… synergy, architecture and resilience.

Does this sound like an enterprise discipline we should be engaging with to help build resilience?
Their goals are;

• Effectiveness,
• Efficiency,
• Agility, and
• Durability

The discipline represents the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. This discipline creates and improves the models of the enterprise’s future state and the roadmap to get there.

This discipline is known as Enterprise Architecture.

Building on one of my core themes, the need to better integrate our efforts with a range of enterprise management disciplines, is this very short look at Enterprise Architecture (or EA for short).

EA shares some of our core areas of business continuity focus, including people, processes, information and technology. Not only is EA focussed on how these items interact within the enterprise, but it is also focussed on their linkages into the external environment.

Sounds like a lot of overlap with risk and resilience to me.

All too often Enterprise Architecture is seen as simply an IT activity and limited to the domain of technology and systems. Like most enterprise disciplines when it is done right it spans the entire enterprise. Where the function reports should not be the issue.

One of the early pioneers of this discipline, John Zackman, argues that many confuse the end result with the architecture, the finished building (or ruin in the photo above) is not the architecture. The architecture is the work that was done to enable the object to be built in the first place. The following is a quote from Zackman.

“Architecture is the set of descriptive representations that are required in order to create an object. If you can’t describe it, you can’t create it.”

Seems to resonate with one of our major resilience challenges, being able to describe (rather than define) resilience in order to be able to build it.

EA gives us some tools and techniques we can use to break the concept of resilience into manageable chunks and to deliver “perspectives” targeted to different audiences. The Zachman Framework for EA represents this as a two dimensional model.

The first dimension represents the answers to the universal set of questions;

• What?
• How?
• Where?
• Who?
• When?
• Why?

The second dimension combines these answers at different levels to deliver the perspectives;

• Scope/Boundaries, that may used by strategists
• Requirements/Concepts, for an owners perspective
• Schematics/Logic for designers and engineers
• Blueprints/Specifications for builders
• Tooling/Configuration for implementers
• Implementation instances for operators

Sometimes risk and BCM seem to spend their entire lifecycle in the bottom two layers.

We need to learn from architecture, both in the construction and enterprise space. Senior Executives demand relevance to their strategy and requirements, our multi-year Programme Management must generate Blueprints for the delivery projects to build, but without this architectural thinking you are unlikely to implement or operate for very long without constant rebuilding or major refurbishment.

If you have integrated your risk/BC practice with EA – adopted an architectural approach to risk and resilience – please share your experiences with a comment.

If not, how might you work towards this synergy in your organisation?