Politically Oriented Architecture
posted by Anna Mar, April 19, 2011In happens in every organization: VPs competing with VPs, directors competing with directors, managers competing with managers, architects competing with architects ...
Antipattern
Politically Oriented Architecture (POA) occurs when office politics is allowed to shape enterprise architecture. POA leads to technology proliferation, broken processes and fragmented data.Example: Technology Proliferation
Competing VPs acquiring technology often resembles a arms race between nations.This gets expensive for the organization — the technology stack becomes complex and highly duplicated.
It is not unusual for a enterprise to have multiple ESBs, BPM tools, CRMs or even ERPs — all because of political infighting between VPs.
Example: Data Madness
A billing project needs data from the CRM system. However, the billing manager does not get along with the CRM manager. So the solution team gets the data from a downstream system. The data from the downstream system has been rekeyed and is less accurate.Solution
Often the business is unaware of all the political nonsense that goes on within the IT organization.It is the role of the Enterprise Architecture team to make POA behaviour transparent to executive decision makers. By naming-and-shaming EA has the power to breakdown the POA.
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