Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others

Innovation strategy for IT organization:

The ideas about broad range of business models are from my unpublished strategy paper. I propose there are two abstract business models.

• Wide open business model.
• Close business model.

Wide open business model
Wide open business model is primarily the models used by companies like google, apple, etc. For example, google’s vision/mission statement is to organize world content and make it universally accessible and useful to every one (or something similar to that). Towards that vision, they build businesses around that. Google is not just a search engine company (do you remember there was a search engine called altavista.com!! It was a search engine company). Google will build any business which aligns to their vision and generate revenue. They are already providing location based content, personality based content etc. They may also provide or facilitate a car loan process or be broker for a mortgages etc based on your location/ creditencials . They are wide open and their vision/mission/strategy map is created such way that they will enter into any venture. It is business proliferation by leveraging their core competency (search technology)

Close Business model:
Close business model is the one confined to do business around their established business model. Let us take a bank as an example, the bank never get into the grocery market and vice versa. A financial service organization focuses only on selling financial services (loan, lease, checking account, credit cards,etc) and very closely related products like financial consulting. The corporate strategy is to focus on the business in and around the core business (like financial)

Innovation strategy for wide open business model:

Innovation strategy for wide open business model is relatively easy since sky is the limit. Based on the type of business model you are in, create the strategy map (ie. Strategic objectives, – the bubbles – the representation of the organization strategy), performance measures for each strategic objectives, targets for each performances measures and initiatives to meet the targets. It is a classical, text book approach to form and drive a strategy for an organization. For example, google being in the wide open business model, they need people who can come up with unlimited innovative ideas. The folks who has unlimited innovation ideas are generally from the younger generation who uses facebook, myspace, blogs, wikis extensively, naturally collaborate and seek for better ideas all the time. The younger generation need money but they do not just work for money, they need pride, recognition and satisfaction. The company who are in the open business model formulate the recruiting strategy to support the over all organization strategy and bring the right people who fits into the strategy. It helps to bring the people whose chemistry matches to the company’s strategic objectives.

In my opinion, driving innovation in the open business model organization is relatively easier to compare to the close end business model.

Innovation Strategy for close end business model:
Formulating and driving the innovation strategy steps in the close end business model organization is more challenging. Innovation strategy for this type of organizations are:

• Ensure the organization understand the core business (how the company makes money)
• Ensure the organization understand the value proposition (how the company create value to the customer)
• Ensure the organization understand the boundary of the innovation (ie. the focus area)
• Create a dedicated innovation program office to build & assist innovation development platform
• Funnel through all new ideas through the innovation program office
• Innovation program office to include the SMEs to validate the innovative ideas
• Develop an innovation incentive program
• Develop a innovation promotion – ie. the whole innovation team wins or the whole innovation team looses (defeat the individual contributor’s recognition and drive collaboration by design)
• Start small and accelerate the phase based on the practical & suitable ideas
• Value driven innovation
• Provide platform to every one to think out side their daily function (You do not need to put everyone in the room and ask them to do yoga and spell innovate as in the IBM commercial)
• Ideas are going to come all over the place if the above strategy steps are followed in an organization which has the close end business model.

Innovation is the latest buzz word. No question about it. But it is not just a buzz word any more. Organization started doing something about innovation. Innovation is easily misunderstood within the information technology organization. The moment, IT organization hear the word innovation, the immediate thing, generally, comes to the most of the IT organization members are

• Server virtualization
• Latest search engine (and introducing latest google appliance)
• Introducing SOA tool sets
• Latest content management
• etc

The above could be few innovative IT solution for some organization, but the innovation in the ITM (Information Technology Management) team should not be limited to just technological innovation. In the current and future generation of the ITM, the value proposition of ITM is not just providing the service to support the business, but to drive business providing innovative solution using information technology. Some organization are already there and few late starters have already started discussing the design of that organization model.

Innovation is integral to information technology organization. To promote innovation in ITM, the understanding of core business process should be significantly increased. Enterprise architect could play pivotal role to improve the understanding of core business processes by

• Providing technology & process road map to the ITM organization and elevate the understanding of the ITM strategic direction
• Providing multiple level of core business processes to the ITM organization and improve the understanding of the complete business life cycle of the organization. In simple words, provide the necessary information to the organization on how the company make money? Who are all the customers, how the company create value to the customer?
• Articulation of business strategy to the organization
• Assisting the organization to validate new ideas by performing quick proof of concept
• Application portfolio assessment. Categorizing the current spend and revenue generated by business

Enterprise architect builds a foundation and platform in the organization to drive innovation by providing the basic necessary information so that the organization will come out of their daily function and start thinking about out side the box solution. The innovation in return will drive efficiency, cost optimization and better customer value proposition.

To become a successful chief architect or chief IT strategist, a person must have multiple technical skills and exemplary soft skills and required to demonstrate multi talent to the organization. The competency required for chief architects or chief IT strategist are generously available in the internet and from the private consulting firms like Gartner, Forrester, executive board, etc.

The real question is, how a chief architect will grow further in an organization. What are the general career progression for a chief architect in an organization. What is a general perception of chief architect and how that perception helps or hurts the chief architect to grow further.

There is always an exception in any scenario analysis and study. However, the majority of the population tend to fit in the bell curve and the discussion is focused on the population who fits in the bell curve.

What Chief Architects do in a nutshell:
Lead a small team to assist the executive and senior management to run an IT organization successfully and align the daily activities of the IT organization to the business and IT strategy.

Career Progression for a Chief Architect:
Chief architects are management consultants who has lots of practical IT experience and holistic (bottom line impact and IT/Business strategy) understanding of the organization. A logical step for a successful chief architect is to become the middle level executive manager.

General Perception of a Chief Architect:

• Jack of all trades and a master of none
• Deliver any complex projects but not quite ready for next level
• Technical and detail oriented but require molding for next level
• Visionary but need to be political savvy

How a chief architect changes the perception to move forward in the career progression:

In reality, perception is the reality. To make the reality work for you, the bad perception (ie. not aligned to what is required for next level)should be changed. If it is strategized appropriately and adequately, changing the bad perception is also the reality. Formulating a strategy should be natural to a chief architect!!

What is perception?

It is an image created by the mental models of a person about a person (in this context. It could be a thing too). Each person builds a mental model about a person based on interaction, discussion, knowledge about subject’s depth, understanding, correlating the relevance of various mutually exclusive events, trust index, openness, value proposition and lot more data points. Once the mental models are built by a person about a person, it is going to take time to change it. The inputs to build a model about a person depends on the personality of mental modeler. If the mental model building process of a person is alike with the person whose inputs are received to build the model about them, then, in general, we call those two people have natural chemistry. In that case, variance between perception of the person and real potential of the person is minimum. However, if the mental model building process of a person is different from the person whose inputs are received to build the model about them, then, the variance between perception of the person and real potential of the person is significant. Conceptually that will work in favor, in some cases. ie. A person does not have a real potential but perceived to be a potential.

It sounds like a science but it is an art than a science.

Steps to change the bad perception:

1. Understand what is the general perception about you with the decision makers?
2. Weigh the perceptions and figure out the perceptions which are going to work against you?
3. Understand the mental model building process of the decision makers and the inputs taken to conclude the model
4. Explore and exploit opportunities to provide inputs to the decision maker to change existing mental model.

It sounds simple as long as some one provides the data for each steps. It can not be found in internet (google) but can be found through social net.

The above are abstract steps and can be personalized for your organization by connecting it from your executive mentors.

Where are the executive advisory mentors?

They are all over. How many times you were with an executive in an elevator and just said “Hi, How are you doing it today? What a nice weather?” How many times you stood next to an executive in a cafeteria line to get a salad, but said “Hello”. How many times you passed a minority group organization sponsored executive panel discussion? How many times when an executive asked you how are you doing? and you just said “good”.

Always, be ready for a 30 seconds elevator talk which will open a channel for 30 min discussion to discuss one or multiple steps to read and change the bad perception of you in the organization decision makers.

This blog is a summarization of what I heard in one of the executive panel discussion on career growth and its challenges, and generalization of that to a Chief Architect or Chief IT strategy person. I thank all the members of panel and I wish, I will speak like them one day. Why they were able to speak so clearly about those vague topics? Is it because they are so matured? is it because they have clarity in their thoughts? hmm.. that deserves a separate blog..