A Rule-of-3 Quote

Jun

Long Huynh General 2009-06-23

“Three levels of executives – CEO, CIO/CTO, and CEA [Chief Enterprise Architect].
Three bridges – inside/outside the organization, business/technology sides of the organization, and business process/information flows/technologies within.
Three delivery mechanisms to stakeholders – one vision and organizational strategy, one technical strategy and execution, one architecture plan to deliver through technology.”

I got to love this passage extracted from the post Executives, One Foot In and One Foot Out by Andrew Blumenthal. Andy is the Chief Technology Officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Previously, he served as the Chief, Office of Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance at the U.S. Coast Guard and prior to that as Chief Enterprise Architect at the U.S. Secret Service. Despite the obviously tough jobs at those tough agencies, Andy seems to possess the wisdom of an eastern sage.

I encourage you to go over his blog The Total CIO to read the full article and find for yourself his pearls of wisdom. I just like to share with you here a few (actually 3):

Just like Yin/Yang are 2 aspects of the same thing (like 2 sides of the same coin), we need to look at both sides (Inside/Outside) of the business to have a complete picture.
The job of linking both sides could be performed by 1 person (CEO) or 2 (CIO/CTO) depends on the situation. I could argue that we may need only 1 techno-savvy CIO or info-savvy CTO to do the job of linking business with technologies, but that’s another story for another day.
To fully execute the strategy, you need People (3 levels of executives) – Process (3 delivery mechanisms to stakeholders) – Technology (3 bridges).

For a lover of the Rule-of-3, there is nothing more poetic that this quote from the Total CIO himself.