The ground is shifting under foot in a disrupted world and change is accelerating. You might find yourself asking questions such as:
At EA, our endeavours in Strategy and Architecture Consulting, Learning and Recruitment give us unique insights into many aspects of the professional landscape for architects within Australia. We thought we would take this opportunity to share some of the trends and changes that we witnessed in the Australian marketplace in the last financial year.
Have you ever attempted to align two ‘high level’ models? Sure there are likely to be features they both have in common – but then there is likely to be the rest of the model where things have been grouped differently, rolled up into different categories or described at differing levels of detail.
On occasion as a practitioner it can be tempting to forgo rigor and precision when asked to produce a ‘high level model’, especially when asked by a significant business stakeholder under tight timeframes and budget. However, in my experience the downstream consequences of getting a ‘high level’ model wrong can be significant.
Design Thinking is more than thinking differently; it is working with, and for, people from the very beginning in order to create better outcomes. The key is engaging your executive sponsor and demonstrating enough value to give you the space (and resources) to deliver something that is innovative, technologically feasible, commercially viable and above all, desirable for the customer.
How can you gain the trust of executives and those in your team to understand and buy into the value of Design Thinking? It’s one thing for it to be a hot topic around the coffee machine; it’s another thing to take action.
Imagine your team has designed a business architecture for your company, and now you have ten minutes to present your findings and recommendations to the CEO.
What do you say? How can you get them believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that your recommendations are the best way forward?
I had the opportunity to hear some of these pitches from the CEO’s chair while three teams presented their solutions to a case study scenario.
I was speaking recently at a Digital Strategy conference and chose to reflect on our experiences in assisting large corporates with their digital strategies. Many of our discussions start with executives just seeking to understand what a digital strategy should actually encompass and how to go about it. It was somewhat revealing to synthesise this experience and I thought worth sharing.
While a digital strategy is now a mandatory requirement for corporations the world over, there are varying perspectives of what a digital strategy should comprise, often reflecting the authorship of the strategy within the offices of Marketing, Products or Technology. However, in many instances these strategies appear indistinguishable from the business technology innovation strategies of yesterday.
At the heart of Digital Strategy should be the premise that the confluence of contemporary forces and capabilities present the opportunity for market disruption and service reinvention – yet invention and disruption generally escapes the major corporates seems to remain the domain of the start-ups.
Enterprise Design is a term we have come to use within Enterprise Architects to describe the merging of the disciplines of Service Design, Information Management and Enterprise Architecture. We have discussed the importance of Information Architecture and Information Management here previously; the focus of this article is the relationship between Design Thinking, Service Design and Enterprise Architecture.
In 2014, Enterprise Architects decided to empower organisations who were working to bring about a 100% renewable energy future. We provided our strategy and enterprise architecture services to climate leaders to rebuild and renew their organisations “better, faster, cheaper”. When the call out was made to the team to see who would be interested to donate their time and skills for a safe climate, we immediately had 12 consultants and managers putting their hands up to contribute, and others joined later.
The effort and enthusiasm that each person brought to the table reminded me what an amazing team we have working at Enterprise Architects and demonstrated the energy that is unleashed when a real opportunity to contribute is presented to people. I am proud to share the results of this project with the architecture community and I’d like to start back at the beginning, with motivation – where all good planning efforts start.
Good design is one of the core elements of the Enterprise Architecture discipline. I recently came across and was inspired by Mike Monteiro’s presentation at Webstock 2013. Mike’s presentation was a ‘call to action’ to designers of all walks of life to take their responsibility seriously and deliver good design. This caused me to re-visit a paper I presented some time ago at the Software Engineering Conference in 2010 that aimed to identify the principles of good design[1].
