Culture

How these characters interact and how they relate to one another is largely a function of the approach of how management organizes reporting structures, but organizational culture is the dominant factor that determines whether and how an organization comes together to work toward greater effectiveness.

Perhaps the single most significant message that the CEA can convey to the executive management team is that enterprise architecture is actually the area that determines the epigenetics of the IT organization. As such, enterprise architecture is best positioned to make the IT organization responsive and efficient in reacting to the business direction of executive management and IT management.

This may appear at first to be a fine line to traverse, but let’s explore the subject of epigenetics to better understand the distinction between the roles of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Enterprise Architect (CEA).

We will begin by making an unusual analogy, which is that the role of the CIO is more like the genes of an organism, and the CEA being more similar to epigenetics.

Epigenetics

Although many have not heard of epigenetics before, it is a cornerstone in science for understanding how designs are expressed for building living things. Unlike a single sheet of paper, called a blueprint, that can express how a house should be built, the way designs of living things are represented is somewhat more dynamic.

For a little background in the field of genetics, DNA carries the instructions for building proteins that are the key components of each living cell and body. Genes are long snippets or chunks of DNA that are the basic units of inheritance representing traits of living organisms that are passed on from parents to children. Genes determine how long a protein should be, how much to make, and when to make it. Genes also determine how to edit DNA strings to make different proteins. This is how the body can make about a million different proteins from merely 20,000 genes.

Just to complete our taxonomy, chromosomes are strands of DNA arranged in pairs wrapped around spherical proteins called histones. Each chromosome strand contains many genes. Humans, for example, have 46 chromosomes.

Genes provide all of the directions for how to build a body and the systems that keep that body healthy. In this sense, genes contain all of the commands for subordinate components to do everything that needs to be done to build and operate the body from an executive management perspective.

We know however that DNA alone does not determine the outcome for building an organism, any more than a general can control the outcome of a military operation by issuing commands to his commanders. The orders may be brilliant, but depending upon the preparedness of the troops, a variety of outcomes are always possible.

When it became obvious that DNA and their genes do not determine the outcome for building each cell of an organism, scientists had to look at more than just the genes. They eventually realized that while all of the genes were present on the DNA, it was the environment that determined which genes would be expressed and which genes would not.

Scientists learned that at the microscale each cell knew whether it should develop into a heart cell, brain cell, taste bud, or any other cell, while at a macroscale they learned that our environment determines what genes are expressed over our lifetime through a series of chemical mechanisms that influence gene expression as we grow up and age.

As a result, genes can be expressed to generate a healthy fully functioning individual or they can be expressed in some suboptimal way as a response to a variety of environmental factors such as stress or a lesser abundance of food or shelter.

Expectedly, when the environment is more conducive to a healthy way of life, genes are expressed differently, and in a better way than when the environment is unhealthy.

Similarly, an IT environment can be determined by the chance, which is what many organizations achieve as the outcome of their activities, or the IT environment itself can be influenced in a positive direction, ultimately improving the ability of the organization to express the commands of its executive management.

In that manner, enterprise architecture works behind the scenes to influence the greater environment of automation. As we will see in this book, over even a short period of time, this influence can help the organization be far more prepared to act effectively on commands from the CIO, and from the head of application development.

First, we will try to understand a little better how an influence over an organization can have such a profound effect.

Degrees of Civilization

Organizations express themselves in certain ways. As groups of individuals increase in size, a culture naturally develops from its individual members. For the most part, immediate families and extended families behave in certain ways. Similarly for the most part, small tribes, larger tribes, and collections of neighboring and perhaps related tribes also behave in certain ways. For example, a leader is usually chosen by each tribe.

Tribal culture can be rather sophisticated with many rules for getting along with other individuals and tribes. In tribal societies, sophisticated dispute resolution often evolves for trading pigs, cows, or women in an attempt to avoid escalating cycles of conflict. But in the end, it is quite different than the culture that results when compared to modern cultures that develop from there being the higher influence of a State. (The World until Yesterday, Jared Diamond, 2012, Penguin Group, ISBN 987-1-101-60600-1)

In short, the influence of a state is what makes it relatively safe for citizens within a society to deal with individuals whom they have never met and do not know. Strangers know that there are police, courts, and judges that exist as part of the state. Civilization as we know it is the product of a higher level influence upon our society.

This includes many quality of life advancements that are available within our society for reasons such as the fact that individuals can easily communicate and conduct commerce with others whom they have never met. In contrast, it is common in tribal societies to chase away or kill anyone not related to the tribe as a way to protect the resources and safety of the tribe.

In this book, we will see how a modest, effectively staffed, organized, and well-led enterprise architecture team can become a higher level influence across an organization. While they are not police, they so have a number of ways to influence the environment.

These include methods, such as:

■ frameworks that act as accelerators to get the work that needs to be accomplished done with less effort,

■ subject matter expertise to mentor IT staff across the organization at the moment that additional expertise is needed,

■ standards that incorporate the interests of organizational stakeholders that otherwise could not monitor each and every application team across a large organization, and

■ direction that has been thought through and approved by the CIO for making technology and application decisions.

In short, the role of the modern enterprise architecture organization is to develop the appropriate level of civilization across automation resources to ensure the preparedness of automation resources across the organization to rapidly act on the directions given by the CIO. Tribal methods must give way to a more advanced more cooperative and more intelligent way of reacting to the commands of executives.

In other words, scattering the bones of enterprise architects outside the offices of a tribal line of business or application team should no longer occur, except in only the most extreme circumstances.

Organizational Fitness

In simpler terms, enterprise architects become the fitness leaders of the organization to improve the health and effectiveness of the IT organization. Enterprise architecture shapes the automation personnel into a leaner more effective set of resources that have the right architectural disciplines at their disposal to get the job done. The role of enterprise architecture is to be prepared to meet the evolving needs of the IT organization, while significantly reducing the emergence of IT health-related issues and the overall cost of addressing those issues.

The role of enterprise architecture is surprisingly like that of a physical fitness leader. In fitness, the more difficult thing is to make the time and apply the effort to exercise and to eat properly. Exercising means work. Once one develops a culture that enjoys exercise, then it is not as difficult to get the motivation to exercise.

Eating properly means eating three meals a day and choosing the right things to eat. It may even mean eating more than before, but eating more healthy things to displace the urge and ability to choose unhealthy foods. The worse thing to do is to start skipping meals as a way to lose...