Management Owns the Enterprise Architecture

Great management pays particular attention to the way they structure relationships and organize resources to provide offerings. If market-facing strategy is the essence of business, enterprise architecture is its being.

Enterprise Architecture is the description of the current and/or future structure and behavior of an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, aligned with the organization's core goals and strategic direction. Although often associated strictly with information technology, it relates more broadly to the practice of business optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management, organizational structure and process architecture as well. - Wikipedia

The world economy is in a turbulent period, adjusting to major shifts in resource prices and extreme uncertainty with regard to the geopolitical forces that underlie them.

This is a particularly critical time for management to rethink the structures of its trading channels, supply chains, back office services, and information infrastructures. There are opportunities for the nimble. Others are in for a rough ride.

To learn more about our work in consulting, read about our Practice or check out our Case Studies

Managing the Consultants

This is an excerpt from a letter to a client.

If I could suggest a course of action for managing your consulting engagements, it would be this:

• Put all truly corporate initiatives under a common executive committee so that scopes can be managed and trade-offs can be more easily assessed
• Combine and prune initiatives as a means of simplifying the messages and focusing the efforts on key strategic objectives
• Grade initiatives for their ability to impact the critical corporate standards

Then you might consider side-railing any initiative that does not yield 50% or more of its benefit within 12 months and does not turn cash flow positive within 15 months.

If the light is not visible at the end of the tunnel, you may not be in a tunnel at all.

Our approach to management consulting can be found here.

To learn more about our work in consulting, read about our Practice or check out our Case Studies

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