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February 17, 2006

Executive Agenda for IT

In the diagram below, we have a bird's eye view on the major business initiatives reconfiguring the management of the enterprise's reliance on the IT infrastructure.

The view identifies that the key high-level motives of the organization are related in certain ways.

The enterprise wants to maximize the value of its autonomy and identity through decisions and actions that:
- differentiate itself in the market,
- optimize its modes of establishing impact and presence there,
- sustain the mechanisms that it uses to do so, and
- control the dynamics of its organization's internal makeup and external behaviors.

These possibilities are systemically related to each other. That is represented by the perspectives that are used to monitor the general states and conditions that presuppose the enterprise's health and/or growth. These perspectives -- governance, performance, architecture, and security -- collectively describe the approaches and models for monitoring the enterprise. The general understanding sought is of whether the way the the organization has chosen to structure itself and to act is viable for achieving its intended goals in the environment it has chosen to inhabit.

Also shown in the picture is the prominent place that stakeholders have between processes and performance.
Likewise, the key intermediary position between security and processes is typically occupied by policies.
The chain of influence formed by their inclusion explains how security is linked to performance -- meaning that the enterprise continually must balance the opportunities to which it commits against the constraints that it can recognize.

For the time being, though, this discussion focuses on the chain of influence that runs between the enterprise's two more overtly discretionary states. Governance and Architecture are both highly complex but they are also more fully synthetic designs than are security and performance, because they are less dependent on external forces to realize and maintain their intended design. As such, they are closer to the issue of the competency and maturity of the organization that can be established directly by management. The picture above expresses the target competency and maturity through identifying issues such as that standards mediate the dependency of processes on infrastructure, or that change mediates the production of infrastructure from architecture.

Taking this picture as a bird's-eye view on the top "surface" of the enterprise's structure, what lies underneath are layers of composition, for example such as "assets". The picture shown here allows us to consider enterprise assets in terms of each motive, perspective and linkage illustrated, detecting discontinuities and strengths of impact. While financial evaluations, functional evaluations (which include intangible assets), and physical evaluations of assets are already three ways to understand how assets become enterprise resources, we see more clearly in the picture here the circumstances in which any of that matters. Likewise, operations, relationships, and strategies are each layers to be interpreted.

The presumption of the different underlying layers highlights that the terms shown in the picture are necessarily abstract -- but it is that very abstractness that allows us to understand that they influence each other in an "essential" way, not just a circumstantial way. Understanding the enterprise from this model is mainly an act of interpretations. For example:
- From an organizational viewpoint, it's not hard to see the organization defining itself in terms of the linkages such as rules, systems, services, etc. by which it institutionalizes itself for attending to the primary motives.
- From a practices viewpoint, it's not difficult to understand from the picture things such as that compliance is a management responsibility that derives from the influence of rules, policies and requirements.
- From a disciplinary viewpoint, BI and BPM have evident locations and sensibly share influence on agreements or "contracts" by discovering and then formalizing the conditions for assuring appropriate deliveries.

While the abstractions and their interpretations cover a wide range of management phenomena and business objects, we'll always eventually wind up back at the huge reliance that the business has on information technology in order to just stay on the playing field. As a result, it is appropriate for IT executives to interpret IT plans, operations and impacts with this same picture of the enterprise, acknowledging that the portfolio of IT implementations can be evaluated for its completeness and effectiveness by considering how much support is being generated for the alignment and balancing of the items in the picture.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at February 17, 2006 3:49 PM

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