Feb

3

Don’t forget social architecture in your enterprise architecture efforts….

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Global Enterprise Architecture Organisation post on their blog titled "Enterprise Architecture within a Social Ecosystem" discussing how we "tend to treat the complexity of humans beings as information processors as a part of the context surrounding our work, rather than a topic within its scope." This undermines the effectiveness of our enterprise architecture efforts. The social context in which our architectural work take place requires careful consideration if our architectures are to be adopted. 

Here are a few specific instances of ways in which social scientists have long known that the human mind tends not to work precisely as we might expect:

  • People tend to find it difficult to visualize a future that is different than the past. We’re natural extrapolaters. For example, when the housing market has been going up for a few years, almost no one can conceive a future in which the median house price will be flat or falling. Similarly, overbuying when times are good and overselling when they are not has plagued the stock market for decades.
  • People tend not to periodically re-test the assumptions on which they are basing their behavior to determine whether or not those assumptions still hold. Encyclopedia Brittanica did not properly adjust its business model when Microsoft Encarta debuted, because they continued to assume that all "serious" reference would be published in paper form. They had to declare bankruptcy a couple of years later.
  • When preparing to reach a decision, people tend to factor in only a subset of the relevant information, because the full range of variables exceeds the "seven plus or minus two" that they can deal with concurrently.
  • People tend to acquire imaginary "property rights" in places and roles they have occupied for a long time. This gives rise to fief building, infighting and other maladaptive uses of enterprise property.
  • People tend to perform better when moderately challenged, especially by novelty, and less well when bored.
  • Mathematical diagnostic models derived from expert’s judgments frequently outperform the experts themselves because the models eliminate the "noise" in human thinking.

If the people and social issues are considered up-front, they can be incorporated into our planning and mitigated to help ease the adoption of new architectures, ideas and practices. The ultimate goal of any enterprise architecture programme is adoption! Sound architecture and engineering is important, but these aspects aren’t as important as creating the organisations change, required to ensure adoption and the unlocking of business value. This requires a robust social architecture! How much of the softer people and social issues do you consider and plan for in your enterprise architecture initiatives?

 

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