Dabbler or a Leader,
What should Enterprises aspire to be?
Have you ever tried cooking with multiple pots on the stove trying
to do everything at the same time? Why not use all the burners on the stove? It’ll
make us 4* faster, right? Wrong. In my
quest for efficiency all I got was burns on my hand.
Allega (2006) explains
the purpose of developing an Anchor
model, is to communicate the relationships between the highest-order entities
inside and outside the company.
“The Discipline of Market Leaders “ by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema is referred
by Allega (2006), which lists the three generic competitive strategies as
operational excellence, customer intimacy, and product leadership. Leading
organizations excel in one of these generic competitive strategies, while
maintaining industry standards in the other two. Many companies wallow in mediocrity
by attempting to excel in all three.
While I tried my hand at too many things and have fading scars to
remember my attempts, enterprises fade to mediocrity attempting the same. Thus
it is critical to provide the business leaders with a big picture of the
enterprise and EVN is one such model that Enterprise Architects can arm the
business leaders with to lead their Enterprise to being a market leader. This is one of several
informational aspects I gathered from this week’s EA872 readings which focused
on understanding the business context.
I like your sentiment about how companies all too often try to do everything better than everybody else, when they really just need to focus on being the best at one thing. However, many modern companies have achieved that sought-after goal, and are good at all three strategies. Take Amazon. They operational efficiency is industry-leading, their product offerings have become the industry standard, and their reviews and customer service make others play catch-up. But they didn't start that way. They started by being really good in a niche market: selling books via the internet, using a supply and warehousing setup that allowed them to undersell the competition - success through operational excellence. Since then, Amazon gradually developed their capabilities in the other realms: expanding their product offerings to the point of ubiquity, and making their user experience top of the line.
ReplyDeleteI guess the point I'm making here is this, to build on your metaphor: when you're starting out at cooking, it's a good idea to just have one thing on the stove at a time; but when you've become an expert at cooking, you better be able to use every last bit of that stove at the same time.
Indeed. Organizations need to focus on managing outcomes, not necessarily the exact steps required to get from A to B. Yes, the CIO may be ultimately accountable for the EA management plan being implemented correctly, but it is impossible for a single individual to be actively engaged in every single facet of the transition.
ReplyDeleteYou are right. Organization needs have focus on what they want as their final outcome. I also think this information should be coming from Upper Management with clear path how to archive the target.
ReplyDeleteGreat cooking metaphor. I keep trying those food food for cooking delivery services and get completely overwhelmed because they are too complicated. Thanks for the tip on that book. It sounds interesting.
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