Recruitment Firm Turns to Enterprise Architecture

Professional recruitment firm Michael Page International is growing, fast and organically. The firm, now numbering some 6,000 people in 25 countries, is evolving its infrastructure to alleviate the pressures created by its expansion over the past few years into new markets, geographies, and businesses.

Its systematic evolution involves the optimization of business processes as the foundation for both a new CRM suite and a SOA initiative, as part of an enterprise architecture program that’s been underway for about a year. Most recently, Michael Page selected MEGA International’s MEGA Modeling Suite that includes its EA (enterprise architecture) and BPA (business process analysis) tools to help streamline the organization’s business processes.

Andrew Wayland, who’s been CIO at the recruitment firm for about two and a half years, says that it’s important the technology behind the effort meet a few requirements. For instance, it couldn’t be “a sledgehammer to crack a nut,” and it also had to fit within the firm’s plan to evolve the enterprise architecture on a pragmatic basis.

Wayland says he’s seen more supposedly “revolutionary” EA endeavors fail at other organizations. Too often, EA teams work in their own worlds, spending a couple of years building web sites with a whole bunch of artifacts around the architecture and creating some manuals, and then announcing their effort as the organization’s future right before disappearing into the woodwork -- after which all their work was ignored.

It’s better, he believes, “to evolve as you go, document [the work] and then use a joined-up approach,” Wayland says.

The firm’s IT group now works in more of a joined-up, global fashion with a standard set of infrastructure, standard applications, a standard architecture, and standard processes, rather than as the regional teams it operated as a couple of years ago.

“That has gradually evolved as we saw the benefit of it, to the point now where there is value to using a tool to orchestrate and manage the enterprise architecture,” he says. “It’s been a gradual process over the last few years as we pulled technology together into a consistent set of tools...with the IT team working as one team.”

That makes it cheaper to operate IT, because problems are solved and solutions built once, and it makes IT more effective, because good ideas can be put into the core system and easily shared.

Easy cultural change

While getting to this level did involve a cultural change, Wayland says it was more like pushing an already half-open door than storming the barricades. The different IT teams at the time realized they already had a similar set of business requirements, a similar infrastructure and the same set of applications, so the idea of collaborating and working together on one consistent strategy using enterprise architecture wasn’t as difficult a sell as it might be elsewhere.

“It was an easy cultural change because they saw the sense of it. At other organizations I’ve been in, it’s been harder to do, But Michael Page is good at coordinating and sharing and working together,” Wayland says.

It’s also been able to succeed with coaching its developers to build their architectural skills to think more about how the infrastructure and business processes and the application they are building align together, and not just about the application itself.

“Once one got it they all started to get it,” says Wayland. Though Michael Page has just one full-time enterprise architect who acts as a coordinator, it has about six individuals who sit among some of the teams working on various projects around infrastructure and applications who perform the architect role as part of their multiple responsibilities.

Wayland counsels organizations planning or going through EA efforts not to discount how important it is to have the right people in the right roles.

“I think in the architect role the social skills element becomes much more important,” he says. “It’s the ability to span across multiple projects, multiple issues and to bring together consistency, to spot opportunities, to help people do things and make decisions in a joined-up way. It almost becomes more conceptual and less technical.”

Not that you don’t need the individuals who can do the deep and hard thinking on the technical front. Success requires both sets of skills, he says, and more often than not, they don’t live in the same person.