If you can slot your organisational culture into a rigid system, then by all means you can align or, at the very least, emulate your business sytems to reflect your culture. IMHO, from what I have seen in many organisations, culture has two aspects:
1. that which the leadership or the organisation wishes to inculcate down the heirarchy - the documented visible mission, vision, values, etc. which are formally available.
2. that which the leadership or the organisation is trying to get rid of - the invisible, undocumented, unstructured, unacknowledged behaviour exhibited by the heirarchy and emulated down the chain.
It is very easy to work with (1), and your could formulate and align architectural principles on a one-to-one basis. But, what is more important is tackling (2), and I think that is more value-add and more difficult. Particularly if you are an external entity, you might find (2) might be difficult to get a handle on.
I would suggest working with some experts on Organisational Behaviour, in order to achieve your goal. But, again IMHO, that is entirely the CEO's responsibility. You could take an architectural approach, but everything is not black and white, in this sense. :-)
In one of my discussions with our CEO, I referred him to an article (not mine, all credits to the original author), which I am happy to mention here, if it would be of any help re this context:
< snip >
Leadership as ‘Intentional Influence’, by George Ambler
The article “Leadership: Intentional Influence” from BusinessWeek provide an interesting discussion on the topic of leadership. Research by the company VitalSmarts uncovered the following key insights that help to understand why few leaders are able to exert influence.
1. Leaders act as if it’s not their job to address entrenched habits.
“Most leaders put a great deal of time into crafting strategy, selecting winning products, and engaging with analysts, shareholders, and major customers. But few realize the success or failure of their grand schemes lies in influencing the behavior of the hundreds or thousands of people who will have to execute the big ideas — their employees.
2. Leaders lack a theory of influence.
“Very few leaders can even answer the question, "How do you change the behavior of a large group of people?" And yet, this is what they’re ultimately paid to do. It isn’t just about making a decision; it’s about getting people aligned to execute the decision. And this means influence….”
3. Leaders confuse talking with influencing.
“Many leaders think influence consists of little more than talking people into doing things… Anyone who’s ever tried to talk a smoker into quitting knows there’s a lot more to behavior change than words…”
4. Leaders believe in silver bullets.
“When leaders actually attempt to influence new behavior, it’s common for them to look for quick fixes—to fall into the trap of thinking that deeply ingrained bad habits can be changed with a single technique. The failure mode is to rely on any single approach…”
< /snip >
Best regards,
Joseph
_______________
Joseph George
+44 (0)7951 499286 (please note change)
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/josephg
On Aug 6, 1:57 am, Tim Leigh
> Thanks for all the useful feedback re: cultural alignment of business
> systems, this forum is one of the best EA resources I’ve found.
> To answer a question, some high level examples of cultural values which we
> are trying to align with are:
> · Client centric
> · Empowered people and teams
> I’d like to take these high level culture/objective statements and expand on
> them within a framework, as the aim of the review is to assess how our
> systems reinforce or compete with the envisioned culture.
> Thanks for the suggestion of VSM, as this appears to be a good approach
> which I wasn’t aware of and seems to be a good way for us to go.