Category: Topic 7

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Rebeka Melber

Brad Miller

“Selecting the right person for the right job is the largest part of coaching.” – Phil Crosby

Technology isn’t the only important aspect of an evolving and agile enterprise architecture program. An equally challenging aspect of supporting business operations is identifying the correct individuals or groups to influence and guide business outcomes that align with future state architecture views. Having the right personality and skillset can make all the difference to help shape and achieve business success. In an article, Jackie Fenn identifies six styles of technology innovation groups that bring unique skills required to maximize and transform business impacts.

“Technology innovation and emerging technology groups need to identify the most useful role they can adopt in advancing their organization’s innovation capabilities, from navigators that drive business transformation through technology, to pollinators that encourage innovation at the edges (Fenn, 2012)

The article focused on identifying the right style of innovation for a team or group of individuals. However, I would argue that each style already exists and is an important part of the innovation process within EA programs. Each style embodies the characteristic necessary to form a comprehensive team to accomplish business driven outcomes. Bigger question… is how do you hire and identify the right people to complete such a team or group?

The Six Styles of Technology Innovation Groups (Fenn, 2012):

1. Navigator – “Determines the strategic business impact of emerging technologies, through tracking evaluation and piloting.” Focused on understanding current and future business processes to align corporate direction and priorities of business units with technology. However, they lack any authority to implement their vision.
2. Scholar – “Investigates technologies ahead of business need through primary R&D.” Focused on research and develop to push technology capabilities to support new technology solutions and maintain a competitive edge through emerging technology.
3. Responder – “Helps business units deploy new technologies through a tactical and pragmatic “SWAT” team approach.” Focused on testing, prototyping, piloting, and development to evaluate new/emerging technology evolution.
4. Counselor – “Educates senior management on emerging technology issues and potential.” Provides education and inspiration to achieve business objectives and will often champion and recommend technologies to executive/IT leaders.
5. Conductor – “Coordinates and leverage emerging technology activities performed in other parts of the organization.” Focused on aligning task through coordinate and leverage already existing teams and resources. Able to manage effectively to maximize impact of limited resources.
6. Pollinator – “Encourages and mentors distributed innovation activities throughout the organization.” Focused on coaching and mentoring to encourage and facilitate across all level of the technology stack.

Attributes/characteristics:

• Navigator: Drives, Leads, Adapts, Communications,
• Scholar: Drives, Leads, Invents, problem solver, hands-on
• Responder: Drives, Responds, evaluation
• Counselor: Enables, Executives, influencers/persuasive, communication
• Conductor: Enables, Workforce, Leverages, planner, communication,
• Pollinator: Enables, Workforce, Unleashes, people-oriented skills, persuasive.

 

References:

Fenn, J. (2012). Six Styles of Technology Innovation Groups. Gartner. https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2277059/files/149153361/download?wrap=1

New and emerging technologies/innovations are rapidly changing how organizations and customers operate/function. Such technologies are designed to make life easier by improving capabilities through efficiency, cost reduction, integration with the intent to produce greater business value. The challenge with businesses and organizations is recognizing the technology or solution that is going to support best. Generally the much larger organizations like Google, Apple, and Amazon will develop in-house solutions to support business strategy and goals… which makes sense, many of those large organizations are leading the way with capability development and innovation. For instances, Amazon Web Services, at its core, is a cloud technology that is providing agile capabilities and solutions to millions of small business. And because there are so many different technologies/solutions that exist, it is difficult for small business to determine the correct one that will provide the best value. This is both a good thing and bad thing, in some cases it will be tailored technology that provides specific capabilities. However, with the many options available, companies can now pick and choose various technologies to develop a modular system that best fits the organization’s needs, but also makes the extremely adaptable to future technology changes. Because technology is constantly changing, business must also constantly adapt to remain competitive and meet customer demands.

So, what are some good practices to access new technology and the potential value of their integration within existing enterprise architecture? Technology innovation leaders must stay up to date with emerging technologies to determine their impact and the opportunities they present within your organization. Ideal, leaders want to assess or analyze technology that has transformational potential and capabilities to support agile business strategies. To assess such technology, the best option is to conduct use cases or develop and test within a small mimic environment to identify its potential and assess any vulnerabilities. Adding new technology within an existing infrastructure can produce unforeseen circumstances too. Knowing how to exploit these technologies can also help leaders develop the capability to handle such unforeseen circumstances. One last practice to help evaluate emerging technology is for an organization to develop a priority matrix map with defined criteria that will help evaluate multiple solutions at once and ideally yield the best solution.

References:

Dawson, P., Davis, M., & Burke, B. (2021). Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/document/4004623?ref=d-linkShare