Tom Graves

Still recovering somewhat from a thoroughly nasty run-in with a guy named Wolf, on an on-line list about future vision for enterprise-architecture. (For obvious legal reasons, I’d probably better not give any more details than that.) To give some idea, he proudly claimed to be “a man of science”, but amidst a stream of insults - “whining”, “hapless”, “technophobic” - and sarcastic put-downs - “poetic wailing”, “now, for everybody who is still capable of independent rational thinking” - this was what he apparently considered to be a rational argument about the process of enterprise-architecture:

Keep dreaming Tom, and if your dreams also bring you some pay checks, I honestly envy you. Beware, though of the bad economy: less and less bosses are willing to pay for dreams.

He’d started off in the wrong direction anyway, because whilst we were talking about developments in how to do architecture at the whole-of-enterprise scale, his vision for EA, he said, was cloud-computing - in other words, a minor subset of content, not process. It became clear very quickly that whilst he certainly knew his stuff about technical-architecture and IT-based process-modelling, he was completely out of his depth in anything else - particularly business-architecture, whole-of-enterprise architecture, the process of visioning, and in some ways even the process of science. What he did manage, and manage well, was a startling degree of pseudo-scientific arrogance:

I have founded this group for those EAs who feel themselves rather a part of scientific community, using exact terms of scientific discipline to create exact solutions and extrapolate them to the future, rather than part of the order of augurs that make gibberish predictions because they not only cannot foresee the future but are unable to understand the present.

As any real practising scientist would know, we cannot predict ‘the future’: we can sort-of predict ‘a future’ for something which operates only within a defined set of premises, but the real world won’t confine itself within any such convenient constraints. And this, for example, was his ‘First Postulate’ for his ’scientific’ enterprise-architecture:

Modern Enterprise cannot run its Business Model without computing means;

Which is fair enough, in a sense - but it’s not science. There’s no rationale behind it: it’s just a religious-style Great Truth, floating in mid-air, without context and without anchors into the real world - where, in disaster-recovery, ‘Modern Enterprise’ may suddenly find it’s physically lost those ‘computing means’, and has to find a way to run its ‘Business Model’ without them. I was trying to explain that that is what an extended EA would need to cover - but he would have none of it at all. Cloud-computing was it: nothing else mattered.

And in effect, he did the classic TOGAF trick of thinking that the label of ‘business architecture’ in itself resolved all the issues about how to handle ‘all the architecture stuff that’s outside of my area of interest’:

EA has evolved and now includes, among others, distinct disciplines of Enterprise IT Architecture (EITA) and Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA), both well-formalized disciplines. EBA includes EITA plus to business-specific acumen like Accountability (people) and others. Everyone can just google or wiki Business Architecture and learn its definition.

Your ‘EA’ somehow includes ‘everything’ (do not know how - no definition) but does not include BPM, which is the common basis of and the bridge between EBA and EITA. For me all this makes the professional level of this discussion very low. It is a warning.

Apart from, again, the startling aggression and arrogance, real EA practitioners would notice the error here: he’s blurring high-level strategy, human factors such as accountability, and low-level process-mapping (BPM) all into the same randomised ‘EBA’ - the classic ‘business-architecture = everything not-IT’, without any means to separate out all the distinct interfaces and interdependencies. As for the comment “Everyone can just google or wiki Business Architecture and learn its definition”, it was obvious he’d never done so himself: if you try it, you’ll find that there are a near-infinity of would-be definitions, most of which seem to be mutually contradictory. :wrygrin: Far from being a “well-formalized discipline”, as Wolf claimed, the whole field of enterprise business architecture is still a disorganised shambles - a fact that anyone actually in the trade would admit straight away. Getting some sense of order into that mess is part of what the whole-of-enterprise architecture project is all about.

At first his aggression was directed solely at me; but then he realised that the other contributors weren’t joining in on the attacks, but instead were agreeing with what I’d said, and then adding further examples of their own (which was, indeed, what I’d hoped the discussion-thread would do). After he found that attacking them too didn’t work either, he pulled out the ‘I’m the boss here’ tactic:

I, as a specialist and the manager of this group, have said enough. Those who have ears, will hear. From now on, I will observe this discussion, as I do with others, unless I am explicitly asked by any participants to express my mind. Your right to express whatever weird views you want is limited by my right to end a discussion if I see it as compromising the group goals.

Metaphorically speaking, I could see a small boy, pouting in petulant rage at not getting his own way in some game, saying “it’s my bat and ball and I’m taking them and going home and then you won’t be able to play any more, so there!!” Which he did: he killed the thread, and, unsurprisingly, also my membership of ‘his’ list.

The whole affair has left a thoroughly nasty taste in the mouth:  I haven’t met that level of aggressively unprofessional conduct since dealing with a group of self-styled ‘pro-feminist’ men in a social-work context in the early ’90s. Though the same overall problem, I notice: the same obsession in asserting that the one very small subset of an issue - the subset that they (somewhat) understand and for which they purport to have ‘the answers’ - is the whole of the issue, combined with violent personal attacks on anyone who inadvertently threatens that quasi-religious belief. Odd; yet in some ways quite dangerous, especially for others.

But despite that, at least the thread did produce a lot of good ideas, and the interactions with the others in the discussion - particularly a guy called Richard, from Siemens - were definitely worthwhile. Since the content has been killed in its original source, I’ll put some of it up here in subsequent posts.

More later, then.

A great conversation last week with IT-strategy consultant Chris Potts of Dominic Barrow ( http://www.dominicbarrow.com/ ), who’s also a regular columnist for CIO.com, an online magazine for CIOs.

In terms of his position on the role of enterprise architecture, in some ways he’s even more extreme than I am in insisting that the role is much wider than IT. I’d certainly agree with this comment in his article (see link to the PDF in the ‘articles’ section of the Dominic Barrow website) for GEAO Journal of Enterprise Architecture (Vol.3 No.1 March 2008: pp.3-8) called Enterprise Architecture Driving Business Innovation: Time to Break Out of IT.

[A]n IT-centric view of the world is a major constraint, sometimes terminal, on EA’s potential contribution. To successfully influence business innovation, it’s vital to take an enterprise-centric view, remembering that technology is just one category of capital. Rather than being IT-centric, effective EA is IT-ambivalent: some innovations will involve IT, some won’t. The presence or absence of IT is not the defining factor.

There’s another valuable insight in what’s almost a throwaway line early in the article [my italics]:

I’ve always found that architecting ‘enterprise’ as defined by economists has a greater impact on innovation and value creation than architecting ‘an enterprise’, typically meaning its capital, land and labour.

He then takes it further than I’d done to date, because he argues that the enterprise always already has a Chief Enterprise Architect, in the form of the CEO:

[T]he chief enterprise architect is already out there, not working in IT and never has. Our challenge [as CIOs] is to become part of their team. …

[W]hether we are focussed on enterprise or capital, the organisation’s chief architects of these things do not reside in IT. They do not have an IT-centric focus, nor use formalised EA frameworks and are not called ‘Architect’. Typically, our chief enterprise architect is the CEO, and our chief capital architect is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). At the executive level, EA does not need breaking out of IT as it has never been there in the first place. The Enterprise Architect’s challenge is to connect with, contribute to and influence the strategy of our chief enterprise architect, the CEO, while making sure the CFO sees the value of our capital.

He’s expanded on these themes in his textbook-cum-novel FruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology (more detail on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), in which he also argues that the best IT strategy is no strategy at all, in the conventional sense - or more accurately, as he commented in our email correspondence:

The ultimate corporate strategy for IT is to ‘not have one’, which is not the same as having no strategy. And you have to make sure the conditions are right before attempting it, otherwise ‘de facto’ strategies will take over….

(Before I read FruITion I’d thought I was a fairly good ‘translator’ between IT and business: I now realise I still have a long way to go… And I certainly wish I’d had a chance to read it before we’d had our meet-up, too: would have learnt a heck of a lot more from the conversation. Oh well.)

An eye-opener, anyway - not just for EAs, but for anyone who wants to understand how business really works at the executive levels. Recommended.

Continuing the fixups from my mildly embarrassing blunder with e-book downloads on Tetradian Books - looks like I didn’t get it right that time either.

Looks like it may have been a case of Read The Fine Manual… oops. Definitely embarrassing.

So I dearly hope that this time, having read the proper instructions for the Drain Hole download-manager, and put in the proper embedded codes rather than an assumed URL, it might now actually work. Let me know, if you would?

Many thanks - and apologies, too.

—

Addendum, 16 July: finally discovered that the read-access permissions were set to default to Administrator-only. Have now reset this to ‘Anyone’, so should now at last work - please please please? I’ve tested it in a whole bunch of different ways, and the only one that doesn’t seem to work, on some systems only, is direct (left-click) view in Internet Explorer. If in doubt, use ‘right click and save’.

Apologies again for the blunders - oh well.

Just discovered, courtesy of a much-appreciated comment from John Gøtze, that my e-book download-links in Tetradian Books weren’t working properly. Or rather, they were, but only for ‘right click and save’, not for simple click, which is what I’d written.

(I’m using a WordPress plug-in called Drain Hole to manage downloads - looks like ‘Black Hole’ might have been more accurate. Oh well, it’s fixed now, in text-form at least.)

Apologies to all who may have attempted to download prior to this. Try again - and again, do let me know if anything doesn’t work!

(Yeah, I know - way too long between posts - sorry…)

“Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” - an article from Wired that’s interesting from a number of perspectives: business, futures, society, and my own rather odd concern with post-possession economies.

A couple of quotes that are worth repeating. First is from the description of the ‘gift economy’:

From Freecycle (free secondhand goods for anyone who will take them away) to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn’t the only motivator. Altruism has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact. In a sense, zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry. In the monetary economy it all looks free — indeed, in the monetary economy it looks like unfair competition — but that says more about our shortsighted ways of measuring value than it does about the worth of what’s created.

When a true gift is classed as ‘unfair competition’, too right that it “says more about our ways of measuring value that it does about the worth of what’s valued”… - the classic monetarist delusion that leads to “the fool who knows the price of everything and value of nothing’. And gift-economies are not based solely on altruism - which seems for some unfathomable reason to be utter anathema to American ‘libertarians’ - but much more on a solid grasp of longer-term feedback-loops in the dynamics of functional societies as large-scale ’systems’ (in system-theory terms) - which again seems to be beyond the understanding of most classic economics, which for the most part seems incapable of comprehending any time-scale longer than a few months, or years at most, not the decades or centuries or millennia needed for real sustainable economics. A bit bizarre, really - and scary.

The other comment was a riposte to economics ‘guru’ Milton Friedman. In Friedman’s monetarism. money is the only possible measure of value. But as the article says:

money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The “attention economy” and “reputation economy” are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there’s something real at the heart of both.

There are quite a few others, too, the relationship economy being one of them. But a key point here, perhaps, is the dysfunctionality of scarcity-economics, the idea that value is based on scarcity - or more to the point, that value is based only on scarcity, which leads to frequent attempts to create artificial scarcities or delusions of scarcity where none exists. Functional societies and economies don’t make that mistake: they create real gift-economies that do function sustainably. More on that some other time, perhaps - but that error is right at the core of why our culture and its economics simply do not and cannot work.

Worthwhile article, though. Recommended.

One of the canons of current futures studies is the need for participatory engagement of the stakeholders - in other words the people who are likely to be affected by any major decisions. So it’s heartening to see that the new Australian government is extending its commitment to participation - previously shown by the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, requiring all his Labor MPs to visit schools and homeless shelters, among other places - by calling for a broad-ranging national summit to identify a future vision for the country as a whole.

Some idiot immediately dismissed this as “a Prime Minister without a vision”: but we suffered 11 years of a questionably-sane Prime Minister pushing his own full-speed-to-the-past ‘vision’, to the enormous detriment of Australian society in general.  As I put it in a spoof version of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ in one of my screenplays, “our meanness and our bigotry/renowned through all the lands”, and “with convicts now the lesser thieves / bereft of any care / we’ll make this Commonwealth of ours / a place of cheap despair”… that was what Howard’s ‘vision’ brought us. So we can do without another one of those, thank you very much…

But despite the idiot, it does look good: well-received by media commentators, and even the new (conservative) Opposition leader is grudgingly approving. There’s hope for real futures yet, perhaps?

Whilst doing the usual web-trawls for a correspondent, was delighted to discover that Common Ground have put their classic Rules for Local Distinctiveness up as a specific page on their website, as well as the poster which can be ordered from their shop.

May not be so obvious at first, but the principles they describe are also just as important for business, as a guide to understanding their own ‘distinctiveness’ or business-purpose within the chosen market. Hence I’ve also tagged this one in the Business and Futures categories here.

Use Common Ground’s list as a way to reflect on the ‘particularity’ of any place, any enterprise, any context… it’s a worthwhile exercise that will almost always elicit some important surprises…

Somewhat belatedly, I checked the Journal of Futures Studies copyright rules, and discovered I do have dual-copyright on the ‘Stealth Foresight’ article.

So I’ve placed a copy up on the Tetradian site, at
http://www.tetradian.com/download/stealthforesight-final-nov07.pdf [PDF, 144kb]

Share and enjoy?

Was delighted the other day to receive some copies of the current Journal of Futures Studies, with my essay Stealth Foresight for Innovation: creating support for creative change in large organisations in Australia. Looks good: formal cite is ‘Journal of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, Taipei; November 2007, 12(2): 121-128′. Many thanks to the JFS crew, and to Jose Ramos in particular, for nursemaiding the essay through into production.

(The link with the futures stems from my somewhat unsuccessful experience as a postgraduate student on the ‘Strategic Foresight’ course at Swinburne University in Melbourne, back in 2002 or thereabouts.  I only did the first year of the course, partly for reasons of cost, partly because I fell out badly with the professor - Richard Slaughter was focussed firmly on educational futures, with little apparent interest or patience for anything else - but mostly because what was being taught there seemed to have too little relevance to the real business issues I was working with. Sohail Inayatullah’s causal layered analysis is brilliant but to my mind still overhyped and underdeveloped, and the obsession with Ken Wilber’s overweening ego in so-called ‘integral futures‘ was frankly nauseating. Most of the other students were great, though - real people doing real innovative work - and many continue to be friends and colleagues to this day. But I digress…)

Basic idea of the article is simple: all organisations need foresight, but most do everything they can to suppress it! To do that kind of work, we need some way to conceal what we’re actually doing - hence ’stealth foresight’, ways to embed foresight capabilities within everyday business tools and techniques. By ‘foresight capabilities’, what I mean are concerns such as:

• the long view - at the very least, a timescale longer than ‘next quarter’, and preferably a lot longer than the usual business strategy-horizon of five years or so;
• participation and engagement - engaging multiple views and perspectives, rather than just the narrow assumptions of a few select executives
• creating space for complexity and emergence - themes such as Cynefin and agile-development
• supporting cross-boundary generalists, to link ideas and innovation across the whole of the enterprise

“So what is ’stealth foresight’? In essence, we take a standard strategy-review tool or technique, and rework it to embed within it true foresight capabilities.” The article gives examples in scenario development, visioning, SWOT analysis, knowledge-management, enterprise-architecture and elsewhere.

The article isn’t on-line as yet, but may turn up on the JFS site in a few months’ time: if you’re interested, watch their ‘articles’ page, or drop me a line if you want an electronic copy.