Reducing Inefficiency Period While Migrating to Object-Oriented Enterprise Architecture

By Rob Byrd, Chief Enterprise Architect

Introduction
Eliminating Barriers to Progress
Personal Experience
Training, Mentoring, and Certification Contributes to Retention
Conclusion

Introduction

Many organizations desire the improved efficiencies achieved by the introduction of new and improved methods, processes, and tools. Frequently, however, organizations are unwilling or unable to burden the loss in productivity and efficiency experienced when new approaches are initially introduced to the organization - this is particularly true when the approach involves highly technical and complex processes. The figure below shows the relationship of efficiency and time when new ideas and concepts are introduced into an organization while increasing significantly over time. Resistance further burdens these principles because many people have a natural fear of change in processes and procedures when they are already comfortable and proficient with the existing process. Senior team members can be particularly resistant because many technically complex ideas and principals require a reeducation, which may threaten their sense of expertise.

Efficiency Measures When Introducing New Approach

A recent Garner Report, Pattern-Based Strategy Will Have a Profound Impact on the Practice of Enterprise Architecture, indicated a need to go back to school and learn something new as a way to eliminate silos and linear thinking in the organization. The Garner Report states, "The creation and operation of cross-functional teams is critical to the organization's ability to deal effectively with the degree and complexity of change. These teams are necessary for understanding and addressing the requirements of a networked enterprise. The formation of high performing teams requires a profound understanding of the "people aspect" of the enterprise from a functional and organizational perspective. Enterprise architects must finally recognize the importance of this aspect and embrace leadership and facilitation skills." As a result, organizations must directly address the people barriers that prevent progress to new principles.

The Garner Report also states, "Enterprise architects must now recognize that they need to perfect some new skills to enable them to effectively contribute to the increasingly complex organizations in which they find themselves. Failure to recognize this important aspect will hinder enterprise architecture (EA) program success and enterprise architects in this new business environment." Many organizations find themselves at this cross-road and there are ways to decrease the reduced efficiency period when new ideas and principles are introduced into the organization.

Eliminating Barriers to Progress

It is well known by industry and the Department of Defense (DoD) that successful enterprises organize, train and equip the work force for success. Organization includes providing the proper authority and responsibility with skilled, competent leaders knowledgeable of the desired efficiency improvement. Organizations must align authority with responsibility otherwise the leader is not really in charge. Successful organizations develop an interview process to hire skilled, competent staff with the mindset of open think able to embrace change eagerly. Leaders recognize that past performance predicts future behavior - we can make someone more than they are, but we cannot make someone something they're not. According to Peter A. Luongo in his book 10 Truths About Leadership, effective leaders manage support systems while employees manage themselves, which further emphasizes that leaders must focus on properly equipping the work force for success. Moreover, properly equipping an enterprise architecture workforce is no trivial task.

Selecting a skilled staff, providing the necessary tools, implementing efficient configuration management processes and effective education on proper implementation and use of the process are the most significant way to reduce the efficiency loss and resistance to change when new methods are introduced. As Peter Luongo stated, "We cannot make someone something they're not"; therefore, we must recognize that everyone in the organization is not capable or willing to learn enterprise architecture. Enterprise architects require very specialized technology skills and they must have extroverted behaviors with strong collaboration and communication skills. Enterprise architecture requires a highly collaborative environment to ensure architecture models do not turn into stovepipes and receive buy-in from the community they support. These environments require specialized tools such as visual systems, meeting space, non restrictive network access, teleconferencing, and well equipped computers with reasonable processing power. Due to the highly distributive nature of large enterprises, the enterprise architecture team must maintain a high degree of configuration control to ensure proper access and recovery from failed or changing ideas. Most importantly, education and training eliminates the fear of change (we fear what we don't understand) while increasing the team's confidence leading to successful outcomes. Training is particularly important when new complex ideas are introduced into an organization.

From our experience, educating a linear thinking EA work force that employ Integrated Definition (IDEF) is a particularly daunting challenge, when the desired outcome is to employ a service-oriented concept most prevalent using object-oriented technologies such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML). During this education process, the linear thinker must first unlearn the viewpoint of decomposing process and things into their parts and learn to rethink in terms of outcomes and interfaces. To further compound the problem, the UML is a much more complicated modeling approach and introduces something foreign to IDEF - the interface. The UML does not constrain the modeler into object-oriented thinking - the architect can still apply structured, linear concepts using UML stereotypes. This "hybrid" style of modeling is quite common as structured thinking architects make the transition to object-oriented principles. This same transition occurred in the early 90s when structured programmers using FORTRAN and BASIC computer languages switched to object-oriented programming languages such as C and Java. Not unlike the UML, these transitional programmers wrote inefficient C and Java code using their structured-think. It can be done! Because of these challenges, we have determined that the quickest way to make the migration is through a comprehensive mentoring process.

Personal Experience

Without feedback and guidance from successful object-oriented practitioners, the linear thinker is not aware that their approach is not object-oriented - you don't know what you don't know. As a result, beginners fall back into their linear thinking process and apply the modeling language with what they know. Only through repeated feedback and mentor review will the linear thinking architect make the transition to object-oriented thought and service-oriented application. Some, such as me, have never learned structured methods to model enterprises and my partner Tom Folk from MITRE Corporation (whom I am grateful) taught me to think object-oriented. As my mentor, he was a well-versed object-oriented programmer; therefore, the proper application of the UML was natural for him. I too had much Web application development experience, which helped in my learning experience. Together, we collaborated in object-oriented thought and abstracted the UML to build enterprise architectures. A practice, which is proving successful in helping enterprises achieve highly integrated solutions.

Training, Mentoring, and Certification Contributes to Retention

In Peter's book, he makes the premise that rules are for the weak and uncompromising standards of excellence are for the strong. What he meant was that bad rules are anything that gets in the way of creativity - he points out that relationships flourish on clear understanding of expectations between one another and we fail when expectations are unclear. A certification program addresses the need to communicate expectations with the evolving and transitional architect. A good certification program provides objective measures of performance and clear guidance between leadership and the employee. Leigh Branham takes up the question why people leave their existing jobs in his book The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. Leigh suggests that while most managers think their employees switch jobs for better pay, that better pay is rarely the primary reason people change jobs. Most people want to feel trust, hope, worth, and competent. When they have trouble finding these feelings, they often seek new opportunities. The seven reasons listed in his book include unmet expectations, mismatched skills, lack of coaching and feedback, limited growth opportunities, feeling unrecognized or devalued, overworked and loss of confidence in senior leaders. A combination of training, mentoring and well-developed certification programs addresses six of the seven reasons people leave jobs.

If people do not understand what's expected of them and they're criticized for poor performance, they're left feeling unworthy, mismatched with the necessary skill, believing there are limited growth opportunity, and devalued. Frequently, they blame leadership for these feelings because of a lack of coaching and feedback, which leads to a loss of leadership confidence. From Serco's EA Group experience, training, mentoring and certification works - as our attrition rate is exceptionally low (less than 5%). These losses are usually due to a mismatch of skills – as Peter said, "We cannot make someone something they're not."

Conclusion

Realistically, there's no way to completely eliminate some period of reduced productivity when new, complex ideas are introduced into an organization such as the migrating from IDEF (structured analysis) and UML (object-oriented analysis and design). All leadership can do is carefully manage the transition by providing a skilled staff, the necessary tools, efficient configuration management processes and effective training, mentoring and certification on the proper implementation and use of the process. We believe, when the transition occurs, the investment payoff is huge. There's no way to place a measurable value on increased capability and productivity when time is infinite toward the future. We are left with only one thought – there are those who wished they did – and there are those who are glad it's over...

About the Author

Mr. Byrd is an information technology professional with twenty-eight years DoD experience, including operational and system architectures, command lead support, requirements analysis, military operations, space control, space lift, and satellite operations. He's well known by industry as a leader in DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) enterprise architecture development encompassing leading edge object-oriented methods. Considered an enterprise architecture thought leader by IBM, Mr. Byrd is an expert with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and related tool suites for enterprise analysis and design. With more than ten years Web authoring experience including Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Java, and Active Serve Pages (ASP), Mr. Byrd is an accomplished Internet security practitioner with experience in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and various PKI products. Mr. Byrd is an expert presenter and public speaker on various enterprise architecture topics. [Biography]