Challenges On The Road To Change

• Which of the four phases (described in Chapter 4) do you believe will provide the greatest challenges in your school district? Why? What steps can be taken to improve the success of the activities in that particular phase?

Based on what I have read of the four phases of establishing an EA for an organization, I believe Phase I, actually establishing the EA would be the greatest challenge for my school district.  The reason for that opinion is that EA program establishment will require a hefty change in mindset from all stakeholders in how the district is organized and run.  If, among other things, phase I activities are designed to "...communicate the EA implementation plan to the executive sponsor and other stakeholders in order to gain buy-in and support," that will take some time, front-loading of information and rationale, and team building (Bernard, 2012).  Currently VUSD has strong, established departments that fulfill their defined purposes within the organization well.  The initial challenge I see is that currently these departments operate almost... separately, meaning that they do their own thing (most of the time very well), without necessarily concerning themselves with the activity of other departments.  Sometimes this is unavoidable, as in the example where our IT department had to move forward with selecting and purchasing technology for the district based on usability rather than curricular goals established by C&I because of the transition happening with C&I. But many times I am witness to situations where one decision requires input from three or four departments, and those departments are not communicating with each other.  I am sure this is very common, especially in large school districts, so I am not criticizing, rather, it is an observation I have made through participating in meetings with representatives from various departments in the district.  A recent example is attending several separate meetings with HR, IT, Innovation, and with the Director of Online and Blended Learning, all related to the same topic, and realizing that all stakeholders are exploring the same topic, but aren't talking to each other.  Obviously representatives from each department involved in the exploration or decision should be in the same room discussing the issue so that everyone is on the same page.  This would cut down on the red tape and extra time it takes to make decisions, and keep efficiency to a maximum.  I believe having an established EA would help this situation very much, by putting the proposed decision on the table and pulling together the required stakeholders to discuss it rather than the decision being brought to each department separately.  Because of the long-established culture of departments operating more independently, it will require the most shift in mindset, habit and behavior by department leadership. 

I don't believe identifying a chief architect in Step 1 will be an issue, but pulling together the team of trained EA architects might be.  I would imagine that, specifically, Steps 2 and 3 of Phase I would be the most challenging for VUSD.  Actually, "challenging" isn't quite the right word. I believe the cooperation, vision, and mindset of department leadership is in place to allow EA to be successful; these steps will simply require the most investment of learning, time, and the creation and implementation of some new processes and habits. With the current way the various departments operate, establishing implementation methodology, EA governance and links to all management processes would require total teamwork and re-mapping of how things are done.  I wouldn't anticipate buy-in to be an issue.

I am not sure what would make these Phase I activities more successful, except team-building, with district visioning at the core, and much information and rationale for the reorganization of how the district would operate.  The stakeholders not familiar with EA would have much learning to do in order to adopt and implement a new way of organizing, planning, decision-making, and leading.  Our IT director confirmed for me that VUSD's current architecture is the Blueprint (LCAP), which contains the eight strategies to be addressed, with allocated funding linked to each strategy.  It took some EA mindset for district leadership to create and agree upon the eight strategies, so the next jump to EA implementation shouldn't be too difficult.

References:
Bernard, S. A. (2012). An introduction to enterprise architecture. 

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