Guerilla EA [Bottom-up EA]

For many EA departments it can be hard to secure management backing for your EA program. I´ve sat in a department like that, and also heard from many others in the same situation.

One day while we, in my EA team, were discussing how the h*ll to get through to the rest of the company and make them realise what we could do for them, I came up with an idea. If you can´t get backing for a grand EA program, you have two options:

1) Give up. Tell management that EA doesn´t  work without backing.

2) Get under the skin and make guerilla efforts where you can make a difference. Ie you have Guerilla EA!

I haven´t really developed the concept fully in my head yet, but it would seem to be a good way of getting through to your management, not only with ideas and analysis, but with concrete products and actual benefits.

Some of the ideas we discussed were: Get a hold of the “doers” in your company, the developers, infrastructure guys, your helpdesk etc, and ask them what their problems are. Do this in a descrete manner, since you cant really promise them anything. You don´t want to talk to their bosses, just yet. Find a good case and make some of your colleagues daily work easier. Find another case and do it again. After a while you might just have enough rogue-EA benefits to go back to your management and then they just might realise your potential. Because once you have the right number of succeses and EA works going, they´re bound to realise the overall benefit, and the need to govern the effort.

Naturally, the above is not my idea of how to start up a good EA program, since Im all for a top-down effort based around your CEO (or at least CIO/CFO). But if you´re stuck in an EA team with no real decision making power and no backing then this might be your way to just that. Are you in a company without an EA program, and you´d like to start one up, it might well work for you too.

I´m going to continue developing the idea, and if you have any comments, ideas og suggestions please feel free to post.

Checking the checklist…

Since Im all for going back and reviewing the work done, I often find it amusing/insightful to read articles concerning checklists and scorecards. Most often checklists are way too subjectively developed and therefore not too helpful. But in this months Architecture & Governance I actually found a good one.

Patrick Motola writes a comprehensive scorecard for ” measuring you organizations progress [with EA]” and it very accurately put its finger on the many problems and mistakes during our work here at DR. A good example is the part about “The EA Mission must be supported by management and the organization” that have the three following checkboxes:

-Adequate resources comitted by management

-Acceptance and support of the mission by all critical groups

-Benefits to the organization are understood and believed.

Since I wasn´t able to check any of those boxes, I suddenly realised how wrong we do things. We´re fighting a brave fight even though we are way too few people for the job and maybe it would be better to stop working and push management into giving us more resources. Or at least to narrow our immediate focus…

We haven’t got neither acceptance or support from the people that should be our stakeholders. It was too much of an effort to get in touch with everyone in the business (we belong to the IT department), and none of us were focusing on communication, really. So now we are 2 years into the program and alot of potential stakeholders dont know we exist…

Benefits understood and believed? Again, lack of communication on our part makes it incredibly hard for people to understand, let alone believe. Thats like Moses coming of the mountain with blank stonetables trying to persuade everyone to quit the golden calf!

Oh well, going through the rest of the scorecard suddenly seemed irrelevant, since these areas aren´t even covered by our program. But I can tell you, no pencils were worn out checking those boxes…

Even though I knew the above, it really makes you think when you cant check those initial and very basic boxes. So if you think you might have missed a few, or maybe just to make sure you´re dead on with everything, subscribe to the magazine and read the article. Maybe it will be worth your time, it certainly was for me.

Thesis posted

As promised, my thesis is now published. I wrote it in danish, but as stated before I do intend to boil it down to a synopsis or an article in english.

Look under the page “speciale” to get the file.