Managing Organisational Change with Enterprise Architecture

The Role of the Enterprise Architect

As key change agents, Enterprise Architects are often critical in the success of organisational change, working closely with all areas of the businesses and IT to produce 'As-Is' architectures, developing 'To-Be' architectures and any intermediate transition architectures. Enterprise Architects need to combine architecture and domain knowledge with other skills such as leadership, persuasion, negotiation, communication and the ability to 'Sell' the value of particular options to sponsors and key stakeholder so that their 'shared' vision can be realized.

Change Management

The Open Groups 'TOGAF'  (Phase H: Architecture Change Management) and some other Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks include change management.

TOGAF provides a comprehensive Change Management and describes it's approach as: "The goal of an architecture change management process is to ensure that the architecture achieves its original target business value.

This includes managing changes to the architecture in a cohesive and architected way. This process will typically provide for the continual monitoring of such things as governance requests, new developments in technology, and changes in the business environment.

When changes are identified, change management will determine whether to formally initiate a new architecture evolution cycle. Additionally, the architecture change management process aims to establish and support the implemented enterprise architecture as a dynamic architecture; that is, one having the flexibility to evolve rapidly in response to changes in the technology and business environment.

Monitoring business growth and decline is a critical aspect of this phase. Usage of the enterprise architecture is the most important part of the architecture development cycle. All too often the business has been left with an enterprise architecture that works for the organization of yesterday but may not give back sufficient capability to meet the needs of the enterprise of today and tomorrow."

JP Kotter, a professor from the Harvard Business School, is a world-renowned leadership and organization change expert. In his 1995 book 'Leading Change', John introduced us to his Change Management process framework and the now famous concept of the Burning Platform. His framework identified 8 steps to successful organization change based on observations of where companies repeatedly go wrong and fail to meet their aspirations.

The first three steps are about creating a climate for change. The next three steps are about engaging and enabling the whole organization. The last two steps are about implementing and sustaining change. By using Kotter's 8 step change management framework with Enterprise Architecture best practices, we can deliver complex organizational changes to the business. A future blog will describe each of the 8 steps in more detail, enjoy!