The world of business is enormously complex and diverse and the boundaries of enterprise are constantly changing, as are the rules of the game. So – what matters to an architect? The EA Headspace infographic is a fun way to communicate what’s on the mind of our team here at Enterprise Architects.
A while back, just for fun, we started sketching a network diagram of concepts that are important to an architect. As the list grew we noticed many of the ideas had a strong bias toward analytical, left brain thinking, while others were more in the intuitive space – and several ideas were somewhere in the middle, drawing from both.
After many iterations and the decision to limit the number to around 200 concepts we saw an interesting graphic emerge – and The ‘EA Headspace’ was born.
We think it’s an interesting device to start the discussion; “What matters to an architect?” We’ll continue to develop and iterate the EA Headspace as a tool to communicate what’s on the mind of our team at Enterprise Architects.
What do you think matters to an architect? We’d love to hear your ideas.
Click here to download the infographic
Hi Hugh,
A great way to represent the potential breadth and depth of the EA role. Jonathan Churchman make a great point in his reply above. I do believe, however, that while the role will cover many of the topics listed, and others that aren’t, the areas of focus (for 2013 and beyond) will depend on the values of organisation being ‘EA-ed’. Your poster prompted me to post a recent presentation (link below) in which I emphasize the importance of alignment with the organisation’s values (i.e. Enduring Purpose & Current Centre-of-Gravity – both of which can change significantly and rapidly these days). Cherry-picking the right subset of topics, at a given point in time, is one of the most important skills required of the Enterprise Architect, IMO.
Further thoughts here:
http://taotwit.posterous.com/enterprise-architecture-charting-the-journey
Thanks @Nigel – great presentation for HKCS by the way… (http://bit.ly/UmecCI) > fully agree with all your insights. The last slide looking at the role EA plays in traditional SDLC versus Lean is a very topical discussion in our organisation at the moment.
In response to your comments above – I also fully agree. It’s no different trying to explain something to a friend or family member… people need to understand ideas in terms that are familiar to them, and ideally in terms that relate to their interests. If you know what they value and you can find a way to link your argument or idea to those values, then you’ll engage them. This is not just a context challenge but it’s also a level-of-detail challenge. Architects need to read the mood of the organisation (as you put it – the “centre of gravity”), understand the pressures affecting their customer and couch ideas and solutions in those terms. It’s not enough to know the answer – we’ve got to know why anyone should care.
@Hugh, to your point “It’s not enough to know the answer – we’ve got to know why anyone should care”: it was exactly this challenge that led us to develop http://www.informationtamers.com/VPECT/VPECT-and-business-information-systems.html – I believe we need new frameworks for understanding Values Systems and Trust-Relationships in play which points to a greater need for more Right-Brained /Design Thinking as we tackle human (and highly business relevant) aspects of things like M2M/Big Data and digital social.
Some earlier related posts here:
http://servicefab.blogspot.hk/2010/09/new-context-for-ea-enterprise-eco.html
http://servicefab.blogspot.hk/2009/06/balancing-reliability-x-and-validity-y.html
Hello Hugh, I really like the idea, and the list of concepts is great (shows just how challenging this ‘space’ is), but I’m not sure the interconnects truly show the complexity of interaction. It feels simplified to allow easier visualisaiton, which might be right, but looking at the nodes I suspect that in reality it could be closer to an n-squared model, not unlike the brain it represents!
Anyway, all that aside, what we’re seeing here are multiple views forming – certainly something like this is useful for the practitioners, but for “the board” it’s as simple as showing that EA is the link between the business goals and the IT change portfolio… a way of making sure that all IT spend is ‘on strategy’… that’s assuming that there is a strategy, of course!
@Gary Yes – love your idea of generating an N2 model to more richly capture the relationships. In the early stages of development we attempted to accurately map the relationships in this way and, while it was helpful for us to understand how everything fits, connects and levels we decided the approach would become too difficult to interpret for a broad audience. The connecting lines in the infographic are there to infer particularly important connections and flows as well as the the connected nature of the whole.
This is also the type of analysis I have been doing now for a few years as I have been exploring the behavioural characteristics of people engaged in various aspects of business endeavour.
I have a preference however to use the term cognitive rather than analytical as it provides, I believe more scope for discussion. This preference is probably driven through both my experience in educational psychology which I was exposed to through my teacher training and also as a consequence of my wife’s recent Master’s degree (Art Psychotherapy) where she she was exposed to the theories proposed by Lusebrink many years ago on the Expressive Therapies Continuum. Using the Cognitive term has meant that we can use a common vocabulary to drive our frequent discussions further.
Focussing on the cognitive rather than the analytic also allows the better understanding of how ‘Cognitive Dissonance’, where an individual experiencing discomfort through holding two conflicting ideas or beliefs, can affect the decision making processes that are required when working in an Architectural framework.
The EA Headspace certainly provides an interesting way of of visualising the various functions that are required. I don’t fully agree with where everything has ended up (game theory for instance I would regard as being extremely cognitive rather than intuitive but that perception may be from having studied this when at university)
An interesting mix of techniques, functions, standards, and even some popular buzzwords.
To be honest Hugh, given that EA (in its broadest and in my opinion most honest definition) is about the architecture of the enterprise I would be more interested to know what you decided to omit i.e. what the collective you, do not believe to be important to architects in 2013.
@Jonathan > We did cull many of the candidate options, often because they were encapsulated by a higher order or closely related concept. Thus I wouldn’t interpret their omission as a statement by EA that they are not important to an architect in 2013. In fact their consideration for inclusion means that, in most instances, they too are worthwhile of focus.
Here are some examples:
Action Learning, Corporate Image Management, Crowd Funding, Horizontal and Vertical Integration, Deming Cycle, Customer Lifetime Value, Planned Behaviour Theory, Constraint Management, SMART Criteria, ERG Theory, Ergonomics, Digital Economy (this one should probably have made it!), Collective Consciousness, The Wisdom of Crowds, Smart Mob, Crisis Management, RACI, Return on Capital Employed, Product Lifecycle Management, Procurement Management, Business Rules, Economies of Scope, Economies of Scale, Value Network Analysis, Open Source, User Experience Design, Delta Model, Strategy Game Board, Trend Analysis, Facilities Management…
Could this be managed in one head?
I see your graph as areas where the logic, knowledge, insight and design options captured, visualized, discussed and communicated by EA “models, methods and skills” can contribute to the development of the entire company.
So how to support the communication and collaboration with other “cross company” functions and usage of the EA findings in all of the areas in the graph is on my mind.
In the years ahead I hope we move towards questions about intentional design or redesign of the company….
@Annika – thanks for your comment. I agree, there’s an opportunity to think about HR, finance, risk, product management and business model innovation as layers of a broader, more holistic business design. Architecture is about articulating these overlays, or views, so that we can understand the layers of the system and their relationships in a consumable form > ultimately helping us to design better businesses.