EA for SMBs

The past eight years of my thirty-plus year career have been at two small-to-midsized businesses or SMBs, as I’ll refer to them hereupon.  The prior twenty-plus years were spent at public corporations with sales in the billions and employees in the thousands.  For context I’ll offer Gartner’s definition of an SMB from their IT Glossary:

A small and midsize business (SMB) is a business which, due to its size, has different IT requirements—and often faces different IT challenges—than do large enterprises, and whose IT resources (usually budget and staff) are often highly constrained. For the purposes of its research, Gartner defines SMBs by the number of employees and annual revenue they have. The attribute used most often is number of employees; small businesses are usually defined as organizations with fewer than 100 employees; midsize enterprises are those organizations with 100 to 999 employees. The second most popular attribute used to define the SMB market is annual revenue: small business is usually defined as organizations with less than $50 million in annual revenue; midsize enterprise is defined as organizations that make more than $50 million, but less than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Prior to enrolling in the EA program, I asked some program representatives from Penn State if EA was just a big company thing or if the importance extended to SMBs.  The answer was an emphatic “yes it’s just as important to SMBs”, as I knew it would be, and as I already believed.  However, real-world EA, both in practice and in theory, seems tilted toward the “bigs” (which will be my hereto reference for any organization bigger than an SMB) as it probably should be, but not to the exclusion of SMBs.  Some of my observations:

1. Out of four primary business experiences during my career, the two bigs had EA programs as far back as the 1990s, while the two SMBs, to this very day, have more of a shoot-from-the-hip approach to IT (and a lot of chaos to show for it).
2. Most of the books, articles, and research material, if not written specifically from the perspective of a big, seem to imply the context of a big.
3. Most of the students in the EA program are from bigs or the government sector.

 

My point being, the bigs seem well represented; the SMBs, maybe not so much.  With that said, my intention for this blog is to make EA theory, with its genesis in the bigs, more relatable and pertinent to SMBs.  

I knew I wanted to make SMBs the focus of this blog while going through this week’s EA872 readings, which address wise execution of EA, with the implication that EA has already been sold and introduced to the enterprise.  I think selling the concept of EA in large enterprises, while not trivial or easy, is still somewhat of a forgone conclusion.  The bigs seem to accept the need, they mostly trip on the execution.  The SMBs struggle with formality and will resist buy-in from the beginning if offered only promises.  

To offer a couple of examples of how EA theory for the bigs can be slightly morphed so it is a bit more pertinent to the SMBs, let’s consider two articles from Gartner: Enterprise Architecture: Just Enough, Just In Time (2006) and EA Must Include Defining Your Enterprise Context (2011). Both articles contain lessons and recommendations for managing scope while in execution mode.  As I put forth above, SMBs have buy-in challenges and one of the best ways to address this challenge, is to execute EA in a limited fashion without necessarily formalizing it - IT leadership at SMBs have this flexibility.  By following the recommendations from the articles for developing a small set of valuable models and for defining the enterprise context, both reasonable undertakings at an SMB without the need for investment, we can show real-world value to leadership and use that as the plan for selling a broader EA program.    

It’s kind of like the notion with job promotions, where people will do a job before they’re given the title, then when given the title, they continue to do the same job with maybe slightly expanded responsibilities.  At an SMB, it seems wise to do some EA before selling it as a formalized initiative, after which, we will continue to gradually expand EA’s reach and impact.