An enterprise architect needs to know about culture and team organization

Why does an enterprise architect need to be a manager, too? Here's a take from "Run Grow Transform" and Team Topologies. This has huge implications on how to do HR- and management decisions and architecture. 
Enjoy! 

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Here's a post connected to Team Topologies. 

I am reading the very interesting book "Run Grow Transform" - Integrating Business and Lean IT (2017) - by Steven Bell. Not an easy read, but really good - I'd recommend that to any CIO/CTO!

Chapter 9 on Enterprise Architecture is written by Charles Betz (Director at Forrester). There he states:

"And even the most advanced expressions of enterprise architecture typically don’t address culture, organizational change management, psychology, and similar matters. These deficiencies can lead enterprise architects into ivory tower isolation and irrelevance. Lean on the other hand has as fundamental tenets “respect for people” and “going to gemba,” …

 “Another aspect of Lean that is not well understood by many enterprise architects is the principle that too much information, and unnecessary information complexity, are forms of waste. More is not better in information systems design.”

“This again gets into the issues of human factors, problem solving, decision making, and organizational change management.”

This is exactly what I read from the 2019 Team Topologies book. From Conway's Law it follows that the way you draw up your teams, their responsibilities, communication and decision paths (the organizational architecture) will decide (!) that your system architecture will look the same. 

You can't get a different system architecture than how your organization is set up. 

So ... system architects need to be involved and knowledgeable in HR-, team and organizational design, too. And vice versa: everyone in HR and all managers need to listen to system architecture when deciding on organization. 

To me, this is *hot stuff*

Manuel and Matthew also cite Allan Kelly : "Someone who claims to be an Architect needs both technical and social skills. … They need to have a say in organizational structures and personnel issues, i.e. they need to be a manager too." 

Best regards 

Thorsten Speil

* we should all try very hard to live together peacefully and improve our world, not destroy it *