,

Emergent is what we get anyway and easily. Right? We're always responding to, adapting, adjusting on the fly, inventing in the small, seeing, and shaping, within our field of influence. Business strategy and its tandem architecture creates coherence of purpose and concert among the many socio-technical systems, the many smaller pools of action and influence, within an organization, so that bigger, more ambitious, impactful things get done. While embracing emergence or extemporaneous dynamic responsiveness, we also note that achieving an ambitious vision takes intentional focus on making what is impossible or very unlikely through sheer accident, and aligning inspired creative, inventive thought and action so that many contributions of mind, will and hands build that vision.

Fractal strategy and tandem architecture are not new--we have just borrowed Bezos' image and put words to what is done, varyingly, in organizations. The important thing about creating this image though, is that it gives us a way to have the conversation about the relationship between strategy and architecture. Why? Because this is done varyingly in organizations--even within one organization, there is inconsistent understanding of the role of strategy, let alone architecture!

In some cases, strategy is viewed as a "bad word"--there is "no strategy," and that is treated as a point of cultural pride. A point of cultural pride. Hmm, that sounds like identity, which is a key part of strategy.  So strategy in the organization is fractal, with an independent "cowboy" (shoot first and aim after) culture set as the unifier at the corporate level, and other elements of strategy pushed out to the business elements. But as soon as that company wants to achieve something more coherent across its businesses, it finds itself needing to work strategically and architecturally to create a shared intent and the relationship platform for enabling that coherence. So, whether "dynamic, organic, fractal strategy" enters their parlance, allowing them to explicitly talk about intentional and emergent strategy or not, they have to get more intentional if they want to do those bigger things that require concert to make them more the way they would like them to be (Herbert Simon's wonderful way of defining and motivating design).  

The impetus for writing this report, was an increasing rumbling around the future of IT and EA. Well, of course we know IT and EA has a healthy prognosis. Still, many choose to see IT as a cost-center--one that encumbers with a mish-mash of entangled, brittle systems, and expensive tastes in technology frills that can't be afforded in lean times, at that. So it is worth articulating the counter-position, don't you think? Anyway, that's a key message--articulating the role of IT and architects (product, system and enterprise) in sensing, catalyzing and responding to change.  So the report makes points like:       

"Many of the business capabilities that IT supports and enables have to do with building and maintaining relationships and their information spaces to run the business and create strategic advantage. ... 

Relationships, both formal (with codified transactions) and informal (with dynamic, even ad hoc, interactions), are enabled through high connectivity. In Connections, James Burke, commenting on the Gutenberg printing press, observed “the easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens.” Alternately put, new ideas come about through conversations, and conversations through relationships, and increasingly these are digitally enabled and/or enhanced."  ...

"When we recognize that this is a world where organizations increasingly compete on and for relationships, perception, and fidelity, and on information leverage, the strategic role of IT jumps into sharp relief. Place this in a context of change, and IT finds itself with a leading role on the strategic stage. Whether it is playing the role of the proverbial bad guy responsible for runaway costs and change encumbrance or a partner in a landscape-defining dance of change depends very much on how well IT is integrated into strategic decision making — at various levels in a fractal approach to strategy setting."

and

"Complexity is a key driver of architecture. That is to say, as complexity increases, so does the need for architecture. It is not that we want complexity to go away, for value comes hand in hand with complexity. Instead, we want to harness complexity and, as it were, to tame it so that it serves rather than obfuscates and subverts the value we are creating."

and

"The role of architects in an agile enterprise, therefore, includes taming the transmogrifying mess created by responsiveness, dynamic learning, and accommodation, even while leading with intentionality to innovatively envisage, build, evolve, and sustain systems and their explicit, enabling and constraining architecture decision sets."