The Root Cause to IT Project Failure: Poor Management or Weak Governance?

Governance brings outside-in view; while management takes inside-out processes. 

Every successful project has many parents; but the failure seems to be like an orphan, no one like to admit it. In fact, there are many causes to fail an IT project such as Scope Creep, Failure to obtain stakeholder commitment, inability to assemble a high-performance team, and failure to plan or execute well. So to dig through the root causes, more broadly speaking, is IT project failure caused by poor management or ineffective governance?

• Governance and Management have a different role in the IT project success and failure. The role of governance is to ensure that projects are properly monitored and tracked to ensure cost, quality and time are maintained and a framework to ensure right kind of projects are being pursued and prioritized. Management, on the other hand, should ensure right resources, such as people, technology, skills are provided and operationalizing the product in the organization and measure various metrics for ROI. Management has the core sponsor of the project and not the governance.

• Governance brings outside-in view; while management takes inside-out processes. Management focuses on a piece with a defined scope to produce defined results. Governance focuses on how the pieces fit together to achieve larger goals. Businesses are like onions, have layers that differ in scale. Corporate, initiative, or program level management imposes governance on individual projects. In another word, Management should be concerned with budget and resource provisioning while Governance should ensure proper execution as per the best practice to use the resources optimally.

• Governance is a tool of management. A failure to fully integrate governance mechanism into management processes results in the issues not being caught early, and so it is a good candidate for the ultimate cause to failures. Standards, templates, rules, organizational structure, and review structure exist to provide alignment across the pieces and across layers. Not for their own sake. Keeping them separate leads to Architecture (or other) Review Boards that focus on the check offs: are the variable in the right case, does every operation have a purpose, does every attribute of the requirement have a value. Effective governance should be about motivating and enabling people to do the right thing.

• Governance is about decision rights. Organizations which abrogate their responsibility for the use of IT by leaving decisions about how IT will be used to IT function get themselves into all sorts of trouble. Requirements management is the backbone of the IT value stream and requires excellence within and between every IT function to be effective. In an environment fraught with complexity and immense pressure to deliver, it doesn't take much for this fragile system to break down. Governance should be applied to ensure that common understanding is reached before implementation begins. If not, failure is nearly inevitable.

• Project management and governance are interdependent disciplines. The management structures and project organization are supposed to separate to the governance of a program. Too often in some organizations, the Project Organization structure and the governance bodies (typically Steering Groups, etc.) shown on the same diagrams and mentioned in the same breath. It is this lack of clarity - for responsibility and decision making - that can derail projects, and these can be both a symptom and cause of confusion between governance and management.

• Governance is a bit of an umbrella term: But if it includes the engagement and the acceptance of ownership for benefits realization for the project by the line of the business owner, then governance (or lack of it) is THE critical factor for project success. The essence is to have that senior business owner regard the project as the sole or the most important instrument of his/her successful achievement of business targets. And then during the project execution, use the governance framework to deliver what the sponsor needs so that the project does not flip to become the excuse for their non-delivery. 

Therefore, An effective IT or PMO leader has to know how to balance the needs of the project management with the needs of good governance -- to use the right methodology, apply it at the right time and in the amounts that are really needed, in order to improve overall IT project success rate.

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Innovation: Abundance of Human Potential

Humanity has only scratched the surface of its real potential. -Peace Pilgrim

The brainstorming of human potential can be understood as a process of continuous discovery. Just like we have not yet explored enough to understand the cosmos, so the discovery of what it means to be alive and to be human is an ongoing process. A High-Potential Mind: The Abundance of Human Potential 

How to unleash the abundance of human potential is perhaps one of the best rewarding arenas for humanity.

1. Human potential is limitless: And the best way to go on discovering what we are capable of doing is by following on our insights, intuitions, and imagination while at the same time keeping our feet firmly on the ground.  There is no limit to human potential; however, it’s the individual, culture, circumstances, and society that sets a limit on that unlimited potential.  

2. Everyone is entitled to their interpretation of the world. One valid measurement of that interpretation is what individual life it creates for the person who holds it. Does that vision of the world enable the person to be positive, healthy, balanced, and a productive contributor in the larger society? Or does it make one unable to tolerate other people's points of view? We make the world and our life in our own image. 

3. Human potential is really a myth. Not only there's known upon unknown, also unknown upon the unknown. There are physical potential, intellectual potential, and spiritual potential. Though education may unlock part of intellectual potential, it might shut off certain raw intelligence or 'sub-conscious' understanding. From an evolutionary perspective, this is what we humans have always done and will continue doing – exploring our minds and bodies for the latent powers inherent in our genes. Based on the talents and skills one has been given, is the person able to live an authentic life and make the biggest contribution to society according to their specific gifts and passions?  

4. Human potential is singular as well as plural. Does the reference to "human potential" begin and end with one individual? Or does it encompass collective potential? Individuals need to step outside the box and challenge perception, push themselves to the limit, their limit. It is only when all individuals challenge themselves and then come together as a group will we see real human potential achieved. As a society, we need to respect and encourage change, difference, and uniqueness. It is only then we will see 'Human potential' really show itself. 

5. Individual potential is interwoven into societal potential The discovery of the human nature opens a mental window in our psyche to dormant attributes we didn’t know existed. Individual potential is interwoven into societal potential: As individuals, the challenge is to transcend the perceived limitations and make the most of the gifts we are given. As a society, we should be striving to create an environment that is egalitarian enough so every individual has, at least, the opportunity to actualize their potential, What had been previously thought impossible is now accepted as possible, as a new benchmark by which to measure other activities is assimilated into our collective consciousness. 

6. Human potential is bottom-up, upwardly and outwardly-expanding process. There’re seven dimensions & plus to unleash it:

1).A life vision - the master plan, your passion,
2). Wishes and desires - peel the layers back on your vision to get more details,
3). Goals - tangible plans with time frames,
4). Networking - find the people to help you accomplish your goals,
5). Experience - gain new experiences that lead in the direction you want to go,
6). Skills - build new skills, again in the direction you want to go,
7). Physical resources - gather (produce?) the resources to make it happen.

7. Human potential is unlimited, the more you use, the abundance it becomes;

         Human potential is like Spring Water, the deeper you dig, the more it flows;

         Human potential is like Flower Seeds; the more you sow, the more you harvest;

        To Discover your true potential, is to soar as an eagle, and beyond.

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CIO as Strategist: Is One Page Strategy Practical

 A strategic planning is like GPS –a simple interface with cascaded context.

For many organizations, the business strategy documents are “shelf-ware”, not shareware. Albert Einstein’s simplicity principle: Keep things as simple as possible but not simpler; should also be applied to strategy making, but is one-page strategy practical or too empty? The concept of a one page Strategic Planning is good, as it means that there is clarity in thinking, having reviewed and distilled all the various scenarios and desired outcomes. It is also great for communication and getting the organization engaged. One pager is also handy for your quarterly reviews. Markets are very dynamic these days particularly for global companies, that regular review is critical. This will ensure you are on track but also reflecting on external changes.

Pre-Planning is critical: The key to most planning or addressing issues an organization faces is the reconnaissance beforehand and getting the participants to understand what they are trying to achieve and the contribution they can make. If strategic thinking is strongly encouraged in all ranks, the strategic planning exercise becomes more or less a formality as details are filled in and ideas are documented for further reference.

• Value propositions – products/services, brands, business models, distribution 
• Business Canvas Model 
• Marketing drives Strategy - Customers, competitors company; segment, target, position; Products & Services Price, Place, Promotions, ...
• Life-cycle thinking and acting 
• Multi-dimensional, functional, level, organizational complexity 
• Systemic approaches to a project  

A one-page document (accessible to all stakeholders) optimizes strategy mapping which adds value and direction in a most convenient manner. Could over-simplification make Strategic Planning look empty? A Strategic Planning is like GPS –Simple interface with cascaded context: A one-page document (accessible to all stakeholders) optimizes strategy mapping which adds value and direction in a most convenient manner. Strategy is like map to guide through organization's transformation journey, the advanced version of map is GPS, which helps users to navigate both current location and destination with significant details when needed, and strategy also needs to be continually visited and updated, though shorter is better for communication, the comprehensive and cascaded context can better guide through execution. The purpose of strategic planning is to get insights so as to envisage the future, and to achieve buy-in for that vision, and to get everybody to contribute to translating the vision into coherent actions. Can so much content be condensed into one page; even so, can it be interpreted coherently; statistically, of the three reasons for misaligned action, the primary cause (60%) is Different Dictionary - meaning that people have different interpretations of the same line of text. Technology can be a mitigating factor to this dynamic. The 'actionable' one-page plan should incorporate:

*Accountability grid
* Scorecard ('balanced' perspectives to provide a framework for both objectives/metrics and drivers.)
* Project management
* Collaboration tools - documentation and notifications

In order for strategic plans to be executed against, they must be easily digested: Make the strategic planning meeting only 1) as long as needed to create the plan 2) make sure the "right" people attend 3) make the plan document short enough so people can read it at a glance. The brief diagram style strategic plan that can be distributed, displayed and communicated is what need to take action; it is simple so everyone can understand it; it is easy to communicate and share; It is easy to evolve over time; it is something can be used to guide through. Realizing your strategic goals requires organizational change. This means the essential elements of successful organizational change need to be included in both the process of developing the plan and in its implementation. One of the essential elements of successful organizational change is involvement. People throughout the organization need to feel actively connected to the organizational strategy and committed to making the behavioral changes necessary to make it a reality.

The length of a strategic plan may depend on whether a page or more, keep it as simple as possible, and it is the process of developing the plan that is important, as say going: it’s planning, not plan that matters.

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BPM: Does Paradigm Shift from Process to People

The case is part of the process but the focus is on the work that needs to be done,  not the overarching process that needs to be followed.

While it is easier to define structure and control internal business processes, processes that involve external interaction can become unpredictable. Case Management is typical processes that involve external interaction. Standard BPM practices can still capture some activities of a “case” in order to help with activity monitoring, cross-silo visibility and business analytics (some of the key objectives of BPM). But the point is that BPM demands that there is a standard process, and Case Management demands that people can react to unforeseen circumstances - these are mutually exclusive.  

1. The Characteristics of Case Management 

Case Management represents a different way of thinking about Business Processes. Rather than focusing on or starting from the Business Process perspective, Case Management implies applying business processes to a case. So you’re thinking more in terms of a case:

• Case Management is about providing the 'Knowledge Worker' with the right information, infrastructure and tools to make critical decisions in real-time. It’s about achieving objectives and goals, rather than just following a single process line. You may follow many different processes just to find and achieve the end goal or resolve business process exceptions.  

• Case Management is just a specialized form of BPM. Unlike a 'business process', which can be mapped to a human-machine workflow, a 'case' defies such mapping because of its inherent open-endedness. Too many variables, too many possible scenarios, make BPM inadequate for case management. Case Management by its nature is extremely unpredictable compared to Business Process Management, Case Management is about being able to handle exceptions and the complexities within Business Process Management. Business Process Management requires relatively little human input to completing a business process.  

• Case management is a body of work that consists mostly of unstructured events that is hard to predict in advance. Hence it is not easily defined as a business process. There may be aspects of the work that could be easily defined and captured as activities in a business process, but the bulk of the activities cannot be captured as such. These activities are usually executed by knowledge workers, who are creative and apply knowledge in a way that can't be captured easily in a well-defined activity that is governed by a set of business rules. Usually extrapolation of the business rules may be required to apply to specific scenario/circumstance A BPMS would almost need an Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability in order to perform these activities.  

2. Integrated Capabilities of Dynamic Case Management 

Dynamic Case Management provides solutions to specific issues that need to be resolved in an organization, at any given time. The cases come from loosely structured requests (internal and external), such as: incidents, claims, requests for goods or services, records, projects, etc., they follow many alternative paths and end when the case has been resolved. Case management, especially dynamic case management becomes new trend, also because the enterprise expands into the new boundary, well-interconnected and interacted with clients and partners through social/mobile computing more frequently.

Dynamic Case Management is more flexible: By implementing a Dynamic Case Management solution the advisor is then able to provide quick real-time information, skip unnecessary steps based on previous calls, link into business intelligence tools, use unified collaboration tools,  and even provide an unexpected compensation measures. Customer expectations will then be more likely to be fulfilled and exceeded. Customers will be more willing to tell others of the great service provided and customer retention will be more likely. 

How is the Cases Managed? A tool for efficiently undertaking Dynamic Case Management must have numerous integrated capabilities, such as:
• Management by BPM Processes
• Business Rules Management
• Agile management of Documents and Web Content
• Elements of Information, Communication and Collaboration between employees and with people external to the entity
• Processes with the ability to deviate the flow at any given time, to other processes
• Management of mandatory tasks, both planned and unplanned, with Dynamic Forms capable of appearing and being hidden according to the circumstances
• Agile creation of additional steps for the element control of the cases
• Tools to observe, control and analyze the execution of each case as a whole, as well as analyze the combined results of terminated cases for continuous process improvement

But above all, these capabilities must be completely integrated and be accompanied by a great amount of agility and flexibility to undertake all types of changes immediately, with security and without the need for programming or IT knowledge.  

3. Paradigm Shift from Process to People 

The case is part of the process but the focus is on the work that needs to be done,  not the overarching process that needs to be followed – the process plays a supporting role. People centricity is focal point. 

• The biggest change brought by the Case Management solutions is the paradigm shift from process to people. This is where the case management solution is marked as a different league altogether. Case Management solution enables skilled workers with excellent decision making ability to choose the right process at right time. Also, automatic process template selection by the case management solution is something not addressed before by the traditional BPM and ECM tools. So clearly, only fusing the BPM and ECM suite will not create a Case Management solution. There are other dimensions to be achieved.  

• Case Management allows systematic collaboration of individuals in a structured or ad-hoc manner to process a particular case. It is ideally suited for processes that are non deterministic, cannot be modeled at the beginning, driven by human decisions and are content centric. The suite provides knowledge workers the flexibility to improvise based on the context and situation at hand but at the same time ensures that broad guidelines are being adhered to. It guides the decision maker through intelligent correlation of similar situations faced in past and helps him re-use that knowledge. 

• A Dynamic Case Management (DCM) solution will be effective if and only if the new business scenarios, situational complexities and exceptions are handled in a timely manner. And to do that, the process workers must be bestowed with power and authorization to take the right decision at the right time. According to the situation, the process workers may select any ad-hoc process route, they can trigger any call for action or they can escalate to higher authority for permission. It’s the individual worker’s decision making ability which will make a DCM solution successful.  

• Case management's "unstructured progression" of workflow, situations that are more ad-hoc (as opposed to pre-defined). Case management also applies to workflow situations that are more document-intense (as opposed to data-intense); to situations that share documents in the same folder; to situations that require real-time collaboration (as opposed to a more defined sequence); and to situations that involve physically separated, remote, and independent resources. 

• A DCM solution can be BPM centric- where the workflow routing becomes dynamic, or ECM centric- where right based content access is provided to the users, or CCM centric- where the right communication channels are chosen for the right customer with right content, or purely Strategic where Business Analytics like Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tool and Rule Management System are used to monitor the process performance and take the right decisions at right time or change the business rule on the fly. 

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Analytics Effect in Decision Making

Analytics is to drive, measure as well as improve decisions.

Analytics is permeating into business’s daily life, It’s no surprise to see more organizations intend to adopt analytics in guiding decision making. Should analytics drive your decisions or should it be used to measure you decision's success?

• Properly done analytics should drive decisions. Properly done analytics will give you information that you wouldn't have otherwise. Analytics are useful in guiding decision making, but always make sure that the recommendations suggested pass the "does this make sense" test. It is important to make sure that you are using the right inputs and a model that adequately fits the problem to carry out the analysis. Otherwise, the recommendations may not be optimal, the classical case of "Garbage in, Garbage out".  

• Analytics are of paramount importance when planning and deriving results following implementation. If one uses the approach of defining a hypothesis for the problem space and the possible solution options, and then using statistical analysis to test and characterize the resultant set to the hypothesis, then analytics is required for both. Because once an approach is decided upon and implemented, a complete solution will include measures of the target results that validate success in achieving the desired business outcomes. 

• Analytics is to drive, measure as well as improve decisions. When focused on operationalizing analytics, meaning implementing predicting analytics results in operational systems in real or near real-time, analytics can 1) drive (automate) decision making, and by monitoring those decision results analytically, then 2) measure-Analytics can be very useful to measure "success" or improvement between different scenarios, it is important to be sure that the right things are measured to come to correct conclusions about the performance.3) improve the decision and, therefore, the overall system and business performance over time. 

• Decision making is both science and art; it takes both data analytics and intuition, in order to make the effective decisions. Well designed experiments can yield great insights that never would have been uncovered if one goes with experience and "gut feeling.". But at the end of the day, it is also critical to see if the outcome bears any resemblance to the predictions. Sometimes the differences are due to poor (or great) implementation. It is important to understand WHY things happened so those learning can be applied to the next iteration or project That all being said, analytics is important, but do not forget common sense. 

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Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch: How True Is It?

Culture is what happens when the managers are not around.

We all heard the saying: Culture eats strategy for lunch, culture as the most invisible but powerful corporate fabric,  is both 'hard' competency and 'soft’ asset of the business. Effective execution of a strategy relies on a strong culture. When does a weak culture ‘eats’ strategy and undermine success? How shall you be mindful of culture? What are the strong culture traits, and how can culture, like water, to push the organization in the right direction and reach the destination?

1. Strategy development requires understanding the current environment including the organizational culture. It requires an assessment of how the various factors (including the culture) help or hinder efforts to move to the desired end state. A successful strategy must account for culture's impact on implementation efforts if the strategy is to succeed. Strategy implementation may have to deal with culture change as part of achieving the new end state  

2. The right culture is a prerequisite foundation for implementing the strategy. Culture precedes strategy. An organization's cultural orientation forms the basis for initiating and improving on strategies and sustaining it. A strong culture should have the characteristics of inclusiveness, innovation, learning agile, etc. A too weak culture affects the ability to walk in one direction and fill in the gaps when formal artifacts - such as strategy, processes and org charts - are not good enough. Weak cultures rely on a bureaucracy to enforce rules and regulations that undermine an organization's speed, simplicity, and competitiveness. Great organizations live their values!  

3. Culture is collective human behaviors: Whether they are aggressive or conservative, selfish or humanistic, collaborative or individualistic. If people are not in tune with an articulated and ingrained culture, their behavior will be less predictable, and understandably so. When people align with the company's values, there is less need for bureaucracy, which means an organization is able to move with speed, simplicity, resilience and possibly gain a competitive advantage. 
   
   
4. Be mindful of culture with differentiated workforce strategy: To maximize execution against a strategy you have to create that strategy while being mindful of the culture into which it will be introduced. To win and maximize strategy execution, an organization must have a differentiated workforce strategy, which requires aligning an organization's strategic capabilities to strategy and aligning the right people into the right position in the organization's strategic capabilities. How does an organization maximize strategy execution when players are misaligned with positions?  

5. Culture is what happens when the managers are not around. The strength of culture is reflected in the degree to which an organization performs as intended and desired without immediate, hands-on direction from its management. That doesn't happen unless people are bought into the strategic direction and have internalized the values of the organization. All changes even executed successfully have been mostly messy experience during transitions. Every major change at its core is a difficult emotional experience for one's involved in making it happen. There are beliefs, assumptions, authority dilution, rumors machines operating beneath the surface 
   
   
6. Simply put, executing a strategy in an enterprise with a weak culture is like trying to drive nails with a hammer that doesn't have a rigid handle. How culture undermines strategy is by increasing the amount of time and effort it takes managers to initiate and execute a strategy and possibly even the degree to which some of the tactical goals critical to the strategy's success can be achieved. 

7. Cultural behavior would be clearly critical capability to execute strategy under shared vision. However, execution effectiveness will be influenced by not only cultural readiness but also completeness of that strategy. For instance, the strategy needs to be developed under the understandings of organizational capabilities, and change management may be one of the tools to promote strategy execution. When existing strategy is not working and the new one is not defined, then 'culture eats strategy for lunch' . 

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Should Enterprise Architects be involved during Project Implementation

There's always going to be natural tensions between enterprise architecture and solutions/project architecture, there's possibility EA needs to be more interactive in PPM & PM level when necessary. 

Although EA focuses on conceptual and design level, project implementation is at the more tactical level, the EA team can find itself getting dragged into project issues for sure, often between the technical delivery team and the business stakeholders over requirements & governance issues. It's not always easy to strike the right balance. But for improving overall IT project success rate (statistically 70% of projects fail to satisfy customer), EA needs to become such progress advocate:

• EA governance involvement can vary by projects, something which is business-critical might prompt the CIO (who may, in turn, have been prompted by others) to insist that there are regular meetings between the project team and EA people to "keep an eye on it." Generally, enterprise architecture doesn't run projects themselves, and so rely on projects as 'vehicles of activity' which continue to move towards that future state. 

• EA as a collaborator than a controller: If the EA group is given the impression that they are a controlling force rather than a collaborative group, that works with the project teams to foster the tension between the groups. Measure the EA team based on their ability to mentor, to provide best practice analysis to the PA (project architect) or project teams and their ability to incorporate and implement appropriate lessons learned from the PA requirements back into the overall EA. Companies with a static EA get left behind. 

• Doing PA and then reviewing the final PA in regards to the EA. This allows a consistent application of the common goals of the EA into each project. Also, it provides the opportunity to update the EA if new factors are introduced or new technological advances have come to light from the latest PA. Using this method of review helps to keep the funding for EA stable and ensures the EA does not get out of step with companies changing goals and focus. At project level, PA (Project Architect) are held to project performance ... while PM is the guardians of Timeline and Budget, Project Architecture are a held to Quality of the delivered product, for that organizations, are prepared to pay for.  

• EA is not to be measured by itself, but rather by their influence on the business, governance, and projects. Most of the effort for the EA is in three parts: 
  
  - The initial setup and the buy-in from the stakeholders. This is when the EA will be initially chartered, scope and objectives defined. Usually, the objectives are the business strategies plus the transition approaches.
  - Governance. Ensure the relevance, communications, and compliance with the EA. This is when the EA interacts with the PA.
  - The upkeep. This is when the EA operating charter is realigned to any new business strategies (if any), lessons learned are presented and incorporated into the EA, and approaches that were defined in the charter or updated in previous upkeep sessions are updated. 

• There's always going to be natural tensions between enterprise architecture and solutions/project architecture, because solutions architecture is defined by the scope of the project, and so doesn't always deliver everything the enterprise architecture defines it should (a compliant architecture in TOGAF parlance). However, Agile methodology shapes the new way to do a project, the design to implementation scenario is no longer following the sequential order, but through iterative communication & process, with agility to adapt to changes. Hence, there's possibility EA needs to be more interactive in PPM & PM level when necessary. 

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Three Approaches to Pursue Organizational Agility

Being agile means anticipating likely change and addressing it deftly, keeping business on course and customers satisfied.

With the pace of change is accelerated, organizations need to be dynamic. A static organization is on its way out. Maturity is the agility and focuses on continuous improvement. Agility is the dynamic capability that allows organizations to adapt their substantive capabilities to business dynamic. But what are effective approaches to pursue organizational agility?

1. Identify and Assess the Changes 

Organizations are complex and to some extent self-healing and certainly change-resistant ecosystems. To make a significant change, or to improve performance, one needs to have a level of understanding about the consequences of change. The better you understand, the easier and faster change becomes. Hence, the business is agiler.

• The key to being agile and flexible is to have a good understanding from a strategic perspective of your current organization (structure, processes, locations, drivers, objectives, goals, applications, data, technologies), To be flexible you need to be able to change and you can't make effective change decisions if you don't know where you are. 

• In order to make effective changes,  you have to know the design of your business. How do you make changes to anything without knowing all the parts and how they are related? A mature organization is one that can quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change and devise effective plans to achieve and sustain those changes - and to do this continuously

• The Greiner curve models help to identify, anticipate and understand the root cause of problems at the stage of business growth. There are several crisis points in the life of an organization. Crises should not be avoided or feared but worked to overcome. At crisis points, this is when change becomes inevitable - deal with it! Equally, this means that change management tools such as EA will need to be low cost and high speed - responsive to the situation.

2. Understand the Changes in-depth with 3 Steps

Agility in organizational context does not equal to unrestrained possibilities. It is more about quick adaptation - whether the changes are small or disruptive. It is about striking the right balance between the types of capabilities that an organization possesses. That's the ethereal part, now for concrete ideas. There are 3 "P"s of a professional organization (Process, Project, and Performance Management). Agility comes from detailed process understanding as being about exactly that - understanding. You might have a clear vision about the endpoint but it won't happen, at least not safely, if you don't understand what needs to change and what the additional consequences of those changes will be.

(1) First, understand what your operational model is. Understand how that constrains your actions and capabilities. How it constrains your ability to adapt. If needed, create an organizational transition plan to move to a different operating model, and execute it in slow, painstaking steps. The slower, steadier you go, the further you'll get.

(2) Second, understand what capabilities your organization has - this could be business, it could be technology, it could be a risk. Classify them - they are not equal - some have more value than others to your organization. Based on that classification, create a roadmap to automate some of them, and make certain that your process designers use object-oriented patterns in doing so. Otherwise, all you'll be doing is recreating legacy processes which will impede your flexibility.

(3) Third, measure right. As the roadmap goes into execution mode, and the various projects go over budget and track toward late delivery, the one place you don't want to cut these efforts is metrics and measurement. Without instrumentation in your processes, your organization will lack the ability to make operational decisions based on quantitative information. That will not only impede your flexibility - but ensure that your successor has to go through the same steps. 

3. Best Practices for Organizational Agility 

You’d have to review the change management processes... typically change management does all it can to "hinder" agility in the interests of 'belt & braces' safety; whilst you don't want to throw caution to the wind, you need to be able to adopt a change process that fits with the new era of agile EA & BPM tools and recognizes 'configuration' of business rules vs. new functionality that fundamentally changes your platform(s). In order to have an Agile organization the following practices are necessary:

• Have an advocate for change on the Board 
• Have Change Management processes that actually enable change 
• Have a Center of Excellence for change 
• Simplify baseline processes and design them to be aligned 
• Have access to key metrics  

Being an agile company means being able to:

Launch a new product / pricing offer quicker than your competitors;

Better adapt organization to a change in the business environment

 Easily adapt to new regulations; 

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, design for emergence, design for innovation, to make change a natural evolution.

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How Tech-savvy are Corporate Boards these days?

Every decision by every decision-maker needs to be informed by an understanding of how technology changes business processes.

According to corporate governance survey, directors reported gaps in critical areas of board expertise: about half of directors said there were skill sets, or areas of expertise missing, or talent with cognitive differences insufficiently represented on their boards. 

Technology expertise was the most common missing or under-represented ingredient on boards according to US directors – boards are recognizing there is a gap of technology expertise in the forward-looking enterprise. This recognition creates opportunities for CIOs as the new breed in the board room, but how shall they make the difference and fill out the gap at the big table?

• Boards are not monolithic--they typically contain a range of technology savvy, never underestimate the knowledge. Executives may have including their understanding and interest in technology. The CIO's role is to understand her/his audience and target appropriately. Frankly, unless the company's product is technology, there shouldn't be a lot of techie discussions going on in the boardroom. The opportunity for the CIO to influence decisions is to identify where IT can influence (product, customer, information, complexity) and discuss technology strategies in the language of the business (competitive landscape, revenue, cost savings, improved efficiency). 

• On IT vs. in IT: Boards should be informed on what benefit is being delivered by IT and aware of constraints and risks. The board discussion may not be only centered around cost, but also on productivity improvement, business growth, talent strategy, and GRC as well. Board role then is Leadership. Meets = continue. Does not meet = kill it or mitigate it. Focus on truth and value. In IT: The Board is neither the programmer nor the implementer. 

• The board has responsibility for failed IT projects: It's under their duty of responsibility and any Board that did not have a credible IT advisor on it was potentially in at least a moral breach of their responsibilities. It may be that the issues related to IT constitute the necessity for more than one IT resource accountable for implementations. For a CIO to be relevant in the Boardroom, the people in these roles must adapt. Understanding technology is important to the business but understanding the business will be paramount for a CIO who wants to influence the Board. 

• The three keys to presenting IT value at board room are financial returns, return timeline and risk Just like any other investment. If you can present IT project portfolio in a manner similar to an investment portfolio it makes instant conceptual sense to board and C-level folks. A CIO has leadership responsibilities that include the three legs of the stool: strategic planning, thought leadership, and operational oversight. But how much penetration CIOs have got in Board Rooms? Even if few of them have secured a physical presence, have they got "voice" in Boardrooms?  They must be there as IT is driving dramatic changes in the business today. 

• As a new breed at the board room, CIOs can bring pairs of fresh eyes and open mindsets:
  1) "Paradoxical Thinking": Always see two sides of same coin, either business vs. technology; management vs. governance; innovation vs. standardization; speed vs. stabilization; 'keep the light on" vs. transformation; As CIO is at position to oversight business processes/ capabilities, should become a good interpreter at board room.   

(2)"Independent Thinking": Through the professional lens, CIOs may help optimize board governance process -from rubber stamp to deep insight, take advantage of the latest technology tools in running an effective board in the digital era. 
(3) "Innovative Thinking": According to an industry survey, IT becomes an integral element of business strategy, As many CIOs think that technology is the innovation engine and that without a proactive IT and Project management, no business can thrive ... the advice of walking a mile in a board member shoes is the most important.

Every decision by every decision-maker needs to be informed by an understanding of how technology changes business processes. Although the technical understanding in the boardroom is improving, the level of knowledge required is increasing even faster CIOs should not only get a seat but really make differences at the board room.

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Five Roadblocks IT needs to overcome to Become Business Partners

Some leading companies already move beyond the IT/business alignment stage and a jump-start to the IT engagement era.

Business and IT leaders have talked about the need for IT/business alignment for well over a decade. Yet…it's still an issue for many companies, why? Beyond alignment,  for the majority of IT organizations, what’re roadblocks IT needs to overcome and move up to become a strategic partner for business?

1.    Lack of Communication

Communications are the key to any business success; unfortunately, for most organizations, communications are abysmal, either through indifference or intentionally making it so. One of the primary roles of the CIO should be "Chief Interaction Officer." The CIO must ensure that the IT organization is respected by all business units as a trusted, collaborative partner and adviser to the business.

Without effective communication, the business often doesn't understand how IT can help, and IT doesn't know what the business needs. The business thinks they know what they need, or the IT department thinks they know what the business needs. This becomes a problem when one side moves forward without communicating with the other side. If the CIO and the business regularly communicate their needs, the problems above could be avoided.

2.    Lack of IT Role Refining

All too often, IT acts as an order taker, many businesses still view IT exclusively as a cost center. If the business doesn’t view IT as being on the same level, they won’t properly communicate (or align) with the IT department. In order to be business partners, The CIO must have a "seat at the table" and a voice in the room to holistically advise on strategic business discussions and decisions, transform IT into rule co-maker.

CIOs need to spend the time to understand the business issues enough to push back on what they asked for and explain how alternatives can provide more value. This is extremely difficult without spending significant time learning the business. IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage, IT needs to clearly define its role as a value creator for business. 

3.    Lack of a long-term Strategy

In many companies, the mission and vision of the company become wrapped in silos, secrecy, and ambiguity; employees turn to be disengaged from the business. IT initiatives can take weeks, months, or years and carry hefty budgets. If leaders want to use technology to move the needle in their business and be a profit center, then planning on 1,2, 5, and 10-year projections are necessities. Of course, directions and tactics may change frequently and plans need to be adapted,  but it's far better to have a plan than daily ad-hoc. 

With a long-term strategy, IT can be the driver of new opportunities, opening doors beyond anything possible for the business, and should be actively engaged as a financial tool in increasing profitability and market shares.

4.    Lack of Process Alignment

A well defined and respected governance process for communication, decision making, and execution is essential. CIOs would do well to regularly verify, reinforce, and re-verify, etc. IT credibility is not just based on the business alignment of the CIO, it's based on the business alignment of ALL the key players in the IT organization...or lack thereof. 

The IT mission is to serve customers. That means both internal and external clients, but to serve does not mean that IT owns the process. The business owns the process and the data, and also has responsibilities assuring that governance, and regulations are followed. Only through cohesive IT-business collaboration and process integration, the business strategy can be executed and IT projects can be delivered smoothly. 

5.    Lack of Open Culture & Resources

In most organizations, many of these alignment challenges are not exclusive to IT yet the symptoms are often more visible in IT due to the fact that IT work touches, serves, and supports virtually every aspect of the enterprise. These challenges are not easily solved and can not be addressed through the use of a tactical project management approach. These are leadership and cultural challenges. They can only be solved by strong "C" level leaders who understand these challenges and work to build organizational culture and structure to eliminate them. Fortunately, there's a fundamental shift happening with the emergence of converging technologies that impact the business through cross-departmental collaboration. When CIOs realize they need more visibility, communication, and better tools to empower that to increase project success rates, IT organizations become an area of focus for Agile IT initiatives which requires tools and resources to enable business engagement.

Some leading companies already move beyond the IT/business alignment stage, jump start to the IT engagement era, in order to better adapt to today's cloud/social/ mobile ecosystem. Be real, be engaged, seek to engage others, Lead through example, be known as approachable, passionate, and above all truly care about the most valuable resource you have, your fellow employees, then IT can overcome barriers on the way to becoming business partners.  

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EA as Coach: How to Instill its Value into Engineering Team

EA needs to play the role of engineers' coach, instill value into IT teams

Engineering teams are wary of Architects in general and quite often don’t see the point in doing Architecture. What were the key messages EA put across to the engineering team leads to winning them over?  How do you explain the concepts or how do you be engineers to accept/realize the benefits that can accrue for an EA? The key message is that EA can be used to "make it easier to do the right thing rather than making it harder to do the wrong thing" 

EA enforces communications within and cross IT-Business teams. EA practitioners can win credibility and get others on board if they are focusing their communication on the benefits it will bring to the engineering team, not to the EA practitioners. It is important for engineers to understand what is in it for them. If they get more value out of it than the effort they put into it, you will win them over! The information has two components, 'know' and 'flow'. 'Know' has three things: intelligence, knowledge, and strategy;  'Flow' is just one thing: communication (in the sense of movement of information within or between organizations). EA practices can enable the engineering team to capture “know from flow,” transform knowledge into intelligence; leverage strategic thinking in IT projects.

• EA unifies vision and influence decisions at all levels of organization: When this vision is fractured the communication is broken and the value of EA is one of the key elements at multiple levels inside the Organization. In this scenario, the mission of EA is to recognize the cracks in the vision and seal them. The abilities to communicate value (of EA) inside a unified vision and influence decisions at all levels in the organization are critical for EA sustainability. 

• EA provides holistic enterprise views for the engineering team to see “big picture”: Engineers are not so good at is developing an enterprise view, only focus on solving the immediate problem, but giving absolutely no attention to all the problems that generate for others, as engineering teams have a scope and context to their work that is often at a more granular level than EA operates... How do you explain the value of EA to engineering teams? Within the context of a unified vision, communicate the roles and responsibilities of the EA. Engineering staff are necessarily focused on one narrow aspect of the business, they are very nimble minded people who can easily grasp the bigger picture, once it is explained. EA helps the engineering team to oversight something usually they may not get the change to oversight, to see enterprise as holism, with a sense of "ownership" thinking, to optimize project cost, and be more collaborative with cross-functional practices. 

• EA trains engineering team to speak “multi-dialects” in business. The EA role can translate 'the One's What to the Next's How', and thus provides an unbroken chain of purpose and alignment through the organization to enhance effective communication cross-business and engineering teams. As some engineers are not so good at communicating in business or architect language or set priority at understanding the enterprise landscape and ensuring they are solving the right problems. EA provides that context and sense of cohesive purpose to the change the engineers need to deliver.

• EA breaks silos to engage more people on board. People represent different parts of the IT, Finance and IT organization. EA can be in the driving seat to break the silos between the different parts of the organization that are involved in the management of individual IT portfolios. These portfolios (for example the application portfolio, technology portfolio, demand-portfolio, risk, finance, etc) are managed in the silo and each silo has its own tools, their own methodologies, their own frameworks, their own people, etc. To get the EA wheel running at a speed to maximize the value, organizations need to break these silos which EA can bring the difference. 

• EA instills long term focus for the engineering team. The engineering team may provide good work; the architect role is there to ensure that the output will provide a long term solution.  EA can also persuade the engineering team via its tactical value. Architecture usually leads to engineering, however, in the absence of architecture software, hardware and infrastructure engineers have had to do everything themselves. EA might be seen as a negative because it’s going to take away that freedom. But EA activities can well connect multiple business disciplines to ensure business wholeness a) Engineering (architect/design/build/operate); b) Accounting (fund/resource/cost/benefit); c) Biological (replication/DNA/emergence/organic) 

• EA provides a systemic approach for resource optimization or re-usability leverage: EA training can help the engineering team to rethink project design at a higher level of understanding to leverage reusability and resource optimization. Within the organization, which is defined as its people, processes, and technology, there are three approaches to optimization: Accounting, Management, and Architecture. Each operates in the same space with a different focus: The Accounting focus is on accountability - Governance, Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The Management focus is on the process - Organizational services. The Architecture focus is on structure - Organizational capabilities. Running IT projects via these approaches can ensure business doing the right things and doing things right, and also create an effective process to manage the processes. 

EA needs to play the role of engineers' coach, instill value into IT teams, as EA is the bridge to mind strategy and execution, also a glue between business and IT. 

Read More about EA Role:
EA as Decision Influencer

EA as Engineers' Coach

EA as Trusted Advisor

EA as Enterprise Navigator

EA as Value Creator

EA as Customer Evangelist

EA as Vista Point Viewfinder

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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Where to Capture Business Logic

The main responsibility of enterprise architects is to have a holistic picture of Business Logic of the whole enterprise, mostly not in the level of part of the organization.

Business logic, or domain logic, is a non-technical term generally used to describe the functional algorithms that handle information exchange between a database and a user interface.

More generally speaking: "Business logic" is a blanket term that covers several very different types of stuff -- at a minimum, algorithms, business rules, workflows, and integration logic. As a general rule, algorithms belong in object libraries, business rules in a BRMS, and workflows in a business process management system (BPM).

1. Three Levels of Business Logic 

Business Logic can be divided at three levels 

• Strategic: In a Strategic Architecture EA decides on High-Level Capabilities inside the organization and consider the interoperability concerns (Business Logic) how the end customer will be served to utilize these capabilities; At Strategic level, business logic is nothing but Business Model to make profit.

• Segment: At the segment level, EA considers the individual Business Units inside the organizations and it further considers Business Processes supporting the end capabilities and we can call them business functions and we devise business rules supporting business processes. Architecture at segment level supports Strategic level capabilities. At segment level (Program and Portfolio Level), business logic supports business functions (Business, Data, Application, Technology).

• Capability: At the capability level, EA considers the actual implementation of capabilities where environment, technology, applications, databases come into the picture that is generating a capability to support Segment and Strategic Level. EA considers capability increments based on developed business logic. This comprises of Application capabilities, logical data models, Infrastructure to support Business functions that further support Business Services at a strategic level. At the capability level, EA considers interoperability concerns for Solution Architectures using business logic. 

2. Three Views of Business Logic 

Business logic comprises business rules that express business policy (such as channels, location, logistics, prices, and products); and workflows that are the ordered tasks of passing documents or data from one participant (a person or a software system) to another. Business logic, comes in three, partly overlapping views.

• Information. EA looks to see if enough information is coming in and going out. Very importantly, EA checks to see if the information is in or out of balance and whether it is sufficient for optimized operation and also what informational investments you have that will support operation and growth. 

• Rules: The business rule is a rule of a business, company, or corporation. It is a rule that defines or constrains some aspect of business and always resolves to either true or false. Business rules are intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business. Business rules describe the operations, definitions, and constraints that apply to an organization. Business rules can apply to people, processes, corporate behavior, and computing systems in an organization, and are put in place to help the organization achieve its goals. Business logic should distinguish between:
  * Decision rules: entail the responsibility of human agents, architectural footprint.
  * Constraints and computation rules: can be fully supported, with no architectural footprint.
  * Control rules: can be fully supported, architectural footprint. 

• Objects. Usually only the information and rules are supported by tools, while the object is the most powerful and flexible view, and can provide models for the business information and business rules. 

3. Integration Logic 

At the segment or capability level of business logic, integration logic tends to be the thorniest, as this is where semantic mismatches between systems come into play. Business logic usually does not come into play at the strategic level at all. The actual business logic is a bit too detailed in nature to be addressed at a strategic level. It starts to come into play at the operational level but the real detailed business logic tends to get captured in solution architecture models.

The main responsibility of enterprise architects is to have a holistic picture of Business Logic of the whole enterprise, mostly not in the level of part of the organization. Without that whole picture, separate parts of the organization will care for their own part and maybe for interfaces and not more. If the logic is clear enough, it can be captured and automated via coding, within process logic, there's data logic, application logic., etc. Integration logic needs to be captured to ensure the organization as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. 

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