 So please give a warm welcome for Jeff Scott. Welcome, Jeff. Thank you. And just so you know, I play bass guitar in a band, so maybe we can get something going here in Austin, make a few dollars on the street where we're going. So good morning, everyone. I know I've already run into a bunch of people I know. It's always fun to come to conferences and kind of get back in touch with people that you haven't seen in a long time or heard from in a long time. So and for those of you I haven't met, I hope to meet you later today. I'm going to start with why I'm here, because I'm not going to talk about models and I'm not going to talk about standards, at least only tangentially. I have been in the architecture space for over 20 years. I spent the first 10 years in what you would think of as traditional enterprise architecture, doing technology things and helping architecture teams start up and all those kind of things. And I've spent the last 10 years in business architecture. And there, I honestly don't do much architecture, which is maybe a bad thing. I don't know. What I do is I help organizations design, implement, manage, grow business architecture practices. That's fundamentally what I do. And every year I speak to hundreds of business architects in one way or another. And when I was an analyst at Forrester, I went to Forrester in 2007 to build their business architecture practice and ran that for four years. There I talked to thousands of people that were either business architects or wanted to be business architects. So the point to all that is, is I may have some radical ideas here, but they're well founded because they're rooted in a perspective that's driven by the marketplace and what's going on out there. So while you may not resonate with some of this, I think it's good to hear and I hope you get something out of it. I totally avoid talking about what business architecture is because we're all going to argue about it if we do that. But I would want to say just the kind of level set you here is this. I think there are a lot of definitions out there. I don't know what your definition is. I think there are a lot of definitions out there that kind of talk about business architecture as a blueprint, as a model of the organization. And I think I'll just be very clear. I think this is exactly the wrong way to think about it. Because when we do that, we narrow what business architecture is and we certainly narrow who we are as business architects. So for me, it's a practice. It's a way to do things. It's an approach. It's a craft. Whatever, however you want to scale that, but the idea to me behind business architecture is how do we get the ideas, the goals, the strategies, the changes we want to make in our company? How do we get those done efficiently and effectively? And how can we help the organization do that? So just kind of a little level set. And what I want to do is talk about, start with the reality today. And I'll warn you, it isn't pretty. But before I go there, I want to give you some insight into what these are for us. Is that me crackling there? Okay. First is, let's make sure I'm all tight here and I think I am. Those are some of our best and brightest folks. We do not take the guys that can't cut it as a business analyst or as a project manager and say, okay, let's put them in architecture. Get them out of the way so they can't do much harm. Yep. Okay. And now we're really going to have a problem because I'm not ambidextrous enough to hold a mic. So the point is we're a bunch of smart people. We also have the latitude to build business architecture in the image we want. Unlike other organizations, when you go to work for somebody, the chances are really high. They know how to do your job better than you do because they were doing it for years and years and years. They got promoted to be manager. You come in, they know how to do what you're doing. Business architecture? Not a chance. You're CIO? For most of you, clueless. Your business guy is clueless. Whoever's running business architecture programs at almost any company is working for somebody that does not know anything about business architecture. They do not know how to do it. They haven't done it for 10 years. There's almost nobody that's done it for 10 years, by the way. So we've got a lot of latitude, a green field, to make it like we want to make it. In addition to that, we've got plenty of time. Now we don't have forever, but we do have a lot of time because it's not a project. People are saying, we know you don't know what it is. Go start it up. Go figure it out. We have some time. Yes, we probably can't take years and years, but we certainly have plenty of time to put this together. And in addition to that, our companies need us. They need business architecture desperately. Over half the world's CIOs believe their business model, their fundamental business model will not sustain them for five years. Think about the level of change we're talking about here that our business executives understand. So we have all these things going for us, all these things. And yet, business architecture teams are struggling for success. So when I looked at this set of facts, and I started thinking about, okay, why is this? It led me to some pretty sobering things. But first let's look at where we really are. 60% of our architecture programs fail. That's not my opinion. That's Forrester Research. A couple of years old, maybe a little bit better than that, but two years ago it was 64% failure rate is what they were saying. And when I was at Forrester and we were looking at failure rates of architecture teams, it was always in the 40% to 60% range when we saw that. So that to me feels about right. So 60% failing, that means they are going away. They're not just sitting there working. 20% are struggling for success. They're working hard. They're trying to get there. The organizations in their first year or two, or in fact, you might call it year zero while they're trying to even get started, are struggling. And then you've got about 15% that I think are good journeyman architects. They're creating models. They're adding value. Somebody's recognizing that value. They are making some difference in their company. They have a possible future. And then 5% are fulfilling what I think of as the architecture promise, what we all think that this should provide for our companies. Now, the 5% is actually being very gracious. I put that as 5 because my peers just beat the hell out of me when I kept saying 1. It's probably closer to 1 or 2% that are really out there doing that. So look at that data and tell me if that doesn't scare you. Because it should. Because you can be sitting there saying, well, I'm smart enough that it's not going to be me. Well, it's very likely going to be you if you do this. Because there's a lot of stuff stacked up. So the question is, what's going on here? How many of you recognize that figure? Boy, OK, a bunch of young guys. That's what I like. That is a figure from late 60s, 70s comic strip character. And his name is Pogo. He is a possum from the Okefenoke swamps, and he's a philosopher. I know it sounds strange, but it's true. And out of his years in the comic strips, he had one indelible quote, which is, we have met the enemy and he is us. And I think that quote fits for the business architecture profession today. So what's going on? One is, what I look out there and talk to business architects, particularly those guys who are struggling, now I have a group of people I work with that are very successful and we're going to talk about how they're different. But when I look at the masses of business architects out there today, what I see are these kind of things. First is we want it to happen our way. We've got models in those models. They are correct, by the way. They are factual. They are truth. They are it. This is the way to do it. And if you want to change that model one out, you're wrong. We want it to happen our way. We ignore culture and context. Do you know what the number one challenge for business architecture success is? Defined by first research, I mean, you know what the number one challenge is? Culture. And yet, we don't pay any attention to that. Even though we have crossed the Rubicon, half of business architects now report outside of IT. They are now reporting to business units, strategy units, operational units, planning groups, all kinds of stuff. But they're reporting, in fact, a number of them are starting to report to the CFO, which I find fascinating, because that's the guy that controls all the money. But they're still overly technology-centric. We're still looking at the world largely through technology, and that's because most of us came from technology. We look at efficiency over effectiveness. Same reason. If you've been in IT all your life, all you've heard from those business jerks across the hall there is quit spending so much money. Be cheaper, be faster, be more efficient. And so we think they really care about efficiency, and they don't. They want that money for themselves, so they can squander it away, trying to be effective to make their strategies happen. So efficiency is not what drives them. We want control over what's going on instead of collaboration. The way we're going to succeed here is collaborate what most people want to do is control. I want the CEO to tell these guys, they've got to follow my model. They've got to do it my way. Or I want to put in a governance mechanism to make this work. That's not going to cut it. Focus on models rather than results. Tons and tons of modeling going on here. You guys do a lot of modeling. We need good models. We need good standards. But as architects, we've got to focus on results first, models second. And I think the bottom line is we'd rather be right than successful. We know how it should be done if those business guys over there don't understand it, shame on them, because we're right. So I think this is the kind of stuff that I'm seeing all the time here. So I'm giving a note to the guys in the back. I'm not seeing the timer up here, which would be helpful because I didn't look at my watch. And I'm going to run over. Here's where we are on the global landscape. If you can read this, and I was talking to Lynn last night, I always have these, in fact, we talked for what? Three hours in the bar last night? Two drinks, and Lynn and I, man, you just don't know what's going to happen. Here's what I see out there when I work with architects. At the left-hand side of the curve, what I see is a whole bunch of guys struggling. And largely, they're focused on IT-ish kinds of issues. That's not a bad thing. That's just where most of us start. But that's where they are. In the middle of the pack is where I see those journeymen, architects that I talked about that are delivering value. And they look different. This is not a maturity curve here. These are just attributes of different groups of people and how they look at the world. And when you look at the guys over on the far right-hand side, those very, very few guys that are really, really excellent at doing this, they're even more different. And so what you see here are things like, over on the left, I talked about culture. We ignore culture in the beginning. Just not my problem, not going to go there. By the time these guys have been successful, what you find is they've figured out we have to align to the culture. We can't fight it. We've got to figure out how to align with it. And then when you look at the really successful guys, they're challenging the culture. They're saying the culture is holding us back from doing what we need to do. We're going to challenge that. And we're going to help the organization change the culture or mitigate it, get around it, or do something. Same way about credibility. When we start off, we have very little credibility. As technology guys, we have huge credibility with other technology guys. But when we start looking at the business, we don't have much credibility because we haven't worked with them. By the time I look at the guys in the middle who are being pretty successful, they've established individual credibility. They don't know much about business architecture, but they know Susie really knows what she's doing. Get her over here to help us. And then when you look over at the right, what's happened is they've transferred that credibility into the practice. So it's now people are saying, I need a business architect. Here's an interesting thing. Because we look at this curve and we say, wow, it must be really hard at the beginning because all these guys struggle, 60%. Fail, all that. No, that's the easy part. What happens is it gets harder and harder as we go. And so that's why when you look back here at this curve, what you see is this pool of people in the middle that are doing really good, but they have an enormous challenge in front of them. And most of the difference there is that, what got you here won't get you there. Doing some good efficiency work will get you started, but you can't hang on to that very long. Being really good at modeling and describing is really good stuff and you can get started that way, but it's not gonna take you to the end. It's a very different set of skills. It's a very different set of activities that move us into that excellence view. And by and large, it has little to do with what architects think about today. We'll talk about that. A lot of it is overcoming politics and culture and organizational context stuff. And what I hear a lot is, well, that's not my job. My job is to lay out the models and to describe how the organization works and do all that, those executive guys need to fix the culture. Well, true, you probably cannot change the culture, but you better figure out how to succeed in it. Because you can do that. And that's a pretty big challenge. Raising executive collaboration. I don't do a ton of work, but I do a moderate amount of work with executives. It's always amazing to me how they all get in a room and they all smile and nod and they're all friendly and they walk out the door and they go do whatever in the hell they wanna do. And so part of what we've got to do is bring that group together. And I think we have the tools and the techniques to do that by showing them how we can work together to succeed better. But that's a big challenge to get over there to the right. Implementing top-down strategy execution. I'm gonna talk about that much more in a minute because that is the key, I think, for our business architecture success. Broad, senior-level advocacy. I talked to so many guys that are like, yeah, yeah, we're trying to get the CEO support, trying to get the CEO support. I'm telling you right now, you don't even want the CEO's support. It's almost a death nail for you to get that because he or she is not gonna be around as long as you are. And what happens to the guys who do get senior-level support like that is they get lazy. They depend on them to push. What you need is a broad level of support across a wide group of senior managers. That's how you exist for a long time. I mentioned before, shift this individual credibility to a practice credibility so that what happens is the organization is now seen as essential to the company. And it's not just a bunch of smart guys. And that's a big challenge, by the way. That's one of the biggest challenges I see in business architecture groups because here's what happens. Think about this. You guys all know this. You're all there. I have a ton of personal credibility because I go and I work with you. I solve your problems. You love what I do. It's all great. And when you have a problem, you say, call Jeff. But if I want business architecture as a practice, as a profession to succeed, I've got to give that up. Personally give that up. And say, no, no, I'm a business architect. You don't necessarily need me. You need one of us. And that is a very, very hard thing to do. Which, incidentally, fuels part of the problem out there which is why business architects don't move around much. A huge issue trying to hire experienced business architects and part of the reason is, A, you don't have anything to offer them. There's not a big enough hierarchy here that I can go from, oh, this level to that level by changing jobs. But the second thing is the successful guys know they're successful because they have business relationships and if they go to a new company, they give it up. They don't want to do that. So you have a very hard time sucking successful business architects out of companies because of that. We need a very strong consulting engagement approach. At the end of the day, when you look at those guys on the right, they're consultants. They happen to use business architecture as their major tool, but they're consultants. They may call themselves business architects and they may not. They're largely using architectural techniques, methods, tools, models, standards, all that good stuff, but they're consulting. Competition, another big challenge for business architects, particularly as they become more and more successful. There are other organizations in the company that jump up and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, you're doing my job. Project office, strategy, customer experience, all these guys that we collaborate with or should collaborate with, all of a sudden they pop up and say, wait a minute, you're kind of challenging my role here. And when I talk to people about stakeholder analysis and stuff, I try to get them to understand, yes, we have customers as business architects. We have investors as business architects and we have competitors and we better figure out how to deal with those guys. Hiring and developing the right staff, that's, again, very difficult to do. But I think the bigger thing here is we have to think bigger. We have to see our role beyond good modeling, good description, good recommendation. We've got to see ourselves as big change agents in the world. And when I talk to one of the biggest things that differentiates those struggling guys from the successful guys is they have a leader who is thinking bigger about what business architecture can be. And you might look at it and say, holy crap, that guy's out of his mind, he'll never do that. That's okay. He might or might not. But at least he has a vision that this thing can be bigger than what it is today. And I think if I had to give one piece of advice to business architects, it would be think bigger about who you can be, because you can be a lot bigger than you think. So what opportunities do we have? And I think we have enormous opportunities. So I'm only gonna talk about a couple here, but I think they're big ones. Kind of back to the definition. Well, there's a lot of words here. I'm sure you guys will get these slides so you can read this. Because again, my definition of business architecture changes, oh, I don't know. Not monthly, but twice a year. Because I learned something. I mean, again, I'm talking to all these different architects and I hear what they're saying, I hear what they're doing, I'm like, oh wow, I never thought about business architecture in that light, we're this. But I think the bottom here is the important part. Our ultimate goal is not to model the organization. Our ultimate goal is not to make it efficient and effective, though that helps, all those things help. What we need to do is unlock the organization's capacity to do more, not more work, more change. How do we unlock the capacity in the company so that it can move forward and be successful? And if we can do that, we have done something nobody else can do. One of the other things I tell business architects is this, efficiency work is good work. Don't get me wrong, operational improvement is good work. God bless you, if that's what you wanna do, we need it, good stuff. There's a lot of people in your organization that can do that work. You have to be relatively smart, you have to be pretty analytical, you have to be very methodical. You can get there and do that work. There are not many people in your organization that can drive change, there are not many people in your organization that can enable strategy. So the big opportunity is trying to figure out how we unlock organizational capacity. Nothing's other guys worry about how to be operationally efficient. You can do more. I do think strategy execution is the big opportunity for business architects. There's a bunch, but I think this is the biggest one, and this is why. So an HBR study a few years ago, 37% of executives said they are really good at strategy execution. So for those of you who haven't had your second cup of coffee yet, 63% think they're mediocre or worse. Okay? Now these are the guys who are in charge of strategy execution. And they think they're companies or mediocre or worse. Robert Kaplan from the Balance Scorecard book says 95% of employees in most organizations do not understand the organization strategy. The survey from HBR said 53%. Pick whatever number you want. It ain't good. People do not know what's going on. And more current 70% of organizations don't link their strategic priorities with their budgets. Now, let me see here. How does that work? If I'm not spending money where it matters, how am I gonna get there? And I think, so when you look at this picture, there is a huge opportunity. So again, when I look at those 15% or so of business architects who are succeeding, 95% of them are working on that problem. They may or may not have it solved. Most of them don't have it completely solved. Every one of them is trying to fix this problem because they have figured out that's where the money is. That's where success is. Here's why. And this is kind of my rendition of why we have that problem. And most of us do. An executive has a bright idea. And if you haven't figured it out, all executive ideas are bright ideas. And what he does is he calls his staff around or his planning group or whoever he works with and they discuss this idea for a day or two or however long they discuss it and they kind of walk out of the room with, yeah, let's go. So if there are five, and I'm just making this up to have a nice little modeling example. If there are five people around the table, here's what happens. Every one of them interprets the conversation slightly differently. Let's just say 5%. And originally when I made this model, I thought, no, 5%. Maybe that's too much. Maybe it's two. Then I started talking to people. They were like, no, man, it's more like 10 or 20. The problem is it's not the same 5%. It's not like somebody coughed in the room and we missed some important statement that the CEO made. It's that, well, I interpreted it a little different. You interpret it a little different. You interpret it a little different. And so we all walk out of there with a slightly different view, which means we're about 75% coherent on what the goal is. That's on day one. And it only goes downhill from there, guys. Because what happens is every one of those managers goes to their staff. They translate what they heard. Their staff reinterprets, has the same problem, goes down, translates it to their staff. They reinterpret, have the same problem, and this continues on. You all have experienced this. Or most of you have. In grammar school, you played a game called whispers or telephone, where I whisper in his ear some statement, it passes around the room and it comes that way over here and it's totally garbled and it's hilarious. Except it's not funny when it's your corporate strategy. And that's exactly the way it works. So what we don't have is a structured way to get from strategic intent to strategic execution. When we look at the processes in our company, like order to cash, concept of product, all that stuff, we have very, very well-defined, articulated, executed processes. I guarantee you, all of you guys got this stuff written down somewhere. And in fact, when we look at what I think of is kind of support processes like order office supplies, reviews, those kind of things, you still have pretty well-defined processes. Strategy, execution, I'm going to bet not 10% of you. Of anything written down. When I talk to executives, here's what I show them. Here's how you order post-it notes in your company. It kind of goes through, you got to check the warehouse to say, do we have post-it notes? Because maybe we don't, we got to go buy some. Oh, and oh, by the way, you might be trying to buy a million dollars worth of post-it notes. So we got to check and make sure your budget's got enough money to pay for these post-it notes. We got to debit your budget, blah, blah, blah. We got to get this into the system so it gets delivered to you and you get a post-it note. And I guarantee you, most of you have something at that level of detail or more about ordering office supplies. And here's how your strategy execution works. The executive management say, go there! And everybody gets together and meets about it, talks about it, argues about it, tries to come up with strategies about it. And they all come up with ideas and they go like this. That's how it gets done. Your executives are frustrated as hell about this. They're causing it. They're still frustrated, it doesn't matter. So what happens here is all these guys go away and they come up with ideas and they bubble back up through the organization. And then as one leader of the strategic planning function for a Fortune 100 company says, the food fight ensues. Because now all these projects are coming up, they're all fighting for money. Nobody at the top really has any good perspective about which of these are the best projects to run. And it's pretty much chaos until they kind of settle on something and even then, they don't know whether they got the right things. So that's reality. So what we need is a more structured way to do this. This is kind of my way of doing this. That is, you can think of this as a mainstream. We clarify, this is what business architects can do. Put a process in place to clarify strategy. We don't create strategy. Very rarely do you see business architects do that, but we certainly can clarify it, illuminate it, document it, communicate it, identify the capabilities that we have, identify the gaps in those capabilities to execute those strategies. Again, I don't care whether we're operating efficiently somewhere else. I wanna know, do we have what we need to build these strategies and make them successful? Choose the investments based on that. And if you follow this kind of model, what you get is an investment portfolio that is tightly aligned with your strategic goals. You don't get all the projects you need. And a lot of business architects wanna make sure we got every project done. I don't care. The value is separating the noise from the signal and saying these are the projects we need to be doing if that's the goal. Again, all these guys that I think are being successful are working on this model. In fact, I went through a dozen of Fortune 500 business architecture teams and I said, how do you do this? And they all said, well, we do this, this, this. Their models didn't look exactly like that. But I'm telling you, you could line those models up and they're 90% the same around this kind of thing. And that's what they're all trying to do. The other part of this is a little different and this is a very different message for you. But it's about unlocking employee capital here. What I see when I go into companies is I see senior executives who are frustrated because they have great ideas. Remember, all their ideas are great. They have great ideas and they just can't make them happen. They got too much resistance, too much stuff going on in their organization. I see the people in the middle organization and that is where I work the most. I know, by the way, I think middle managers are the people that make stuff happen. Executives talk a lot. Middle managers make it happen. And they're frustrated because they don't understand what they need to do. So because I don't understand what I need to do, I just keep getting better and better and better at what I do. I don't know what that matters. I'm just getting better at it because that's the only thing I know to do. And I say a whole bunch of guys that just say, tell me what to do. I don't care. And in fact, Gallup, who does a lot of political polling and all kinds of polling, has developed this tool to look at employee engagement. And what they say, not me, what they say is 20% of your employees are engaged. That means they really care about your success. They're working towards your success. They're highly motivated. They make things happen. 50% of your employees are disengaged. They just do what you tell them and they don't care. You want the room painted green? I'll paint it green. Tomorrow you want it blue? I'll paint it blue. I don't care. I'm just gonna do what you tell me to do. And a really sad part is about 20% of your organization is trying to screw you up. How many of you read Dilbert? Wally, that's Wally right there. So in fact, this lines up with my leadership model that I developed when I was leading organizational change things. What I found just kind of walked into it and kind of watched what was going on. And what I found was about 20% of the guys would go with me if I would just point. Cause they wanted an answer. They would go wherever you wanted them to go. And so you could lead that 20% very easily by saying we're gonna go there and they'd all step up. They'd salute and they'd go. About 50%, 60% of the organization for me would go if you convinced them. You had to educate them. You had to show them. You had to give them a reason. But if you did, they would go. That last 20% down there, they would rather go straight to hell than go with you. You're too old to know what you're talking about. You're too young to know what you're talking about. You don't have enough hair to know what you're talking about. Whatever it is, they're not going. And you can spend your life trying to get those guys to go there. If you haven't, I'm gonna recommend that you read the book Drive by Dan Pink. This is an excellent book that describes why people are motivated, what causes them to engage. He has three things, purpose, autonomy, mastery. And as business architects, the work we do can increase those things in our organization if we do them right. If we help clarify the vision and the goals of the company and we help clarify them, I call it making strategy consumable. We can get people to feel like they're part of the purpose of the company. If we can get strategies developed correctly, what we're doing is building guardrails. Everybody talks about strategy being what to do. Most of the strategy is what not to do. And if we can draw those guardrails, what people know is I can operate in this space. I can make independent decisions. I can be autonomous and I will be safe. I will be doing good stuff because I understand I gotta be in here. And if we talk to people about what capabilities the organization needs in the future, they know where to develop their skills and can develop the mastery that matters. So the question is, where do we go? Here's what I think we need. One, I think that we have all the operational models we need. They're either great or at least pretty good. We need to start thinking about how do we describe the people side of this thing? How do we describe the organizational elements here because we are ignoring them. You know, I talked about earlier that business architects could not agree on a definition. Let me tell you what business architects agree on. I have asked and I've counted 2,000 architects this one question and to a person, they agree 100%, to a person, which is harder developing business architecture models and frameworks or getting the organization behind your models and accepting what you're doing, adapting what you're doing and using it. Not one person, not one person thinks that building the models is the hard part. And how do we spend our time building models? Gotta put three more colors, that's gonna do it. So I think what we need partly is first to stop and start thinking about modeling a little bit differently or at least how do we do that. What we need are we need models that describe the political environment that we're in. So we understand how to navigate that political environment to be successful. We need models that identify the cultural elements that enable our success and the cultural elements that hinder our success. How do we get our strategies done? What we need are diagrams that illuminate those informal and often hidden structures about how information flows in the company, where the power flows in the company because we think it starts from the top down, that's not the way it works, where pools of resources are that we can tap into. We need those kind of models. But more importantly than models, what we need is to look at our job differently. We need to look at ourselves, we need to look at our role. We need to kind of rethink our role as business architects. What our companies desperately need is what we have to offer. They desperately need the view of the organization that we can create. They desperately need change agents and change leaders. We need to get off the sidelines. We need to move from describing and modeling and recommending to jump in the arena and get in the fight to make change happen. If we become change leaders, business architecture is gonna be wildly, wildly successful. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Jeff. If you take a seat, if you would please, we'll have a few questions. Not sure where the right place for the camera is, but maybe here or maybe here. No, I'll go here and then we'll be here. We'll be good. I won't be hidden by one side. Somebody's going around, there's a question here. I can see that somebody and more, so we need some questions gathered. Had someone to start off with? Why, one of the first things you said was if we talk about what business architecture is, we'll never agree. And we can relate to that in the open group. That was certainly our first attempt resulted in kind of impasse over what it was. Why is it so hard, do you think? Why is it that the folks who think they're doing the same thing or related disciplines just can't agree on a definition? I love this question, by the way, because I'm working, I finally have given up arguing about the definition and why I don't wanna do it. So I'm writing an article about what I think this is architecture is, so. Okay. Part of that, here's the reason I think that's true. One is we define it at a fairly low level about what we do. We look at the activities that we have and we define it there. And so what happens is business architects come from different perspectives. I've got business analysts, and that's actually the biggest pool of people who become business architects. Business analysts come to that perspective around trying to understand requirements and goals. Enterprise architects come to it through technology and modeling. Process guys come through it through a very process-centric view. So they start with a very different view. Then they work in organizations that are very different. So what I've got is I've got big, complex organizations. I've got smaller, more focused organizations. I've got organizational culture. I've got what I think of as the management context, the incentive systems, how the things organized and all that. And what you find is the successful business architects are building a way to work in their environment. And all of those environments are different. Their backgrounds are different. The environments are different. The other thing that drives it is that's really interesting is as architects progress from beginning to successful, their perspective changes. So what you've got is a whole bunch of guys out there who are in fact working at it slightly differently. And so I think to get to that definition we've got to get past, oh, what's driving those activities to be different and get to something more fundamental about what is it we're all trying to accomplish. And I think that's gonna be my attack. We'll see what happens. All right, we'll look for the article too. So question from one of the members of the audience. Are business architects typically asked to clarify strategy execution processes? If not, how can this be addressed? I think what you find today is business architects aren't asked to do anything. Most business architecture teams are started by people like you who look around and say, my God, we need this and try to figure out how do we push that into the organization? And that's the big challenge. So I think you don't see that very often. Interesting enough, you do see that when your organization goes to external consultants. So when I worked for Acceler, we had the model pretty much that I showed you. We had a great model, but Capgemini, Bain, all these guys, they have models for that and your executives are asking them for that help. So I think that does open the door. In terms of how do you get there, again, it's gonna vary by organization, it's gonna vary by the culture and everything you have there. The key is, think big, know what your goal is and start working. So for example, one of the ways that I see these guys getting started is they will do a capability assessment and match where the money is going to the value the capability produces for the company. That's not hard to do. You can do it without senior managers, you can do it by talking with the middle managers in your company. I know of one company that did this, they found out that less than 10% of their IT projects were aligned with their strategic objectives. And that particular thing that was done by some consultants helping but their enterprise architecture team, that resulted in IT being totally reformulated, a business architecture team being started that now works for the CFO of the company to help take that kind of thinking throughout the company. So you can do it, you can get there, it does take some effort. Okay, thank you. The big premise in your storyline is that things happen sequentially in a waterfall type way, waterfall-ish it says. Can you elaborate on how business architecture will survive the Mool 2 type of world or the, you know, I had myself a question about agility versus business architecture and all this kind of. Yeah, I guess I won't agree with the premise there. I don't think it is waterfall. And I'm sorry if that was the impression I gave. I think that again, back when you look at what business architects are doing, they're all being much more entrepreneurial, they're all being much more dynamic. Agile, if you want to use that term, again, they're trying to figure out how, how do I take this theory, this concept, and fit it into this organization? And so what you see, and this is where, I think there's some issues with the rigidity that people define business architecture is, what they're finding is I can't take that theory and, you know, apply it directly. If you remember the famous Yogi Berra quote, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. And I think that's part of what you see. The early on guys are trying to apply the theory directly. The guys who have been successful have figured out, no, I have to adapt, I have to shift, I have to change, I have to iterate. And by the way, what you see is those teams don't stay doing the same thing for very long as they progress, as the organization changes, all of a sudden somebody comes back and says, can you do this? So I had one of my business architecture clients call me the other day, they've been doing traditional business architecture work, blah, blah, their chief strategy officer came to him and said, can you develop a plan for me on how we can use our capabilities in totally different ways than we use them today? So in other words, how do we take our capabilities and create new businesses out there in the world? Now, all of a sudden he's like, holy cow, I've never done that, I don't know how to do that, and that's not normally what I do, so it's another spin. So I do think that to be successful, you have to be highly adaptable with the term I typically use. Okay, thank you. I think we're gonna leave it there in view of time, Jeff, but will you be around for people? I'll be around at least through lunch, maybe longer. If you have questions, I certainly encourage you to stop me, I like questions, I like challenges, so. Absolutely. Give me a shout. You love the debate. I love the debate, it's good. Okay, thank you very much, Jeff Scott.