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the Free CMSWire NewsletterMy absolute favorite tool of the Enterprise Architect as he or she navigates amongst the sea of paradoxes that face them as they identify and stitch together the packaged, open, and custom solutions that make up the modern enterprise is the good old-fashioned “bake off”. It’s also sometimes referred to as the “beauty pageant”, but this metaphor doesn’t work for me as a well designed bake off is intended to reveal the ugliness beneath the slick marketing sheen of either a COTS package or a SaaS offering.
The Paradox
Enterprises need the right solutions to their problems AND they need them in a time frame that will allow the business to meet the needs of the rapidly shifting marketplace. In short, they want to dictate the speed of delivery and the position of the thing delivered (where the position in question is defined as “the right solution” for the enterprise). The problem as stated seems to defy the laws of physics. Werner Heisenberg famously proved that, when it comes to particle physics, the more precisely one property of a particle is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known.
The Conversation
Try as they might, many technologists and their business counterparts cannot transcend this problem. The discussion goes back and forth with the following cycle:
Business owner — “Our current tool to manage process X isn’t meeting our requirements anymore. Can we replace it with something that meets our needs?”
Technologist — “Sure! Given that we will have to live with this decision for more than a few years and that this is a big decision with a lot of dollars attached to it, I think we should do a platform selection.”
Business Owner — “That sounds good. How long will that take?”
Technologist — “A formal selection can go anywhere between 6 to 12 months, depending how many alternatives you want to look at.”
Business Owner — “So you want me to wait a year to pick something and we still won’t have it replaced? I can’t sell that to my leadership.”
Technologist — “I’m sorry, but picking an expensive package is complex. You don’t want to jump into bed with a vendor and then find out you’ve recreated the same problem you started with.”
Business Owner — “I’m sorry too, but a delivering something in 18 months or more is not a solution at all.”
After this discussion is over, both parties walk away with a common thought: “He/She just doesn’t get it!”
The Solution
Luckily, Betty Crocker has a way to solve this Zen koan in a time frame that is a little bit longer than baking a cake but still comes in way shorter than the formal platform selection process; The Bake Off.
Ingredients: An inscrutable business problem, an impatient sponsor, several vendors and a multidisciplinary team capable of being comfortable in ambiguity.
Step 1 | Compose a long list: Using a variety of reference sources, identify a “long-list” of possible vendors. This can be done either by working with the analyst community or even through reading the trade publications or talking with trusted colleagues in different companies.
Step 2 | Capture requirements: Collaboratively, identify and document high-level business requirements. It is important that this not be done too thoroughly as it will not actually provide any value at this point. The goal here is to be just detailed enough to be able to combine the critical high level requirements into somewhere between 6 to 10 use cases.
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