Review - RecEAtion by Chris Potts

RecrEAtion by Chris Potts is an IT fantasy novel aimed at frustrated Enterprise Architects. The novel begins with an Enterprise Architect named Simon starting a job in the role of Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at a global company. He meets the CEO who says “Sounds like we have the same job!” Obviously the CEO had never heard of Enterprise Architecture, which would be easily believable, but the fact that the VP of EA reported to the CTO should have set off the warning bells. It is comedy gold, as the CEO mistakenly construes Enterprise Architecture as something to do with designing the enterprise!

At this point the novel turns into pure fantasy. Undeterred by the fact that Simon is actually a mid level IT person with an impressive title the CEO decides to take Simon under his wing for no obvious reason, and within a few days Simon is reporting to the CEO and sitting in on a meeting with one of the senior executive team. Then with one fairly inane idea blurted out in this meeting the CEO decides Simon is a genius and sends him around the world to meet and advise senior executives in the company’s most critical locations.

During the journey Simon realises that everything he ever thought he knew about Enterprise Architecture was wrong, that his whole career is a lie, and that what he really should be doing is flying around the world chatting to senior executives about financial ratios and organisational issues. And just to prove you can take the man out of Enterprise Architecture but you can never take Enterprise Architecture out of the man he manages to develop a new process model and framework diagram that solves all EA problems!

The critical issue with EA that Potts fails to grasp happens in the workshop with the team of EAs in Hong Kong. Simon asks the Architects to answer two questions:

1.      What is Enterprise Architecture?
2.      What constraints affect EA contributing to the company’s success?

The answers to the first question were completely inconsistent, which is to be expected by anyone who has ever had to deal with Enterprise Architects.  Rather than attempting to clarify the definition Simon takes the role of a true EA and says that all responses were part of EA! Like the Force, EA is everywhere, able to do anything. Crisis averted.

The second question is wrong in so many ways. The various responses really boiled down to a marketing problem with the rest of the business, and EA needing to communicate their brilliance in a way that the dolts in the rest of the business could understand.

A much better question would have been “What is the purpose of Enterprise Architecture?” Potts provides a mission statement for EA that provides something of an answer. Although the statement is essentially meaningless (“structured innovations” sound like fluff) it does capture at least some of the aspirations of EA. 

“Enhancing Enterprise performance with structured innovations”

I think this is really the critical question for all EAs. If you know your purpose then you can plan your strategy and tactics for achieving your purpose. It really does not matter how much business engagement you have at a senior level, or how much marketing activity your team does, you are never going to provide much contribution to company success by mapping all of the company’s systems and processes in Archimate J

I am not sure I have a better mission than Potts, but then again I am not the one writing the book J I guess if I had to come up with a mission for EA it would be something like this:

“Helping the company make better decisions about systems and processes to enhance current and future performance”. OK, so a bit ungainly, but captures the essence of what effective EAs actually do, rather than a fantasy about engaging seasoned executives with undergraduate business school ratio analyses (what do they think they are; consultants?!).

When I do IT strategy sessions with customers I ask them to define their end state in terms of what can be achieved with current technology. There is no point in trying to predict what technologies, vendors or practices might be ascendant in five years. Strategy is hard enough without trying to incorporate fortune telling in to the process. I always tell my customers to wave a magic wand and describe what good would look like today if there were no constraints. It gives a realistic goal to shoot for while clearly understanding that the goal is not reality. 

In many ways RecrEAtion is also trying to wave a magic wand and imagine how Enterprise Architecture could be. But unlike my strategy example there is no value in imagining a fantasy, as there is no practical roadmap to get there. In its current state the reality is that EA will never be anything more than an IT discipline because the people that do EA are essentially technologists. In fact in the last few years EA has drifted further off course. The over reliance on EA frameworks, EA tools and certifications has fostered a very insular community that is not only out of touch with the core business, but increasingly out of touch with IT as well.

The idea that many EAs would be able fit in to the executive group of most organisations is laughable. There are such fundamental cultural differences, and a requirement for skills that I would not usually associate with many Enterprise Architects, such as the ability to deal with ambiguity, big picture thinking, non binary decision making, diverse relationship nurturing, concise presentation, rapport building, consensus building, engaging public speaking, optimism, determination, passion, leadership…. I could go on, but you get the picture.    

So ultimately a though provoking and interesting book, but no real solutions.