On August 11th, Gartner announced a “new approach for enterprise architecture” that they labelled “Emergent Architecture”.  I got a chance to read some responses from Todd Biske, Mike Rollings, and Dion Hinchcliffe.  Thanks for the great insights and commentary.

In the press release, Bruce Robertson, Gartner Research VP states the two characteristics of “Emergent EA”:

1. “Architect the lines, not the boxes – which means managing the connections between the different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves.”
2. “It models all relationships as interactions via some set of interfaces, which can be informal and manual”

On characteristic 1. is if you only look at the connections between parts of the business, how can you look for opportunities to reduce complexity, increase efficiency and implement reusability? I believe enterprise architecture is about the whole organization and its environment, not just pieces of it. As an example, our EA practice encompasses IT Service Management (ITIL), Business Analysis (BA) and Program Management (PMO).

On characteristic 2. , again all this says to me is to take a “user experience” approach to describing the architecture. This is nothing new as far as I can tell … perhaps I am missing something?

Now to look at the 7 properties that differentiate “emergent architecture” from “traditional EA”.  Read more...

1. Non-deterministic – “… decentralize decision making to enable innovation”.  I don’t see this as anything new. We address this with our technology lifecycle and our technology governance models. We ensure our architecture has a place for innovation in the R&D phase of the technology lifecycle and in the Innovative area of our technology governance.
2. Autonomous actors – “… devolve control to constituients”.  Being that we grew our EA practice out of IT and that I was a one person team, I never was able to “control all aspects of architecture”.  Working collaboratively, within a technology governance framework allows autonomy based on funding, support and impact our practice influenced the architecture adopted by our community. Again, I do not see how this is different from our existing EA practice. Implementing data stewardship in our business areas is an example of autonomous acting within our EA.
3. Rule bound actors – “… define a minimal set of rules and enable choice”. What EA practice has not started with some set of guiding principles? Enabling choice is fundamental within an architecture as long as it respects the established guiding principles. I blogged on this here and here.

Andy Blumenthal wrote a great post “Adaptive Leaders Rule the Day“. In his post, Andy reviewed a Harvard Business Review July 2009 article “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” and commented on the article’s insights on adaptive leadership.

I really liked Andy’s quote “Leaders need a proverbial “toolkit” of successful behaviors to succeed and even more so be able to adapt and create innovative new tools to meet new unchartered situations.”

Andy listed some of the successful behaviours in the “toolkit”.  I recommend you read the full article to get all of Andy’s insights. 

Here is the list of successful behaviours:

• “Foster adaptation”
• Stabilize, then solve
• Experiment
• “Embrace disequilibrium”
• Make people safe to question
• Leverage diversity

Taking a similar approach to my previous post on Generative EA Principles, I will explore and share how Andy’s list of behaviours fit with our EA practice (and maybe yours).  We have a long way to go to fully leverage the successful behaviours but having some clear names for what we have accomplished helps.  Thanks Andy!

Foster adaptation: “leaders must develop ‘next practices’ while excelling at today’s best practices.” In 2005, we established the Strategic Practices groupin our IT Services department. This group role is responsible for the development, maturation and integration of a broad set of IT disciplines and methodologies across all areas of IT Services. These disciplines are intended to raise the level of rigor and reliability of all of our technical implementations while ensuring that IT investments are aligned with institutional strategy. The Strategic Practices group includes practices like enterprise architecture, business analysis, project management, business continuity, IT security, risk management and performance management. Think of these as our ‘next practices’.  At the same time, we adopted the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework for standardizing, managing and measuring our core service delivery. So far we have implemented the Service Desk function, Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management and are building out Configuration, Capacity and Availability Management processes. These are today’s best practices.  Read more...

Tomorrow, I will be asking my peers in the Internet2 ITANA – IT Architects in Academia to do a peer review of a Technology Lifecycle taxonomy that we use at BCIT. As we developed our Enterprise Architecture, we needed a way to communicate not only the lifecycle of initiatives and technology but also their viability.

Here is what we use:

Here are the definitions that we use:

Watching:
- includes initiatives and technologies that are being watched for maturity in industry

Researching:
- includes initiatives and technologies that are currently under consideration, investigation or evaluation for future implementation

Investing:
- includes initiatives and technologies that are the target of resources including financial investments and/or investments in human resources

Sustaining:
- includes initiatives and technologies that deliver services identified in the Core Services Catalogue or in Service Level Agreements

Containing:
- includes initiatives that have been completed and technologies that are in the process of being phased out

End of Life:
- includes initiatives and technologies that are being retired from service

While this is a life cycle, it is not mandatory that an initiative of technology follows through every step.

Comments?