From Vision to Execution: Mastering Strategy with Business Architecture | Whynde Kuehn EA Forum 2024

Welcome back and I'm so glad you're back and hello again to our virtual audience. So far, so good. I mean, when you do an event like this, I get over 350 sign up and you always wonder if, then you're going to get 350. 200 will show up, 250 will show up, there's actually over 350 of us that actually came, so that's kind of out of the ordinary. , which is cool, so I'm super excited because I was telling someone earlier that when you're doing regge you have a list, but it's never real until real people are in the room, so thanks for coming, we know that We're sorry anyway, so we'll get started.

I'm very happy to welcome our next guest, uh, Wendy Keane, um, Wendy has become our friend, it's kind of fun. I contacted her on LinkedIn last August, when her book came out, we became friends, her book came out, she sent me a bunch of copies to Germany and another place I spread the word in Sap Land, we were good friends since August and we connected and I finally met face to face last year when he did a road show in Australia, so the relationships you built are incredible. So Wendy has a book called Strategy for Reality that I brought in 150 copies to share.

Wendy will be signing the book at the reception tonight after the women's and Enterprise Architects reception, so all the women in the crowd and some guys are welcome. It is on the third floor. We'll be having a reception inside the lobby from 5:30 to 6:30, so please join us. Wendy so without further ado I'm going to invite Wendy from Norway to come to this event so Wendy welcome thank you awesome thank you Paul and thank you all it's an honor to be here so let's talk about how to become.

strategy

in reality with enterprise

architecture

and I have had the great fortune to work with organizations around the world, from the world's largest companies and governments to startups and non-profits, and I have fallen in love with the idea of ​​how Organizations take really big steps. ideas and turn them into action, but as I have worked with them regardless of the size of the organization, the sector or the industry, I have observed that most of them have a tremendous challenge in executing the

strategy

quickly and well, so that is what what are we going to do.

What to talk about today and how

architecture

can help, so we'll look at strategy

execution

as a concept. The challenge and the opportunity, we'll look at how architecture and enterprise architecture as the tip of the spear can help and then we'll talk about that. And now how do we take action with these ideas? Starting with the

execution

of the strategy. What if you had a magical power and if with that power you could take any idea, any insight, any strategy, any transformation and make it a reality, that would be pretty powerful. Isn't that right, but that's what we do as architects for our organizations and now I think we are very important leaders in helping our organizations do even better and it's easy to get distracted and dazzled in our busy world of global disruption and change.

Climate and AI and all the things that are coming, but that change will always be there, but what I believe remains the same and what I believe is important for our organizations and institutions to survive and thrive is the ability to change. and the ability to adapt and that is the power that strategy execution gives our organizations, but as I said, they have a great challenge to execute well and there are statistics that abound in this space, but one that I selected here cites that of your strategy sources. implementations fail between 30 and 70%, but I find that organizations have almost gotten used to it, it is like walking with a stone in your shoe and after a while you forget that it is there and you just move on, you forget that the execution of strategy is a problem and we In some ways, we come to expect these results and all kinds of challenges appear in execution, like we built the same thing multiple times or we have created an experience for people that is disconnected, fragmented and inconsistent or things What we fund and are doing may not be misaligned with our strategy, but those things can show up in execution, they manifest in execution, but they are actually created much higher up in the strategy execution lifecycle and we can prevent them from happening.

Be spoiler alert with the architecture, so why do we have so much challenge? execute the strategy well, I ask myself this all day, every day. I'm fascinated by it and there are many reasons why there are many sources on the site and they are good reasons, from you know, bad strategy to lack of communication of the strategy. leadership change management culture resources and things like that, but there are four other factors that we don't talk about much, they are all related to holistic

vision

and holistic thinking and they are big blockers, so I will share those four with you.

I see that and the first is that we haven't necessarily been taught how to execute strategies, so in 2021 the MBA Roundtable did an investigation of graduate

business

curricula in North America and found that very few, I mean Very few universities teach students how to execute. strategy, we teach formulation, we teach leadership, we teach, you know everything, change management, all these important things, but we don't really teach students how to take formulated strategies and turn them into a portfolio of work that will make them a reality, so that It is another source. is that strategy execution and by this I mean that strategy to execution is often not treated as a formal or cohesive function or process, we don't look at strategy execution as a thing or a very important thing, so which is typically executed in a fragmented manner by different teams with fragmented sets of responsibilities and activities, and even different KPIs and motivators for those different teams.

Strategies often translate into silos, which is how you get bubbles, those challenges I shared on the last slide and our

business

knowledge base to support our decisions holistically, from strategy to execution, haven't been comprehensive enough and of course that's where the architecture comes in, so I often think that there are a lot of strategic management frameworks that we've also invested in globally, just tremendous, agile methods, and they're both important, but they focus on executing the strategy up and down and there is still a gap in the middle that needs to be closed and that is the gap that we can help our organizations close, so what is successful execution? of strategy is the ability to define clearly. strategic intent because it starts there, we cannot build unless we have a clear strategic intent and then we can translate it into an organized effort between people, process information and technology, and we know that for a large organization this is no small feat and being able to do so with transparency and accountability for value and results delivered and intentional change management taking care of people along the way, so the key is for organizations to build a cohesive, multidisciplinary, end-to-end capability or a muscle for strategy execution, the muscle for change and treat strategy execution as a crucial function, important as any other, such as sales, marketing, customer service, human resources, such as finance , it's a thing and it's critical to the survival of our organizations that thrive today and tomorrow. and of course the reason why that's important is that I like to say that organizations have to change well because we all have this huge management funnel, their strategies, transformations, regulatory changes, what are we going to do with AI, such sometimes acquisitions and all that commercial management. make changes in our organization and changes and changes in many of the same parts of the organization and all that change must be defined, designed, planned and executed using a finite set of resources, a finite set of talent and a finite set of budget, of So Now let's look at how we turn strategy into reality with enterprise architecture at a high level, but before we do that I'll just give you some headlines about the discipline of enterprise architecture, so enterprise architecture as a discipline has grown a lot over the years. of the years.

Over the years, it's really come into its own, it's evolved, it's been formalized, so the first headline is that the components of enterprise architecture, its scope has expanded and formalized, so enterprise architecture is not one or two things, they are 10 correct things and the

vision

I have. What we have is from the Bisbach guide. It is the set of enterprise architecture knowledge at the heart. We have capabilities and value streams that connect to other things like strategies, initiatives, products, policies, and of course focal points of other disciplines like architecture, human-centered design, etc. Enterprise architecture in its evolution has also reached a higher level in its elevation, it is the forest, not the trees, but that forest connects to the trees, to the systems, to the processes, to the details of the organization and a enterprise architecture is a holistic view of an entire organization and the ecosystem in which it operates is a refreshing view of the whole and is or should be owned and driven by the enterprise and following that enterprise architecture has become an enterprise discipline strategy with one foot as part of the enterprise architecture umbrella, no doubt, but the other foot is in another world and that world is strategic planning, which also means that people in strategy, transformation and strategic planning are using more than ever before to support strategy execution and other decision making, and that's a good thing.

That's good news for all of us, so the role of enterprise architecture in executing strategy is our business plan, as we know, and the role of any plan, whether for a house or a product, is create a common understanding and activate change on both sides. and in strategy and transformation, business architecture helps us understand where we are, where we are going and how we are going to get there and with that business plan it helps us think differently, especially because it is a vision of the whole, so we are used to interacting with enterprise architecture through blueprints, through views, through capability models, through value streams, through composite views, or through business model canvases, um, and those are wonderful because they give us a canvas for design. of our organizations, but as alluded to above the correct enterprise architecture.

Throughout the enterprise architecture there is also data and that is where the power lies. I marvel that we have data for everything and everyone, except for what our organizations do from a holistic perspective, so that's what we can contribute with the architecture and at the heart of the business. architecture our two modular building blocks, capabilities, but also value streams and value streams will reuse capabilities to deliver value to internal and external stakeholders, so the end result is that this business and enterprise architecture enables the agility of execution of the strategy and we do it from two different perspectives, the first.

It's through intentional design that we don't do a lot of intentional design at the macro level of our organizations, but enterprise architecture, like I said, gives us those frameworks, those canvases to design and redesign for transformation or digital or sustainability or new strategies. and business models and we design around the reusable components of capabilities and value streams and those same reusable components give us a structure for business ownership that transcends B that transcends silos that transcends the business units on the other side, for What with an intentional design we obtain agility by having an optimized organization so that when the time comes to change it is simpler and faster, but the other side is translating the change and here the architecture gives us the knowledge base to inform and translate the strategy and keep it continually aligned with execution and to inform investment decisions with a With an enterprise lens without architecture, our organizations cannot do these things with architecture, we can address the root causes, particularly the four of which I talked about earlier, so strategy execution has become the primary value proposition for enterprise architecture over the years and continues to win. traction around the world in organizations in architectural professional associations and increasingly in higher education, so I'm going to pull a little bit on that thread of translating change and then give you a quick, real-life example of each of these in action for a company.

So, as I said, theArchitecture unites strategy and execution. Here I only have a macro level view from strategy to execution. I'm not implying a waterfall or anything to be clear, but what I see most organizations doing anyway is that we start from Big Ideas. in stage one, our strategies and we respond, we jump to stage three and respond with a long list of initiatives or, worse yet, we jump to stage four and start creating solutions to try to carry out that strategy and when we do , is there. By skipping or not having a stage two, it creates those Downstream execution challenges, that is, in another way, having stage two gives us the opportunity to design the change together to look at that funnel of things coming and understand what that means. collectively for our businesses and how we shape work in the smartest way, so the role of architecture in executing strategy is two things, one is to inform uniquely, translate the strategy, shape the work by advance, the second, gives us a golden thread to link the strategy with the architecture and the execution, this is what I call the golden thread and you will remember that I said before that two key things are needed to execute the strategy well, a clear intention translated into an organized effort, so the clear intention comes in those blue columns where we are diligent in decompressing our strategies into common, clear and consistent objectives. points and then not jump to the initiatives, but the key addition and the Cher game.

I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but the tipping point is adding those two green value stream capability columns to understand our goals, our courses of action, all that direction, what value streams are going to impact and what capabilities are going to impact. , because capabilities and value streams are going to frame where. Change is happening, we know there are many details behind how people process information than technology, but with capabilities and value streams we can connect the dots with all the other things in the organization that are impacting the same parts of the business, so capabilities coordinate change essentially and without capabilities we have the direction of the business and a lot of right actions, a lot of things that we are trying to do and, to the best of our ability, of course, we try to coordinate, but it's a big burden. cognitive and It's too much to understand, so the alternative in mindset change is to take that same set of directions and understand what it means for capabilities, what capabilities need to be improved and invested to carry out that direction and then finish the job what we have. wrap the initiatives around that and you can also have business ownership around those capabilities, so this represents a big shift in mindset from having business direction and responding with a long list of initiatives to having business direction and developing strategic capabilities to an organization of today. and tomorrow and that golden thread gives us this continuous response mechanism.

I imagine organizations as a kind of living organism that adapts to change as they respond to their environment and therefore when strategy changes or something in the world requires us to react, we can understand it. immediately what that means for the architecture and what that means for the execution and the portfolio of work that is being executed and methodically identify what we should be doing, what we should stop doing, what needs to change and of course the execution feeds back into the strategy and that. It happens over and over again, this is our muscle to change, so just to give you a very quick example, this is from a Fortune 500 company and this particular company was transforming the entire company around customer experience, so What it looked like is actually many different transformations. that they were very close and this particular transformation, which I won't go into details, but has to do with communications with clients.

The bottom line is that they are actually designing the current state and the target state around capabilities and value streams with the IT architecture. it overlaps and also ties into travel and the strategic roadmap is also oriented around capabilities, so you know the initiatives that we're defining are not just listed, you know, system by system, but they're organized around the capabilities that we are going to mature and deliver improvements over time, which will again allow for ownership of the business and better tracking of what we are actually getting and harmonizing people processes and technological changes across all of them, for which with that is a little microcosm, this is the The rest of the image I call it cube architecture, so on the left side you can see that there are multiple different capabilities, they are all transformations across the company and the teams of capabilities are responsible for delivering easily usable capabilities, people process technology, value.

The flow teams are responsible for ensuring that the value stream processes and experiences are unified across all business units, products and channels and of course the value streams will use the capabilities for all of these teams to work together, your roadmaps harmonize your target states. Each of the teams has a set of business and IT architects and an executive sponsor, and there is a set of executives, a Customer Experience Leadership Council that is responsible for everything you see here, basically to drive the customer experience. client for the organization. They are deciding investment in management and using capabilities and value streams as an organizational structure, which is why Gartner talks about the composable enterprise.

I think this is a very good real-life example of what that can look like, at least from the business side. architectural perspective, so there is a much broader picture here and it is not my intention to paint architecture as you know, the White Horse or the Silver Bullet, although it plays a tremendously important and often missing role, but the Strategy execution takes a village and this The other part of what it means to execute an end-to-end strategy is watching that process from start to finish and how all the teams work together to turn the idea into action or the strategy into reality and of course , there is a very important Trifecta right and many of the perspectives focused here today, you know the business and the enterprise architecture in the process and of course we need to integrate with each other and with the rest of those teams, so how do Can we take action on some of these ideas? what and now what do I expect, so what is obvious, then what is that architecture has renewed its strategic relevance, especially as organizations are hungry to improve strategy execution, it is becoming a higher priority on the agenda business and as business architecture.

It moves Upstream, just as all architecture moves Upstream, which also means that we can be at the table in the conversations to help shape the direction and shape the work rather than receiving it Downstream and trying to correct certain things and just these ideas that we've talked about. It creates a new mindset, a new organizational setup for others in the organization to think holistically and see the world as we do, so it also paves the way for architectural thinking. Now, this is definitely a trip and I really like it. What did Rishad say earlier? If you're not solving for people, you're not solving anything and that's exactly true here, this journey is a human journey, it's more about the people than the architecture it's about. change and new ways of working thinking about the execution of comprehensive strategies and holistic visions and designs, that is, new ways of thinking and working and even if you know incredible sponsorship from the highest level of SE Suite, we still have a complete organization of People change, so the only way to get to the top is for one person to take it one step at a time and win at a time, so some good places to start is through the lens of strategy execution.

How well is strategy execution working in your organization? Are you getting the results you would like? I would like to see what opportunities you have and then start conversations with your peers and your leaders and create intolerance for the status quo. Remember that people walk with this little stone in their shoe. They have come to accept these results, so you have to do it. in a way drawing attention to the art of the possible and what can be and building a case for change for the execution of a comprehensive strategy and an intentional modular or commercial design and then you start to progress, one person, one step, one victory at a time, show people what it looks like. how to build Defenders do bigger things over time.

Two really good places to start are: take a golden thread, translate a strategy or one that you know, so people can see it and another good one is to put a capability lens on the investment portfolio, of course you need an enterprise architecture to do this. There will be more sessions that talk about that, but we need an enterprise view of capabilities. An enterprise view of value streams and cross-mapping between the two, but once you have that all. everything else can be done just in time and of course partnerships are tremendously important, between the trifecta I talked about and all those other teams, so of course the idea of ​​comprehensive strategy execution has to be done. be business led and driven and This is where I spend most of my days working with business leaders and business and higher education teams.

However, it's like building a railroad and you're building tracks between each other, that's what we're doing and the people in this room understand that. This, you see it, you live it and you can be an advocate of changing your voice, expressing your action and your leadership are very important because together we are creating a new reality, we are creating a new future of new ways of thinking and working driven by architecture, so with that I hope to continue the conversation with any of you throughout the week and again thank you so much, great, so amazing, a couple of quick things, so another area that Wendy is incredibly passionate about is helping women in architecture.

They're going to chat about it at the reception tonight, but let's just frame it a little bit for our audience in terms of what they're doing with women's architecture because what we're going to look to do as a community is a collaboration between our SCP community of architects. business and some of Wendy's efforts in the broader realm of women in architecture, absolutely yes, so I mean, of course, the idea is that there is power in diversity and, you know, about 133% of this room. I guess it goes without saying that around 13% of enterprise architects are women, so we believe architecture has never been more important.

We need each and every one of us at our best individually and together, which is why women in architecture is a global initiative. I'm a co-founder and president of that and we're really looking to change that through community and interventions and in support of businesses, so it's named after the collective cause which is more women in architecture, which means it's about of all of us, the right men. and women working for more diverse architecture thank you and we all know what's coming next, awesome, cool, this is a little bit of your break, okay, am I here with you?

Yes, this is great, by the way, you guys are getting good at it. down a little tight tight tight yeah here we go and we're fine amazing thank you thank you Wendy and thank you all thank you