Nice to catch the opportunity to read the discussion of enterprise canvas fresh from the oven. I have developed the Enterprise Topology in my EA practice for many years. The true story is that I can not write english so I draw. Here is what my thought about Eneterise Topology, Business Canvas and Enterprise Canvas.

http://www.liteea.com/index.php?itemid=715

The bottom line of Enterprise topology approach is that Enterpris Topology a tangible EA product for both business and engineering community to comprehend rather a framework for enterprise architect as a EA thinking tool and check list.

You’re still jumping the gun again. This layer (row-0, ‘Enterprise’) is just the vision and core values. The next layer (row-1, ‘Context’) is just lists of categories of people and organisations (and, later assets and events and capabilities and so on) which in some way link to or align with or whatever to the row-0 vision. That’s it. We don’t even look at relations and roles and the rest until we get to row-2 (‘Business’); we don’t look at any of the detail about how any of this actually works until we get to row-3 (‘System’). We haven’t got there yet (and we never will, if I keep on writing everything here, rather than moving on! ).

I’ve just realised that some of this is my fault, because there’s a key point I haven’t explained properly. (It’s in the article on Layers, but I’ll admit it isn’t obvious unless you look for it.) It’s this: if you follow the logic that there are no relations as such in rows 0-1, there are no subsidiary cells within the entity in rows 0-1. They actually become relevant only later on in row-2, when we start to want to do some kind of hierarchical decomposition of functions. My forgetting to explain that point here probably didn’t help, but that’s one of the key reasons why your breakdown above into cells 1a/b/c, 2a/b/c and 3a/b/c above wouldn’t actually make sense in this context.

I really do need to move on to row-2, where I can explain some of these points a bit better – may we move further comments there?

I do see this above Zachman’s rows. What I did see originally was a pyramid…with vision on the top … or a sphere with the core belief in the middle. Because once a company loses it’s core why…nothing else will last.

The why does someone get out of bed in the morning. This is why the tag line “Ingredients Matter” seemed to fit though you brought it down to include more of what their vision statement stated.

Elevation Burger had an idea (putting words in their mouth) to start a burger business where ingredients matter. They wanted to be green so the building ingredients mattered too. Hence the concept and eventual tag line … ingredients matter.

The goal of this layer is the selection list to set the boundaries (before you get frustrated…I haven’t had coffee yet).

1a. Suppliers Relations: List of the type of suppliers we will contact.
1b. Value Proposition: List of why the ingredients matter
1c. Customer Relations: List of the type of customers.

2a. Supplier Channels: List of where to find suppliers
2b. Value Creation: List of
2c. Customer Channels:

3a.
3b.
3c.

I’m going to stop because I believe I’m getting too deep already.

We shouldn’t even have gotten near a business-model by this stage – we’re solely concerned with what it is that “gets us out of bed in the morning”. It’s like the old ‘five why’s exercise: we’re looking for the why behind the why behind the why behind the why behind the why.

So yes, I suspect you might be “reading the diagram wrong” here (which is my fault if I haven’t explained it well enough, of course… ). What we’re talking about here is still a lot further up than you seem to be reading this – to be precise, you seem to be reading this at least two layers too low, maybe three. This is really abstract: it’s just an idea here, a description of a feeling. But it’s also the one thing that doesn’t change, that provides a stable anchor for conversation between ‘interested parties’ (which is who we start to identify in the next layer).

It isn’t a column, in Zachman sense (i.e. Zachman’s ‘Why’): it’s a row. It’s ‘above’ the whole of the Zachman stack (which is why it’s labelled ‘row-0′). It’s the kind of ‘vision’ that ISO-9000 means as the ultimate stable anchor of a quality-system. So take it at least two notches higher (in terms of abstraction) than you seem to be doing at present: it should then start to make more sense.

I know all of this can sound pernickety and pedantic-seeming at first: but when you’re facing extreme instability in the business-context and extreme demands for business-agility – which is exactly what a lot of our organisations are facing now, and is only going to get worse – then you’re going to need something that really is as stable as this.

To be actionable, you need a qualifier (which is a quick statement of whats in and whats out). This too should be in the Vision/Value box.

I still see Ingredients Matter as the “WHY” or core of why the organization wants to exist. It is what Elevation Burger VALUEs but not a VALUE PROPOSITION.

The qualifier (what type of ingredients) can be expanded and contracted. It’s actionable and should be separate because qualifiers limit it’s growth. Why can’t they sell chicken products? So, qualifiers are temporary (may be decades…but still limits). It does help you decide who goes in your top row (supplier/proposition/customer relations).

Am I reading the diagram wrong? Is the box Vision/Value box a label for the column or a separate box?

The part that’s actually closest to an enterprise-vision here is “elevated product that is fresh and flavorful because it is made of the highest quality ingredients”, together with “elevated experience in a well-appointed and environmentally friendly setting”.

The rest is a business-vision – a description of their current or ‘as-is’ business, rather than the broader shared-enterprise. It’s kind of half-way between what I would ‘role’ – what we look at in row-2 – and ‘mission’ – the capabilities that we explore in row-3 – all mixed in with perhaps a bit too much marketing-puff that comes from actual instantiation (row-4). What it doesn’t tell us much about is the shared-enterprise in which this business operates – the ecosystem shared by all players in this enterprise, and which determine the options available to this business for guidance and for future redesign.

Remember that the whole purpose of all of this exercise is about dealing with change. It’s exactly the same principles and layering as in the ISO-9000 quality-system standard – vision, policy, procedure, work-instruction – but at a larger scale, where the ‘work-instruction’ in this context is the current business-model for the business. To change the business-model, we need to go up to the ‘procedure’, the rules that guide the writing of ‘work-instructions’ – which is about re-thinking relationships and the drivers for those relationships (row-2). To change the ‘procedure’, we go up to the ‘policy’ – which in this case is the factors that link the players together, and the lists that describe those players (row-1), and their asset-types and function-types and event-types and so on (row-1 items we haven’t looked at yet, but we come back to them somewhat later). And when we’re unclear about anything in that space, we go up to the enterprise-vision – which is the one stable anchor for everything.

So here we’re still talking about the equivalent of the ISO-9000 ‘vision’ layer; in the next article in this series we’re also looking at the ‘policy’ layer, and just starting to touch on the ‘procedure’ layer (row-2); but we haven’t gotten anywhere near the ‘work-instruction’ of the business-model as yet. Working only at the business-models layer is like having a quality-system that consists only of work-instructions: we have no idea what to do when anything changes. What all of this is about is identifying a structure – an architecture – that can help us know what to do, and why, when things change.

By the way, thanks again for pushing me on this: this way of looking at the enterprise has always seemed ‘obvious’ to me, but I now realise that it’s not obvious at all, and is surprisingly hard to put into words that would make sense to those for whom it isn’t already ‘obvious’. This really does help a lot.

About Us: Our vision is to be much more than just a burger restaurant. It is a vision for an elevated product that is fresh & flavorful because it is made of the highest quality ingredients. It is a vision for an elevated experience in a well-appointed and environmentally friendly setting. It is a vision for 100% USDA-certified organic, 100% grass-fed, 100% free-range, 100% ground-on-premises beef. For fresh-cut friends cooked in 100% heart0-healthy olive oil. For hand-scooped shakes and malts and fresh0bakes cookies. … Come try us, and see what makes Elevation Burger unique.

To me, the above is more than a vision. Once they mentioned the beef, it limited their options.

The one thing we need to be wary of here is getting lost in semantic loops: this is purely about pragmatics, not about finding ‘the right answer’, because actually there are an infinity of possible ‘right answers’ in every case.

What we’re after in a vision-descriptor is an emotive phrase that constrains ‘the everything’ to a scope that we can actually work with. We need a ‘just-enough’ constraint here: not too little (otherwise we get swamped with possibilities), not too much constraint (otherwise we end up with just our existing market, or less…).

The Action component is part of that constraint – but remember that it applies to every player in the enterprise, not just our own organisation. I’m beginning to think that the problem with “Ingredients Matter” here is that it isn’t actually a vision, but more a tag-line that summarises a core-value: as in my previous comment, “Ingredients Matter” just as much in plastics-moulding as it does in quality fast-food. (There’s a direct comparison here with the Open Group: their vision is “boundaryless information flow”, with one of their core-values expressed in the tag-line “Making Standards Work” – I think you’d agree that your “Ingredients Matter” is closer to the second than the first?)

So to me it seems more likely that a more usable vision here would be something like “Making Food Matter” or “Making Food That Matters” – action, content/focus, qualifier.

The ‘action’ in the sense of what we do to make that vision happen is something that comes later in the architecture (though in row-2 ‘Business-Model’ and row-3 ‘System-Model’ rather than row-1 ‘Scope’ or row-0 ‘Enterprise’). The Action that applies here, to the vision, is simply about making the vision feel active, literally emotive – it’s not about what the organisation does as such, to make that happen, to realise the vision. I know it’s a subtlety, but it’s important, and a lot harder than it looks – which is why visioning overall is a lot harder than it looks, too.