 

• Sacrifice: People admire/respect those who make sacrifice for more people' benefit, to pursue universal happiness.... 

• Responsibility: People admire/respect those who take more responsibilities, less credit when making right decision, or accomplishing tasks qualitatively and quantitatively.

3. Leadership as “Whole” Takes Both Substances and Style

If title is on the surface, while responsibility is underneath, either style or substance, leadership as a "whole" makes better influence.

• At the end of the day, you define the role you play. Title certainly creates an expectation in people of what your role is, and to a degree, the level of responsibilities you've progressed to. But nothing defines you more than what you do. 

• There is a blend of multiple elements to get respected. Your mindsets, actions and how the results you produce impact others, customers and the business are what matters. There are many ways to succeed in a role; the long term relationships you create, the trust you build, and your choice to succeed are the greatest factors that lead to being successful in any role. 

• Who get Better Respected will also reflect the Organizational Culture: Our opinions are our biases. And our biases affect how we work with (and relate to) others. Our biases also affect how others work with (and relate to) us. It's unavoidable. So, take a few moments, and consider how your biases are, quite likely, undermining your relationships and diluting your impact, up, down, and across your company's hierarchy. Consider how you interact differently with people simply because they happen to have:
  -More title than responsibility
  -More responsibility than title
  -Neither title nor responsibility
  -Both title and responsibility  

Nowadays, in the global organizations with multi-generational, multi-cultural and multi-tasking workforces, getting respect is a tough journey, besides position power, you needs to have social power and knowledge power, you need to be both tough and nice; answering and asking; influential and adaptable; serious and humorous, creative and critical, emphasize and insightful, wise and cheerful; and it takes both title and responsibility.

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How to Map IT Capabilities to Business Capabilities in One Page

Capability definition is: "The ability and capacity to realize a measurable result in a specific operational context of conditions.” 

Business capabilities are a hierarchical decomposition of ‘what’ the enterprise does. Business capabilities do nothing by themselves, all the work is actually done by business processes which are the ‘how’ part of the question. All resources, business applications, etc. belong to business processes. While at age of information, all key business processes are enabled by enterprise IT capabilities. Therefore, the crucial question needs to be asked: How to map IT capabilities to business capabilities in one page?

1.Why it is important to Map IT Capabilities to Business Capabilities

Go back to your IT promises and see whether capabilities or processes provide answers to some of the questions you want answered and if there is value then go ahead and provide these views. Some have question the validity of the capability matrix because they see IT as a support function but the reality is that IT is a business enabler. This implies business is driven by technology. As it is an IT capability in most cases would be enabling one or more business capability. Such IT Capabilities to Business Capabilities Mapping is trying to assess and define how interconnected the IT organization is to the business, and trying to determine the return on investment (ROI) for their technical architecture (delivery - services costing) that is mapped to a businesses' capabilities.

• Creating a one pager view of this relationship helps an organization to identify IT capabilities that are critical for running business. Organizations may also use this matrix to identify business capabilities that are neglected by IT and these usually appear as business capabilities that do not have any IT enablers. Business could also go one step further to identify business capabilities that are over enabled by IT and these usually appear as a business capability with so many IT capabilities mapped to it. It is the ability to use such a matrix to identify over extended IT capabilities and duplicate IT capabilities and solutions. 

• Such a matrix is useful when planning or defining an IT Strategy that aligns to business needs and strategy. It is important to first define what an IT capability is as this determines whether all the above apply, identifying over extended IT capabilities would imply such an IT capability best represents an IT application. The relationship between business and IT capability is that of enabling. If you want to map business applications to business capabilities, you can do this by mapping all the applications associated with business processes to the business capabilities which use the processes. 

• Both capabilities and processes are decomposable - decomposing capabilities is the start point for documenting functional requirements that are usually automated by applications (this is the language of IT professions) while decomposing processes provides a deep understanding about how these granular functionalities connect to deliver the final business outcome (this is the language of Business professions). Capabilities give additional views that are seldom available in processes, etc. components that are common and reusable across the enterprise (business units are silo organs and they do not give a lot of attention as to whether what they do is also replicated elsewhere). All this depends on business drivers though.
  

2.    How to Map IT Capabilities to Business Capabilities

From a strategy perspective, the business capability analysis is based on current definition of functions instead of an organization structure, as organizational structure is quite dynamic and frequent changes, which may create a chaotic process model, use the value chain or the supply/demand governance model to map the business capability.

• A pragmatic approach is to look at this from a 'value streams' perspective:
  1) Identify major business value streams (end-to-end processes that deliver customer value).
  2). Map information technology related services that support these or are missing (untapped capability).
  3). Estimate the 'capability leverage', preferably in dollars, provided, or potentially so, by of each of these IT services to each value stream (greater agility etc).
  4). Estimate the business capability (preferably normalized to dollars) represented by each value stream 

• Map IT capabilities to either:
  1) What the business does - Capabilities or
  2) How the business does it - Processes\Functions
  3) Processes are best if you are working at a tactical level
  4) Capabilities are best for strategic work
  Either will help identify business/IT alignment issues  

• One Page IT Capability Mapping: It is quite interesting if everything can be put in one page. It depends on the nature of the enterprise (diversified), size, and the age of the enterprise as well. So single page would include fundamental to any business enterprise are the questions of ‘what do we do’, and ‘how do we do it’. :
  1) Vision
  2) Requirements to deliver
  3) IT capability
  4) The resources, metrics, application, and information associated with capabilities are the aggregation of all the resources, metrics, etc. belonging to the business processes that 'work for' the capabilities.

The approach could be to draw an enterprise value chain and expose all the business capabilities beneath those functions and highlight the activities & identify the overlaps and gaps;  then, take to next level (with lots of details) in multiple pages. For all the capabilities, then calculate cost in three categories like strategic, operational and governance. For all the foundational capabilities like HR, finance and others, then draw that at the bottom of the sheet across the whole enterprise value chain. 

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The Business Practices to Breakdown Process Silos

Too fast and unprepared action threatens "detachment" from the actual operations of the organization. 

1. Architecture is the best "tool" to explain to each group of stakeholders how their concerns
   will be addressed by BPM and how their current working practices will be changed for the better.  

2. People (they are the future of the organization because they represent its core capital). IT takes time to change the culture of the organization and usually change the attitudes of its managers. They need to look at the company as a whole. Not the part of "my principality” and the rest. So they need to get out of their silos. In structured organizations with a high culture of information & innovation, it’s much easier to breakdown silos. 

3. Achieve planned business benefits. In order to break down the silos, people first need to see the benefit in breaking the silos (and even only possible interference with competitors). But in practice, it’s often difficult to communicate the advantages and benefits. On one hand, to manage processes and data, and on the other had, to show the daily business advantage and further opportunities for improvement and cost savings. Too fast and unprepared action threatens "detachment" from the actual operations of the organization. 

4. It is the overall organizational adaptability to the market in lieu of these breaking of silos.  At every juncture, there must be a check that "is this optimized process placing us at a better stead than before?" The most optimized process is nothing without end results. 

5. Delegating authority and responsibility for individual organizational units and employees. Be conscious of the processes leading to the main objectives of the organization, subordination of the goals and processes of the business units, to the basic process and goals of the organization as a whole. 

6. The main subject is to adjust the pace of implementation of process. A good starting position is to identify activity that is capable of benefiting from dynamic/static BPM and piloting a project so that others can see the benefits. Then, expand with more ambitious projects across silos.

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Seven Pillars of Agile Organization

Agile goes beyond as a methodology, it’s a mind shift, and management discipline.

One thing is certain: Change is no longer something that happens periodically. It’s continuous—constant and unrelenting. Agility is the dynamic capability that allows organizations to adapt their substantive capabilities. 

Being agile means anticipating likely change and addressing it deftly, keeping business on course and customers satisfied. To achieve those goals, agility must be built into an organization’s very foundation, from strategy to design, people, processes, and supporting technology. Here are seven pillars of Agile organization. 

1. Agile Strategy 

When the environment is so unpredictable, how can business apply the traditional forecasting and analysis that are at the heart of strategic planning? The volatility of the current market further complicates detailed planning and requires an even greater time commitment, preventing involved managers and employees from taking part in critical business activities

• Strategy Planning becomes a "living process" with regular evaluation, scanning, listening, revisiting and potential course correction. There is no "predictable future", but there are many possible ones. Long term planning has its place, but linearity and over prescriptive-ness" don't. If you laid all of the corporate strategists in the world end-to-end you wouldn't reach a consensus. 

• Agility is the strategic mix of standardization and flexibility, targeted at those organizational pressure points where they’re not only needed today but will most likely be needed tomorrow. In order to survive and thrive amid constant change, companies must reclaim the right balance of standardization and flexibility and build strategic and operational agility into their business foundations. By developing a business agility blueprint—a shared view of an organization that promotes deeper understanding of core processes, risks, and transformational opportunities—business leaders can approach change confidently 

• Alternatively, companies can explore having a base plan as well as a stretch plan; this dual approach requires clear top-down expectations for targets. It requires coherence of culture, strategy and leadership. Culture and leadership need to foster agile mindset and behaviors, supported by aligned policies and practice. The strategy needs to respond continuously to change with speed and through informed decisions. 

2.    Agile Architecture 

Incorporating agility into a business foundation or architecture requires new ways of thinking, new approaches to enterprise architecture and business process design. The failure to build flexibility into both organizational design and operations can threaten a company’s survival, as your environment 'will' change, so anything that you do too far "up front" is likely to be wrong in the future.

• EA needs to keep modular design and continuous planning: The agile practices address this using a short feedback loop (plan, try, test, and learn); so that you never get too far away out on a tangent on the manifold of reality. From EA perspective, it’s about how to keep modular design, continue planning and improving, and then fulfill EA purpose--to bridge strategy and execution, transcend business into next level.  

• Agility isn’t inherited like some trait passed on through or organization’s DNA, you have to work hard to achieve it. It isn’t permanent either, once achieved you have to work hard to maintain agility. One of the key things in the architecture space is the relationship between various dimensions of an enterprise. Agility isn’t just synonymous with innovation and product development, agility can help to improve performance across the entire range of organizational activities 

• Agile, in or of itself, is more about inspecting and adapting the process to what suits the specific and unique needs of your organization according to its environment and culture while abiding by its fundamentals 

-The way forward
- Use some sort of baseline in discussions
- Start thinking in terms of ‘may’ rather than ‘must’
- EA is not one thing, it is many things
- EA is an umbrella term for the many things
- These many things should be designed, structured, architected so that they are a coherent, integrated set of things which can be used jointly and severally  

3.    Agile Project Management 

Agile is a natural evolution in software development processes, to adapt to rapid changes; Agile is an emerging methodology with many advantages such as faster release cycle, iterative communication, more end customer focus. It's the right way to do software or run business strategically, methodologically and tactically. 

• Agile requires good engineering disciplines. It also requires some business disciplines. Agile has to be continually tweaked for it to work. Because, as a new practice in many organizations, it also causes further concerns: Is Agile the cause for defect increase? Does Agile make most of the customers more satisfied? Does Agile improve project success rate? What’re pitfalls to adopt Agile? 

• For Agile SWLC, change management needs to go with Agile hand-in-hand, with senior leadership support, cross-functional communication, and a clear vision of the project.  

• Processes alone do not deliver the product. It takes people, resources, processes and values to make a successful delivery. All of these must be reviewed in context together if one is to find the root cause and apply effective countermeasures. Agile promotes teamwork, iterative communication, and incremental improvement 

4.    Agile Process Management 

With the right mix of process standardization and flexibility in place, business leaders can efficiently anticipate and execute on change, turning scenario planning from a theoretical exercise into a real decision shaper

• Creating agile repeatable processes which can be changed quickly as needed. Create a common picture, understanding, and vocabulary of the way the enterprise operates. 

• Identify additional capabilities, processes, and technology which may be needed to reduce operating costs, improving profitability, reducing process cycle times, Improve quality  

• Develop more effective governance models, systems, and processes of improving agility and flexibility. Identify ways of realizing the end-to-end monitoring of key performance indicators and critical success factors.
  
  

5.    Agile Budget Planning 

Any good leader/manager will routinely monitor his/her budget and create either formal or informal forecasts as the environment continually shifts. Changes to that forecast have to be communicated early and often so that you purposefully don't wind up with those big surprises at the end of the fiscal year.

• Shorten the Planning Cycle. A shorter cycle puts the emphasis on speed and flexibility and results in less overall company coordination, fewer parallel and redundant activities, and less frustration. Effective planning—and a more realistic outcome—results from striking a balance between the setting of targets (ambitions) and light but frequent forecasting. 

• The agile budgeting focus is on optimizing use of resources based on rolling forecasts and not adhering blindly to fixed annual plans and budgets. Similar to the way Agile IT uses an iterative approach to developing systems, some innovative organizations use iterative budgets based on continuous feedback from real world events and actual operating results. 

• Identify Opportunity Timely. Instead of blindly carrying out projects because they are in the annual budget, agile finance people continually identify opportunities with the highest return and allocate resources appropriately to profit from those opportunities. These agile pioneers advocate doing quarterly or even monthly forecasts instead of one big annual forecast and dynamic resource allocation based on emerging threats and opportunities. 

6.    Agile Talent Management

Today’s workforce is more global, flexible and virtual as the world becomes so volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous, meanwhile, today’s employees value different things compared to previous generations of workers. Therefore, talent management as a business-critical process needs to be agile in adapt to the accelerated change facing in organization.

• There needs to be broad management support for Agile talent management and an understanding that it means empowering staff to make data-based decisions by accessing right information at the right time. 

• Focus on the fact that the fundamental nature of enterprise/business consists of human social systems, which are partially designed (or even architected), but are also grown, matured, and evolved. A culture of passionate people that embrace change and seek understanding will be paramount. Share early and share often, cross-functional collaboration and iterative communication are encouraged to optimize business agility.  

• Not only that, the "components" of such human social systems include *aspects* of human beings who have purpose, intent and attitude to openness, who take full responsibility for their activities and goals, and who are spurred to make radical change and aim for break through innovation even facing failures. And finally, you need an audience and organization with a focus on people and results, which celebrates small successful steps but keep the focus on long term objectives.  

7.    Agile Governance 

How do you manage unpredictability, rather than focusing on how to control the environment and how to make it more predictable or manageable, from managerial and governance perspective, how to become comfortable with turbulence or the unknown, and to focus on the organization’s ability to respond with the environment.

• Agile Governance produces awareness by generating ‘consilience’ (coherence + resilience). EA as governance tool can help you remember what you know you know, and it can help you chip away at what you know you don't know. It can even help you realize what you didn't know you knew. That's how governance practices might bring you infinitely close to full awareness! Of course, you can't avoid all the laws of the universe: EA may not be able to help you with the knowledge you don't know you didn't know. That's why it might not help you leap the gap between the immediate outcome of the Endeavour (you succeed in transforming the enterprise as intended) and the outcome you ultimately desire 

• You also likened awareness to enterprise transparency. Agile Governance Planning is a key steering instrument that will influence the overall direction of the business. There might very well be differing opinions within divisions, among divisions, or between the divisions and corporate headquarters about the best direction to take. These differences have to be made transparent, and all relevant stakeholders must reach consensus on the best path forward through effective governance disciplines. . 

• In order to make changes to their planning systems, companies must acknowledge the necessary tradeoffs involved. One point of struggles is governance taking away liberties that are essential to people doing their jobs at creative way, if there's a problem with trust then governance will suffer, because motivations are not aligned across organizational boundaries.

Therefore, Agile goes beyond as a methodology, it’s a mindset shift, management discipline and governance practice, Agility is also not just the ability to change. It is a cultivated dynamic capability that enables an organization with solid agile pillars to respond in a timely, effective, and sustainable way when changing circumstances require it.

Read more about Agile Pillars:
Is Agile Strategy on the Way
Main Characteristics of Agile Enterprise Architecture
Three Perspectives in Agile Success
Agile Process Management
Agile Budget Planning
Agile Talent Management
Agile Governance

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