The other day, I received the nicest note from Ivan Lazarov, Chief Architect – Enterprise Business Solutions at Intuit. Ivan wrote, “I recently read your book The CIO Paradox and a lot of what you wrote resonated with me. I even took the list of CIO paradox statements and with very little modification translated them to Enterprise Architecture Paradox statements.”
I really liked Ivan’s translation of the CIO Paradox into an EA Paradox, so I thought I would share it with all of you. Note: Ivan’s changes from the original CIO Paradox are in italics.
The Enterprise Architecture Paradox
• Your Role
–You were hired to be strategic, but spend a lot of your time on operational issues and convincing operationally focused folks that they don’t want to “just plug the hole for right now.”
–You are the steward of risk mitigation and cost containment, yet you are expected to innovate and encourage engineers to experiment with multiple offshoots of existing capabilities, because otherwise they cannot get their modifications in the roadmap fast enough. Then you are accountable for the proliferation mess, the cost of running it and the consolidation roadmap “ASAP.”
