Sunday, August 27, 2006
Enterprise Architecture and the lack of communication...
Anytime you hear an IT executive or industry analyst talking about communication problems in the enterprise, kidnap that fool...
The mention of communications or the lack of has received more industry analyst and media attention than it deserves. For the record, there is not a single enterprise on the planet that has a communications problem! There problem resides elsewhere.
Have you ever heard of something called open source? Thousands of developers work on projects such as GNU Linux, Apache, Liferay and other projects who not only don't have problems communicating but never have ever met face to face. Some of the projects I contribute to are wildly successful and yet the spec lead may have never even heard my voice nor know even what I look like.
Maybe if enterprises had real leadership, they may figure out that they should not focus in on better ways to communicate but instead figure out ways to reduce the need to communicate. If your competitors internal IT process requires communicating to ten people where your equivalent internal IT project requires fifty, guess who has the competitive advantage?
Have executives ever thought for a moment that maybe communication is improved by doing organization chart optimization? Would communication improve if everyone wasn't matrixed (dotted line) to ten different bosses but only had say one? Maybe communication would be improved if you figured out as IT executives how to instill trust in your employees? What if you trusted folks to do the right thing and made it easy for them to communicate with you when things go wrong?
| | View blog reactionsThe mention of communications or the lack of has received more industry analyst and media attention than it deserves. For the record, there is not a single enterprise on the planet that has a communications problem! There problem resides elsewhere.
Have you ever heard of something called open source? Thousands of developers work on projects such as GNU Linux, Apache, Liferay and other projects who not only don't have problems communicating but never have ever met face to face. Some of the projects I contribute to are wildly successful and yet the spec lead may have never even heard my voice nor know even what I look like.
Maybe if enterprises had real leadership, they may figure out that they should not focus in on better ways to communicate but instead figure out ways to reduce the need to communicate. If your competitors internal IT process requires communicating to ten people where your equivalent internal IT project requires fifty, guess who has the competitive advantage?
Have executives ever thought for a moment that maybe communication is improved by doing organization chart optimization? Would communication improve if everyone wasn't matrixed (dotted line) to ten different bosses but only had say one? Maybe communication would be improved if you figured out as IT executives how to instill trust in your employees? What if you trusted folks to do the right thing and made it easy for them to communicate with you when things go wrong?
