Organizations that keep in mind the big picture, take wise precautions, and seize the right opportunities can thrive in chaotic, challenging times. Will yours?
Many organizations have sustainability programs with a strictly operational focus. Some have gone further, making sustainability a strategic imperative. All must continue to improve.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a key, but frequently overlooked, strategic discipline. By enhancing it to deal effectively with disruptions, you can transform your EA into Sustainable EA (SEA)—we call it making a "SEA change"—and greatly improve the ability of your organization to thrive in disruptive times.
Compared to traditional EA, SEA focuses on:
At the heart of SEA is systems thinking—understanding a system's multiple contexts and expanding beyond its immediate boundaries to see the not-always-obvious interactions with related systems. Systems thinking also requires analyzing at deeper levels, continuously challenging our perspectives and biases to better understand how and why systems behave as they do.
SEA considers sustainability to be the primary system quality, and therefore pays special attention to how other system qualities support sustainability.
SEA requires that we think and act differently when it comes to architecting an enterprise. It treats architecting as a continuous, iterative, and adaptive process that is closely integrated with strategy, operation, governance, and learning.
Making a SEA Change is first and foremost a business consideration. Senior managers need to see sustainability as a key strategic goal. They must also adopt a disciplined, long-term approach that combines innovation with obsessive attention to resources and other strategic factors, and to the many things that can go wrong.
Two processes are at the core:
To be viable, of course, these processes must deliver short-term as well as long-term value. A useful principle:
Think long term, act now.
Learn more about SBSA's Sustainable EA approachSBSA's article, "SEA Change: How Sustainable EA enables business success in times of disruptive change," has been published in the February 2012 edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture. Read this article & other SBSA publications.
SBSA Partners is pleased to announce its participation in the 2012 Open Group Conference that took place in San Francisco in January. The conference this year focused on the role played by IT and Enterprise Architecture within Enterprise Transformation. SBSA Partners discussed how sustainable EA can enable business success in times of disruptive change. Their presentation, "There's a SEA Change in Your Future," (download as PDF) was given on Tuesday, January 31, 2012. Learn more about The Open Group Conference by visiting http://www3.opengroup.org/sanfrancisco2012.
The Sustainable EA Group was created to provide a forum for an open, collaborative exchange of ideas about how to add a sustainability focus to enterprise architecting, and how to leverage sustainable EA to improve the sustainability of the business. By sharing insights and experiences with other practitioners, the Group can build a body of knowledge (BOK) on how to improve the sustainability of an enterprise, and how to incorporate enhanced sustainability into the enterprise architecture platforms, thereby improving the business's capabilities that are built on these platforms.
Join the discussion at LinkedIn.