Eight Hybrid Thinking Principles for Enterprise Architects

1. Coordinate from the outside in. Once the "outside" design is in place, it serves to guide the foundation for inside structures.
2. Pursue a portfolio of strategies.   Evaluate many small bets instead of single large ones
3. Harmonize, rather than optimize.  Enterprise architects learn to focus on "harmonizing" a diverse set of existing approaches and less on creating an optimal approach from scratch.
4. Coordinate, rather than architect.  Hybrid thinking approaches view the enterprise as a collection of interdependent portfolio management processes, with the goal of coordinating across and among these portfolios.
5. Focus on interactions, not interactors.   Hybrid thinkers must focus on coordinating the behaviors among systems rather than optimizing the internal mechanisms of such systems.  Gartner sometimes refers to this approach by the phrase "architect the lines, not the boxes." "Lines" refers to behaviors shared among systems, and "boxes"
6. Embrace a different approach to standards.   The focus shifts from thinking of standards as "inhibitors of choice" to "enablers of change." Hybrid thinkers emphasize that the purpose of standards is to enable coordinated interactions and behaviors to change and evolve.
7. Encourage continuous and participatory interaction.  Hybrid thinking charrettes enable individuals to overcome traditional process barriers by fostering more collaborative, creative and meaningful outcomes. Design is done best when it is peer to peer.
8. Focus on business outcomes, not IT outcomes.

Source: Gartner 2010

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