Transformation Overcomes Inertia

Enterprises develop inertia over time.  And just as inertia keeps a gyroscope from changing direction, inertia stops enterprises from changing themselves.  Transformation is about overcoming inertia to change direction.

Inertia is not always a bad thing.  Inertia can be very valuable in keeping an enterprise on track. When we talk about institutionalizing change we are talking about creating inertia that will keep the enterprise from reverting back to its old ways.  In this case inertia is the gyroscope that keeps the organization moving in the right direction.  It guides future decisions as processes and systems are updated.

Thus not all change is a change in direction.  Some change may be a course correction or a detour around a temporary obstacle.  Some change may be simply to keep going the same way but more efficiently or faster.  These changes may nor require a change in inertia at all, or may require only minor changes in inertia.

However, when a change in direction is significant or sudden inertia will become a major obstacle to change.  This requires an effort of Herculean proportions; this requires transformation.

Types of Bad Inertia

• Organizational Inertia – This is about people resisting change.
• Managers and executives resist change when they fear they will lose power because of it.
• Employees resist change when they fear they will lose their job because of it.
• But mostly people fear change because they lack confidence in the portability of their existing skill set and their own ability to adapt or learn new skills
• Financial Inertia – This is about the cost of change. Pre-existing investments in capital and resources make change expensive:
• We just built that factory last year.
• We just implementation that system.
• We’re still depreciating that expense.
• Process Inertia - The “we always do it that way” syndrome.
• System Inertia - We do it that way because that the only way the system supports and the system is too hard to change.

Strategy Sets the Course, Execution is the Journey

When we talk about direction for an enterprise we are talking about strategy.  Strategy does not simply specify a straight line direction; strategy defines a course from where we currently are to where we want to go.

Execution is how we translate strategy into action.  When strategy and execution are aligned the enterprise moves smoothly along the course laid out in the strategy.  Over time strategy changes and execution must change with it, but if inertia has built up and is not properly accounted for strategy and execution can drift out of alignment.  The problem is not that we don’t know we need to change direction; the problem is we can’t change direction as easily as expected.

Take the example of a car driving on an icy road.  If the road suddenly curves the driver will see it and know that he/she must change direction to match the curve.  So he/she turns the wheel of the car, but the ice on the road has robbed the tires of the traction required to execute that turn; the car continues to go straight.  The driver continues to turn the wheel for the expectation is that turning the wheel will cause the car to turn.  Finally the tires may summon enough traction to execute a turn, but at this point the driver may have over turned the wheel and the car turns more than required.  Anyone who has lived and driven in a cold winter climate knows how this story ends.

Unfortunately unlike the driver of the car on the icy road, it is not as easy to recognize when the enterprise has failed to change direction as desired.  Often times the enterprise fails to respond to even what are considered minor changes in strategy. This failure to respond may go unnoticed as may the next change in strategy and the next.  Left unattended the misalignment between strategy and execution grows over time.  Worse yet as execution deviates from strategy making strategy changes become harder because the assumed starting point may not be correct.

Back to the analogy of the car on the icy road; since the normal feedback associated with turning the wheel is not available, the driver turns the wheel randomly until he/she is no longer certain in which direction the wheels are pointing.  This is an enterprise skidding out of control.

The Role of EA in Avoiding the Car Wreck

It’s popular to talk about Enterprise Architecture as aligning business and IT.  Like “transformation” that has always struck me as too vague.  I prefer to talk about EA as aligning execution to strategy.

So if we define transformation either in terms of change to strategy or re-alignment of execution to strategy, the role of EA in transformation becomes one or more of the following:

1. Avoiding misalignment of strategy and architecture in the first place.
2. Recognizing when there is misalignment between strategy and architecture.
3. Identifying specific misalignment between execution and strategy.
4. Root cause analysis in the misalignment of execution and strategy.
5. Designing new modes of execution that align with strategy.
6. Identifying and minimizing the potential for creating bad inertia in the execution of strategy, in particular avoiding System Inertia, one of the most common and troublesome forms of inertia.