Tom Graves / Tetradian

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects.

The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years or so: more than 40 posts here on various aspects since ‘The enterprise is the story‘. And as in the post ‘The no-plan Plan: architecture as story‘, it’s one of the five key-themes in my ‘no-plan plan‘ for my current and future work-direction. So it’s something I need to get down on paper, in more direct, usable form.

There’s a definite deadline of end of February for this one, because I’ll need it available in time for my presentation ‘The enterprise is a story: a narrative approach to enterprise-architecture‘ at the Integrated EA conference in London on 6-7 March 2012.

The second has a working-title of The business-anarchist: enterprise-architectures for the edge of chaos. This has perhaps been a less prominent theme on the blog, but it’s turned up quite a few times, such as in the post ‘Analyst, anarchist, architect‘. In essence, it’s about being deliberate and responsible about working with disruption in the business-context, preferably before that disruption is thrust upon us – a concern which is rapidly becoming more and more important almost by the day.

I’ve been nibbling at this one since mid-2009, and even wrote a fair chunk of it at various points last year, but didn’t finish it then, in part because it didn’t feel like the right time. Now, post-Occupy and suchlike, it does feel more like the right time, so I need to get it done. It’ll have to come after The enterprise as story, but with luck and lack-of-distraction it should be ready somewhen in April.

There’s also another enterprise-architecture book I’ve been working on for quite a while now with a colleague in Guatemala, Michael Smith. We don’t have a working-title for this one yet, and it’s rather further away in time – somewhen mid to late next year, probably – but it’s probably worth mentioning at this point. It’ll focus on the Five Elements theme that comes up in quite a few places in my work – for example, the structure of the effectiveness model used in SCORE strategy-assessment and the book Real Enterprise-Architecture, and the core of the market-cycle that’s used in conjunction with Enterprise Canvas.

Will let you know when any of the books become ready and available, but thought I’d keep you up to date with this part of work-in-progress, anyway.

I’m currently sifting through my past blog-posts of the past five years or so, with a view to republishing some of them in ebook-format, to make them more accessible in a more convenient and more portable form.

So far there are well over 400 blog-posts here on enterprise-architecture and related themes, plus a few more on the companion Sidewise weblog. That’s a lot of material – probably somewhere upward of half a million words, with literally hundreds of diagrams as well. Kinda big, even in EPUB format, and not easy to navigate in one go, given that that the various themes have been weaving through each other in different forms and with different emphases over the years.

So the idea at present is to publish them in the form of small anthologies, each of perhaps 15-30 related posts that focus on a single theme at a time. Some posts might appear in more than one anthology, but that probably won’t matter too much, I hope? – especially as keeping it simple will keep the costs right down, to perhaps $2.00-3.00 (£1.50-2.00) each.

Themes for the first few anthologies would include:

• the Enterprise Canvas set, including the simplified notation for Enterprise Canvas
• rethinking Zachman and the TOGAF ADM for whole-enterprise use
• foresight, futures and ‘really-big-picture’ enterprise-architecture
• the human side of enterprise-architecture, including management-structures and tacit-knowledge
• narrative and story in enterprise-architecture
• business-architecture and enterprise-architecture (including ‘translation’ between Business Model Canvas and enterprise-architecture notations such as Archimate and Enterprise Canvas)
• taxonomy, ontology, (meta)metamodels and toolsets for enterprise-architecture
• sensemaking with context-space mapping and SCAN

These should start to appear on Amazon and elsewhere in the next few weeks – I’ll post more details here as they become available, of course.

Any other requests for ebook anthologies? Any comments about pricing, formats, availability or anything else? Over to you, if you would?

Many thanks, anyway.

This one’s on the travails of being an innovative thinker who publishes on the web…

Whilst writing an article on the enterprise-architecture and the Shirky Principle that I’ll post later today, I needed to add a reference to my old Sidewise article about the role of the business-anarchist. So, like anyone else would, I did a quick Google search for my own post. Didn’t find it at first (turns out I needed to refine the search with ‘sidewise’). But up near the top of the results, I found an interesting-looking article: ‘The Rise of the Business Anarchist – R2 Global Meshwork‘, dated 31 May 2011. The first few words, as shown in the Google search-results, looked interesting too:

If you work in a large organisation, no doubt you’ll have analysts everywhere; you may well be one yourself. You know who they are, …

So click on the link. Look at the first few sentences. Then realisation: wait a moment, this looks a bit familiar, doesn’t it…? Very familiar, in fact?

Yup. It’s scraped, word for word, line for line, format for format, from my original Sidewise post ‘The Rise of the Business Anarchist‘, dated 24 Aug 2009. But in this case, credited solely to Robin Wood, the apparent owner of that website. No attribution, no link to the original, no nothing.

Not impressed.

Seems that the only way on the website that I can complain about this somewhat extreme example of plagiarism is by becoming a ‘member’ of the ‘R2 Meshwork’ – which means that I need to be personally approved by the perpetrator of the plagiarism itself. Hmm… don’t think that’ll work… Hence the only option I have left is to make it public here.

Oh the joys of plagiarism… hey ho…

Most of the Yabbies novel is made up of story-fragments that in principle could come together in any sequence: we make sense of them in whatever way we choose.

What follows is perhaps my favourite story-fragment, “Mishie’. (A gentle reminder that it’s fiction? ) A bit of context first, though. The fragment takes place perhaps thirty or forty years from now, some decades after one country has shifted from a ‘conventional’ possession-based economy to a responsibility-based (‘no-money’) economy. The latter is that ‘world’ that Mishie inhabits, has grown up in – and wants, very much, to see more of the world. A few terms: ‘vizzie’ is a ‘visitor’, someone from a different country; ‘GA’ and ‘garda’ are police, ‘tucker’ is a standard current Australianism for ‘food’; the language is basic English with a fair few adaptations over time, and a lot of local slang. The reference at the end to ‘that book we did in Year Nine’ is Ursula le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Dispossessed. What happens in the story-fragment is a simple contrast of before, and after…

Over to you after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway: have fun, I hope?

Read more…

All right, I admit it: my novel Yabbies doesn’t say much about real-life yabbies. In fact they only put in one cameo appearance in the whole book:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

The real yabby is a small Australian crayfish, a kind of miniature freshwater lobster. They’re common all over Australia, particularly in the south-east, and can frequently be found burrowing into the sides of a farm dam – hence their Latin name cherax destructor. They seem to come in all kinds of colours, from muddy brown to red to white to a really startling blue, such as this fairly large one at something close to actual size:

Yet what’s the connection to the book? Uh.. not much, to be honest. What’s now come out as the book first started out more than a dozen years ago as an idea about sustainability: namely, that we won’t be able to achieve any kind of sustainable economy unless we have a system of law that supports it – which we certainly don’t have at present. The working-title for the project was ‘Yet Another Book Idea’ – hence the acronym YABI. Which had a nice ring to it, and hence kind of stayed in the mind as ‘Yabbies’. Which is what the project has been called ever since. A bit unfair on real yabbies, and yabby-farmers and the like, perhaps, but there ’tis.

The idea of story-fragments that could assembled in any order came on quite early in project – in fact the first form in which it surfaced was as an interactive website in which people could make up their own story and add their own story-fragments to build a richer picture of the YABI ‘world’. (This was in the days before social-media, so it never really went anywhere: perhaps it might be worth-while having another go at recreating that website somewhen soon?) Later on, I tried doing it as a screenplay: it worked quite well as a story, but with so many characters in so many cameos it would almost certainly be too complicated an expensive to produce as a conventional film-type story. (But it might work well with current transmedia – another avenue to explore, perhaps.) All sorts of other frames I’ve tried out over the years: one version had technical notes attached to each story-fragment, another split it into separate story-streams for distinct audiences, and so on. But this version will do for now? – enough to get the story-ideas out there, anyway.

Its real aim, I guess, is to get some pretty challenging ideas out there in a more palatable form – hence packaging it as fiction. The ideas behind it, though, are not fiction at all: they’re real issues that somehow, collectively, we must all face, and definitely sooner rather than later. Make of it what you will, perhaps?

And the yabbies themselves? Yes, they’re strange little creatures, “all in their own world at the bottom of the dam”. Feeding on whatever falls down from the surface, making sense as best they can. Linking that across to my more usual ‘world’ of enterprise-architectures and the like, that’s kind of what we do every day, isn’t it? So I kind of like yabbies as a metaphor for ourselves…

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

Courtesy of a screw-up shared somewhere between myself and my web-hosting provider, an old back-up was overlaid onto the whole of my websites. At least two posts were lost – the announcement of my new book ‘Mapping the Enterprise’ (describing the Enterprise Canvas), and “How not to integrate your IT-systems” (about a real doozy of a misintegration between check-in systems at United Airlines and Continental Airlines) – and also several comments.

There is of course no backup and no way to retrieve the lost posts and comments, since it was the previous backup that overwrote it. My apologies to all…

It’s been quite a while since I wrote about my own policy on how I use Twitter.

In Twitter, many people aim to follow just about anyone who follows them. Quite a few people seem to think that this is a matter of etiquette, that it’s rude to not follow someone who follows you.

And yet here I am, a fairly ordinary, nothing-special kind of guy, with a fair few more than five hundred followers at last count, but only following rather than less than a hundred. In terms of those views about etiquette above, it might seem like I’m more than a bit rude to the Twitter community. So if my follow/not-follow seems unfair to you for that reason, I do apologise.

But it’s not about rudeness, I promise you – in fact it’s simply a matter of managing Twitter-overload. Let me explain.

As I understand it, many people just let the Twitter-stream go by: wash past them in a swirl of unending opinions and experiences. (If someone is following literally thousands of people on Twitter, I can’t see how they could do otherwise than let the stream wash past.) This would mean that the only option is to trust to serendipity: that the right Tweet, the meaningful Tweet, will somehow jump out of the stream, demanding attention at just the right moment.

I know that works for some people, perhaps many people, but it doesn’t work for me. Instead, I treat Twitter as my main business-intelligence tool. I assume that every Tweet is potentially meaningful – which means that I read every single Tweet that comes my way. I manually check just about every link presented in those Tweets. And I read probably at least half the articles linked-to in those Tweets – not just skim-read, but read carefully enough to make (I hope) useful comments on them.

In short, it’s a lot of work. As it is, it already occupies at least a couple of hours every day, and often more. That’s why I’m very careful about who I follow, because I have to – I don’t have any other choice, if I’m to stay sane and get any other work done in the day.

I’m an ‘aggregator’: I collect information, annotate it, and pass it on. I reTweet an average of about ten Tweets a day, sometimes more; many other Tweets that I receive (totalling more like thirty a day) will end up, often with extensive annotations, in my weekly ‘A week in Tweets’ blog-posts. That’s why I tend to restrict my ‘follows’ to those who are other ‘aggregators’ – people like Oscar Berg, Sinan Si Alhir, Craig Hepburn, Trevor Snaith and Pat Ferdinandi, to arbitrarily pick a few examples – yet who tend to post only a relatively small number of focussed Tweets. I also follow a few specific ‘thought-leaders’ in a much wider range of disciplines, but again, only those who post a relatively small number of Tweets.

I do believe I deliver a useful service in annotating all the Tweets that I reTweet or re-post. (Several people have told me this directly, which is kind of them.) Yet the only way I can do this is by keeping down to something manageable the numbers of Tweets that I have to deal with – which at the moment is around 150-200 Tweets a day. Hence the tight restriction on who I follow, and how many people I can follow.

The simplest annotations I do are the addition of specific hashtags. I’ll admit that a few of these may not be readily comprehensible to everyone, particularly:

• #entarch – enterprise-architecture
• #bizarch – business-architecture
• #bmgen – business-architecture, especially business-models, linked with themes from the book Business Model Generation
• #itarch – IT-architecture
• #e20 – ‘enterprise 2.0′, the use of so-called ‘social-media’ in a business context
• #km – knowledge-management, usually with an emphasis on narrative-knowledge
• #ux – user-experience, particularly the design and usage of online-tools

My longer annotations always occur after the link (if any), and are preceded by a ‘<’ sign. Occasionally I’ll have to abbreviate or edit the original Tweet to make room, but otherwise I try to keep them intact. And wherever possible I try to include the Twitter-ID of the person who provided the original Tweet. (I notice that quite a few people don’t bother, but to me the attribution is an important point of professional etiquette, and also important for those who need to follow citation-trails in future.)

One other point: blocking. Like everyone, I receive quite a few ‘follow’-requests that are from spammers, time-wasters and people who are just trawling for auto-follows in the belief that quantity is more important than quality. (It isn’t. ) I check every follow-request, and allow or block accordingly. There are also a few people whom – politely, I hope – I will block on the grounds that my work will be irrelevant for them: for example, someone from a building-supplies store who misunderstood the context of ‘architecture’ that I work in. In general, that check of the initial follow-request is the only time that I will block a potential ‘follow’. In fact I’ve only had one case where I had to block someone who’d been following me for quite a while – and that was because that person had become openly abusive to me and to others on my Tweetstream, and was frankly beyond a mere nuisance.

So that’s it. If I don’t follow you, it’s not because I don’t think that what you say is interesting – because it almost certainly is interesting. It’s just that I’ve found that this is the only way I can cope with the flood of information and still stay sane (or vaguely-sane, anyway… ). If there’s something that you think I should know about, please Tweet me direct as @tetradian – because, again, I do read every Tweet that I see.

Many thanks to all, anyway.

Okay, so that’s all of the Mythquake book-project. The chapters, in variously-complete condition, are as follows:

• Mythquake
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

I also have a fairly large collection of research-material in electronic form, and a matching domain-name, mythquake.com .

If someone wants to take over the project, all I’d would ask for is some kind of credit in the final product. That’s it.

Anyone interested? If so, please let me know via a comment here.

The final section of the Mythquake book-project – a book I know I’ll now never complete, so I’m making it available for anyone who wants it.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-9: Possession‘, explored what will probably be the source of the most disruptive mythquake that’s hit human society for several thousand years: the notion of personal property and possession.  It’s the key-stone for our entire economics, much of our politics, much of our systems of social relations: yet in terms of physical fact, it has no more foundation than the equally delusory myth of ‘rights’. Dangerous indeed…

Yet if such mythquakes are inevitable, what can we do about them? How can we prepare for them, so as to minimise the damge they would cause? That’s the topic for this final chapter of the book.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Did the earth move for you?
• Mythquake preparedness
• Everyone’s a winner

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

Read more…