Hands up if you spend your days listening to ideas that sound more like solutions looking for a problem and people jumping to the answer before really listening to the question or understanding the aspects of the problem.

We work and live in fascinating time’s where we can :-

* all google symptoms and get quick diagnoses of what the problem could be and what the answers could be to dealing with the symptoms

* all buy books on prescriptive ideas to dealing with leadership, transformation, technological trends

* we all believe what we do and what our companies provide will provide value to the end customers we aim to serve

But seriously ask yourself are you really spending enough time on

* engaging with customers,

* understanding customer needs,

* assessing if multiple customers have similiar needs or all provide unique and different needs

Getting access and time with customers is challenging to mitigate this are you running hypothesis and scenarios of the market and the need and based on more remote less engaging evidence but evidence none the less framing the problem you are trying to solve and the unique role your business will play in solving that need.

I fear too often as an Enterprise Architect that we are faced with a whole heap of vague and ambiguous assumptions about the customer need but are expected to bring precision in the functionality of the business model and the cost to provide that functionality to support business cases and business strategies.

We are often at the feasibility side of the equation, with the desirability side predicated on internal dreams and ambitions rather than facts and from a viability perspective expected to drive out cost and deliver the most efficient and effective solution to be competitive and desirable.

I am seeing a change in dialogue and discussion, I am seeing more of a trend to drive customer focused, customer experience based facts into the discussion. I am hearing more probing questions and I am witnessing more scrutiny on who is the customer. Which is great .. the more we can all drive more of these discussions as enterprise architects the better – and just spend a few more seconds, minutes and maybe days on framing the customer problem before configuring the operational and technical solution – come on we can do it we all know it makes sense.

What’s your experience?