Architecting the enterprise - Clarify the Concept of Architect, Architecting and Architecture

Coming soon

Digitalization and integration solving the last mile problem – thoughts from my personal flu shot experience

I went to a local grocery for the flu shot last night. The pharmacist over there were very polite. He asked me to fill in the paper form. It took me about 4-5 minutes to fill in the form. Signed my name, I returned it to the pharmacist. I also gave him my insurance card.

Going through my form, the pharmacist tried to locate my insurance record in the system. Somehow, he found out the record in their system didn’t match with the information from my insurance card or the form I filled in. In fact, over the years, I rarely need to see the doctor, let alone go to the pharmacist. My record in the local grocery could be the record from last couple years. He tried to retrieve my eligibility record using my insurance card, somehow it didn’t work either.

He explained to me what happened, and asked me to wait while calling the customer service reps from my insurance company. He made the first call, and could not get my eligibility record verified. He was told to make a second call, still can’t resolve the issue. I told him I just used my insurance card last Friday for another visit. He explained to me that he was going to make the third call, and asked me to wait a little longer. 40 minutes passed with 3 different phone calls, he finally got my record verified and my eligibility checked. It then took 3-4 minutes for the nurse to give me the flu shot.

During the entire visit, the pharmacist was very professional and courteous. I can sense those customer services reps from my insurance company were very patient and persistent too. I must admit it is the best customer service I ever received. I have been in healthcare IT so many years. As a chief architect for large health insurance program, I felt extremely embarrassed and guilty. We took every effort liberate the health data, with an intention to make it available at the customer service reps’ or patient’s fingertip. We came up with tons of innovative initiatives to directly engagement the members, educate the members and help the member make the right health decisions for the right cost they can bear. 

Then where are the problems? What could be wrong? What makes the best customer services inefficient? It is the last mile of any industry. It is the last mile we keep forgeting or ignoring. The cumbersome paper process, outdated system integration, staled data silos and aging customer service interactions (phone calls) make it impossible to have the patient’s data real time accessible. It creates barriers for efficient services at the corner of the street, at the remote rural area, or at the smaller doctor offices. If we don’t solve this kind of last mile problem, a 5-minute pharmacy visit could turn out to be 50 minutes, and a $20 medical service could cost as much as $200, considering the 45 minutes waste of the human cost the payer, pharmacist, and myself spent.

Imagine you can initiate your flu shot with one simple click on your mobile device before you walk in to the local grocery. By the time you walk in, they scan your digital insurance card and validate your eligibility right away. The entire process will take just 5 minutes, instead of 50 minutes.

This brings another personal experience of mine. Last summer when I visited my family in the remote countryside in China, I went to the local farmer’s market with my nephew. He picked a few local produces, took them to the farmer. The farmer calculated the cost with the smart phone, showed him a QR code to pay. My nephew scanned QR code, instantly paid the farmer with the phone. There is no paper involved, no cash exchanged either. If you have a smart phone, any customer can buy and pay, and any merchant can sell and get paid.

That is the digital transformation we need. It is the digitalization and digital disruption we needed to re-image the entire health industry, including the last mile. It requires the mindset changes to totally transform the health system. We have a long way to go.

Architecting the enterprise - the art of enterprise architecture roadmap

coming soon.

Architecting the enterprise - debunk the myths of enterprise architecture frameworks

coming soon.

Enterprise architecture as strategy enabler or as governance enforcer

When large transformation opportunity presents, organizations often struggle to position enterprise architecture in the enterprise. Some expects enterprise architecture becomes the panacea of the organization’s business and technology solutions and ends up always finding out it falls short of expectation. Some drives the innovation from ground up and finds enterprise architecture as the roadblock of any sort of technology innovations. This has caused many enterprises reboot enterprise architecture program again and again.

Where do enterprises position enterprise architecture? As strategy (enabler) or as governance(enforcer)? Or as both? As an advocate, consultancy or rubber stamp? In my own experiences with various organizations, I felt the balance between a strategic role and a governance role may benefit the enterprise most. Without that balance, enterprise architecture could become the ivy tower where no one cares, or become solution driver whom everyone hates. 

So where is the right balance of strategy and governance in the role of enterprise architecture?

A strategic role of enterprise architecture is an enterprise architecture program which is capable of the following:

1. Having an in-depth understanding of business strategy, industry, and short-term and long-term strategic business plan
2. Becoming innovation enabler, savvy in both business and technology, and being able to devise a set of technology strategies connect to and enable the business and organization strategy, and being able to put together a big picture of business and technology view together to drive the executive level strategy conversation.
3. Being able to navigate the organizational and political structure to advance the business and technology strategy.

Obviously strategic enterprise architecture defines the technology strategy and technology plan to align with business strategy. It starts with business strategy, dissects the business model with business capabilities, and anatomizes business priority through value stream, codifies the business operations through business model canvass. 

Enterprise architects need to be technology savvy, and is an emerging technology though leader. They should be able to see major technology trends in the industry and be cognizant about innovative and disruptive impacts of emerging technologies onto the business. In formulating technology plan, they should be able to devise a cohesive set of technology strategies informing the enterprise what is ahead of IT organization, how organization prepare for the future, and when things need to be in place to enable the business. 

A good technology plan needs to build a smooth and just-in-time connection with strategic business plan. That requires enterprise architects work closely with the business, program management office, and delivery organization, as well as all supporting shared services within the organization and beyond. Without such just-in-time connection, enterprise architecture can easily be viewed as an ivy tower, and may not be able to drive effective strategy executions.

In some occasions, due to heavy regulations and compliance needs, organization may choose to leverage enterprise architecture as the governance. In some other occasions, especially when major modernizations and digital transformation are done, organization needs to settle down and ensure all pieces in the enterprise are able to fit together, organization may tap enterprise architecture as the gate keeper to ensure such alignment. In such cases, enterprise architecture tends to establish rigor or strict technology and architecture governance process, procedure, and policy. Their role is more to ensure architecture compliance with those defined standards, processes, and policies. 

The right balance lies in between strategy and governance. At the time when major transformation opportunities present, the organization should position enterprise architecture more as a strategy advocate, a strategic partner, digital transformation driver. Its role should be the one piecing together a big picture view of the enterprise at this moment, during the transformation and at the end of transformation. They should be charged to come up with strategic technology plan to enable and reinforce the transformation. 

Enterprise architecture may accidently become more governance entity in the organization. Strict or rigor governance tends to hinder the innovation. Enterprise architecture should examine its process, procedure, standards, and policies to ensure it reduces the innovation barriers, and becomes more an innovation enabler.

Enterprise architecture may become stale from time to time. It is perfect okay to reset and restart enterprise architecture program. The goal is to make the enterprise architecture become a strategy enabler again. 

Digital transformation is hard!

Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of his novel "Anna Karenina", "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". It is called Anna Karenina principle. The same can be said for digital transformation. 

According to unofficial statistics, large percentage of digital transformation initiatives failed. Why? What went wrong? Business and technology executives are searching for an answer. In Tolstoy's words, those successful digital transformation initiatives do share a common set of attributes, and the deficiencies in any of those attributes may lead to a failure in the execution of a digital transformation initiative.

Reflecting on my personal learning and reading experience, as well as my own observations, I want to share my views, experiences, and understanding on how to get it right. The topics will be covered here including:

• Business and technology strategy, technology planning;
• Enterprise architecture strategy, architect, architecting and architecture
• Emerging technology introduction and adoption
• New business model and technology Innovation (Insurtech, Fintech, Healthtech, Smart City etc)  

Regarding emerging technologies, I am passionate about the following, so any of them may be a topic or case study in my blog:

• Enterprise integration (API First, Domain Driven Design, Microservices, Kafka, etc.)
• Enterprise automation (AI/ML, RPA, BPM, Robotics, etc.)
• Enterprise insight (AI/ML, NLP, Big Data, Data Lake, Data Science)
• Enterprise infrastructure (Cloud native, Container, Kubernetes, Docker, Observability, SRE, etc.)
• Enterprise experience (Design Thinking, UI/UX, Product strategy, Mobile, conversational UI)
• Enterprise agility (Agile, DevOps, etc.)

I will try my best to write as much as possible as times allow. All thoughts expressed here are my personal view of things. Some may be wrong, and some may be inaccurate, I would welcome all feedback and comments.