Organizational Design
Blog: Brian's Blog - Enterprise Strategy, Architecture and Management
This weekend I restarted efforts around organizational design dimension of business architecture. Its interesting to note that this is an area that most Enterprise and Business Architects do not address in their practice. Perhaps as its been seen as non-technical and squishy, thus relegated to Human Resource Departments. I think this is a tremendous oversight. Both HR and Enterprise/ Business Architecture has a lot to gain from the synergies of working together. EA/BA work is not all technology as it appears to be heading often. This maybe due to the situation of EA/BA departments being rooted in IT organizations that are tasked with building out technology and see the others aspects (process, organization, economics, etc.) as a means to an end which Executives measure the IT organization on ( running back office software and fulfilling PC requests).
About two years ago I started some R&D around the organizational design vector of Enterprise / Business Architecture, came across an excellent book by Burton, Obel & DeSanctis on the topic and started to translate the materials into a analytic tool in EXCEL. As I come close to completing the Business Model Evaluator spreadsheet, I plan on restarting this effort and linking to the BMC and Portfolio Management work I continue with.
…and yes this was the original vision I had for Active Directory way back when during my first stint with Microsoft. Looking back twenty years its hard to believe we’ve progressed so much and so little. I thought by now CIO Workbench (aka Enterprise Portfolio Management) would be a reality now, but the state of the industry is still a cataloging system for applications and a separate accounting system for tracking IT expenses. The Value/Benefits Management work done at IBM, DMR, and Microsoft still is used as sales aids more than a investment management tool. Guess I’m going to have to get funding and build out the system myself.
Filed under: Business Models, Enterprise Architecture 
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