architecture

Being a Business Architect and battling “Hollywood” decision making..

ericcrichardson Leave a comment

 

What I will hope to do with this blog over time is share some learnings about being a Business Architect as well as living in technology my entire life with over 20 years of experience professionally. Today I’ll talk very briefly about architecture as well as talk about how decisions are made and the impacts of them.

 

I’m not going to give a text book definition of Business Architecture here, truth is there is no hard and fast official globally accepted definition. There are many frameworks, many organizations out there that’ll do that for your. Some of them even agree on a few points!

 

The whole “Architecture” space is a bit of a synonym soup. Business Architects understand business processes to identify and give their company the best chance to advance an opportunity of some sort. Frequently it means mapping out processes but it’s also so frequently understanding the technologies used.   You can be an EA (Enterprise Architect) IA, (Information Architect), SA (Solution Architect), etc etc…   to me it’s all about the business and really the master umbrella is BA.. Feel free to disagree.

 

So why have any kind of an Architect in an organization? Making data rich decisions versus making an emotional one, or worse yet a “Hollywood” decision.

A Hollywood decision is a goal set that is clearly beyond difficult, or in fact impossible.   There’s a great example of Collins and Porras’ “BHAG” or “Big, Hairy Audacious Goal”. From “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies”– they posed that a BHAG should be something like an aggressive mission statement (such as Microsoft’s old company mission of “A computer on every desk and in every home“, or Google’s “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“– clearly missions they both were very successful in bringing about.

 

Frequently management takes the notion of setting aggressive long term goals and translating them into Hollywood goals in the guise of a BHAG. An example could be the “Double or half” rule which is an arbitrary goal to double output of some sort or cut something bad in half, this is in my observation a Hollywood goal robed in a BHAG.

 

What’s the difference? Clearly a Hollywood approach as it has no science but a BHAG as articulated by Collins and Porrras’ does, that’s a great way to understand the difference between what BA’s do and what “management” does. BA’s are here to guide decisions to help management set aggressive goals that won’t do long term harm to a team. Sometime projects go bad and they end up in a “Death March” (Coined by Yourdon in ’99) where the team has a rapidly approaching due date and is working faster and faster while working longer and longer. Any Hollywood goal puts the danger of a death march on the radar, while using smart data rich decision making and opportunity identification helps to prevent it.

 

So to sum up this entry what do BA’s do? BA’s help prevent the old axiom of “Lack of planning on your part does not mean an emergency on my part…” from occurring!

 

In upcoming entries I’ll talk to proactive vs reactive decisions, goal setting and alignment, managing data, identifying decision makers and supporters, mapping realization of value as well as analytics..

 

Please feel free to suggest other areas you’d like to see covered!

 

 

References-

 

Collins, J. & Porras, J. (1994). ‘Built To Last.

Yourdon, E. (1999). Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving ‘Mission Impossible’

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/company/

 

@ericcrichardson

Where do I come from???

ericcrichardson Leave a comment

What led me to technology as a career?

In the mid 1970’s when I was a kid, my father was working as an electrical engineer. He’s a HAM radio operator and like so many of them he liked to build electronics. As an EE what he could built at home was pretty impressive. 

What he began to build one summer looked to me like another radio to listen to the Voice of America, the BBC, or Tass from the Soviet Union. It was both funny and scary to a fourth grader to hear these great powers making fun of one another, but of course the cold war was not at all funny.

It didn’t take long to realize this thing wasn’t a radio, it had  two banks of little red lights (LED’s) with 16 switches under them and another row of 9 switches under those. The box came from a company called “MITS” and it had- what I thought- very futuristic lettering at the bottom.. “ALTAIR 8800 COMPUTER”.

Home Computer Genesis, that’s what I was witnessing. I “Helped” my dad, I had small hands and I could hold wire bundles while he soldiered.  Then I learned how to follow  a set of written instructions to flip those LED’s to make it do something.. Basically turn the LED’s on in  certain pattern. It was wonderful!  That set me on path, myself and two of my three brothers are in high tech to this day.

I come from a family of engineers, I don’t just mean my dad and brother. Several cousins, my grandfather, his brother, several of their cousins, my great grandfather, his brother their cousins.. Pretty as long as there has been an “electrical engineering” there has been a Richardson there.

My work has spanned from the early days of the Internet back in the mid 90’s when I recall trying to sell the idea of a ‘virtual walk through’ of a house on the market to Real Estate agencies. Just a bit too early in 1995.  in 1996 I wrote a book about programming web server applications and due to enthusiasm overcoming logic, I published a nifty little program that many folks took to help create anonymous re-mailers.. Which could have  kept the NSA confused today!  In the later 90’s I wrote about the potential of search engines and how they could be harnessed to give great information.  I also helped create some early websites focused on marketing by drawing “eyes” in via slick online shockwave games.

I then went corporate and built one of the first large scale software distribution sites tied to licensing entitlement in the early 2000’s,  I ended up moving to battling software piracy and through that received a patent that pretty much created what we all know as “Geo Blocking” in the Mid-2000’s. After impacting a few billion dollars worth of piracy I moved to help move product data mastering forward, and after a few years I moved back to IT to build a team of business and information architects focused on hardware, software, and services. 

I write, I teach, I solve, I try to laugh and make others laugh, but always I’m happy to be a “geek”. I come from a family of geeks, we were there through the last century taking part, leading, or supporting many of the great technological leaps forward.   It’s been a great ride so far!

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@ericcrichardson