My feelings on Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM)

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I have become increasingly interested in organizational development as a tool for addressing the human dimension of enterprise architecture and its challenges. My readings on OD have brought me to believe that:

• the empirical-rational strategies to change/learning that most EA groups use which are based on the assumptions that “people are rational” and “will follow what is in their self-interest if it is revealed to them” are not necessarily effective strategies.
• an EA group that functions in a elitist and “top-down” manner will create more resistance then is necessary and will also have a lot of difficulty in getting people “engaged” in realizing the proposed visions.
• most IT organizations under-estimate and under-invest in on-going learning and the strategic management of skills.

My mid-term objective is to define an EA framework which incorporates values and techniques from the discipline of organizational development in order to achieve the following:

• an EA approach which truly recognized the human component of an organization as the most important one and fosters the definition of visions and solutions which take into account the organization’s culture as well as the learning needs of people required by these visions and solutions;
• an EA approach which is inclusive (cross-department and cross-level), based on teamwork, fosters double-loop learning and system thinking;
• an EA approach which privileges the definition of visions which are “bottom-up” and based on shared visioning;

I believe that tools such as appreciative inquiry, shared visioning, open system thinking, group process facilitation and culture transformation will be key elements of a “human-oriented" framework for EA.

I have discovered a Enterprise Architecture approach called Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM) promoted by Ken Orr. My interest in BEAM is that I feel that the RAD sessions and the alternative scenarios which the approach includes incorporates, at a certain level, elements of the values and techniques I mentioned above. For example, I perceive the RAD sessions as fostering an approach which is inclusive, teamwork-oriented and based on shared-visioning. I perceive the alternative scenarios elements as similar to the scenario planning work done at Dutch/Shell which is base on system thinking and shared visioning.