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Ana-Maria’s first work experience as a co-op is still vivid in her memory. That very first day, she went to the bank to find her salary already deposited and get a cheque to sign the lease contract of her cozy little apartment. That feeling of “everything is under control” helped her feel confident with the challenge of moving from her home town in Bucharest, Romania, to Brussels, Belgium, and living on her own for the first time.

Twenty years have passed and she is now the coordinator of co-op assignments in a large European non-profit organization. She welcomes cohorts of over 600 undergraduate students from all over Europe. One of her biggest commitments is to manage their first and all subsequent payments on time. To get all the wheels turning, she and her colleagues work long hours on manual administrative tasks. At the beginning, it was fairly easily, but as the program success increased along with the number of incoming students, their work got harder to coordinate with all parties.

International co-ops are a special professional engagement. They are paid on the very first day of work so they can settle in their experience. Ana-Maria knew she couldn’t manage it alone, so she needed to work with third parties. She connected with the accounting department in advance, agreed on payment dates, made sure to send the list of students with bank accounts, and was on the phone with students or bank branches to solve any last minute issues. She was satisfied only when she knew all transactions had been successfully completed the day prior to their arrival.

When she wanted to decrease the administrative burden by simplifying the list of documentation requested to students, she had to align with existing regulations and processes by working closely with the document management and communications teams. To get all students allocated in different departments depending on their skills and interests, she needed to involve representatives from each department in a simple selection process. When she saw that her team was still struggling to maintain everything organized and share the information in a timely manner, she started making it a paperless process with the technology team.

Like Ana-Maria, every company is trying their best to give the best customer experience, but even when they think they’ve thought of everything, there are still broken links leaving their customers unsatisfied. Where do we start? How can we find what’s wrong?

Just as Ana-Maria realized early on, it’s hard for one department to solve problems for their customers on their own. Sure they can solve part of it, but usually we need to work with other people in the organization if we want customers to have a good experience.

So, before we are able to close the gap in the customer experience, we need to organize our business. But how? There are so many different solutions, but today we can talk about using enterprise architecture as a model to organize the people, processes and technology so that we are better set up to address our customers. This holistic view makes it easier to identify the impact of changes across teams. So, how could we go about creating an enterprise architecture?

Linking the Views

There are different frameworks, tools and approaches for Enterprise Architecture. But in a nutshell, Enterprise Architecture supports change by showing how its parts are connected. Some of the key domains of an organization include business with its objectives, processes and functions, data, and applications. Each organization will define how these domains are connected so they understand each other and work in collaboration to achieve common goals.

Defining Enterprise Architecture is rather organic, it’s more like solving a puzzle. When we work on one piece, it points us to another one until we complete it. A few questions to link the different parts of our business are:

People

  • Are they supporting organizational goals?
  • Are the responsibilities reflected in the processes?
  • Are functions mapped to the organization structure?
  • Is the data shared between different functions?
  • Is terminology supporting good communication?

Processes

  • Do the activities help achieve the goals?
  • Have we identified how stakeholders, functions and business units collaborate?
  • Is there a common terminology across processes?
  • Is data accessible to understand, operate and improve processes?

Technology

  • Which applications support key processes?
  • Which roles operate core applications?
  • How does data flow across applications?

Principles

It can feel overwhelming to define an Enterprise Architecture because we may think we need to document all aspects of our business and define their relationships in one go. One approach is to start small and operate through iterative cycles. We can follow four principles:

  1. Simplicity: Prioritize focused on customers

    According to the Nature Human Behaviour Journal, as I learned from Liane Davey, people tend to add more things to feel more strategic. But given the choice, people prefer simplified strategies. We need to favor simplicity over complexity so more people can understand and follow through.

  2. Customer-centered: Observe what’s happening to highlight problems

    Understanding exactly what customers are going through helps acknwoledge their limitations. The point is to base it on actual observations to get an accurate view of the situation. In lean, the Japanese word Gemba means we go in the actual place where the work is happening to understand the impact of the problem.

  3. Systems Thinking: Look at the overall picture and rely on relationships to help see the impact of changes

    Business is an interconnected network with complex and dynamic interactions. The goal is to see how changes in one place impact other areas and learn how to look beyond where the problem is occurring.

  4. Lean: Iteratively test ways to solve problems in practice

    Going through any change can be difficult but we can simplify this journey by embracing uncertainty and learning as we go. We don’t know what we’ll find out after we make improvements. That is the reason for experimenting and refining in an iterative cycle.

Beyond the Surface

In some ways, Enterprise Architecture seems similar to weather forecasting to me:

  • It needs a standard vocabulary describing key elements

  • It needs to be broadcasted so people are aware and can take proper action

  • It needs to be measured to determine the success rate

  • It assumes we take a holistic view, looking beyond just one location. Interesting to learn that it was only after the invention of the electric telegraph in the early 19th century that weather forecasting improved accuracy because it allowed reports from a wider region to be shared almost instantaneously.

Connected to Serve Customers

Enterprise Architecture is sometimes seen as a heavy approach when people focus on upfront modeling, as a paper exercise without trying it in practice and forget about the relationships between the different parts. But worse than investing the time to understand the enterprise is to face avoidable problems had we understood how our business is connected. Enterprise Architecture is increasingly seen as strategic for change and innovation since it supports contextualized decision-making when we are faced with so many changes.

So how did Ana-Maria use all this to help with the customer experience? To give the best customer experience, a lot of things have to be aligned and work well behind the scenes. She needed to help all parties and applications to know what to do or how to operate when interacting with customers. Again, she needed to show that they are all connected. She showed them that when she made a change, it could have an impact somewhere else, even in unexpected areas. She used the links to know where to look so she maintained it balanced. A transparent, connected and stable flow behind the scenes sets us up for successful customer experiences.