Dear Mr. Odent,

We have done some research on the risk structure of firms and industrial organisation hierarchy in firms in the stock market and we have found in the case of Emerging Markets like India with bounded rational behaniour, debt-equity ratio as the traditional measure of capital structure or the starting point of analysis about entreprise architecture as far as I can tell, have insignificant effect statistically in explaining the returns and price movements in the stock market. This of course conditional on high liquidity preference in the form of demand elasticity of electronic stock markets where demand for capital factors dominate. Hence by transforming stock market investment in terms of capital theory as opposed to pure finance theory we get results broader than that captured by CAPM say although Entreprise Architecture matters in a mixed method by implicitly assuming "jump quantum conductance" price data flow in electronic stock exchanges when capital is generalised in form under incomplete asset markets being imperfect capital markets (Mallick (1993),Mallick, Sarkar, Roy, Duttachaudhuri, Chakrabarti (2007), Mallick, Hamburger, Mallick (2016, 2017)).

Soumitra K. Mallick

Dear Stephane,

I would recommend you to refer to the foundational literature on organizational design to take further steps for framing your research question.

For example, seminal author Henry Mintzberg describes the most suitable organizational choices for young and small companies, depending on their activities:

Academic paper: Henry Mintzberg. Structure in 5's: A Synthesis of the Research on Organization Design. Management Science, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Mar, 1980), pp. 322-341

Further paper: Henry Mintzberg. Organization Design: Fashion or Fit? - Harvard Business Review, January 1981, available at https://hbr.org/1981/01/organization-design-fashion-or-fit

In the same vein, the manual “Organization Theory and Design” (12th Edition) by Richard L. Daft is a recent and well-written textbook that focuses on contemporary organizations.

By contrast, the Business Model Canvas is a popular practical tool. The start-up founders may use it for brainstorming, developing new ideas and preparing comprehensive business plan documents. Yet, it provides a plan to follow for finding the right questions rather than the answers for start-up structuring. It is great to use Canvas in practice at the stage of business plan writing and presentation to potential stakeholders.

Kindly,

Evelina

Hi Stephane,

It would be good to understand the notion of EA you are referring to. Evelina already gave you some references concerning the organisational design perspective.

Another aspect would be business/IT alignment with Enterprise Architecture methods and tools. An example for this one would be designing an adequate IT landscape for a corporation based on its objectives and business processes. I would see some synergies here as IMHO the products and busioness model of a startup need to be innovative but IT can profit from following best practices available via EAM methodologies. Capability maps are often referred to as basis for determining the optimal need fo support by IT application systems.

Can you elaborate a bit further on tghe context of your question?

Best regards,

Jürgen

Thank you all for your answers. My question was asked in the context of a master (MSc) thesis in Enterprise Architecture. My research question: "Is there an enterprise architect is the lean startup?".

The organisational point of view is interesting.

I believe most start-ups are doing EA without knowing it, like Mr Jourdain in the "The Bourgeois Gentleman" of Moliere (1670) was doing prose without knowing it. I think also the problem is with scale up. As long as the team can be fed with two pizzas, architecture can emerge within the team, but what happens when you grow and have two teams? Who is taking care of the holistic and consistent view? I believe someone in the founding team of the startup is taking an EA role. I actually used to have that role as CTO in a startup, managing a portfolio of innovative projects.

Lean Startup requires architectures that allow for easy integration and exclusion of features.