Aligning To The Emergent Strategy

Business-IT alignment efforts are a mainstay in most CIO’s agendas. And enterprise architects’ business architecture initiatives take that a step further, aspiring to find a nirvana where creating, vetting, and maintaining business architectures that map to well thought-out business strategies are regularly occurring activities (see the Forrester report, “Business Architecture’s Time Has Come”). Then aligning application, information, and technical architectures completes the loop, and there’s plenty of information to feed into innovation incubators, too. The IT organization and the architecture become aligned and the IT strategic plan practically writes itself

But many IT shops are still stuck figuring out just what to align to. That’s because most organizations don’t follow deliberate and static top-down strategies – not even when they have taken the pains to create them. Instead, most organizations follow a pattern described by Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University and internationally renowned author on business strategy. Mintzberg states that strategy more often emerges as a cumulative pattern of actions that is only retrospectively rationalized and organized as a plan. He advocates studying this, stating that it is better to “…respond to an evolving reality rather than having to focus on a stable fantasy.” His many books describe numerous compelling examples.

Mintzber’s body of work was brought to my attention by a presentation at Forrester’s EA Forum EMEA in London last month, where Jon Hill of BNP Paribas presented his approach to creating an “emergent architecture” in the alfabet Guest Executive Session. Hill laid out an approach for unearthing the emergent strategy and reconciling it with the clearly articulated top-down strategy. What struck me about this presentation was that this very interesting formal body of work on emergent strategies describes something we at Forrester have observed time and time again working with clients, and Hill’s solution paralleled our approach to dealing with it. We’ve thought of these short-term decisions as tactical responses to problems in lieu of a strategy, perhaps at best called a de facto strategy. In Mintzberg’s work, this is the strategy – full stop. Learn to deal with it.

How? Go out and interview all the decision-makers who are making all the short-term decisions that will look two years from now like the strategy of 2009. Yes, all of them. Get out there and ask: “What are your current plans for delivery between now and year end?” And ask “We know it won’t be perfect, but give us your best guess as to the major deliverables and projects that you’ll be doing next year?” And “Looking into the crystal ball, what do you think will be important further out – 2 to 3 years? Give us something with a 50-70% confidence level.” Analyze the answers to these questions and group similar types of initiatives into themes, connect them to capabilities, functions, and systems, and you’ve defined your emergent strategy. If you do have a top-down vision, you can now reconcile one with the other and make adjustments (to the static vision or to the decision-makers’ plans). Next year, do it again.

No shortcuts here, no silver bullet (see the Forrester report, “Choose From Five Basic Approaches To Business Architecture Based On Your Context And Goals”). The solution to the information gap in today’s business-IT alignment efforts, and to the future problem we’ll see when the relevance of the newly created future state business architecture is challenged, is to make the major effort to pull information from all the decision-makers who are creating the emergent strategy as we speak. A good time to do this is now, as you’re beginning to build your business architecture capabilities. As you develop your own capabilities to apply technological innovation to help achieve business goals, you’ll be training the business side to plan more effectively and to begin to think about reconciling day-to-day decisions with the vision for where they want to be in the future. 

If this is a topic you’re struggling with, be sure to check out the Enterprise Architecture and CIO track sessions at our upcoming IT Forum in Las Vegas.

By Gene Leganza