Sense and Respond - Adaptive Enterprise Architecture

21/05/2007 by Roger Evernden.

Agile, nimble, responsive, adaptable, flexible, compliant, accomodating - words that describe a pervasive goal for all architectures. The more architecture has these characteristics, the more useful and valuable it becomes.

There are at least two parts to this aspiration.

The one that is most commonly described is fairly passive, being able to respond to changing needs; if we design well, then our designs can adapt to meet emerging business trends or revised organisational strategies. If we are lucky, then not only can our designs adapt, but they can do this with agility and nimbleness - they are accomodating designs that can be changed quickly and easily.

Better still, the architecture can be designed in such a way that it is more proactive - it is designed to be able to anticipate or sense changes and then respond to them. An architecture that has this characteristic is able to accomodate changes that are totally unexpected and unanticipated - as well as scenarios that are predicted. This, of course, is more of a challenge - but there are well-proven techniques that help to create such supple designs.

You may be surprised to find that many of these techniques were pioneered twenty years ago. In fact the term “sense and respond” first appeared in a 1992 Management Review article by Stephan Haeckel. Haeckel has moulded the ideas into an adaptive management framework - described on the sense and respond web site as “a comprehensive, scaleable and internally consistent recasting of industrial age strategy, structure and governance to cope with the post-industrial environment of unpredictable change”.
If you are not familiar with Stephan Haeckel’s work, then I thoroughly recommend the website and the book Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations.

I was privileged to work with Westpac Banking Corporation in the 1980s. Westpac is regarded as the prototype sense-and-respond organization, and it’s story is told in the book, Adaptive Enterprise. From this experience I have developed EA techniques that have also been adopted and used in many organizations.

Why is this such an important concept? Business expects support and functionality from IT, but IT can only deliver if there are appropriate and corresponding business changes. Having the right organizational or business infrastructure is as important as having the right IT components. And EA is the discipline that ensures that all of these elements are in designed in harmony.
From an Enterprise Architecture perspective, there is much to learn here, especially as EA moves more and more into areas of organizational change and complexity.

Roger Evernden

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