Orientation - Strategy, Architecture and Enterprises

What is it about a strategy that can have an architecture, and why would it need one?

Having a strategy means taking a position from which operations will extend in logical directions and relations. In that sense, the strategy dictates a structure. This structure must function as an environment within which to comply to the strategy. Within the environment, certain behaviors are critical to the strategy by forming an alignment to the sustainability of the strategy. This means that the strategic requirements of the environment are for the environment to sustain the mandated logic of the operations.

No wonder, then, that strategy often precipitates re-organization. Organizing that environment is an architectural concern. Architecture creates the "spaces" in which behaviors conform to generate the impacts that function as the support for the strategy.

Spaces created by architecture are designed spaces, and the purpose of the design is to specify the characteristics of the space that are necessary to assure the needed functions (which are the impacts of behaviors).

The essential behaviors pertinent to a strategy are generic, but for any given strategy the behaviors are specifically related. This reflects the reality that strategy does not define behaviors (which are autonomous, portable and reusable) but instead defines their relevance. Behaviors typically needed for strategy include, for example:

• reconnaissance
• analysis
• communication
• production

These behaviors may be understood as "domains", and within a domain the activity can occur across a "range" of various disciplines, locations, resources, events, processes, and other phenomena.

The importance of acknowledging the domains and range is to understand that at minimum there is, for a strategy, an architectural framework that maps out commitments to some domains and commitments to some of the range. This framework is readily envisioned as a 2-dimensional matrix, but the likelihood is that more than two dimensions will be needed to sufficiently articulate both current commitments and the progression of successive commitments over time.

Architecture also is responsible for designing the spaces (the intersection of domains and ranges) in such a way that they facilitate the progressions, not just the moment. This is, for example, what is meant by saying that a flexible architecture is a prerequisite to strategc agility.

We can apply the concept of an architecture of a strategy to the scale and activity of an "enterprise".  This architecture is especially important to an enterprise because it is the nature of an enterprise to set external boundaries and internal relations that in both cases cross over multiple significant time periods and multiple discrete organizations. Enterprise Strategy does not simply mean "the enterprise's strategy" -- but much more significantly and primarily it means "strategy that enables continuity and persistence of operation as an enterprise".  To that concern we secondarily add the context of particular goals being addressed by the selection and plan of a strategy dedicated to external impacts (being, namely, where you're going to be and why you're going to be there).

Understanding the order of precedence of those two issues is esential to understanding that the relationship of strategies to enterprises is that they need each other but that the relationship may still fail or succeed. This relationship outcome usually has only some predictable factors, and uncertainty is a built-in characteristic of strategies but not of their good architecture. The risks of a bad strategy can include the risk of disrupting the viability of the enterprise, and the benefits of a good strategy can include enabling enterprise status where it had not existed before.

The Archestra Topical Framework (June 14, 2005) is the central reference framework of the work that appears on this website. As a reference it may be used as an instrument -- to contrast or confirm, extend or constrain, and describe or dissect the subjects, topics and propositions about strategy that come from theorists, analysts and practitioners, presented in their work.

(This text, and the Archestra Frameworks, are copyrighted by Malcolm Ryder.)

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack