Reflection: politics and people

"People" is my next topic, so it seems apt to reflect on how it is people who make the politics work - only when it's "us" and not "us and them" can the three governance bodies work together.

And a good way of enabling a feeling of "us" is to mix things around - people I mean.

It is already widely accepted that the CAB needs technical and business experts on (the) board alongside the execa.  This usually means the OCA's Chief Architect sitting "at the right hand" of the CAB's chair (together with the more politically oriented CIO), with selected architects joining the board either on a rotational basis, or from time to time when technical topics crop up.

It is very unlikely a CAB Exec will want to join the OCA, but that's definitely NOT true for a DA's designers, many of whom (in my experience) enjoy being co-opted into the OCA (sometimes for extended periods), providing detailed expertise in a critical topic for which the enterprise needs an enterprise wide solution, sometimes in the form of architectural guidance but often as a Reference Design.

And the reverse is also true - architects can be more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, so may be employed in the early days of a programme to untangle and resolve ill thought through requirements, or some out-of-date aspect of the pre-funding transition plan's outline design.