Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Enterprise Architecture and the Three Pendulums
There are three pendulums that enterprise architects need to pay attention to...
We are all familiar with the first IT pendulum where we go through cycles of being centralized to decentralized. Centralization is all about bringing consistency at the expense of overhead while decentralization is all about efficiencies and autonomy at the expense of unified approaches.
The second IT pendulum you may be less familiar with but occurs within the management ranks and begs the question of whether managers need to be technical or not. Sometimes, ITleadership management is extremely technical having come up through the ranks while in other situations, IT management tends to be heavily process oriented and attempts to leverage processes as a substitute for competence.
The third IT pendulum that you may find is one of survival instinct. Have you ever met an IT employee in your travels who has survived outsourcing, layoffs, etc not because they are competent but more because they are nice? Sometimes being nice has more value than being competent and sometimes delivery matters regardless of atitude.
It would be interesting to understand where the three pendulums are in your enterprise. Please leave a comment or trackback...
| | View blog reactionsWe are all familiar with the first IT pendulum where we go through cycles of being centralized to decentralized. Centralization is all about bringing consistency at the expense of overhead while decentralization is all about efficiencies and autonomy at the expense of unified approaches.
The second IT pendulum you may be less familiar with but occurs within the management ranks and begs the question of whether managers need to be technical or not. Sometimes, IT
The third IT pendulum that you may find is one of survival instinct. Have you ever met an IT employee in your travels who has survived outsourcing, layoffs, etc not because they are competent but more because they are nice? Sometimes being nice has more value than being competent and sometimes delivery matters regardless of atitude.
It would be interesting to understand where the three pendulums are in your enterprise. Please leave a comment or trackback...
