As I mentioned in my Business and Silver Bullets article, there are a lot of different approaches to managing your business, or at least a portion of your business. None of these approaches are easy to implement and it seems that there’s a bit of a revolving door around what leadership approach is the best for a given business. Furthermore, it’s troubling to me that organizations are looking at initiatives like Lean and Six Sigma as only operational improvement opportunities. As I’m reading through how Business Architecture works, it’s obvious to me that many of the organizational deployments of LSS have failed in reaching their full potential. I saw it at Samsung, AMD, and I’m skeptical of the full reach I’m going to have at Regence. It’s not a failure of the individuals deploying it or of a given leader, it’s a failure of the full organization to accept that changes need to happen. Organizations need to integrate approaches like LSS into their core strategic planning process. Otherwise those methodologies will only impact a limited area and won’t appear to have a holistic approach to making changes to an organization.

From my experiences Lean and Six Sigma methodologies can indicate the need for organizational re-alignment. These require real change with serious effort to implement those changes. In many cases those are outside the scope of the project facilitator, the leader of the process improvement center of excellence, and likely the owner of the processes. It’s got to come from an executive sponsor. They have to be able to provide the organizational courage to make real changes to an organization. Through these tools it’s possible to identify redundancies and areas where organizations require massive change.

Why don’t organization implement these changes? Too many priorities is likely one problem. Another is that these changes are hard and unless they are well versed in Lean or organizational structures, they won’t understand why the changes are fundamental to continued success of an organization. They may not understand the changes because they weren’t involved in the redesign process intimately enough. Finally, it might also be that these changes are bottoms up recommendations and not top down.

I believe this is why Business Architecture eventually was a created as a discipline. I believe in organizations that are truly Lean that these types of roles are not needed. Simply because the bottoms up approach allows the leaders to focus on different things especially since a true Lean organization is always customer centric. In organizations that there is a great deal of legacy behavior and entrenched management fiefdoms, it might be a requirement to go through an organization like Business Architecture to give the true sense of ownership to the leaders. It makes the bottoms up recommendations that come from the BA team seem like it’s a top down approach that is sanctioned by all of leadership. It let’s people see that clearer tie between the different organizations in a way that a lot of Lean work doesn’t. It’s designed to be holistic not something grown into the whole over time.

This leads to a different method for developing strategy than what a lot of Lean practitioners utilize. Business Architecture focuses on the current capabilities and works to align the strategy from there. Lean starts with the 5 year vision and goals and figures out how to align existing projects and improvement efforts to enact those goal, through providing a metric for the person doing the work on the ground.

I think that these business management approaches are both valid, I’m really biased towards Lean, but I do believe that in many organizations Business Architecture is likely required. It leaves the control a bit more in the leadership rather than the Lean approach. I believe they both can impact strategy in an effective manner, but it’s likely that BA will be more tightly coupled from the start than many Lean initiatives.