On Architecture and Strategy

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is endeavouring to establish itself as a business management discipline. Although the discipline takes its offset within information systems (IS) academia, many authors are constantly emphasizing the sheer fact and ambition that EA is a strategic management discipline -- and not only an IT-related management toolchain that never really makes its way to management boardrooms. With no doubt, EA is a fully-fledged management discipline in its own right, and several companies (fx. Swiss-based Syngenta) are now exploiting the benefits from serious investments in architecture emerging from the CEO level. 

Having pure managerial ambitions implies building a supportive methodology for strategy development. EA is a strategic discipline, bridging the gaps (courtesy of Tom Graves) between and aligning the interests of business, strategy, and technology (following Scott Bernard's definition of the discipline: EA = S + B + T) in a coherent and coordinated fashion. That said, what is strategy anyway? When depicting ambitious flowcharts of clearly defined business strategies linked to management processes that in turn are linked to an aesthetically well-designed service architecture, we tend to conceptualize strategy development as a strict top-down approach. An approach that preconceives disciplinary planning and calculative, conscious processes. An approach assuming that we first develop the strategy -- and then we tailor the management processes and technology investment to that strategy. In a stable and predictable industry linked to infinite amount of venture capital these assumptions may prove correct, but who is that lucky to navigate in such a greenfield of blue oceans? Not many.

Reflecting upon these questions, what view of strategy is EA supposed to adopt? The orthodox approach of pure Cartesian core capabilities as put forward by Michael Porter's positioning school? Traditional strategic planning as developed by Ford in the 60ies? Peter Senge's collective learning approach which in turn preconceives the same orthodox assumptions about learning organizations? These are all popular conceptions of strategy, but they all emerge from -- and lead to -- the same assumptions about organizations: that enterprises consist of easily-programmable human cogs that respond to every strategic or cultural initiative commenced by upper management. But people are not robots, people are often individuals with a free will, influenced by other concerns than just implementing the next strategic effort put forward by the CEO. As management researcher Tony Watson writes, managers and employees alike all suffer from the same existential schism: the double control problem, that arises when we try to manage our careers and corporate interests while at the same time attempting to manage our own lives. Such view is never discussed nor adopted by contemporary orthodox management theories.

To solve these issues on strategy and escape the cage of Cartesianism, Weick proposes the notion of just-in-time strategies. Strategies are not grand master plans of corporate initiatives permeating every individual action or thought inside the organization. Strategies emerge from the ongoing interaction between individual, organization, and the competitive environment. What managers in hindsight expose or describe as a rational strategy really is the result of a continuous stream of varied and improvised attempts to solve a certain strategic problem and sustain corporate survival. Weick denotes strategy making as 'just-in-time' (JIT) since it is a cyclical, incremental process of different strategies rather than a strictly linear process of calculations in a static environment. JIT strategies acknowledge the fact that corporate environments are inherently dynamic and turbulent. Good companies and good enterprise architectures acknowledge and support this framing. 

So, if strategy making really departs from a just-in-time notion of thinking and acting, why not adopt the active, dynamic, and participative version of strategy - strategizing? EA could provide a systematic framework for ongoing strategizing, not just a good reason for fabricating yet another glorified, long-term strategy plan assuming predictability and deliberation. In my opinion, this is one of the key management issues for EA to adopt.

Finally, the notion of just-in-time strategies leads us to the last concept of this blog entry: Supporting just-in-time thinking through deliberate architectural thinking. How can we support varied attempts, managerial improvisation, and first and foremost dynamic environments through a company-wide enterprise architecture? Framing reality as equivocal calls for our frameworks to adopt the same framing. EA should acknowledge and embrace ambiguity. In order to solve this issue, I propose the concept of just-in-time enterprise architectures: an architectural view which supports the notion that strategies are not deliberate but constantly changing in order to comprehend equivocalities. A view that expounds the emergent properties of socio-political contexts and systems and transfers these emergent properties to the supporting architecture in itself. Enterprise architectures should ideally be represented as rhizomatic artifacts with emergent, constantly changing properties rather than static, idealistic, and orthodox models of organizations and processes.

With these words I call for a new academic effort in order to explore and describe the concept of just-in-time EA.