fruITion and recrEAtion (a double-header book review)

Several years ago Chris Potts wrote his two-part Information Technology and Enterprise Architecture story (or was it a warning?) in FruITion and RecrEAtion.  These stories are intended to express Chris' belief of how IT/EA teams should be fully-engaged in the Strategy of the companies they belong to, and not just be a "cost center".  He uses a novel format in both books as well as follows a character from the first novel into the second.

I have to admit I read them in the wrong order.  That said, I'm glad I did as I'm not sure I would have picked up recrEAtion if I finished fruITion first.  That's not to say that it is dramatically different than the other one, but I really identified with recrEAtion in the first place because of my involvement in the EA function at my employer.  I wanted to get some additional viewpoints on EA which is often the most misunderstood (or least organized?) team within a technology shop.  

The first book, fruITion is centered on a CIO whose CEO went ballistic when she was presented a 78 page IT Strategy document full of business process maps, architecture blueprints and technology roadmaps.  The CEO really had already decided to dramatically shake-up the IT organization and the rest of the book was about how the CIO decided to respond to an approach that seemed totally against everything he had done, and known, his entire career.  I'll let you read it to find out how he did.

The second book, recrEAtion focused on a character that left the company in the first book.  His role at a new company was to lead the Enterprise Architecture function.  He didn't buy into the CEO's thoughts at his prior company and was thrown another curve ball when his new CEO said, "sounds like you and I have the same job."  Needless to say, this really caused the main character to question what was going on around him for having two strange experiences back to back.

The underlying theme in both of these novels is about IT/EA's involvement in the "strategy" of the company – not just having an IT strategy that was centered on what was in place to day and IT's understanding of what needed to be done next.  Both throw in some rather drastic changes to how IT/EA shops should be structured and aligned.  It goes past the well known "partner with the business" mantra and suggests to the reader to "be the business".  In both stories, there is a strong push for measuring success by metrics – almost always financial.

While I'm not so sure many organizations are ready for the sweeping changes presented in these two stories, the push for technology teams to not be isolated, but very tightly integrated, is a good topic for discussion in almost any organization.  

I can recommend this book to senior technologists and formal technology leaders in your organizations, but would not recommend it to less seasoned and/or more narrowly focused employees, or even folks in "the business", because the book overly simplifies (for brevity's sake, not necessarily that the author does not understand) the complexity of a technology team of any size.  I'd hate for someone to get the impression that all IT/EA needs to do is talk "business strategy" and not be responsible for the normal "care and feeding" activities that are the responsibility of the non-innovation aspects of an IT organization.

As for me personally, the biggest thing I take away from these books (especially recrEAtion) is that we should stop imagining that we know where we need to be in five years (i.e. the "end-state architecture") and focusing so hard on continuing to maintain an accurate roadmap of how to get there.  The author doesn't suggest we should stop planning, but what I took from it was that we need to be constantly preparing multiple options of what we might do next and focus on the financial reasons our companies might want, or need, to go there.  If these options are truly aligned with our business needs then we will be more respected at the decision-making table and have a much better chance of not only being successful, but working on the "right" things for our enterprises.