Yesterday, I gave a presentation at the Open Group Conference in Rome, Italy, revisiting many of the ideas I have put forth in this blog before. The presentation was entitled "Integrated Approach to Enterprise Architecture Governance".
In my presentation, I maintained that the traditional notion of corporate governance that is primarily geared to address the "agency problem" subscribes to a functional view of an enterprise, aimed at maximizing shareholder value; and that this teleological stance inherently results in control-oriented behavior that emphasizes short term efficiency and conformance aspect of governance. Likewise, I reiterated that the traditional view on IT governance, paradigmatically exemplified by CobiT, exacerbates Business-IT divide by making the distinction between the two in the first place.
I pointed out that as the complexity of the global business landscape escalates, the mechanistic, reductionistic and control-oriented approach based on top-down planning and formal logical thinking renders inadequate. A more open, organismic and dynamic view on organization is called for. I also discussed how this paradigm shift manifests in information technology.
In a similar vein, a more encompassing notion of Enterprise Governance, reflecting the "white box" systemic perspective, will be required. I put forth my succinct definition of Enterprise Governance (EG) as follows:
"Enterprise Governance defines the requisite roles, accountabilities and policies to effectively design and operate an enterprise in continually shifting contexts."
I stressed the importance of intentional organizational design in complex and dynamic environments that impose several concurrent objectives on the enterprise. Suggesting that Requisite Organization would provide a stratification scheme for natural decision-making layers and structure governance and enterprise architecture alike, I gave an example of how TOGAF ADM would map to Agile Governance Model.
As a recap, I provided the following three takeaways:
- "Mind the gap": Do not just align business and IT; converge them.
- Design organization for concurrent objectives using requisite stratification as guiding metadesign.
- Do not turn EA upside down -- just 90 degrees.
Leave a comment