One of the things I have seen over the years is tremendous inconsistency in the way supposedly unified organizations operate and share information. It is sometimes even worse than those organizations that were not even considering each other in their formation.
The boundaries to communication and cooperation that are put up for political and “fear” reasons costs the owners/citizens of those endeavors at least 60% of the annual cost of operations. Every action is start-stop-wait-restart that crosses any capability, resource, process, function, organization-unit, organization, or location boundary.
From my experience, I submit that these artificial boundaries/constraints are not technical, legal, or regulatory, they are caused by indifference, ignorance, fear, doubt, greed, lust for power, lust for control, etc., all human vices of the workers, supervisors, managers, executives, and boards performing their activities. In some ways, these vices are understandable as “defensive/security” actions against possible unseen threats, perceived risks, etc. But adequately shared and appropriately secured information flow to all the participants within and around an endeavor is the cure to that feared-risk.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of “methods/techniques/tools/notations” that claim to provide “enterprise-wide improvement”, but how can they do that if they only operate with a fragment of the enterprise, and with only a partial awareness of what the enterprise consists of and how all the pieces relate to each other. Some examples of these partial-enterprise improvement approaches are BPR, TQM, SixSigma, Lean, EA, Balanced Scorecard, CMMI, and SDLC. These efforts can heal a piece of the enterprise, but don’t see or care about the whole-enterprise – it is out of their “scope”. It seems only the Owners, Board, and Executives have the whole enterprise in their scope. All of the Managers, Supervisors, and Workers are forced to keep their nose to their functional/localized grindstone and not seek to better the whole enterprise – their operating environment.
An “enterprise architecture” (EA) can provide the “full awareness” needed for enterprise-wide or “whole-enterprise” improvement, BUT ONLY if it is built from the start, or extended, to encompass all enterprise requirements, for all resources, for all processes, for all functions, of all organization units, within all cooperating organizations, at all locations. Most EA approaches only consider IT requirements and IT resources, which are sub-sub-categories of materiel resources. These partial IT EA approaches do not address decision-making-requirements for HR, Finance, Logistics (Equipment, Supplies, Transportation, Energy, Services), Facilities, Contracts, and value-measurement and management, among the any diverse enterprise functions and external environmental issues.
GEM-EMA is the only publicly available whole-enterprise management approach, encompassing a whole-enterprise architecture available. GEM-EMA is intended to provide a means for all diverse organizations, staffs, programs, projects, and individual endeavors to be consistently identfied, informed, and engaged in dramatic management improvement. (e.g., reduce cost of value-stream, value-chain, and value-lattice operations by 40% or more, all with increased adaptability, responsiveness, quality, and timeliness)
I have posted my General Endeavor Management (GEM) methodology at the link shown, including my Enterprise Management Architecture (EMA) methodology with its Business Architecture, Data Architecture, Service Architecture, and Technology Architecture parts. It is public domain.
