Tom Graves

A ‘tweet’ on Twitter pointed me to Colin Beveridge’s post ‘Enterprise Aliens‘, on his “Trillion Dollar Bonfire” website. (Colin estimates that over the past few decades at least a trillion dollars have been wasted worldwide on useless corporate IT - hence the website name.) His theme is that for enterprise architects and executives alike it can be useful to view the enterprise as if from the viewpoint of some imaginary alien or Outsider, so as to break free from corporate groupthink. As he says, this has strong precedents in folklore:

Every culture has age-old tales about rulers disguising themselves to pass among their subjects, often learning vital lessons about policy and behaviours that otherwise go unreported.

(One key cultural point is that the unwitting providers of those often painful ‘lessons’ must be protected against punishment for their honesty. Much the same theme is echoed by Oscar Berg’s recent post ‘Management by Listening Around‘ on his “The Content Economy” blog, about the processes, practices and ethics of using social software to ‘listen around’ in anonymous fashion for real-world management review.)

Many other traditional contexts have an explicit role to provide that ‘alien view’ function: the court jester, for example, or the formal appointment of an ecclesiastical lawyer as ‘Devil’s Advocate’ in reviewing the life and works of a proposed candidate for Catholic sainthood. In both those cases, though in different ways, one function of the role is to disrupt the groupthink and the ‘yes-men’ mentality, and, if possible, provide a palatable way to break through wishful thinking and face the more subtle complexities of reality. In short, to be an anarchist in the midst of the wishful groupthink-’rules’ and regulations of the realm. Enterprise alien as business anarchist.

Which leads to another theme: the roles of analyst and anarchist within enterprise architecture, and within business in general. To use the mediaeval court metaphor, most of the king’s advisers and elders are analysts: they assess best practice from the past, and extrapolate those lessons to the future. The jester’s job is to think sideways, to parody, critique, disrupt - in short, to be an anarchist - and we might note that whilst there may be dozens of elders all jockeying for the prime positions, there’s usually just the one jester. Sure, there’s humour in the act, but often it’s there only to make the critique more palatable, to use self-deprecation to deflect attack: it’s a serious role with serious responsibilities.

The analyst as ‘insider’; the anarchist as ‘outsider’, alien, Other. For each analyst role in business, there’s a matching anarchist whose role is to bring the analysis down to the ground and get real. Compare the the opposing emphases of the roles:

• causality model
  • business analyst: linear - analysis in terms of assumed rules of derivation
  • business anarchist: non-linear - causal relationships either not identifiable or identifiable only retrospectively (”small pieces loosely joined … always a little bit broken”)
• temporal focus
  • business analyst: before action (plan) or after action (assessment / analysis)
  • business anarchist: during action (’the Now’)
• management model
  • business analyst: top-down, controls for predictability - emphasis on machines or IT
  • business anarchist: bottom-up, direction for inherent uncertainty - emphasis on people
• scientific analogue
  • business analyst: Newtonian physics as metaphor - mass-markets, large-scale statistics, Taylorist ’scientific management’
  • business anarchist: chaos-physics as metaphor - ‘market of one’, quantum effects, self-organisation, enterprise as ecosystem
• systems-development approach
  • business analyst: ‘engineering the enterprise’, Waterfall development
  • business anarchist: emergent systems, Agile development

Perhaps the simplest way to summarise is that the analyst relishes taking things apart, but purports to put them together; whilst the anarchist puts things together to work with the real context in real-time, but is blamed for taking things apart in ways that the analysts don’t expect.

That clash is also clear if we merge those summaries above in Cynefin terms:

• business analyst: rule-based + abstract time = ‘complicated’ or ‘knowable’ domain
• business anarchist: non-linear + real-time = ‘chaotic’ domain

…which, in practice, are almost diametric opposites - no wonder there’s a clash.

Yet a key aim of the enterprise architecture must be to provide a framework in which these inherent differences can be resolved. Too often, for example, I’ve seen examples where every nominal business-process is beautifully documented, but what they describe is not how the work is actually done in practice. Management relies on its analysts, but have no grasp at all of what the foreman or equivalent does to keep things moving along as smoothly as possible in the chaos of real-world practice. Anyone can analyse supermarket checkout queues en-masse - the statistics are easy enough to follow, to give average service-times, mean, standard-deviation and the rest - giving rise to the nice illusion of predictability, control. But in the chaos of real queue-flows, the ‘quick-service’ line can easily end up slower than the main checkouts - which hits hard on customer (dis-)satisfaction, for a start. And when it takes longer to get out of the store than it does to select purchases - as seems to occur more often than not in one of this town’s supermarkets - potential customers soon learn to stay out in droves, whether the prices are good or not: price is not the only measure of perceived value here… But the sources of such business issues are all but invisible in statistical analysis: to see them, and to resolve them in business practice, we need the eye of the Outsider, the alien, the anarchist.

Seems an idea worth exploring further, anyway.

Better write something here, if only to counter the mood of the previous post.

That ‘downer’ was real, and still is, to some extent. A few friends and colleagues expressed concern; some were kind enough to offer advice (for which many thanks); yet for me this is my normal way of life, and hence my responsibility to deal with its consequences. My apologies if that post worried anyone: that was not its intent. It’s just that with no other outlet available, just about the only way of coping with the stress is to be open and honest about, and not pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Few people who live conventionally-’normal’ lives as employees and family-folks and the like will have much experience or, often, much understanding, of what life is like out on here the ‘bleeding edge’. ‘Normal’ lives are stressful enough, I know; and the lives for those guys out on the streets selling ‘Big Issue’ and the like is stressful in the extreme. So I’m well aware I’m luckier than most, in that although by choice I have no home of my own at present, I do have somewhere to live, and enough savings to live off for a while longer, even though they’re dwindling fast. I have no explicit commitments, no mortgage, no family, no ties, nothing. In effect, I have a kind of freedom of manoeuvre that many others might envy. But with that freedom comes responsibility, to create in other ways for the society in which we live: and in my case that seems to come out in the form of deep-exploration.

“Some sow, some reap”, it says in the Bible somewhere. Yet before anyone can sow, someone has to clear the ground for that sowing to take place; and before that, someone has to explore the landscape, to find places where sowing could be viable. And that’s what I do: explore the metaphoric landscape. It’s the only true work I know: oh, I can do other work, of course, and do it well - my standard fallback of information-architecture, for example - but it isn’t my vocation, my ‘real work’, and that conventional work isn’t where this scrambled society gains the most value from my existence. I explore ideas, and the practical implications of those ideas, on a very large scale: that’s what I do best.

But there’s a catch. Just like a physical explorer, much of this work is hard, and literally painful: carving a path through uncharted metaphoric territory also brings with it no small amount of metaphoric thorns and brambles and gorse, falls and failures, dead-ends and seeming defeat, in the short-term at least. Sometimes, just as with physical exploration, it’s hard to keep going: in fact often the only way to keep going is the certain knowledge that there’s no way back.

And whilst the wilderness of the wide-open spaces is exhilarating, that too takes its toll, in the form of an often crushing sense of aloneness and isolation: not only that there’s no-one else there to share it with, but the bleak fact that few will understand it when we finally make it back ‘home’. Just as with the physical explorers of old - and of the present day, for that matter - this strange process of exploration does have value: but that value may not make sense to others for years, decades, perhaps even whole lifetimes. That’s a long time to know that few others will understand or value what we do: hence a sense of isolation back ‘home’ in the ‘normal’ world that’s even more intense than the isolation ‘out there’, driving us back into the wild again as the only place where we seem to ‘fit’. Wild ideas of other worlds, even in a metaphoric sense, make little sense in the comfortably delusory ’safety’ of suburbia. Hence explorer as natural anarchist: the task itself leads to an imposed alienation - literally, ‘making Other’ - leading to self-alienation as a way of life.

And yes, there’s another catch. Some explore, some clear the ground, some sow, some reap: but it’s only at the point of harvest that all of that work ‘pays off’. Hence, in our self-centred culture, so focussed on the ‘now’, there’s an inevitable obsession with harvest, harvest, harvest, with little awareness of what has to happen before the harvest can exist. Just as of old, there needs to be foresight enough to see the whole of the pattern; and just as of old, in our absurd possession-based ‘economy’, an explorer needs a patron with foresight enough to fund that exploration. Yet right now, such foresight is hard to find - especially with the current panic about a ‘credit crunch’, and even more especially in the US, where financial law all but enforces short-termism to prop up the personal profit of stockholder ‘owners’. Hence right now it’s hard to survive as an explorer of ideas - even though it’s all too plain to see that such ideas are urgently needed. Which is a problem - both for me in person, of course, but much more for the wider society.

Again like explorers of old, I provide reports of my explorations: hence the books that have been my main visible work for the past year or so. Most of those, such as the Enterprise Architecture series, aim to provide information that’s immediately useful in day-to-day practice - metaphorically, closer to clearing the ground after exploration, rather than the exploration itself. But I haven’t yet published - dared to publish? - much as yet on the real deep-explorations, not least because much of it is downright scary in everyday terms. Some examples of the metaphoric landscapes that I’ve seen in my travels:

• There are no rights - only responsibilities. Rights are a delusion, and often a dangerous delusion at that; in a social context, only responsibilities are real, whilst purported ‘rights’ are often (mostly?) used as a means to avoid those responsibilities, or to foist them on to someone else either in the present or elsewhen. A Bill of Rights sounds like a great idea, but the self-centredness that arises from it will destroy any society that uses ‘rights’ rather than responsibilities as its core foundation-stone. The evidence for this fact is clear everywhere, but is not likely to be popular anywhere - especially in the US.
• There is a great deal of truth in the old anarchist slogan “all property is theft”, because our society’s core model of property is based on ‘right’ of exclusion. Private possession of property, we are told, is an inalienable right. Yet responsibilities are real, ‘rights’ are not; a responsibility-based model of property - characteristic of most ‘traditional’ societies - is viable, whereas a ‘rights’-based (possession-based) model is not. Once again, the evidence for this fact is clear everywhere, but there’s a sizeable amount of effort being put into ignoring it.
• In the long term, a possession-based economy is not and cannot be sustainable. The only way a possession-based economy can be made to appear to work is to run it as a pyramid-game - hence our culture’s obsession with supposedly-infinite ‘growth’, and hence also bizarre distortions such as the notion that an ‘economy’ depends on people indulging in uneconomic behaviour. Hence sustainability will not be possible without changing the entire economic model on which the dominant culture has operated for the past five thousand years or so. Once again, the evidence for this fact all too obvious, yet this also is not likely to be a popular idea - especially in present-day business, which for the most part believes that it depends on propping up the delusion that the current ‘economy’ actually works.
• Another, perhaps even less palatable fact: women are violent - just like men. To be more precise, the blunt fact is that not only are women violent, but the scale and severity of their violence matches or even exceeds the violence of men. (And yes, I do include the evils of war and the like in that statement.) It is easy to pretend that women are not violent - and indeed, vast swathes of law, and the entire ‘women’s rights’ industry, are founded on the arbitrary and ultimately indefensible assertion that every flaw in the world is the exclusive fault of men. But the moment we understand what violence actually is, in (dys-)functional terms, and look at the issues systemically, rather than through ‘convenient’ blame-based selective snapshots whose primary purpose is the evasion of women’s personal responsibilities for their own actions and behaviours, the evidence for that fact is all too clear: as a society, we do a great deal of work to reduce (and punish) men’s violence, yet instead to exacerbate (and condone) women’s violence, requiring men alone to sort out the resultant mess. It will not be possible to resolve key societal problems such as domestic violence until we face up to the fact and the sheer scale of women’s violence, reject the wildly-unequal so-called ‘equal’ ‘rights’ for women embedded in so much current law and custom, and instead require equal responsibilities from women as much as from men. And yep, I’m well aware just how unpopular that fact will be, too: but it is fact, and the longer we evade that fact, the more long-term harm will be done to our society.

Plenty more home-truths where those came from, but I’ll be unpopular enough as it is just from those few points above… <wrygrin> Hence, yes, not surprising that I don’t get much support for what I do. <alsowrygrin> And hence, yes, no real surprise at the isolation.

My apologies if any of the above upsets you: but that’s who I am; that’s what I do; that’s my work, my life, and I don’t have much choice about that. I don’t have any choice about what I see, what I feel, though I do have choice and responsibilities in what I do with what I see and feel. Simplest to be open and honest about it: if others don’t like it, well, I just have to live with that fact too. And complain about it from time to time - not that it makes any difference!

Oh well.

Yet another month, yet another enterprise-architecture conference that I need to go to and can’t possibly afford; and yet another month gone by without the slightest hint of any paid work. (Fully half the speakers at that conference are people I know personally, or at least are direct colleagues I work with online; I even helped one of the speakers to write his conference proposal a few months back. The difference between us is that they are all paid to be there, and are in very high-paid work; whereas I’m neither, even though I’m frequently acknowledged as one of the thought-leaders for the entire profession. So once again I’m in effect being asked to pay to sort out others’ thinking, so that they can go on to sell that thinking at their very high consultancy rates: the usual joys of living too far out on the ‘bleeding edge’, but I have no idea what else to do… and at least these days I do get some respect, though respect alone don’t pay no bills… )

What is the point in doing any of this? After a brief upward blip last month, book sales have again slumped down, to half what they were last month, which means that after almost two years flat-out work I’m yet again still giving away far more than I sell, for no visible result; even the free downloads from the website have plummeted to the point where there’s been no download at all for the last three days. And the sense of success after the TOGAF conference last month has faded away to nothing: the only real change I can see in ‘the trade’ is that the TOGAF types think they’re doing something new by trying to shoehorn the whole of the business world into the minute subset represented by the scope of TOGAF9, rather than TOGAF 8, and only occasionally wondering why it still doesn’t work. The quality of analysis is so pathetic that I even came across one guy who placed ‘Goal’ and ‘Location’ in the same column of his metamodel - in other words, insists that a business decision and a physical building are identical, because they’re both ‘imaginary’ from an IT-centric perspective…

I haven’t seen incompetence on this scale since the bad old days of the domestic-violence ‘industry’… yet it’s all too obvious now that it’s entrenched and endemic throughout the whole ‘enterprise’-architecture field. So who the heck do I think I’m kidding when I say I believe I can do something useful here? Or anywhere? Seems no-one’s even interested in finding ways to sort out the mess: they’re either playing counting-angels-on-a-pinhead games, or too busy chasing imaginary money or whatever. In the meantime, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket: but no-one’s doing anything about it. They’re waiting around for someone else to fix it - some idiot like me, who then gets stomped on in the rush to claim the credit.

All of which is getting me down: seriously down. Again. It’s been a very long time since I had anything to actually live for (though fortunately also quite a long time since I had anything to ‘not-live’ for…); I’ve managed to keep going only by inventing the hope that what I do makes some tiny useful difference in the world, but it’s increasingly difficult to keep up the optimism in the face of so many weeks and months and years of unrelenting reassertions of utter failure.

Looks like I’ve once again been trying to change an entire industry - probably the entire world - and trying to do it all on my own because I don’t have a clue how do otherwise. Not surprising I burn out, really. I talk about the need for collaboration, but I’m not good at it myself: having been trashed so often, and been the Outsider so long and in so many different senses, I literally don’t know how. Right now I’ve been struggling to get my head around metamodels and toolset design and, inevitably, the vast complexity of what would in effect be a major software development to implement, simply because none of the existing toolsets even come close to what we need for enterprise architecture, and we won’t be able to get EA working unless there is a toolset that supports it. Which, yes, is an obvious candidate for collaboration. But it’s become painfully clear that I can’t explain myself well enough for others to understand it; I can see it clearly enough, but it’s all too big, too complex to put into words. It’s obvious I can’t do it without support - in fact obvious I can’t keep going in any sense without support - but seems I know no way to garner that support other than through a kind of angry expostulation, which soon drives away what little support I do have (if I don’t run away first, which also happens all too often). Hence failure, again… and again… and again…

So is it time to just give up, and forget the whole thing? Add enterprise-architecture to that towering, teetering pile of utter failures that define my so-called life? Limp back off ‘home’ to Australia or whatever and try to pretend that… well, what? Find something else to fail at? One of my Twitter correspondents repeated that all-too-accurate, all-too-painful quote on his ‘Thoreau Page’ the other day: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them”. Much of my time and work is about helping others find their own song, and I know I’m quite good at doing so; but whilst it may be that there’s space in my life for the songs of everyone else, it seems that there’s no room in it for mine. What is my own song? - I have no idea. After almost sixty years, I still have no idea - unless it is solely a song of failure, time after time, hour after hour, day after day, a song that hurts almost too much to bear, yet seems to be the only one I know. I’ve shown so many, many others how to sing their duets, harmonies, orchestral choirs; yet no space, it seems, for any of those in my own life - just a cracked, broken, mumbled solo in an empty, broken desert of my own creation. A ‘life of quiet desperation’ that can include space for everyone but me: “My life without me”, to quote another old film-title…

So yeah, frustrated, disillusioned, down. More than just a bit. Oh well.

It’s both saddening and sobering to reach the age where close friends and colleagues start appearing in the Obituary columns in the national newspapers…

A couple of years ago it was Mike Mepham, who worked with me for some years in the Wordsmiths days, back in the mid-1980s, and went on to fame amongst puzzle-fans as the person who brought the Sudoku craze to Britain. This time it’s a perhaps more famous friend, John Michell (see the obituary in the London newspaper The Independent).

The rather gushing obituary concentrates on his writings, and indeed it was his The View Over Atlantis - the ‘rather peculiar book’ that my parents brought home from a Bristol bookshop in 1969 - that really started me on my own earth-mysteries researches, building on previous schooldays-experiments with Tom Lethbridge’s work on dowsing. I’ll admit, though, that I found almost all his later work impenetrable to the point of incredulity - with the exception of a brilliantly acerbic little poem written in the aftermath of the unprovoked assault by police (the Battle of the Beanfield) at Stonehenge in 1985:

…but here’s the subtle dodge:
Stonehenge has now been proved to be / an old Masonic Lodge
…[so] they’re not just simple coppers / spoiling other people’s fun
they’re members of the Brotherhood / out worshipping the sun

But to me it wasn’t the writings that that meant so much: it was the man. One who saw the world through rose-tinted glasses - literally so. A cultured Etonian voice; a sculptured, elf-like face; a bird-like manner, quick, sharp, like a heron; an intense scholar’s intelligence balanced by bright wit and a warm, genuine inclusiveness - I was stunned when, at a book-launch of mine a few years back, he told me that he regarded me as one of his peers, because to me he had no real equal either then or now. An eccentric in the best sense of that term: one who stands aside from the usual centre, and applies that leverage to change the world.

I last met him a year ago, at the Megalithomania gathering in Glastonbury. (Reading the Megalithomania site, I’ve just realised I’m a bit late in this - John died almost a month ago, 24th April. His obit was in The Independent only yesterday, though, and that was the first I’d heard of it.) He’d always looked older than his age - back in the 60s and 70s he looked to be in his sixties at least, though I now realise he must then only have been in his mid-forties - but he was definitely looking old by then, yet still active, engaging, aware, alert to all the subtle nuances of ideas.

Yes, and a real ‘character’ too. The obit coyly states that he “joined the civil service as a Russian interpreter”, but it was more likely the intelligence-service, either MI5 or MI6: in other words, he was, bluntly, a spy - part of the same Cambridge clique that produced the double-agent Kim Philby. Yet though he may have come from the Establishment, he was certainly not of it: there is a happily apocryphal tale of him in one of his post-Cold War visits to Moscow, chatting to the security-guards at Vnukovno airport whilst rolling up a joint literally under their noses, lighting up and waving to them as he wandered out of the door surrounded by a cloud of that so-characteristic aroma. It undoubtedly never occurred to him to be concerned about its extreme illegality, and they probably never had a chance to notice: like the best of anarchists, he harmed no-one, yet he made up his own rules everywhere he went.

Oddly, I know almost nothing about his earlier life beyond his writings and research. The Independent obituary mentions his time at university and in the Royal Navy, but no mention of parents or childhood. In a very literal sense, he seems to have come from nowhere: it certainly felt like that when, as an awed, angst-ridden eighteen-year-old, I first met him in Glastonbury almost forty years ago.

Yet there’s a quote from him in the Independent obit that seems to sum up almost perfectly his life and his work:

The important discoveries about the past have been made not so much through the present refined techniques of treasure-hunting and grave-robbery, but through the intuition of those whose faith in poetry led them to scientific truth.

Life as poetry: that was John Michell. Like so many others, my own life has been enriched by his gifts and his presence: so my thanks, and fare you well.

Yikes! Talk about misinterpreted in a sound-bite…

(Before I go any further, a note to all in the TOGAF training/education community: from what you’ve read elsewhere, you may at present believe that I’ve been attacking you personally. As you’ll see below, this is not the case - so please accept my apologies for others’ interpretations of what I wrote. Do read on - and thank you.)

There are a few Tweets going round that suggests I’m attacking TOGAF (again), this time by suggesting that TOGAF training is worse than useless:

harsh deduction by @tetradian: TOGAF certification almost an indication that one is NOT capable of doing #EA

“… close to … a TOGAF certification is an indication that someone is not capable of doing enterprise architecture.” http://bit.ly/uZDZd

I’ll admit my original post summarising the London TOGAF conference last month does indeed include that latter quoted text. But it’s quoted way out of context: so please, do read the whole post before you jump to that conclusion! - because it isn’t what I’m saying at all.

First, it’s not my own ‘deduction’: it’s a near-verbatim report from a broader discussion at the TOGAF conference. From the certification perspective, four key themes came up from the conference, all from leading members of the TOGAF community:

• the reference-architectures (Part VI of the TOGAF spec: ‘Technical Reference Model’ and ‘Integrated Information Infrastructure Reference Model’) are way out of date, and at the least need a complete overhaul, if not dumped altogether [that was from the Open Group’s lead Allen Brown, in one of the plenary sessions]
• “almost no-one” uses the ADM in the form described in the TOGAF specification [in my last post I said I thought that was one of the guys from Deloitte, but my notes indicate it was Mike Lambert from Architecting the Enterprise, one of the lead TOGAF training groups]
• enterprise architecture is much broader than IT, and must now encompass the whole of the enterprise [that theme came up at least a dozen times, in plenary sessions and elsewhere]
• enterprise architecture needs to be understood as a professional discipline, comparable to other professional disciplines such as medicine and building-architecture [again, many people, but particularly Len Fehskens, Open Group VP on Skills and Capabilities]

These are all points that, yes, I have personally pushed hard over the past few years: but you can see from the above that it’s not just me that’s saying it - it’s being echoed now right from the centre of the TOGAF community itself. (Just this once, I’m not ‘the Outsider’ here! <wrygrin>)

So, to the problem of certification. The key point is that certification alone is not an indication of professional competence. Back in my aero-engineering days, it was common knowledge that newly-graduated engineers were a potentially lethal danger to everyone in the place: they knew just enough to think that they knew what they were doing, with that arrogant certainty of the newly-qualified, but had no idea of how to work with the subtle complexities and constraints of the real world of engineering. For example, they would specify components that couldn’t actually be made, or assemblies that could be made but couldn’t physically be assembled. Even for the best, it usually took a year or two at least “to learn how to make my mathematics sufficiently imprecise to be usable”, as one of them put it. Crucially, there were a few who never learnt that lesson, and instead clung on to their certification as ‘proof’ that they were competent - which in practice more proved that they were not competent to be let loose on a real aircraft. Or, in this context, a real enterprise.

On its own - and again I’ll emphasise, on its own - an enterprise architecture certification does not and cannot indicate competence: it needs to be balanced by real-world practice. For which, again, crucially, this profession at present has no means to monitor or measure.

Next, look at what’s actually covered in the existing TOGAF certification: it’s primarily about the ’standard’ ADM and the reference-models - which are no longer used in that form in practice. And - as also indicated in those themes from the conference - real enterprise architecture is much, much broader than IT: yet everything in the existing certification is centred on IT. So anyone who does slavishly follow the ’standard’ will be almost guaranteed to create an architecture that might at first seem ‘efficient’, but will be so outdated, so IT-centric and so far off the real mark that it will at best be useless, and possibly much worse than that.

What the old TOGAF 8 certification exam did not cover was how to adapt the ADM to the enterprise, or how to create reference models and use them for compliance-monitoring and risk-management - which is what is actually most needed in those stages of architecture that the TOGAF spec aims to cover. And there’s no way that any of that kind of context-dependent knowledge could be assessed in a simplistic multiple-choice exam such as is still used for TOGAF certification. As I mentioned in the previous post, I nearly failed my TOGAF exam because in many parts of the test, none of the options shown on the screen actually matched what I knew from experience works in practice, and the nearest available guess turned out to be ‘wrong’ according to the specification in the book. Conversations at the conference made it clear that I was far from alone in that experience: in effect, anyone who presents a high score in their TOGAF certification may have the book-knowledge but know nothing about the practice, whereas many will score low because they are competent in practice. So as it stands, the TOGAF certification not only tells us nothing about professional competence, but can be actively misleading: a high score may well indicate that someone is not competent to do the work, whereas a low score indicates either high competence or complete failure, with no apparent means to distinguish between those two extremes.

All of which adds up to a serious problem.

It does not, however, mean that TOGAF training is wrong. Quite the opposite: many of the trainers I talked with at the conference made it clear that their training-courses emphasise the importance of adaptation of the ADM, development and use of reference-models, and all the other skills needed to assess and adapt to the enterprise context, and how to extend EA beyond the IT domain itself. To develop those professional skills, we’re likely to need more training, not less; and much of that training needs to be context-specific, too. The catch is that almost none of this material is in the current TOGAF specification, and none at all is assessed in the current TOGAF certification. So yes, whilst to my mind the TOGAF specification is still annoyingly limited and limiting, that’s not the real problem in this case. The point here is that, as it stands, the TOGAF certification is not only meaningless but actively misleading: and right now that is a real, genuine, active, in-your-face, fundamental problem for the profession.

This is a problem that’s being addressed: as I said in the previous post, Len Fehskens is specifically tasked with this on behalf of the Open Group, and others are tackling it in other ways with other groups. But we must first acknowledge that it is a real problem, and one that won’t go away simply by ignoring it, which is all that had been happening to date. So, yes, whilst it’s an uncomfortable fact to face, one of the key signs that the EA profession is maturing as a profession is that it is now willing to face up to such uncomfortable facts.

‘Bad’ news that’s good news all round, in fact.

My colleague Shawn Callahan from Australian business-knowledge consultancy Anecdote kindly posted a link via Twitter to the ‘Girleffect.org’ website

Just rewatching http://girleffect.org to remind myself how to use mystery to setup a presentation

As he says in the post, the site-design is a very good illustration of how to build a story to present an idea. But unfortunately I also looked at the content of the site - and found myself quietly roiling in irritation. Oh no, not again…

Looking at it with a business-anarchist’s eye, I suppose I have to applaud its disruptive intent. But it’s what I would call “kiddies’ anarchy” rather than a true responsibility-based anarchy: the catch is that, as usual, it hasn’t been thought-through properly, and what they’re promoting as ‘the right solution’ will almost certainly cause more harm than good in the longer term.

For a start, it displays the usual rampant sexism of Western culture - best summarised by one of the old feminist slogans, “men are the problem, women are the solution”. In this case, it’s “girls are the solution”, but it comes to much the same in the end - there’s no mention of males at all anywhere in it other than one fleeting, quickly-removed reference to ‘husband’, in the same context as ‘cow’. The underlying model is a straightforward win/lose - we don’t actually have to do much to make things better for girls, all we have to do is shut the boys out of everything and it’ll magically all come out right because ‘girls are the solution’. The real end-result is that the boys, having been shut out of the society, will go off and create their own - which, yes, may well be rampantly misogynistic, and which would be no surprise at all given the way boys are treated. The only way that works is a win/win - everything else guarantees that everyone loses in the longer-term. And I must admit I find it so frustrating that would-be activists like the promoters of ‘girleffect’ still do not grasp that basic fact. Hence one reason for “oh no, not again…”.

The other is probably more subtle: the ’solution’ is that putting a girl in a school uniform somehow magically leads to that girl receiving a cow which she will then somehow transform equally magically into a whole herd, which she will sell for dollars, and she will become a rich businesswoman, which will be wonderful for everyone. There’s no grasp of even basic economics; no grasp of basic environmental issues; no grasp of where this will fit into the societal context; nothing. Just magic. What it would really do - unless there’s a full socially-grounded structure such as Grameen behind it - would simply entrap the by-now-woman into the wage-culture - in other words, yet another owned not-quite-slave of globalised business, whilst tangling everyone else around her into the same mess, and almost certainly lead to a medium- to longer-term ‘tragedy of the commons’. Oh no not again…

Feminists in Asian countries especially have routinely expressed their annoyance at what they describe as Western-feminists’ ’smug cultural-imperialist intrusions’ into their own much more complex societal contexts: judging from the content of the girleffect’ website, they certainly have a point.

Nice idea; nice sentiment and all that (if it wasn’t so damned sexist); but overall, I just wish these blasted people would think for once…

Bah.

I’m now on Twitter, if that might be of interest to anyone.

Still in catch-up mode after a very useful (and pleasant) trip over to the Netherlands, to see Bas van Gils, Erik Proper at Capgemini Utrecht, and Jos van Oosten of Q-Tips NL. Bas is characteristic of a new generation of enterprise architects, with a strong background in strategy and formal ontology; Erik is a key player in NAF, the Netherlands Architecture Forum; Jos has been working with the Netherlands police and others on architecture for a fair few years now, and is a leading light in the SqEME process-modelling standard. Both Erik and Jos are also active in the Open Group, with Jos currently the lead (I think?) in their Business Architecture Working Group.

‘Twas a great couple of days: Utrecht was lovely in the spring, bicycles everywhere; Amsterdam perhaps a bit too sleazy and tawdry for my taste (compared to Utrecht, anyway), and mostly forgettable apart from some seriously dangerous bookshops. A country where the public transport was not only easy and everywhere and cheap (compared to Britain) but was uncrowded and fast and actually worked (again unlike Britain… ). Nice.

I’ll have to go there again sometime - preferably when I do actually have the time and the mindspace to play tourist for once!

Thanks again, folks - all much appreciated. See you again soon, I hope.

For some while now I’ve been using the term ‘business anarchist‘ to describe what I do in the business-architecture context - and yes, it is a sort-of joke, of course, but there’s also something very real behind it.

Real anarchy isn’t the kiddies’ concept of “all property must be liberated - but don’t you dare touch my stuff!” that I used to see so often amongst self-style ‘anarchists’ in my student days, rather too many decades ago. Functional anarchy isn’t easy at all - in fact it’s actually the most difficult of all political forms, because to make it work, it requires a relentless discipline of responsibility and self-responsibility. No rules: just a ceaseless demand to be aware of what’s happening, of the needs and constraints, in this moment, in the far past, in the far future, all of the times colliding together, and to respond accordingly. Hence, yes, definitely of interest in a business context, because that kind of proactive awareness is what we need most for an agile, responsive enterprise.

A few businesses have gone partway down this path already: see, for example, the post “The Business Anarchist Is The New Entrepreneur”, on the Bloginization weblog, which references two well-known food-retail chains on the US, John Mackey’s Whole Foods and Tod Murphy’s Farmer’s Diner:

…both share one thing in common as managers: they have disregarded and rejected the norms surrounding their respective industries and have forged new paths to reshape the food industry, arguably much like an anarchist does with a governing system.

But perhaps a better example of such an organisation is one that, technically at least, has been run on strict anarchist lines for almost four centuries: the Quakers (or, to give them their proper title, the Religious Society of Friends). There are clear, explicit guidelines, but no actual rules; clear principles for leadership, yet no formal leaders; no vote, and no majority rule - in fact the exact opposite, the dissenting voice has a near-priority in any debate. And probably the guiding principle is that of personal responsibility - which is perhaps why they’ve long had an influence in social issues and social reform far beyond their mere numerical strength. (And not without risk, either: the question asked each year at the worldwide Annual Meeting, “How many Friends have died in prison this year for their faith?” has never yet had the answer “None”…)

The business impact and importance of responsibility and self-responsibility is something I’ve already explored in some of my enterprise-architecture books, such as Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems and SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness. But it might well be worth linking it more strongly to anarchist concepts, whether formal or not-so-formal (such as one of my favourite science-fiction novels, Ursula le Guin’s masterful The Dispossessed), and then bridging back to the business context.

So yes, it does seem that the idea of ‘the business anarchist’ could have some real value. I’m in the middle of working on yet another enterprise architecture book right now - provisional title Doing Enterprise Architecture: process and practice in the real enterprise, about which more shortly in another post - so I don’t have time right now to play with that idea in more detail: but feels like it’s something that would indeed make yet another book (yep, another one… ), and perhaps quite an important one, too. Watch This Space in the coming months, perhaps?

I moved back to Britain a bit more than a couple of years ago; prior to that I’d spent almost the whole of the previous twenty years in southern Victoria, first in Melbourne, then at a more country location in Drummond, about sixty miles north-west of the city. So you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve been watching the bushfire news very closely indeed - for example, the excellent summary and multimedia presentation from Melbourne’s newspaper The Age.

Most of the attention, correctly, has been on the beautiful forested areas north and east of Melbourne - towns I knew well, like Marysville, St Andrews, Kinglake, where so many have died. Closer to my old home, there have been lethal fires at Bendigo and Redesdale; closer still, several houses destroyed at Drummond, barely a mile or two away, though thankfully without loss of life. But it’s been bizarrely random: other friends at Castlemaine, barely ten miles from Drummond and Redesdale, have said they haven’t even smelt a whiff of smoke. Odd.

And a colleague of a close friend at Australia Post was also one of the probably-lucky ones in the worst-hit zone: she and her family all survived relatively unscathed, but everything else is gone. She sings the praises of her Subaru Forester - the same car I still have back over there - because it somehow kept going till they arrived at the fire station, and safety, before it finally melted…

Fire is a basic fact of life in the Australian bush: the whole ecology is centred round fire, it’s why kangaroos can run so fast, and wombats and koalas can dig a burrow in one heck of a hurry. I’ve seen fires often enough in the hot dry summer, thick smoke on the horizon, or roaring in the trees in the distance - even a gorse-fire, accidentally set off by one of the local fire-crew, which roared up the hill to within a few yards of my fence-line. But it’s clear that this was something much, much worse: flames well over a hundred feet high, temperatures that had no trouble melting alloy car-wheels, fire-fronts that in some places leapt through the landscape faster than a mile a minute, pressure-fronts so severe that they could cause a house to literally explode. Lethal: no wonder people died.

“I love a sunburnt country”, runs a much-loved poem, amended some years back to the somewhat sardonic “I love an unburnt country”. Long may it be so; and for those who died, may you rest in peace, as your friends and neighbours and family start the painful process of rebuilding their lives once more.

Go well.