EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 9

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." - Warren Bennis

I'd like to begin with this quote from Warren Bennis for this this week's reading of the chapter, Take Charge! The Leadership Agenda from Ross et al 's Enterprise Architecture as Strategy. The chapter discusses 9 symptoms of ineffective foundation for execution, any one of which could be a case for action. The chapter then lays out a leadership agenda by listing the steps to design or rethink your foundation of execution. It gives top ten leadership principles for building and exploiting your foundation.

Symptoms of ineffective foundation for execution are a customer query eliciting different answers, new regulations requiring major effort, difficulty achieving business agility and unprofitable growth initiatives, IT consistently being a bottleneck, different business process completing the same activity, information to make decisions not being available, employees moving data from one system to another, senior management dreading IT agenda discussions, and management unaware if it's getting value from IT.

If the above are the symptoms for ineffective foundation, a common factor found in top performing organizations is the senior management involvement in enterprise architecture issues.

Leadership should take action to rethink or design a foundation for execution when faced with any of the symptoms listed above by defining an operating model, designing an enterprise architecture, setting priorities, designing and implementing an IT engagement model, and exploiting foundation for execution for growth.

The top ten principles are commitment to the foundation, initiating change from top and removing barriers, feeding the core and experimenting, using architecture as a compass and communication tool, not skipping stages while transitioning through enterprise architecture maturity stages, implementing the foundation one project at a time, not doing it alone and employing outsourcing, investing in people, awarding enterprise-wide thinking, and empowering employees with the foundation for execution.

References

Ross et al (2006). Enterprise architecture as a strategy: Creating a foundation for business execution.