Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

James Governor of Redmonk said something intriguing that resonated with me. It was: If Markets are Conversations then Twitter is Money which got me to thinking about how Twitter can be used within an enterprise setting and how I may leverage it for my industry vertical identity management consortium I am attempting to get off the ground...



James stated:

I long ago came to the conclusion its impossible to truly engage with more than 200 bloggers. That, after all, is the size of a village, and the natural limit to our legacy brains, unaccustomed as they are to the I/O requirements of the utterly connected age.

His statement isn't just limited to bloggers but to folks who are practicing enterprise architecture in large corporations. We are constantly being pressured to extend our sphere of influence which has a dilution effect on our quality of conversation at the expense of perception management. There is a fine balance between reaching out to other demographics within the enterprise and staying more insular so as to have maximum impact.

The 80/20 rule comes to mind in that enterprise architects shouldn't focus on everything and likewise industry analysts need to stop sending out surveys to IT executives attempting to measure where the gaps reside. Sometimes having gaps is a good thing. Everything and everyone is important but who is more important?

James goes on to state:

The Power of Small Teams: Gore tries to keep its teams small (and caps even its manufacturing plants at 200 people). That way, everyone can get to know one another and work together with minimal rules, as though they were a task force tackling a crisis.

It has been a long, long time since I have personally advocated for the creation of small, highly nimble teams that are empowered. Somewhere along the way, I have lost my soul and will be vigilant in terms of getting it back. Today, we are so indoctrinated and bought into the notion of governance that we forget about the core principles we should all adhere to. The law of large numbers gets in the way of us remembering that we are just silly human beings that want peace, love and prosperity.

James then mentions

Make Time for Face Time: There’s no hierarchical chain of command; anyone in the company can talk to anyone else. Gore discourages memos and prefers in-person communication to email.

It is sad, as I have been so heads down on my current activities that I truly haven't had a meaningful face-to-face conversation in the last several weeks. Now is the time that many folks in large enterprises are preparing for their 2008 budget and get consumed by tweaking numbers, creating over-hyped sales pitches, flooding each other with emails and otherwise forgetting about the human on the other end.

There are lots of benefits to face-to-face conversations. While they take longer and most certain put pressure on the elusive work-life balance, it does help reduce the headache of managing your email inbox, especially if your shop institutes mailbox size quotas. Now I know why I am always in mail jail...