As the years lend clarity to events gone by, I begin to wonder… Are we reducing what are legitimately long term processes into events that are short-lived and wonder why the longer term processes whose outcomes we so desire are seldom successful.
Case in point: Marriage. (Apart from the exceedingly wealthy) the inordinate attention we pay to the event of the wedding is often detrimental to the later success of the marriage. The tremendous amounts of money spent on something that happens briefly instead of husbanding the money for the couple’s future challenges is the reason for a lot of stress downstream and must definitely contribute to the ultimate 50% divorce rate we have in this country.
I just came back from visiting the US Tennis Association’s US Open held in Flushing, New York. Over the years, we have found that the grounds passes bought a week into the tournament work for us – we get to see one or more sets of different matches, walk around the grounds and see the major players at very close quarters instead of sitting in nose-bleed seats at the Arthur Ashe Stadium with the price of the tickets we can afford and watching the players like ants moving around the court.
Case in point: Marriage. (Apart from the exceedingly wealthy) the inordinate attention we pay to the event of the wedding is often detrimental to the later success of the marriage. The tremendous amounts of money spent on something that happens briefly instead of husbanding the money for the couple’s future challenges is the reason for a lot of stress downstream and must definitely contribute to the ultimate 50% divorce rate we have in this country.
I just came back from visiting the US Tennis Association’s US Open held in Flushing, New York. Over the years, we have found that the grounds passes bought a week into the tournament work for us – we get to see one or more sets of different matches, walk around the grounds and see the major players at very close quarters instead of sitting in nose-bleed seats at the Arthur Ashe Stadium with the price of the tickets we can afford and watching the players like ants moving around the court.
As I watched the top 20 players of the world play in various matches, it was clear that talent, practice and enthusiasm for the game was evident in all of them. Any one of these could have won the US Open on a good day. Yes, a good day or a bad day determines whether someone takes home a million dollars or not. We have reduced the years of practice, skill building, and sheer expertise into a one event horse race, however long and grueling that event is. Of course, measures like the ATP rankings have come into existence to winnow out the one trick ponies.
As a senior in high school, my daughter is seeking admission to college next year. As I step back and see the obsession of the students and the colleges with the SAT or ACT scores – a measurement taken on one day in their lives, their four years of high school achievements mean nothing if they do not make the high SAT minimum score cut because consideration of the high school performance comes second to the SAT.
And then we come to enterprise architecture. Almost always, the act of building architectures to understand complexity, deal with ever-changing internal and external environments, make sense of the business, systems and technology context – always a hard and time consuming exercise – is reduced to the exercise of passing a budget decision point event. We are transforming architecting and engineering exercises into a budget justification exercise.
For us to make lasting progress we must take the eye off the event and put it in perspective – a long term process is a succession of many successful events. As the successful general knows, “winning a battle” is not “winning the war”. In architecture terms, we must shift our focus from preparing for events to preparing and executing successful processes.
For enterprise architects, ATP like rankings are probably what the industry needs to regulate the skill and proficiency level of the practitioners!!
As a senior in high school, my daughter is seeking admission to college next year. As I step back and see the obsession of the students and the colleges with the SAT or ACT scores – a measurement taken on one day in their lives, their four years of high school achievements mean nothing if they do not make the high SAT minimum score cut because consideration of the high school performance comes second to the SAT.
And then we come to enterprise architecture. Almost always, the act of building architectures to understand complexity, deal with ever-changing internal and external environments, make sense of the business, systems and technology context – always a hard and time consuming exercise – is reduced to the exercise of passing a budget decision point event. We are transforming architecting and engineering exercises into a budget justification exercise.
For us to make lasting progress we must take the eye off the event and put it in perspective – a long term process is a succession of many successful events. As the successful general knows, “winning a battle” is not “winning the war”. In architecture terms, we must shift our focus from preparing for events to preparing and executing successful processes.
For enterprise architects, ATP like rankings are probably what the industry needs to regulate the skill and proficiency level of the practitioners!!
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