Run EA like a political campaign?
It’s week 2 of EA872 and I’m reading the importance of
stakeholder analysis to develop communications planning while across US folks
are thinking about Presidential nominees and the candidates or their campaign
managers are thinking about how to dominate the news cycle. I cannot help but
draw parallels between running a political campaign and running an EA program.
Political campaigns have tools to nail down voter analysis and EA has tools for
stakeholder analysis. This got me to thinking about fields like criminal
justice system and the juror analysis but there at least they get to reject
someone who they know could mean trouble. Unfortunately Enterprise Architects
do not have that luxury and can appreciate the benefits of using stakeholder
analysis to plan a communication campaign to gain and maintain their support
for Enterprise Architecture.
Jyothi, I agree with your analogy - for better or worse, stakeholder analysis for creating/maintaining an EA program does feel like politicking. I think this relates to the difficulty of measuring the value of EA. EA has no direct benefit to the bottom line; if we could provide an ROI measure for an EA program, I think it would be fairly straight forward to gain support.
ReplyDeleteMy organization does not currently have an EA program and I find myself scheming up tactics to introduce concepts, towards building a critical mass for establishing architecture as a separate discipline within IT. Perhaps I should take a few lessons from House of Cards.
Jyothi- I never thought of using EA in Political campaign. I think Presidential candidates would be able to use your fund to state where they not populate. EA tool could be used to make sure the message is sent loud and definite to the general public.
ReplyDeleteI agree with John and Nishil here. With rapidly changing developments in the political arena, EA could be very valuable. I see it being especially helpful when scaling a campaign (expanding or contracting)
ReplyDelete