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I was at a meeting with a potential customer once, where we discussed moving forward with a social portal project. Their process – despite having some great people (!!) – compels them to spend months and years discussing how things would be done, if there were to be done, assuming they should be done. Or something like that; what they were unable to do is actually move forward. For 18 months. At the same time, we can read about Groupon‘s enterprise architecture here.

We spoke with Ryan Miller and Chris Bland from Groupon about how the company has managed to scale its business so quickly and with such agility. Rather than relying on its own complex internal systems infrastructure, Groupon uses tools like Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2 and S3 to keep the site powered and deals flowing.

A company barely existed 18 months ago! And then I went back to this letter to Enterprise Architecture I saw yesterday:

Actually, we’re still burned from the last time you did that to us, when you told us that “multichannel integration” would give us all the competitive advantage that we needed. It didn’t give us anything very much, but we suppose you got some “cool” bits or architecture. Anyway, once bitten, twice shy.

But even more surprising than all this was the discovery that even if we agreed to everything you want, we will then have to face an Architectural Council who have the power to overturn everything and send us back to the drawing board. Considering the constitution of this “council” is anyone who has a view on anything, we’ve heard on the grapevine pretty much no decisions get made ever. Apparently you all argue for hours over definitions of things such as TOGAFs and whether your “strategic” statements are correct or not. Its all so very ivory tower. Herds of elephants must have been destroyed in the process.

There is a lot in the post that I do not like, but it is hard to argue with the feeling most enterprise architecture teams inspire in their business users and IT colleagues. This reflection prompted a thought,

what if that is the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture – something that lets the company scale as fast as possible with minimal costs. Period. Everything else is a red herring.

One organization had a series of meetings, and another went from start-up to a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees in hundreds of locations – all in a same interval it took Earth do 1.5 orbits around its star.

Image by mdanys via Flickr

This is certainly one of the small issues that is so well-known, people have stopped talking about it long time ago. Specifically –  in one of our conference rooms we have an old Polycom phone. It is not too bad – as far as very old phones go – but even in the small room, everyone’s default voice level is raised to the level of shouting. That is terrible. Sure, you think you are just making yourself heard, but it is impossible not feel stressed and tired, on both sides of the phone, after screaming and being screamed at for an hour or two. As the meeting goes on - antagonism builds up driven purely by the emotion of screaming at your teammates.

Think about it – does your company expect you to SCREAM at colleagues working TOGETHER? Of course not – they just do not realize that we are hardwired to remember emotions and fall into patterns without remembering the reason you fell into the pattern in the first place. (my interpretation of pp. 276-278 of ‘Upside of Irrationality‘ by @danariely)

So office managers, and other managers, when you invest in cherry furniture, just leave a little money to buy some decent audio and video equipment – it will pay off very very quickly for your team.

Anyway, what really hit me was that message of product introspection applies to established companies as much as it does to start-ups. Existing companies spend as much, perhaps more, time dreaming up products and solutions, offers and packages, as any start-up. IBM alone has thousands and thousands software “products” (part #s you can buy) and each one of these was debated, researched, fought over – and in the end decided to solve some problem for a non-trivially sized market.

So next time we have a solution definition meeting, I will be the guy standing up and asking, “How are they doing it now?”

Update: It took me a couple of days to get to write this post. I actually *did* bring this up in a strategy meeting. The result was to change one of the marketing approaches to our international business. Great return on investment of reading a blog :)

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Suddenly, New York looks pretty good.

In case you just want to go straight into the visualization, click here – http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/house-prices-to-income-ratio

At first I thought it was different, especially between different socio-economic circles, but now I think it might be the same problem. Perhaps there is not a difference between knowing “someone by name” and “someone by skill”, at least in terms of the length of the chain. The difference may occur on the level of semantics – “good lawyer” or, in today’s headlines, “good bank” are different from “John Smith”. I’d be curious to know if people have done reaearch into this question, and what their findings were.

How does this relate to anything useful?

As I constantly think of how best to work with my teams, this is an important, but largely unmeasured consideration. When forming the teams we formally look at the person’s skills, some relevant experience with a similar type of project or industry is helpful – but rarely measured. However, I do not think I have ever heard anyone say, “we must have 40 points of X experience and 60 points of Y exposure for every project we undertake in order to have 90% confidence of success.” We do a similar calculation with technical skills, but not much else. At the same time, it is pretty obvious that the MVPs on all teams are always the multi-faceted guys who not only know how to manage java heap sizes, but also where to get a projector on short notice and can talk sports/stocks/beer with colleagues and customers.