Tom Graves / Tetradian

An important email for me this morning, from management consultant Ray McKenzie, that’s triggered off a significant re-think on the role and label for one of the nine main cells in the Enterprise Canvas model:

While you labelled the bottom row of ‘Enterprise Canvas’ as Value, somehow as I read through the material I kept thinking ‘Governance’, not sure if this was your intent or just my imagination.

And yes, he’s right: of course it’s ‘Value-Governance’ – of course! Why on earth didn’t I see that before? I knew that ‘Management’ wasn’t right when I wrote it, but I couldn’t find the right alternative. Yet there it is, staring me right in the face: of course it’s ‘value-governance’! – in fact, given its role, at the intersection of ‘our value’ and ‘the past’, it really couldn’t be anything else. Using the term ‘value-management’ for that single cell gives it completely the wrong flavour – in fact that’s the main function of the ‘value-direction’ cell in the somewhat-external ‘guidance’ group, so it’s already covered elsewhere. Management is something that happens throughout the service, not just in one place – but it is fair enough to say that overall governance-activities for a service tend to be concentrated in one subdomain of that service, enacted via its own domain-specific roles.

Value-governance makes sense here in both directions on the Canvas’ grid. On the vertical ‘our value’ axis, ‘value-proposition’ deals mainly with what we will do (future); ‘value-creation’ is concerned with what we are doing (present); whilst ‘value-governance’ looks at what we will do, but perhaps even more at what we have done (past), to ensure that they match up correctly. And in the horizontal value-web axis, ‘value-governance’ sits on the backchannel – completions and the past – to hold the balance between what comes in as ‘value-return’ from the customer-side of transactions, and what goes out as ‘value-outlay’ on the supplier-side.

Hence duly-amended versions of the key diagrams – first, the ’service-cross’ version of the ‘brick’:

…and the ‘robot-chicken’:

Not many people use the shorthand two-letter codes for cells and flows, but these should change from VM to VG (for the cell-label), and XM to XG (for the flow-label). The XG flow now focusses primarily on matters relating to governance between the layers (rather than getting mixed up with overall management and direction, which should probably be associated more with the XD guidance-flow).

In all, this cleans up an inconsistency that had been bugging me for ages in the structure of the Canvas, but I hadn’t been able to see what was wrong or why. Hence, once again, many thanks to Ray McKenzie for this.

In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides.

And don’t worry, I’ll aim to keep this one short(ish) [later: turns out it's another long one - sorry...] – though I’ll probably return to the theme quite a bit in subsequent posts.

The key point in the previous post was that no ‘alternative-currency’ would solve the socioeconomic problems that we currently face: the all-too-evident failures and failings of the money-economy are merely at the symptom level, and attempting to replace conventional state-issued currency with some other kind of home-grown alternative would be merely one more variant on the theme of ’shifting deckchairs on the Titanic‘.

Yet clearly we do need something that will enable us to operate the kind of global-scale exchanges that our current economic models allow – because without that, it’s obvious that the city-based cultures especially could quickly collapse into anarchy of the worst possible kind.

It might perhaps be a surprise that what I’m suggesting here as an alternative actually is anarchy – but anarchy only in a strict technical sense, and of a radically different form.

Let me explain.

In the previous post I hope I made it clear that there is no way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable. Therein lies the real economic problem: possession is a classic example of the antipattern that “for every complex problem there’s a least one clear, easily-understood wrong answer”.

Underpinning that ‘wrong answer’ is another even deeper ‘wrong answer’: the notion of rights. Possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. (In British law it’s more subtle again, in that it’s actually defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need: as the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone put it, “that “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.) But there’s a catch – a very important catch. To paraphrase Margaret Mead:

Rights are a social fiction; responsibilities are a social fact.

More to the point, it’s probable that responsibilities are the ’social fact’ – that the structure of a society is actually an emergent property that arises from the intermeshing of mutual responsibilities. A society – and hence that society’s economics – arise from those mutual responsibilities. A society’s economics represent its recognised means and controls via which its available resources are shared, exchanged and used – and those ‘means and controls’ are, in effect, defined and circumscribed by mutual responsibilities.

You might ask “So where do rights come into this?” But that’s the whole point: they don’t. Rights don’t even exist in any real sense: they’re just a convenient social fiction, useful for some circumstances – as we’ll see in a moment – but dangerously misleading in others. And economics and purported ‘rights of possession’ are a good example of where the rights-discourse is indeed dangerously misleading – as all of us are discovering right now…

Read more…

Ideafarming.

Sometimes a word will pop up out of nowhere, like the mushrooms did yesterday on the grass verge just down the road on this small suburban block.

But ‘ideafarming’ is a good way to describe the work that I do:  like a old-style farmer, planting seeds for new ideas, tending them, nurturing them, watching them grow.

Perhaps not as exciting as fishing for facts; perhaps not as challenging as herding cats; yet in its own way definitely as much hard work as either of those, and it has its own quiet pleasures too.

Different styles of ideafarming, of course. Some go for a machine-like monoculture, repeating the same ideas over and over again to reap the maximum benefit before the ground itself is exhausted – at which point an overly-artificial hydroponics-style approach may be the only option left. Others are aggressive – almost obsessive, even – in their war against the weeds: “Any idea needs to be challenged, vigorously and early … to make it more resilient”, thundered one erstwhile colleague – a tactic which seems more like ripping every tender young shoot out of the ground to check if it’s growing. My own ideafarming is probably more organic in style: watching, waiting, letting things be, letting things grow together in unexpected ways, companion-planting between disparate ideas and the like.

Some ideas ripen quickly, to give a quick harvest – but those ideas tend to be the most perishable of all, and getting them to market in time can be a chancy business. Other ideas are more predictable, perhaps with a yearly harvest – but that can mean long gaps where the work is as hard as ever but still no return in sight. Others again may take years, decades, even centuries, before they start to yield their crop – the metaphoric grapevines, hazels, chestnuts, walnuts of the ideafarmer’s harvest. They all look much the same when their first shoots first push their way out of the ground – and yet each needs nurturing in their own distinctive ways. Often the nurturing consists of deliberately ‘doing no-thing’ – which is not the same as ‘doing nothing’; and sometimes what we most need to do may make no sense at all to ‘outsiders’ – such as the paradoxical advice that “in order to remember something you never knew, first set out to forget it”.

And we’re always at the mercy of the elements, too. City-folks may see the machinery that we ideafarmers use – the mobile-phone, the library, the computer as metaphoric combine-harvester – and think that that’s what does all the work; but the reality is that those machines do nothing on their own, they help us in our work, but they don’t make the ideas grow at all. If we’re fortunate, and skilled, and careful, we may indeed at times have a bumper harvest, a glut of new ideas; but sometimes – and sometimes even for years – nothing will grow. Stuck. No matter how much we might like it to be otherwise, it’s not something we can control.

So we ideafarmers tend to be of a taciturn temperament: quiet, reflective, often rather solitary, a bit scruffy, perhaps, even a bit eccentric in our ways at times. Observant, yes – because we have to be; careful; innovative, always trying something new, yet always aware of how things work out over the longer term, looking to the future by being carefully aware of the present and the past. Passionate about what we do – as anyone can see at any conference – yet often irritable with those who get overly excited about everything: after all, there’s not much room for excitement in a working life that for the most part consists of watching, very carefully, at the way the grass grows.

And it’s a working life that never stops: get up in the morning, walk the fields, tend the fences, watch for pests and predators, for termites and ‘term-hijacks‘, for wild ideas and other weeds that will run rampant if we don’t watch out for what’s happening to our would-be harvest; a moment’s rest on the porch at sunset, perhaps, but then it’s time to settle down to get ready for yet another day. We don’t have much time for the bustle of the market: the work is calling – never stops calling – for our attention, we know we have to get back to the farm. And ideafarmers don’t take vacations as such: the ideas continue to grow whether we’re there or not, so we’re always working even when we’re not at work. We don’t have much choice about that: ideafarming isn’t a job, it’s more a way of life, a way of being. In reality, it’s not just something that we ‘do’: we’re ideafarmers because that’s who we are.

Ideafarming. A strange job, but someone’s gotta do it, I guess?

Another slidedeck that I should have uploaded to Slideshare ages ago: a quick (8-slide) answer to the question  ’What is effectiveness?‘.

Understanding overall effectiveness is a core concern for enterprise-architectures, and for all of its subsidiary domain-architectures within the enterprise. The key idea here is that there are five distinct dimensions to effectiveness:

• efficient: makes the best use of available resources
• reliable: can be relied upon to deliver the required service
• elegant: supports simplicity, clarity and other human factors
• appropriate: is ‘on purpose’
• integrated: links everything together across the whole context

Businesses tend to focus obsessively on efficiency, almost to the exclusion of everything else; but we won’t achieve effectiveness overall unless we rotate our attention continuously across all of those dimensions, in a consistent and balanced way.

Here it is, anyway: another one to Share and Enjoy?

One of the comments on the previous post on the unacknowledged risks of  ’cooperative IT’ triggered off an essay-length response that really deserves its own post. So here it is.

The comment that started it off was from Ric Phillips. (I’ve trimmed it slightly, but you can see the original here.)

The innovations that led to mini-computers led to the increasing importance of information processing based on the technology’s ability to capture and model transactions (atomistic events). It really did change the nature of work and organisations and made a new kind of information available.

It wasn’t really the advent of PCs that changed things. If the information about the world that could be stored in them and used had not changed radically they would have simply replaced the niche occupied by terminals. But they allowed people to simulate sheets of paper and type writers. And spreadsheets – which were existed prior to software and were done on very large sheets of paper. Later came sound files, photographs, building designs, industrial machinery, complex electronics (like audio mixing decks) and a thousand other things that are now simulated in software.

In this wave computers became personal productivity tools. The changes to how personal productivity expressed itself in our lives when assisted by the new ‘virtual’ things PCs could provide is what changed our jobs, our professions and be extension our lives.

The internet started out as an extension of publication and communications models that already existed. But (in this case much more slowly that in previous transformations) our activity on the internet started to capture large amounts of information that previously wasn’t subject to computation – social information, information about opinions, subjective value, and what we might call (tentatively) knowledge.

There are intersecting trends (consumerisation for example). But mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on are all converging to create a new domain of information – information that allows us to model and manipulate in computers new and extremely complex things. Once again this will transform organisations. But this time maybe even whole societies.

I don’t see this as an impending disaster. Our world is changing again. As a strategic profession EAs need to get their heads around this. We are leaving the era of ‘information processing’ and ‘ICT’ and entering the era of social computing and Knowledge Technology.

Reading it again, I now realise that this critique has completely missed the point: all it’s doing is extolling the virtues of each of the transformations in technology, yet seemingly ignoring any possibility that there might also be vices associated with those virtues. Yes, each of those transformations are real and valuable to some context, and that is indeed a key driver for change. Yet the change itself is not the risk, and neither is the technology: it is the dependence on that technology that creates the risk.

So, as I put it in my response, I strongly agree that “mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on” are not in themselves an impending disaster. The same applies to their initial impact on organisations and “maybe even whole communities” – in general I see those impacts as desirable, even if certainly not something we can ‘control’.

What does worry me is what happens next. As an EA I’ve spent many months at clients tracking down all those small private-to-a-workgroup spreadsheets and databases and log-files and the like that were a) business-critical and b) unmaintained, undocumented, not backed up, inherently fragile [such as trying to use MS Access as a multi-user database, which it was never designed to do], unregistered, and in many other ways a real business risk. Whenever some key person changed jobs, or a single hard-drive failed, or a sysadmin triggered an automated application-upgrade, or any other of a myriad of seeming-trivial events, that business-unit would literally lose that part of its mind – and an entire business-process, affecting an entire cross-functional workstream, would grind to a halt until someone could work out what had gone missing and how to set up yet another kludged workaround.

When the business-application is non-critical, kludges usually don’t matter: it’s how people learn, it helps get things done, and it’s exactly what ’shadow-IT’ is for. The new mobile technologies and the like are brilliant for this – just as spreadsheets and single-user databases were (and still are). Everything’s fine as long as they’re essentially used in the same way as Lego bricks or a Meccano set or the like – a ’serious toy’ that can be used to knock out a quick prototype to test out an idea, or perhaps even to keep around as a vaguely-useful tool and talking-point. And as long as they’re used for that kind of purpose, it shouldn’t matter much when they do fail – especially if we can use that failure as a way to learn what to do differently next time. In other words, we accept failure as part of the deal – it’s ’safe-fail’.

But don’t try to use a ’serious toy’ for anything that’s business-critical. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s simply not ‘fit for purpose’: they’re not robust enough, resilient enough, agile enough, secure enough, and so on – which means that as a system we cannot set them up to ’safe-fail’ in such a context. Sure, you could use Lego to build a house (it’s been done), or Meccano to build a bridge (that’s been done, too), but the effectiveness of doing so is questionable at best, especially over the longer term.

It’s the ‘-ilities’ that usually matter most in architecture. The functional requirements for a system are usually much the same at any scope or scale, but the qualitative or so-called ‘non-functional’ requirements are what will usually make or break the system in practice. Building an IT system that can handle half a dozen strictly-sequential requests in half an hour or even half a minute is relatively trivial; building one that can handle thousands or even millions of parallel, interleaving, fragmented, potentially-incomplete requests every second is not trivial at all; and yet the functional requirements are essentially the same. That’s the difference between a ’serious-toy’ prototype, and serious engineering with serious architecture and serious service-management and support behind it.

What we have right now in mobile-computing, ubiquitous-information and cloud is a whole bunch of serious-toys desperately pretending to be more than they are, and – more worryingly – being sold and used as if they’re more than they are. Sure, the function is there – but that’s easy. It always is. Getting them beyond that ’serious toy’ stage is not easy – and because it’s hard work to get there, it hacks into the short-term profits, too, so it’s not exactly popular amongst the money-obsessed.

So we have here all the ingredients for a ‘perfect storm’: more and more of individual people’s lives and livelihoods being placed onto platforms that are inherently unstable and unsustainable, because little or none of the work to make them stable and sustainable is as yet in place or even in progress. If you’re not already seriously worried about what will happen when large chunks of our society literally lose their collective mind and memory through the failures of these kludged-together toys, you’re not thinking hard enough about the architecture of the enterprise… 

The lessons of history are plain to see, and it’s also plain to see that the level of unaddressed risk has been raised each time, with even the earliest-period risks still not fully addressed even now. You Have Been Warned?

Twitter-correspondent Craig Hepburn posted a Tweet this morning pointing to Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent ZDNet article, ‘CoIT: how an accidental future is becoming reality‘, about the current rise and rise of ‘consumer IT’ or ‘cooperative IT’:

It’s a story as old as the IT department: New technology arrives in the market, it makes some type of work easier to accomplish, the business asks for it, and IT reacts and delivers it. Not always however, and usually somewhat slowly. It was this way with PCs, it was this way with the Internet, and now IT is faced with what is turning out to be a veritable perfect storm of technology and social change. …

Today’s highly mobile, social cloud has set everyone’s expectations for how easy, powerful, and simple IT can be. The genie will never be put back into the bottle.

For once I’m going to stand firmly on the side of the IT-folks on this one – because no matter how wonderful this looks right now, this is not good news at all. Looking at this with a futurist’s eye, I’m wondering how long it will take before we wish we could put the genie back into the bottle… because what I’m seeing here is a full-on disaster-in-the-making. Or rather, a double disaster-in-the-making, given how much this will interact with the ongoing disaster that is ‘cloud-computing’…

One of the first lessons any futurist learns is to look back at history, to seek out any equivalent occurrences in the past. And the blunt fact is that we’ve been here before… not just once, but several times already. Each time that we came back to the same place – if perhaps from a slightly different direction – it’s clear that the fundamental lessons were not learned, in fact were wilfully ignored; and each time it took a lot of effort, a lot of skill, and a lot discipline, to tidy up the mess – just in time for the next batch of overly-excited idiots to trash the place all over again. This is the dirty end of Gartner’s ‘hype-cycle’: someone has to tidy up the mess. And yes, “it’s a story as old as the IT department”, because in every case so far, that ’someone’ has been the much-derided IT department – and also enterprise-architecture, in its broader sense, beyond IT alone.

Go back sixty years or so, to the first beginnings of mainframes and ‘big computing’. Watch the hype-cycle at work: slow adoption, then a huge take-off in ‘data-processing’ (we didn’t get round to calling it IT until quite a bit later). It will solve every business problem! Control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (COBOL, the IBM-360 architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Twenty years later, it’s the mini-computer boom. It will solve every business problem! Now even medium-sized businesses can control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except that it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (the C language, the Digital PDP-series architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Ten years later, we get the microcomputer revolution. It will solve every business problem! Now you too can control the world, right here on your desktop! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (disk-formats, file-formats, data-architectures, the IBM-PC architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Yup, you’ll be seeing the pattern here. The exact same sequence applied to the rise of the internet ten years later, the web five years after that (with a merry little hiatus called the Dot.Com.Bomb), the rise of cloud over the past few years, and now the rise of Hinchcliffe’s mobile IT or ‘CoIT’. In every case, there’s the same wild hype, the initial push from outside the IT-department (as ’shadow IT’) which gets the basic idea going to point where it’s usable.

(And to be fair, if that push hadn’t happened, those new developments would probably never have been usable: as Hinchcliffe implies, it’s actually quite rare that innovations arises from within the IT department itself. Because that isn’t it’s job: IT’s real job, unfortunately, is to tidy up the mess that will inevitably follow…)

In every case we see the same exuberance… then the slowly-dawning awareness that it isn’t quite as simple as that. It turns out that there’s a lot of work that’s needed in order to get standards happening – otherwise the new ‘revolution’ turns out to be something that can’t be shared, which means that the whole thing fizzles out quite quickly because we need that sharing to happen. We need clear standards for hardware, software, data-architectures, information-architectures, interchange protocols and much more besides. We need distinct disciplines around requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, quality-management, service-management and a whole swathe of other areas. And all of those, it’s now clear, need to allow for customisation, agility, security, versatility, adaptability, resilience and the like – none of which are easy to balance with conventional ‘control’-style disciplines.

So here I am, looking at the rise of Hinchcliffe’s ‘CoIT’ – particularly cloud-computing and mobile-apps. And what I’m seeing is an architectural disaster waiting to happen, if not unfolding right before our eyes:

• security – where is it? does it exist at all? (I’ve seen lots of hype and promises, but not much reality as yet)
• file-formats – half the iPad apps I’ve seen seem to embed their data actually within the app itself – they don’t even have a file-format other than perhaps plain-text or unstructured PDF
• interchange-formats -if they have a file-format at all,  most of the apps seem to rely on unpublished proprietary file-structures with no means to enable exchange between different apps, whilst cloud-providers will often deliberately make it difficult to exchange, so as to enforce ‘lock-in’
• escrow – information-lifetimes range between seconds and decades – yet no-one seems to be thinking beyond a year or more at most, and no-one at all seems to be planning for what happens when a cloud-provider or app-provider goes bust – which they will, often (over the long-term at least), and often very expensively
• system-standards – where are they? do they exist at all? – we seem to back in the worst days of early microcomputing, where just about every man-and-his-dog-in-a-garage could and did create an entirely different architecture for everything, often intentionally incompatible with everything else

I could go on… and on… and on… there’s no shortage of other nightmare-level architectural risk-factors that aren’t being addressed at all. Other than by the much-maligned IT-department, that is (who unfortunately tend to be able to see only the IT-related risks, which represent only a relatively small proportion of the whole); or by the few enterprise-architects who actually do think about whole-of-enterprise scope (and who are mostly derided, by the hype-merchants and their ilk, as doomsayers who’ve lost the plot). Not funny… Oh well…

Yes, it’s true that the excitement (or the oft-forlorn hope that it will finally be better this time?) is what gets people going to create new ideas; so yes, the exuberance does matter. Hence, in turn, I suppose, the hype does matter too. And safe-fail experiments are also always a good idea, because they show us where things will break but without causing much damage in the process. ‘Safe-fail’ can get quite extreme, too: for example, think of the buildings in a fireworks-factory, with very solid walls, very lightweight roofs – because when you know there’s a high risk that things can go badly wrong, you can indeed design for that fact. Yet there are also many types of structures that we can’t allow to fail: anyone who’s lived through a major earthquake or major storm-event will know that fact firsthand… Architecturally we need to be able to tell the difference between those two extremes, and design accordingly.

Yet that’s exactly what’s not happening here with cloud or CoIT: architecture of any valid kind, it seems, has all but been abandoned in the usual wild rush towards The Next Best Thing… So might it not be wise to take a brief pause for thought at this point, before we rush headlong into yet another insanely-expensive IT-disaster? Or is that too much to ask of anyone whilst the hype is in full flow?

This one’s about uniqueness and serendipity and ‘chaos’, and I’d better say straight away that it’s a lot more tentative and exploratory than many of my posts of late.

I’m seeing a theme in enterprise-architecture and the like that’s always been there in the background, but seems to have recently started to become a lot more visible to a lot more people. It’s difficult to pin it down precisely, but it can be seen sort-of sideways-on in many other themes:

• design-thinking and the like, now even embedded in the new US Army field-doctrine
• references to the difficulties of designing for uniqueness or ‘being prepared for surprise‘
• a lot of posts on applications of improvisation-training in business, not just for sales-folks but for business-execs as well
• more references to futures (futures-plural, that is, rather than the singular ‘predicting the future’)
• more interest in ideas about personal-level strategies and tactics for innovation, such as those from one of my favourite books, Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation
• a sense that the pace of change in business is heading towards real-time, and often is already at real-time
• a surprising number of references to serendipity in business, often linked to innovation in various forms
• a renewed focus on disaster-recovery, business-continuity and the impact of ‘long-tail’ kurtosis-risk and ‘black swan‘ events
• the recognition that every sales-event is actually a unique ‘market-of-one’, in which the choices at the moment of choice are not predictable or ‘rational’ at all
• the role of visioning and the like within enterprise-architectures, business-architectures, quality-systems and so on

Or, to illustrate, a couple of items from today’s Twitterstream:

• CreatvEmergence: Improvise to Innovate – http://bit.ly/apch2U
• oscarberg: RT@esauve: “The Social Web is moving toward a future where serendipity replaces search” http://wp.me/p4P8c-zug from @gigaom

This isn’t about emergence, or the ways in which unique or ‘chaotic’ events can be used to guide sensemaking and pattern-identification in complexity: others are better-qualified to explore that domain than I am. Instead, what I’m seeing here is almost the inverse of emergence: rather than deriving a pattern within complex events, we choose and use a pattern to guide our choices in inherently-unique events. Not just serendipity, but serendipity by choice – an architecture for uniqueness.

One item that comes to mind here is Gooch’s Paradox, identified by the psychologist Stan Gooch: “things have not only to be seen to be believed, but often also have to be believed to be seen”. To enable serendipity to occur, we first have to be a mental space that allows it at all. In that sense, beliefs themselves become tools.

Another is a quote from The Art of Scientific Investigation:

The truth of the matter lies in Pasteur’s famous saying : “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” It is the interpretation of the chance observation which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

In a truly unique context – and it seems to me that every real-world context must always be in some part unique – there is only chance: there is no actual connection between anything and anything-else, other than that which we give it. Everything is coincidence, in an exactly literal sense of ‘co-incide-ence’: any meaning that we may ascribe (or not ascribe) to such coincidences is our choice.

Yet from Gooch’s Paradox, this also seems to be able to run backwards: we have the meaning first – predetermined beliefs from our culture or ’scientific law’ or the like – and then find coincidences to match. The belief determines what we see – which can lock us out of an ability to see anything else.

So in a business-context, for example, the beliefs that we use to filter what we see need to be tight enough to allow us to make useful sense of what’s happening around us, but also loose enough to allow true serendipity to happen – where the context itself seems to be giving us what we need. Hence Pasteur’s “chance favours only the prepared mind”: a preparation that has the right balance between precision and openness.

Which leads us to the idea of an architecture of uniqueness, an architecture designed to enable and enhance opportunities for serendipity.

Improvisation is one obvious component of such an architecture: a deliberate practice in working with uncertainty, in real-time.

Another component might be some variant of meditation, where continual, consistent repetition of the same actions or conceptual behaviours provides a stable ground within which useful ideas and events can coalesce. (This is the exact inverse of Einstein’s famous remark that “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”. That dictum is true enough in a predictable world; but in an inherently unpredictable world – any context which is truly unique – anything we do will always lead to different results, hence repeating the same action over and over may be the only thing that will keep us sane! )

Sometimes we also need to deliberately ‘trick’ people into a state where serendipitous events can occur. For science-fiction buffs, this is very well described in Noise Level‘, a classic 1952 short-story by Raymond F. Jones: a group of scientists and engineers are asked to ‘reconstruct’ a supposed anti-gravity device, and actually manage to do so – only to be told at the end that the whole thing had been a kind of hoax, to show them how to open their minds to new possibilities that their conceptual filters would otherwise prevent them from being able to see. The method was a deliberate trick, but the end-results were no trick at all: nicely recursive, in that a very practical real-world technique is embedded in a fictional story about a fictional story.

There’s also the key role of visioning – a real enterprise-vision, that is, not the usual useless marketing-puff ‘vision’ – as a principle-based anchor for real-time decision-making amidst inherent uncertainty: the role in the military of ‘Commander’s Intent‘, for example, or John Boyd’s OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) cycle.

And there’s much more, such as the distinctions between analysis and emergence – which only ‘make sense’ outside of real-time – contrasted to the real-time spectrum between the simple and the chaotic; or the need for some kind of boundaries between the ’special world’ or chaos – where anything is possible but can send us into panic the moment we go off-balance – compared to the ‘ordinary world’ of rules, regulations and supposed certainty.

So what’s your opinion on this? What can we do to make this work? What strategies, tactics, models, methods would we need for this ‘architecture of uniqueness’, and architecture to support serendipity? And how would we apply this in enterprise-architectures and elsewhere?

Over to you, if you would?

In the previous articles about context-space mapping with the Enterprise Canvas, we looked at the topmost layer, the extended-enterprise and enterprise-descriptor or vision; then the next layer down, summarising all the player in the enterprise ecosystem; and took a first high-level look at the organisation’s business model with an exploration of value-proposition and business-relationships. All of that was moving ‘top-down’ through the enterprise, so we took a brief detour to see how the same principles can be used for ‘bottom-up’ strategic review, where a re-think of existing technology can lead to a new strategy and even to a new enterprise.

We now do another sideways move, to explore how we might use a modified version of the classic Zachman framework to assess the content and activities of each entity (or service) in scope.

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So far in this series we’ve explored the key concept of the extended-enterprise, used that to summarise the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, and started to model the organisation’s value-proposition and business-relationships.

Up until this point we’ve been working top-down, starting from the most abstract layer, the ‘extended-enterprise’. But we do need to to remember that there’s no reason why we have to work only in this direction, and often many reasons why we should make use of the more freeform approach that context-space mapping will allow. And in the usual serendipitous way – via an article in IndustryWeek, ‘Assessing Product Innovation Assets: What’s in your attic?‘ – we now have a useful reminder that the vision and strategy for an organisation may also be reconstructed bottom-up.

Low-cost innovation doesn’t have to be boring or incremental. Sometimes true innovation is as easy (and inexpensive) as evaluating the technologies and capabilities you currently have and expanding them to a new industry or customer base. It is a particularly powerful product innovation strategy during an economic downturn, yet too few companies today are taking advantage of it.

[An] important message for business leaders: “Use something you already own to generate income in a whole new way.” Truly innovative and resourceful manufacturers can embrace this message by reevaluating their existing assets, intellectual property, and product lines to develop completely new streams of revenue with little investment. The assets are already in their “corporate attics.” All a company has to do is unlock the revenue-generating power of those assets.

So let’s use the examples from that article – and a couple of others – to see how this works, in terms of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas.

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So far in this series we’ve explored enterprise-vision (Enterprise Canvas row-0) and high-level business-context (row-1) in a fairly straightforward way. It’s been much the same as any other conventional ‘top-down’ strategy-development, except that we haven’t really mentioned our own organisation at all as yet. (That’s coming shortly. )

A few important points have come up in the comments to those two articles, though, which are worth reiterating here before we move on.

One is to remember why we’re doing all of this. It’s not about abstract ‘blue-sky’ thinking: it’s about building a stable platform for organisational change. In enterprise-architecture, this needs to be a platform in which all of the other architectures – business-architecture, process-architecture, skills-architecture, values-architecture, security-architecture and, oh yes, all the IT-architectures too – can all interweave and interlink and intermesh into a single unified, dynamic whole. But although we talk a lot about the extended-enterprise here – especially in these ‘higher’ layers – this isn’t actually for anyone else at all: unless someone seriously-senior decides otherwise, all of this is solely for our own organisation (or client, if we’re doing this work as external-consultants). Working this way, whatever we develop is always in the context of this broader extended-enterprise: but our own organisation (or client) becomes more and more the centre of our attention as we move down the layers. That transition of emphasis starts to happen here. In short:

In enterprise-architecture, we create an architecture about an enterprise, but for an organisation.

It’s really important to remember that point – not least because it’s the organisation, not the extended-enterprise, that’s paying our bills!

Another point that came up in the comments is that the usual nine-cell structure of the Enterprise Canvas can be a bit misleading in these upper levels. The nine-cell structure is really a kind of functional-decomposition – who’s handling what interfaces, and why. But functional-decomposition assumes or describes specific interfaces and relationships – and we haven’t even got that far yet. In row-0 and row-1 we only deal with each entity as a whole, without any internal subdivision into cells. It’s only here, in row-2, that we start to introduce the idea of relationships and roles between entities, which eventually leads us to relationships and roles within entities, which leads us in turn to that nine-cell structure. If you try to use the nine-cell structure in rows 0 or 1, or in most of the work in row-2, you may have missed the point somewhere: at those levels, it’s only about each entity as a whole.

And finally, I would hope that by now you’ll have realised that this can be a lot harder to do than it might seem at first glance. It’s so easy to fall back to organisation-centric habits, where the organisation is placed as the sole centre of everything. The blunt fact is that it isn’t that ’sole centre’ at all: in fact, the organisation only has a reason to exist if it’s placed within the context of its extended-enterprise. If we don’t understand that broader context, we would have nothing to guide us when that context changes – which, these days, can happen on a literally moment-by-moment basis. One of the keys here is that the description of that enterprise is literally emotive – it drives change. So although a lot of thinking and analysis will be needed here, ultimately it’s not a rational matter – it’s about what feels ‘right’, about identifying what is valued. This is especially true of the vision-descriptor: we need to keep exploring that context-space until we hit upon a phrase that can engender emotions and commitment that are literally strong enough to get people out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, time to move on: time to start looking at the business of the enterprise, and of the organisation itself. To summarise where we’ve gotten to so far with this example, we’d established a row-0 ‘Enterprise’:

We then started a Zachman-style row-1 ‘Context’ with a conventional market-based view of our enterprise, with our own organisation as its centre:

Which didn’t show us many options. But as we started to explore what that enterprise-vision meant in practice, and what kinds of stakeholders would be engaged in that vision, we realised that the actual enterprise was much broader than our current market:

Which should create many more strategic opportunities than we were able to see before. To make this work, though, we first need look more closely at the meaning of a common business-term: value-proposition.

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