The Turning Point: A Novel about Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation

The Open Group Series

Kees van den Brink, Stephanie Ramsay, Sylvain Marie

• Publisher: Van Haren Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9789401808040
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Little did Kathleen, Chief Architect at ArchiSurance, know, as she walked into a meeting with the CIO, just how much her job was going to change. Her intention had been to get approval for some new ideas she'd had to strengthen their Enterprise Architecture, after having slowly lost a grip on it during the merger. During the meeting, however, it becomes apparent that the transformation of the organization to become more digital has caused chaos, and not only for her team. It is clear, despite all good intentions, that the transformation is failing. By the end of the meeting, she has agreed to help turn the situation around. After leading the initial reset of the Digital Transformation, Kathleen is suddenly the owner of the implementation. What follows is a journey of the typical problems faced by companies as they make decisions to deploy digital technologies. Kathleen proceeds to solve one problem after the other using guidance from the open digital standards of The Open Group to lay the foundation for deploying quality digital technology solutions at a faster pace.

Chapter 1. Digital Customer Intimacy Strategy Kickoff

Dr. Kathleen Stone, Chief Architect for ArchiSurance, wakes up bright and early, before her alarm clock goes off, excited about her presentation at the town hall meeting later that day. Her moment to shine has finally arrived. Today she will be unveiling a new Business Architecture that will enable the company’s digital strategy. Her Enterprise Architecture team has done a tremendous job working with the organization’s stakeholders to build out the strategic plan. It has been an intense period, but Kathleen is happy with the objectives that will move the organization from functional silos to holistic operational value streams. The Business Architecture comprises a new organization map that aligns to the development of digital products and services within the value streams. She will tell the story of how this new organizational structure can change the company culture, moving it away from one with functional silos to one where teams work together toward common goals and business outcomes. This organizational work, with its accountability framework, is a key building block for Digital Transformation [4].

The first digital strategic theme identified in the Architecture Vision is “Digital Customer Intimacy”. It will employ Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to help support the organization in deeply understanding the company’s customers and their wants and needs. The number one customer complaint for years has been that service calls get transferred from one department to the next and nobody seems to be able to help, or has accountability for dealing with problems. Customer orders and requests for service seem to get stuck unless they call and find someone to move things along. The cross-functional team structure Kathleen is proposing has the potential to eliminate thousands of hours a week of wait time in queues by reducing the need for specialist teams to exchange work orders and tickets. It will also unlock data and information that has been hidden away in disparate systems as functional groups begin to work across value streams. As the information begins to flow it will be easier to identify the common systems of record that are critical for product delivery. Application rationalization was also identified as an opportunity that will eliminate an enormous amount of duplication and redundancy. This will strengthen the company’s “shared customer insights by configuring the people, processes, and technology to learn what customers want” [4]. This is all foundational work that must occur before deploying the new technologies that will digitize and transform the enterprise [4].

All of this has been characterized in the Business Architecture that Kathleen will be presenting in just a few hours. As she thinks about the phenomenal value the cross-functional structures and team of teams will bring ArchiSurance, she wonders why it has taken so long to get here. She knows the most important thing she can do today is to highlight the value to the consumer and the overall product satisfaction that can be gained very quickly once ArchiSurance begins to organize itself in cross-functional teams across key value streams.

Failed Digitalization

Still waiting for the alarm clock to ring, Kathleen’s mind wanders back to the meeting she had with Dick Masterson, the CIO of the company, and the chain of events that changed her life just four weeks ago. Kathleen had tried again to convince him to mandate the TOGAF^® Architecture Development Method (ADM). She strongly believed that this would help her to get some order in the chaos of all the digital initiatives. She had been trying to get his attention on this topic, but their meetings were cancelled due to “other more pressing issues”. Little did Kathleen know that the ADM mandate was just a small issue. Finally, Kathleen was able to meet with Dick late in the afternoon on Tuesday …

Kathleen remembers she opened the meeting with a thank you to Dick for taking the time to listen to her ideas on getting the digital initiatives in order. She noticed Dick appeared tired and asked him if she could buy him a cup of coffee. Dick agreed and they walked over to the cafeteria while Kathleen anxiously kept telling herself not to let this opportunity for getting architecture standards in place slip by!

They sat down at a table next to the window.

“You seem tired,” said Kathleen. “May I ask what’s on your mind?”

Dick was not normally the type to share his problems, but apparently this time was different.

“Actually, Kathleen, I am worried. Worried about my job. Remember a year ago, when the company announced the merger of the three companies? One of the main drivers was the opportunity to transform the business. Get the company into shape for the future. I guess you know the business decided to invest in a program of digitalization, which was driven by the Business Units themselves. All kinds of teams were organized, and every Business Unit started “digital product” projects. I can tell you, most of the projects had great ideas and had great starts, but after one year, none of these intended projects have realized any value. Since we invested 30% of the budget in new hardware to support all those projects, we have reached the end of the $10 million budget. Apart from a large number of new racks in our data centers with idle running machines, we have nothing to show for it! And compounding that, there are now even more types of technology running in the data centers causing us to have to manage even greater complexity for no value. All this was justified on the premise of ‘we need to be Agile’ or ‘it’s the new industry favorite’, or ‘we must stay current’.”

Dick sighed and looked out the window. “From my perspective, in the past year we have managed to designate just about everything there is on the market as a corporate standard! Perhaps we can stop producing company technology standards and just say: ‘We have standardized on everything’. It is driving the Operations team to breaking point. I don’t think it will be long before we will have a Priority 1 (P1) incident that will disable the company for days simply because there is not enough time to both support the projects and maintain the technology environment they depend on. My only hope is that the P1 will not be a data leak.”

Looking 10 years older, Dick faced Kathleen again and continued. “I don’t need to explain to you that our company investors are starting to demand changes. Simply said, the digitalization project has failed, and our legacy systems are running on fumes. Unfortunately for me, everybody is pointing to me since it is a technology issue. Problem is, I had no control over the approvals and decisions being made. Each time I tried to get a project reviewed by my team before the business initiated it, the response was, ‘Oh, we’re Agile, so no need for you to review. If we need to adjust, we can do so because of our new way of working’. You know, our teams have been working very hard to implement Agile practices, but instead of enabling transformation, we only managed to change from a traditional project delivery to scrumming during the project execution. I’m wondering why it’s so hard for us to get beyond this change.”

Kathleen listened, realizing that her problem of not being able to get a proper architecture from all the initiatives was not even close to the size of the problems that Dick faced. She started to feel very sorry for him.

“But let’s talk about something else,” Dick said, with a weak smile. “What is it you’ve been wanting to discuss with me for the last two weeks?”

Actually, four weeks, thought Kathleen, but who’s counting? She took a deep breath and went for it.

“Well, when this Agile way of working was introduced, it also created a problem for me. I have been struggling big time to get an understanding of the architecture the company would end up with. The real issue is not that we are becoming Agile, it is the fact that our Enterprise Architecture has not followed suit. To really become an Agile workplace, our architecture needs to be incremental, with enough runway to be in sync with development. We also need to architect organizations and people in accordance with the flow of work across value streams. For the past year, we have been constantly chasing information, and when we got something it was incomplete, out-of-date, and, frankly, a lot of times conflicting. The way we see it, it’s like trying to help a team of mountaineers to reach the top of a mountain safely without knowing which peak they are climbing, and without having a joint base camp to assemble the team for the climb. The consequence is that every team member is building their own base camp at a different location and targeting a different peak to climb, which increases, not decreases, the risk of failure.”

“So, you mean to say there is no vision and no understanding of the current state?” Dick asked. “I can relate to that. I have been trying to tell my counterparts in the Business Units the same thing. We need to think about where we are now, and where we would like to end up before we start. Unfortunately, the response is always: ‘We have our vision, please do not worry about it. We do not want to be held back by past ways of working – that just slowed us down when we needed to run fast and make changes to keep up with market demand. So, please, just focus on supporting our projects where you can and leave the rest to us’.”

“Exactly,” replied Kathleen. “We get similar push back. And honestly, my team is starting to give up. They are being told that ‘old style architecture is not needed when working Agile’. I know some of my team is actively looking to find a job somewhere else. And if that happens, I think we as a company will lose a lot of tribal knowledge and that will set us back in time even more. You know, once we collect the information and put it together into a holistic view, the end architecture shows how disconnected everything is. When viewing just one project it seems very much OK, but as soon as you look across all projects, well …” Kathleen hesitated, unsure if she should be this nakedly critical. “A while back I read an article referencing work done by Mike Sutcliff and his co-authors [5] who conducted a survey among 1,350 executives to discover why Digital Transformations fail [6]. The number one reason given for failure is unspoken disagreements between top managers about goals. The authors recommend a need to ‘define and articulate not only the opportunity but also the problem it solves, and how the company will build the organization around the desired solution before investing’.”

“I get it,” replied Dick. “And I agree; we as a company are an example of such failure. But the more interesting question is: ‘How to correct it?’. We have lost a year, sunk a whole lot of money, and everybody is blaming Operations while my organization was barely able to keep up with the demand for the infrastructure and the constant need to patch up the old systems.”

“Sure, I understand,” said Kathleen. “You know, before the merger, as architects we were using an architecture methodology based on The Open Group TOGAF framework, using the elements fit for our company to develop the relevant architecture artifacts. This approach helped us to understand stakeholder concerns and develop solutions, while keeping the different parts of the company aligned. Sure, I know we couldn’t always produce quickly enough, but we did prevent chaos.”

Gaining momentum, Kathleen continued, “As you know, ArchiSurance is a member of The Open Group. So, when I started to notice the difficulty in maintaining the architecture across all the new “Agile” work popping up, I decided to use our membership benefits to interact with the architecture-related forums there and check what their response might be. Luckily, they had identified this concern as well. In fact, they have been busy defining a standard to help organizations understand the importance of architecture when shifting to Agile at scale. This is the Open Agile Architecture™ Standard (also called the O-AA™ Standard) [7]. It is perfect for us because this is what we are going through. When I started to digest their ideas, I learned a lot in hindsight about what we’ve done wrong.”

Dick was listening, but he didn’t look convinced. Kathleen carried on.

“One,” she said, holding up her hand and raising a finger to start counting the challenges. “There is no shared vision on which to base our strategy to become a digital company. All we have done is add an app to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel Pagina
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• A Note from the Authors
• About the Authors
• Dedications
• Trademarks
• Acknowledgements
• Referenced Documents
• 1. Digital Customer Intimacy Strategy Kickoff
• 2. Architecture Standards for a Digital Transformation
• 3. Strategy to Portfolio
• 4. Requirement to Deploy
• 5. Request to Fulfill
• 6. Detect to Correct
• 7. Supporting Functions
• 8. The Open Group Presentation
• Bonus Material