Architectural Control as a Managerial Paradox

In recent years, IS academia has argued that EA is increasingly becoming a strategic management tool or a high-level business function for long term planning and execution. It has been a healthy evolution for EA to question its IT heritage and adopt a broader perspective of how commercial enterprises navigate and gravitate in their respective marketplaces. This healthy evolution has particularly been articulated by Turner, Gotze, and Bernus (2010) in their paper Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise, which argues the key role of architecture in executive management. Architected organisations are said to achieve better, more consistent results since the strategy is aligned and architected against operations, processes, and the technology portfolio.

As I have previously argued in my writings on strategic management, the assumed reality of strategic long term planning has to a large extent ignored the socio-political side of human and organisational behaviour. Planning is volatile and subject to rapid change in turbulent environments. As Rittel & Webber (1973) argue in their 1973 article on government policy and planning, assuming that any problem can be solved by rational planning will ultimately lead to confusion and failure. In their view, assumed rationality leads to unexpected ambiguity. Here, it is crucial to ask the question: if EA really is such a strategic discipline driven by the need for informed decision making, how can the first and always at-the-top-of-the-framework-pyramid component called strategy rely on such a naïve view of how human planning works in practice? This discussion is by no means new; already in the late 90ies, Mintzberg (2002) argued the need for an organic, emergent view of strategy by elaborating on Simon’s (1997) concept of bounded, contextual rationality. 

Let us for a short moment forget about strategy as an applied, deliberate package of human reason and rather think of strategy as inherently equivocal. Management concepts, as they often arrive straight out of the business scholar’s first year text book on business strategy, are, in fact, paradoxical and ambiguous despite the strive for precision and forecasting. This is explained in the following:

1. The first paradox concerns the relationship between assumption of control vs. human and environmental ambiguity. The more one attempts to control and superimpose predictability onto reality, the more imprecise and irregular reality, in fact, becomes. This classic paradox of the manager as an assumed homo oeconomicus is discussed in depth by Kallinikos (2004).
2. The second paradox is three-sided: the short, very generic nature of corporate vision and mission statements vs. the corporate search for control and manageability vs. the complexity of the business ecology surrounding the enterprise. The first facet is short and simple, where the second facet strives for precision, detail, and consistency, both which in turn neglect the ecological complexity and institutional pressure (the third facet) of the organisation’s environment.
3. The third, most noticeable paradox is the fact that the implicit equivoque of high-level mission/vision statements fosters organisational resilience. The more loosely or ill-defined the strategy, the better will the official policy document fit into the actions and immediate strategies (what Weick (2001) denotes just in time strategies) deployed by employees to fulfil or achieve certain goals and expectations (Astley & Zammuto, 1992). The more ambiguous the official strategy or policy articulation, the more free hands for the individual employee to appropriately navigate the socio-political problems of the business environment. Despite the intended precision of a strategy document, the more possible interpretations of a strategic policy or plan, the more organisational resilience and responsiveness (Weick, 2001).

However, it is too simplistic to assume that corporate ambiguity per se triggers organisational resilience and flexibility. In that case, any old plan would do.The paradoxical nature of precision and ambiguity is better understood as a second order systems theoretical concept (Luhmann, 1995 & Luhmann, 2000), in which any system, be it social or biological/ecological, applies certain reductionisms in order to reduce the outside complexity the environment. In Luhmann’s theory of symbolically generalised media within social systems, phenomena such as scientific truth, politics, sex, and power are applied by different institutional systems in order to reduce the complexity and ambiguity of modern society. Similarly, organisations as social systems deliberately deploy equivocal mission statements and simplistic strategies in order to interpret and cope with a hyper-complex, fast-paced business environment. Despite the claim of predictability, strategic long term plans are thus put in place in order to reduce societal complexity and constraints to static architectural maps and prescriptive policies. The reduced conception of reality is by no means successful or comprehensive enough to account for all important details simultaneously, but it makes reality manageable until the actions taken and plans made are reasonable enough (see  reasonableness as a criterion for strategic success in (Weick, 2001)). 

As Teubner (2000) writes, strategic planning fosters productive misunderstandings: business strategies have to be misunderstood (compared to what was originally intended by e.g. senior management) and reinterpreted in the particular reality and bounded rationality of the individual. The final, synthesised (mis-)understanding of strategy, mission, and vision serves to build and sustain resilience and organisational responsiveness---but only with reference to the organisation itself. As Luhmann’s sociology tells us, the end result would never achieve the same results in the outside reality. This also explains why replicating or adopting existing patterns of strategy will most likely lead to a bad result without adopting, contextualising, and productively misunderstanding the presumed strategic rationality. Good strategies are misunderstood, self-referential and contextual whilst fostering resilience and adaptability.

It is my conception that EA must adopt such view of strategic thinking as a self-referential, ambiguity-producing human practice in order to successfully navigate the needs and requirements of tomorrow’ adaptive and flexible virtual enterprises.

References

Astley, W. G. & Zammuto, R. F. (1992), `Organization Science, Managers, and Language Games', Organization Science 3(4), 443{460.

Kallinikos, J. (2004), `Deconstructing Information Packages: Organizational and Behavioural Implications of ERP Systems', Information Technology & People 17(1), 8-30.

Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Writing Science, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Luhmann, N. (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2002). Strategy safari (2nd ed.). LT Prentice Hall. 

Rittel, H. & Webber, M. (1973), `Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning', Policy Sciences 4.

Simon, H. A. (1997), Models of Bounded Rationality, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA.

Teubner, G. (2000), `Contracting worlds: Invoking discourse rights in private governance regimes', Social and Legal Studies 9, 399-417.,

Turner, P., Gøtze, J., Bernus, P. (2010) Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise. In Bernus et al (2010) Enterprise Architecture, Integration and Interoperability: IFIP TC 5 International Conference, EAI2N 2010, Held as Part of WCC 2010, Brisbane, Australia, September 20-23, 2010, Proceedings. 

Weick, K. E. (2001), Making Sense of the Organization, Blackwell Publishing.