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Jennifer Zaino
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Professional Development Series

 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the first in our series of professional development blogs highlighting industry associations that enterprise architects should consider joining (see here) . Among them was IASA, the International Association of Software  Architects, which also offers a year-long mentoring program for professionals who want to grow their expertise in a particular capability such as enterprise, business, software or information architecture. Also on the menu are programs that are industry-specific, or related to a skill or next-generation technology such as security and service-oriented architecture (SOA).


The discovery of this list came shortly after I received an email from my high school: It’s starting an Alumnae Mentoring program to help students interested in similar careers work toward their goals all the way through their college years.

 

This got me thinking: Do most enterprise architecture practices offer mentoring to staffers? As I recently wrote here, I think it’s very important to encourage the participation of younger architects in projects in a more holistic fashion. But I focused on why that’s good for you and your efforts, not how it helps the company and the staff. As Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research at MIT, recently told us, it’s important even for those lower down in the architecture food chain to spend time with those whose processes they are trying to affect. “They will start to design simpler things if they can start to understand the essence of the issue,” she noted. (For our interview with her, see this blog.)


Giving Back and Paying Forward


Here, I’d like to focus on giving back, or paying it forward — whichever interpretation you prefer — and not just to individual staffers but to the company that (we hope) you’ve been proud to represent. Toward that end, I talked about the value of a mentoring program and how to develop one, with Badar Munir, Chief Architect at i3 Technologies Inc., which provides management consulting services in business architecture, enterprise architecture (EA), organizational change, business transformation and process improvement. In Badar’s architecture consulting engagements, he’s had experience mentoring personnel who would run the EA practice after he left.

 

One important result from creating some type of formalized mentorship effort is this, Badar says: that home-grown and nurtured talent will be ready to step into the shoes of departing senior EA professionals. He says, “In bigger companies — especially if they have more complex enterprise architectures — they keep looking for people from the outside.” But why?  Going outside means they haven’t built a base of solid strategic architects to promote from within even if they have technical talent.

 

The goal, of course, is to ensure that future enterprise architects are business leaders and strategic thinkers first, not primarily subject-matter experts in a narrow area of focus. Says Badar: “An organization should establish and [develop] an EA program to achieve strategic benefits. [These benefits] may include achieving higher levels of business agility, improving ROI on IT capital investments, developing better insight into IT and business strategies [and/or] improving IT/business alignment.”

 

Steps to a Mentorship Program


So how do you  establish a mentorship program at your company — one that will not only affect junior architect staffers but also those who’ve perhaps had longer careers in roles such as project and program management?

 

Here are some thoughts from Badar, who recognizes that there can be two levels of mentorship efforts;

  • The first level focuses on developing a core EA training and communication program. “Provide this training to all resources whose projects will be audited or monitored by the EA team,” so they are prepared for their roles and deliverables from EA perspectives for all incoming projects. That means selected individuals, from project managers to solution architects to senior business analysts, are provided training regarding the company’s EA framework, its standards, components and goals. They are also trained about the EA governance process. 

 

  • The second type of mentorship identifies individuals to become future senior enterprise architects. “For mature EA shops, I recommend that chief architects establish such a program within their practices. As a matter of fact, it should be part of their EA maturity model,” he says. In his experience, it’s wise to consider as mentoring candidates not just individuals with hard skills such as program and process management, and information and infrastructure architecture adeptness. Soft skills, he says, are important, too — which means considering as candidates those individuals who are people-savvy, who respect the company’s culture and values, who are both analytic around total cost of operation and return on investment issues, and who have shown an understanding of business strategy and business models, he says.

 

  • Promising candidates can be identified through project participation. “For those you think you want to move up in the future, look for one or two of the soft skills — when you talk to them about IT or business strategy, how do they react?” he says. “Do they ask more questions, or do they remain in their technical domain and keep talking about how cool the technology they support is?” Be prepared for those coming from technical architect roles to struggle in the soft -skill areas in different ways.

 

  • The career ladder for IT architects may include moving them from project architect to solution architect to enterprise architect, as they acquire soft skills and experience interacting with the EA group to develop an understanding of the organizational EA practice, he says.

 

  • Project and program managers, he suggests, can be selected for EA management roles based on their personality and expertise in areas such as process development and management, and strategy and governance skills. These, he says, “will be critical for them to succeed in the EA group.”

 

Has your company thought about developing an EA mentorship program? If so, let us know how it got its start and how it’s going today.

 

359 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: mentorship, iasa, international_association_of_software_architects, program_management, solution_architecture, badar_munir, enterprise_architecture, smart_architect, jeanne_ross, mit, project_management
Jennifer Zaino
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Did you hear the one about the clinical psychologist who became an enterprise architect? No? Well, if this were a joke, the punchline might be that the poor guy’s spending more time in therapy now than ever before. Only this time he’s on the other end of the couch, trying to work through the pain of resistance and rejection by senior business people who tell him that they understand architecture matters but they just don’t have time for it.


As it happens, MIT’s  Jeanne Ross, one of the premier researchers in the field of enterprise architecture and IT, actually did once meet an architect who started out as a clinical psychologist — and he told her that his earlier training really helped him in his current role. Point being that much of what an EA does is as much the art of persuasion as the science of integrating data and processes, as much about gaining insight into people’s hot buttons as it is about bringing standardization into the organization.

 

As Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research, explains, they have to “know how to get buy-in for something people don’t think they have time for and think that you [the enterprise architect] will take care of for them.” The problem with that is that while architects can do a lot, they can’t have a positive impact all by themselves. Says Ross, “I would urge architects to recognize that their success totally depends on other people’s behaviors, and thus they can never give up working on other people’s behaviors.” (Are you seeing the psychology connection now?)


Ross, who gave a keynote presentation on how enterprise architects can design business success at The Open Group Conference in San Francisco in January, says that architects don’t always recognize that not everyone necessarily gets what it means to have enterprise processes and what it takes to get enterprise data. That’s not to say that their business peers aren’t logical and smart people, but, Ross says, “they’re thinking in silos and silo-thinking works against all that architecture tries to do.”


To counter this, Ross says you need to be prepared to go against some natural inclinations of what you think you should be spending all your time doing — focusing on design — and what you actually should be spending time doing. The great architects, she says, are in the field, spending time with the people designing processes, for instance, or heading up call centers. They’re stepping back from the big-picture view of creating enterprise value and instead first asking themselves who it is in the organization that is best positioned to make things happen — “Who wants something in the worst way that will be better accomplished if it’s well-architected,” she says. So, your plan should be to get them to recognize that the best way forward is to think end-to-end, about integrated processes or shared data. “Invariably there’s some piece that some people will get,” she says. And those movers and shakers become your champions. 


Being proactive with the business side also means that chief architects likely will find themselves in the position of constantly forcing more clarity around the operational decisions of senior executives that, frankly, in many cases aren’t very clear. Their desire to take steps to transform the business, which includes transforming the architecture, is real but doesn’t always take into account long-term impact and the metrics that will be used to gauge it. “Architecture comes down fundamentally to two things: standardization and integration. Many senior executives think about neither in the long term, and because they don’t think of it, in a way architecture is impossible,” Ross says. “If a company has made no decision on what to integrate and standardize, you can’t go forward.”


The job, then, is to make it plain that integration and standardization will be in vain unless the business understands the real commitment this entails, and the impact that it will have on the company in terms of what it can and can’t do going forward. “A lot of companies haven’t gone the step beyond to talk about how we operate, how people’s jobs would change, about how their relationships with customers would change,” she explains. “Architects have to articulate that if I do this, then that is the result. You can help them understand the implications of their decisions.”


In other words, you have more leverage than you may think. Ross says that in her experience working with companies that have succeeded in IT-enabled transformation initiatives, the CIOs had good architects working with them. As one example, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia began a transformation in 2006 focused on meeting its customers’ need to be treated as one entity across all the divisions they dealt with. The inclination of many architects, she says, would have been to do a major overhaul, consisting of ripping out the legacy system and putting in a new banking engine, but here they focused on getting to the big impact through smaller initiatives with more immediate results. The bank began with doing just enough of an architecture revision on the back end to deliver a friendlier Internet interface to the customer. “They said, let’s fix just what we need to fix [to create] a single interface for the customer so it looks better in the back end than it is. That is brilliant,” she says. A few years later, having met their desired operational metrics — operational costs as a percentage of revenue and customer satisfaction — they’re ready to take on the banking engine itself.

 

Bottom line: “In companies where leaders have religion about architecture, it has a huge impact, and individual architects have a huge impact,” says Ross.


To be successful at proselytizing requires knowing your audience well, of course. To gain that insight, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sign up for a Psych 101 refresher online, or reflecting on a couch before diving into the EA challenge.

2385 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: enterprise_architecture, mit, standardization, integration, jeanne_ross, australia, the_open_group


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