They say the only thing constant about business is change. Change, of course, occurs in fits and spurts, with occasional leaps in technology. Luddites protested mechanization in the early 1800s. Factory workers protested robotics in the 1980s. Innovations and belt-tightening in the Great Recession resulted in lean, mean business organizations that marched in lockstep to the mantra of doing more with less. The current gig economy rising from the Great Recession’s ashes almost hearkens back to pre-industrial centuries of cottage industry, except for that whole digital revolution thing.
The point made here is that business evolves and the failure to adjust and accommodate changes in technology and human resource deployment quickly consigns a business to obsolescence. A thriving business must retain the agility needed to execute robust processes that accommodate, incorporate, and guide the development and acquisition of new capabilities and services.
In their paper “Capability Driven Development—an Approach to Support Evolving Organizations,” Stirna et al. focus on alignment between business and information systems: “[I]t is important to tailor these applications with regard to functionality, usability, reliability and other factors required by users operating in varying contexts.” In other words, whatever system developed to meet user needs must work and work and lead to consistent, predictable results.
Focusing their attention on the management approach, Oliver Bossert and Jürgen Laartz observe that enterprise architecture limits a company’s agility in adapting to change. They begin with a comparison of Internet-based companies to brick-and-mortar companies: the former can adapt within hours, the latter requires months to effect change to meet the new operating conditions. They define their suggested model for enterprise architecture as “‘perpetual evolution,’ because it emphasizes continual changes to and modular design of business capabilities as well as the technologies behind them. … It compels executives to take a comprehensive view of their digital capabilities and technologies but to manage them in a way that mitigates or removes interdependencies and emphasizes speed.”
The Open Group offers a detailed description of capability-based planning that focuses on business outcomes. This focus analyzes the desired results and then builds the systems to support delivery of those results. Those systems then must retain sufficient flexibility to accommodate future changes in corporate governance, changes in management and personnel, changes in physical infrastructure, and changes in technology. The Open Group frankly notes that functional or vertical changes are more easily discerned, developed, and implemented than capability or horizontal changes. Changes, they say, occur in increments: people, process, and material.
No one blog article can address any single company’s enterprise architecture needs, much less outline a general, useful plan for surviving and exploiting business evolution. You want your company to thrive, not just survive. Successful adaptation often requires an outside expert who can take that bird’s eye view and come to the problem without bias and without preconceived solutions that may or may not fit your company’s culture and needs.
The Heggen Group helps companies organize, analyze, develop, and implement the systems that effect robust and consistent business evolution: personnel training and development strategies; concepts, business processes, and information management; and, infrastructure, information technology, and equipment. We’d love to teach you how to do that, too.
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