Strong Natural Hierarchies versus Analytical Hierarchies in an Enterprise

Understanding the Common parts of an Enterprise

Use case, in 2008 a group of 35 super subject matter experts convened to address the use of hierarchies in a major organization with global presence and well respected for its ability to innovate, change and operate.

Strong Natural Hierarchies 

The structured information used by applications and reference architectures to inter-operate within and beyond the organizations boundaries. Real World requires us to align closest with the physical world.

Financial purposes requires a physical alignment and exclusion on paper if technology doesn't use strong natural hierarchies. 

• A real world perspective of information otherwise referred to as the physical implicit order by which we base the foundation before we execute the explicit order in our actions.  
• A location on the planet 
• If viewed from a zip code we are in the node at the lowest leaf node level of the hierarchy.  
• If viewed from a city, we are one level up from the leaf node (zip codes) which has a single city to many zip code relationship.
• If viewed from a county, we are another level up from the city with one county to many cities relationship.
•  If viewed from a state, we are another level up from the county with one state to many counties relationship.
• If viewed from a nation or country, we are another level up from the state with many states in a nation relationship.
• If viewed from the international or world, we are another level up from the nation with a single world to many nations relationship.   
• A fit for purpose use would be in a case where a region was defined by a group of users and they may elect to select specific nations without selecting all nations.  
• The implicit order remains with a region having a part of the whole 
• The regional use may apply but the ability to enforce the benefits are far more difficult in a fit for purpose model.  
• Each person has a different mental model 
• Each person may be without the facts about the whole
• Each fit for purpose type may benefit only the people in a sub-group.   
• The explicit order often results in false positives as we never compare to the whole of implicit order.  Without the two types we are not aligned well to the physical world and change based on partial information.   
• Data in lieu of performance measurements - 5th normal form suggest an ability to overstate or exclude parts which others include misrepresenting the actual performance for one, while overstating another or simply not having the cost represented to appear more profitable.

Impossible to Influence Stakeholders 

Volunteers a group of Super SME's

The SME's organized into five working groups, a single person agreed to lead each team and a centralized business leader was the bridge between the business and IT including enterprise architecture.

The SME's were both business and technology leaders in individual contributor roles or functional architect leaders.  The business stakeholders had never joined forces with their IT architects in a way that was collaborative, instead an architect often guided the business high performers (fresh graduates from college) through the requirements in a solution architecture.

The business SME's were often the ones who had far more knowledge than both the high performers and beyond the scope of any one technology.  The hidden networks of trusted advisers in an organization, the people who ask the "uh, oh" questions in a very large meeting.

Barriers for the Experts (Type 30) 

The impossible to influence stakeholders are the Super SME's who are in a hidden network within the organization.  The same resources are often excluded from initiatives and not consulted at the most critical times within the organizations strategy and execution.

High performers and people managers are often intimidated by these super SME's as they hold others accountable openly and these types are usually burned often by those in power.  The problem is thrown over the fence where the super SME catches the mess made by others. 

These resources are often discounted or excluded from working on the major initiatives, as they are unlikely to allow the resources without experience room to break the dependencies and work in silos.  Difficult to work with, does not communicate well, doesn't understand the scope of work and other similar complaints will surface when these persons are invited to the conversation.

These people are difficult to influence when they are not presented with a solution or those developing the solution are not understanding the wholeness of the work. 

High Performers (Type 20)

High Performers rely on SME's within the organizations, although there are no motivations and no rewards for performing the synthesis and including all impacted areas of the organizations.

• Resources are not experienced enough to challenge and ensure the synthesis or wholeness of their work. 
• High performers are graduates with degrees in processes with a focus on the parts.  
• High performers are assigned a project manager whose purpose intends to reduce scope versus manage the change when a risk surfaces due to a lack of synthesis.  
• High Performers are considered the leaders who elicit requirements and influence others to change.  

People Managers (Type 20)

People managers are the ones who are accountable for the changes in terms of their workers in the hierarchy according to reporting relationships.

Both Leaders and People Managers would be represented in the segment type (20) or advanced workers, in looking from an executive or real world context.

Generalist (Type 10)

The majority of workers who are not changing the organization and without a people manager title.

Effectiveness of the Initiative 

Credit would be to the experts in the groups and their value to the organization overall.  Many organizations are unlikely to understand these resources roles and only the best people managers know how to leverage them without forcing them into exclusion or allowing them to be bullied out of the organization. 

Timeline 

Initiatives of these types are likely to span a year or more for high performers.

• Outcome; The work was complete in 10 weeks 42 weeks effort saved and the following benefits
• Benefits 1; No incremental funding request - entirely supported by Volunteers 
• The resources are the highest grade individual contributors or domain architects 
• Funding to allocate 50% - 100% of the resource time  was saved for the balance of the 42 weeks estimated on the initiative.  
• Cost to staff these types of initiatives was saved
• 42 weeks of program and project team resources
• Benefits 2; 5 million dollar asset savings - Team B - DO NOT PURCHASE A TOOL
• Cost savings on one groups pending purchase 
• as the work stopped the purchase of a tool which was unlikely to produce the outcomes intended.   
• Cost savings on another groups pending development of a tool
• the work stopped the plans to develop another in house tool

These stakeholders are unlikely to have participated with a high performer as they were not interested in educating a new graduate on such a complex topic as the enterprise business data.

Each Leader - Commitment of Time as volunteers 2 - hours for cross functional work

Each work group leader met with the business leader for an hour each week and each work group met as a team for an hour each week.

Work Group Objectives and Goals

A) Collect and Inventory the pain points associated with hierarchies
B) Collect the top 3 tools in the industry for managing hierarchies in an Enterprise Ready Solution
C) Design an Ideal Business Architecture
D) Define the way hierarchies impact financial close and reporting
E) Design a template for create, update and read capabilities on an enterprise hierarchy publishing for business and IT.

Initiative 

The group convened with the understanding that we would need to write the business case to fund the year long initiative.  Each person committed to work within their own operating roles through the development of a business case.

Building Bridges and Relationships through Influencing

We managed to collaborate well despite barriers held in the past.

Team A (Work group) - Pain Point Inventory

• Collecting the historical references to projects over time allowed us to avoid wasting time
• Re-use of the artifacts - making adjustments and understanding what approaches may have worked or not worked.  
• Ie,...two prior attempts - "buying a tool to address the problems associated with hierarchies" produced no gains over time the same problems remained. 
• Each of the leaders were very supportive of using the historical records as a point of reference.    
• Aids in alignment of work done in the past with current issues

Create, Read, Update and Archive

• Design the vision and strategy
• As we design the vision and strategy, we need to understand cross functional 
• We modified the language on the pain point inventories from both earlier projects and mapped the former to a new inventory.  
• We grouped the pain points into the following segments;
• Definition and Terms of Use 
• Quality 
• Governance 
• Quality - When we failed to apply the definition in functional applications we produced lower quality results. 
• Governance - When we failed to monitor and enforce the terms of use

• Quality of information 

• Implicit order was absent while the group focused entirely on the explicit use by each function

• Governance

• Those in charge of governing established implicit order with a set of conflicting explicit order requirements.
• The people governing were in fact the reason the tools were not behaving
• The people governing could point to the IT group and blame the execution of projects on the custodian of the enterprise business data.  
• Yet, the attempts to pro-actively prevent the risk were discounted and left for the custodian to approve in production (exclusion from the trustee).