Tom Graves

Realised that the free-download reference-sheets from the Tetradian Enterprise Architecture books would be useful to have up on Slideshare as well, so have uploaded them there for more general accessibility than solely from the Tetradian Books website.

• “A framework for whole-of-enterprise architecture” - the amended-Zachman reference-sheet from Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects
  
• “A revised TOGAF ADM for whole-of-enterprise architecture development” - the amended-ADM reference-sheet from Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects
• “Power and Response-ability - a workplace ‘Manifesto’” - the PDF version of the ‘manifesto’ from the Introduction to Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems
  • (note: a Powerpoint version of the ‘manifesto’ is also available on Slideshare)

A minor glitch in that they ended up as ‘Presentations’ rather than ‘Documents’: anyone know how to fix this? There doesn’t seem to be anything about it in the rather limited online help on Slideshare itself: odd…

Hope it helps, anyways.

Another slide-deck from a fair while back (2001, in this case), but still seems relevant today. Many of its quotes reference a section in The Economist edited by Peter Drucker, about ‘the business of the future’.

[It’s in PDF format, as the ‘Notes View’ of the PowerPoint, soslides and script together.]

Still recovering from the TOGAF conference - about which I need to do a blog-report later, ‘cos some major shifts there - and still ridiculously tired from the way-too-early-start, way-too-late-finish days of the conference itself.

But a key point came up yesterday in a conversation with Erik Proper that was nominally about the enterprise architecture notation language ArchiMate. We started by talking about various themes in his ‘meta-blog‘ - “a blog about things I want to blog about” - and the conversation wandered onto Cynefin, which he hadn’t seen before. I described each of the Cynefin domains, at the end of which Erik commented that if the real world is naturally chaotic - naturally anarchic, in the science/physics sense of ‘without rules’ - then all the other modes are ways to guide our understanding of that chaos. The ‘unorder’ segment is where we start the assessment, perhaps, but in practice - at the point of contact with the real world - the ‘chaotic’ domain is where we must always end up, because everything else is just an abstraction for the purpose of ‘making sense’ of what’s going on.

If that’s so, we might note that the analytic segment of Cynefin - the ‘knowable’, complicated domain up in the top right of the frame - is in diametric opposition to the real world. It assumes that there are ‘knowable’ rules - which the real world says there aren’t - and it takes time to do its analysis - a luxury that we don’t have in the real-time interactions of the real world.

So in an enterprise-architecture that would work in the real world, would we need an anarchist counterpart to every analyst? Not just business anarchist, but functional anarchist, process anarchist, security anarchist, data anarchist, storage anarchist? And if so, what would be their work and their role within the enterprise? - keeping things real within that realm, perhaps?

Seems a useful idea to explore, anyway.

For a while now I’ve been describing myself as a ‘business anarchist‘, in part because a sizeable aspect of my work is ‘creative destruction’ of business assumptions and the like, for the purpose of clarifying the direction in which the business really wants to go. But what is an anarchist, anyway?

The literal translation is ‘one who accepts no ruler’, but it’s not quite as simple as that. There are two radically different forms, at opposite ends of a spectrum: one insists on ‘rights’ without responsibilities - what I call ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ - the other on responsibilities alone (because there are no ‘rights’ - in essence, so-called ‘rights’ are a self-centred delusion), as typified by principle-based anarchist groupings such as the Quakers.

I suppose what makes me a natural anarchist - preferably of the latter kind - is that I don’t belong. I’ve never been able to ‘belong’ to anything: a perpetual Outsider. Which, to say the least, is not a comfortable place to be, but it seems to be who I am. Oh well.

I don’t belong to any company: I’ve never been an employee, I’ve only ever been a contractor, a consultant, or an independent business ‘owner’. I don’t belong to any specific discipline, either: I’ve not so much had a career as careered. Which means that I’m good at linking across businesses and domains and skillsets - the quintessential generalist - but it again means that I never settle anywhere.

I don’t really ‘belong’ to any place, any country. I have dual citizenship, for a start (British and Australian); I’ve now lived (vaguely inhabited?) on three separate continents; and (despite that Australian anthem “I still call Australia home” etc), I’ve never felt anywhere to be ‘home’, the place where I belong.

Same with ideas and theories. I would agree strongly with Paul Feyerabend’s dictum that in science “the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is ‘anything goes’”. Like Isaac Newton (though I hope without quite his level of vituperative irascibility!) I’ve probably written and published more on ‘alternative realities‘ than I have on anything else: as a author and theorist, I’m almost certainly better known as a writer on dowsing and related subjects than I am on my current main field of the architecture of the whole enterprise. Busy adapting some of that material right now for mainstream archaeology: as with the idea of ‘Slow Science’ (and yes, I need to find out more about that), it seems they’re at last starting to grasp the importance of balancing the objective analysis with the subjective ‘experiencing’ - I have a joint paper on that coming up in the next issue of the archaeology journal Time & Mind, for example.

And same is true at a social level:I don’t belong to any defined group. I’ve been an occasional member of some society, or a cluster of people playing folk-music, perhaps, but that’s about it. After a fairly short time the internal politics and the narrow focus begin to pall: it’s time to move on. Again. Always moving on. (Might explain why I’m endlessly moving-on on mywould-be holidays, I guess: can’t seem to settle anywhere. Oh well.)

And it’s also true at a personal level. It’s a painful fact that I share almost nothing with my parental family other than accident of birth: again, I don’t feel I belong, and never have - I’ve wanted to, for as long as I can remember, but that feeling was never there. Not excluded, as such; just no way for the ‘in‘ of ‘included’. A quiet absence of connection, rather than its active rejection, I guess: a nothingness. Same also applies to the direct personal side: I have no family of my own, and despite variously-unsuccessful attempts over the decades, I’ve now lived alone for almost three-quarters of my adult life - and as I approach my sixties, I see less and less chance or, now, even hope, that that would change. In an all too literal sense, out of touch with the rest of the human race. Again, it’s not an active absence, an active rejection, as I know it is for some others: it’s more like a subtly-closed door, a fog which prevents any way through, leaving me always as the Outsider, watching from beyond. That so-accurate Welsh term hiraedd describes it so well - “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. The loneliness - an all too literal ‘aloneness’ - never really stops hurting: it does fade into the background most of the time, fortunately, but it never actually ceases to make its presence felt. Gives me a better overview than most people have, I suppose - but that’s about the only ‘advantage’ that can be said for it. Hey ho.

Anarchist by nature. It’s who I am, I guess. My apologies to all, then, for being who I am.

In another interesting thread on LinkedIn, Roderick Lim Banda suggested that one way to resolve some of the arguments about what enterprise architecture is would be to ask what it isn’t.  The discussion has gone round the houses a bit, as one might expect, but I thought my most recent addition to that thread would be worth repeating here:

One possible way to sort out this tangle is to deconstruct a single-sentence description:

• “Enterprise architecture is a business-capability that manages a body of knowledge about enterprise structure and purpose.”

It manages a body of knowledge: it’s a decision-support system, not a decision system. Decisions are the role of strategy, and in a smaller organisation the EA may do that too, but it’s not actually the core of the role.

• If it doesn’t manage an explicit body of knowledge used in organisation-wide decision-support, it’s probably not enterprise architecture

The core business role is to advise: “if you change the strategy, these are the implications on structure, this is the structure we will need; if you change the structure, these are the implications on strategy, these are the kinds of strategy this structure can support”, etc etc.

• If it doesn’t provide executive-level advice, it’s probably not enterprise architecture

It’s about the overall enterprise - the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, not just the organisation itself (which is the preserve of business-architecture). A scope any less than the whole enterprise (business-architecture, applications architecture, technology architecture), it’s domain-architecture.

• If it doesn’t have a whole-of-enterprise scope, it’s probably not enterprise architecture

It’s a body of knowledge about structure and purpose, and especially the intersections between them. If it’s only about structure, it’s primarily an operational issue, or a straightforward structural issue such as software-architecture; if it’s only about purpose, it’s strategy, without any actual attachment to the enterprise or organisation reality. In a small organisation an EA may well also cover some aspects of strategy (e.g. IT-strategy) and will often cover aspects of operational structure (especially e.g. IT-structures), but the real role is about purpose and structure.

• If it doesn’t deal with the intersection of structure and purpose, it’s probably not enterprise architecture

Hope this helps, anyway.

More ramblings on the ‘business anarchist’ theme.

The conventional ’scientific’ assumptions about business reality - as in Taylor’s classic ‘Scientific Management‘ - assume that everything is based on predictable Newtonian-style rules and laws. It’s sort-of true, up to a point, but in practice it only works in the mid-range: many of those supposed ‘absolute rules’ cease to make sense at the scale of the very small (e.g. quantum uncertainty) and the very large (e.g. emergent systems, ecosystems and ‘chaos’-mathematics). And some of the supposed ‘rules’ are just plain daft, such as the ‘rational actor’ assumption in economics (aptly nicknamed ‘the dismal science’ because so much of it is dismal as science) - by contrast, most marketing assumes a non-rational actor, which is a great deal more realistic!

One of the core tenets that we need in a functional business - and elsewhere, for that matter - is perhaps best expressed by the character Odo in Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Day Before the Revolution, with her definition of an anarchist:

“One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice”

This leads us to the key themes of what might be a business-anarchist manifesto:

• There are no rules - only values, and the principles and guidelines that devolve from them
• There are no rights - only responsibilities, including the responsibility for self, and the responsibility for mutual aid

The latter provides an interesting cross-link to the current hype about Charles Darwin and his ‘dangerous idea’ of evolution. (The real ‘dangerous idea’ was not Darwin’s notion of evolution, but the wilful misuse of those ideas by others such as Huxley and Dawkins to justify their own inanities and insanities. I sometimes wonder whether, like the apocryphal tale about Marx, Darwin might at some point have said “Personally, I’m not a Darwinist”… ). Huxley and his successors have endlessly pushed the notion that nature is necessarily and solely “red in tooth and claw”, that “survival of the fittest” means that the only natural prerogative is the “selfish gene”. The reality, as Peter Kropotkin demonstrated in his analysis of animal survival in the extreme conditions of the Siberian tundra, is that the essential driver in nature is not self-centrredness, but is actually one of mutual aid. Kropotkin is often described as one of the fathers of modern anarchist theory: but in fact, like Darwin, he was first and foremost a naturalist.

In any emergent business context, the existing rules have fallen apart; in that sense, there are no rules. What will guide us through an emergent context is a recognition that there are no rights, no ‘entitlements’; all that is real is responsibilities - the ability to choose appropriate responses. That’s what power really is: not ‘rights’, but responsibilities. “One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice - and the consequences of choice.

In response to the current chaotic collapse of so-called ‘capitalism’, we see plenty of finger-pointing, plenty of blame: yet blame is actually the least-useful response to a crisis. To quote Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, “no fight, no blame”; yet the inverse is equally true, “no blame, no fight”. We don’t have the energy or the resources now to waste on fighting: what we need is mutual awareness, mutual aid.

Right now the business world appears to collapsing into anarchy. But I’d suggest that’s not a bad outcome: anarchy is what we need right now. But we also need to be clear about what kind of anarchy is needed: not the kiddies’ self-centred ‘me-first’ pseudo-anarchy that’s got us into this mess in the first place, but the real anarchy of self-responsibility, mutual-responsibility, mutual aid.

Something to think about, anyway.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about the ‘business anarchist‘ idea, following a couple of great conversations yesterday with Bas van Gils in the Netherlands and Stuart Curley in London. Hence a few more notes:

• Every business-consultant is, in effect, a business anarchist: the whole point of their role is to break the existing rules and create something new.
• The same applies to business strategy (unless the strategy is ‘business as usual’ - though that isn’t a viable strategy anyway when “the times they are are a-changin’” ).
• Anarchy is the appropriate response in a chaotic context, but the key concern is what guides the anarchy:
  • self-centric (i.e.”the kiddies’ anarchy”) leads to dysfunctional anarchy and fragmentation
  • principle-based (i.e. anarchy in the true Quaker-style sense) leads to functional anarchy and integration
• At the exact point of action and decision, the business-context is always inherently chaotic, requiring personal responsibility in the moment - hence some level of anarchy is always impled
• In the SEMPER diagnostic, level 1 (actively dysfunctional) and level 5 (wholeness-responsibility) are both examples of anarchy - but the former is self-centric, the latter is principle-based

Definitely seems worth thinking about in more depth. More later on this, anyway.

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?

Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks back I finalised an agreement with IT Governance Ltd for on-selling my Tetradian Enterprise Architecture Series books. That includes both print editions and e-book editions (which is why I pulled the full e-book versions of those books from the Tetradian Books website and replaced them with ’sampler’ versions).

IT Governance are able to promote the books to the industry in ways that I just don’t have the skills or time to do, which leaves me free to concentrate on writing! Links are as follows:

• Real Enterprise Architecture: beyond IT to the whole enterprise: print and e-book
• SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness: print and e-book
• Power and Response-ability: the human side of system: print and e-book

I’m at last in the final stages of finishing Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects (just writing the last chapter now - hooray! ), so that’ll be available on the IT Governance site pretty much as soon as it’s done.

They’ve also commissioned me to do two small books in their Pocket Guide series - one on enterprise architecture, the other on business architecture.  Scheduled to deliver those by end of February, so will write more about those when we get closer to the time.

Moving on, anyway.

As mentioned in a previous post, I decided at the last moment to go to the TOGAF Munich enterprise-architecture conference. Kind of a wild one-day dash - up at 3:30am; 100kms there and back to Stansted; two hours each way on Ryanair to Salzburg; 300kms there and back Salzburg-Munich; back in Colchester at just before 1:00am - and not exactly cheap (a whopping £170+tax conference-fee for what was in effect just one afternoon), but I hope will be worth it in the long run. If nothing else, it was very good news to see a big shift in perspective about the nature and role of enterprise architecture, such as in these almost throwaway remarks by Len Fehskens, the Open Group’s ‘VP, Skills and Capabilities’:

The conventional wisdom is rapidly becoming that Enterprise Architecture is more than Enterprise IT Architecture.

• There’s a lot more to an enterprise than its IT; IT budgets represent about 2% of revenues.

• An increasing number of enterprise architects believe that the rest of the enterprise, often generically referred to as “the business”, should be architected as well.

To address the architectures of things outside the domain of IT, we need a concept of architecture that is not technological, and that is expressed in nontechnical language.

(Full link to Len’s talk Re-Thinking Architecture is here, but may require login.)

Considering how much so many people in ‘the trade’ (though not Len himself, I’ll hasten to add) have put me down, mocked me and a whole lot worse, for saying such things over the past few years, I’ll admit it is perhaps a little galling to see this now described as “the conventional wisdom”… But hey, the message is getting through. At last. At last.

So can now we actually get down to doing this, as a profession? Can we at last get the tool-vendors to give us some tools that will actually work for this purpose? And perhaps can those of us who’ve been stuck out there on ‘the bleeding edge’ for so damn long now get some help and support in doing so? - and perhaps, just perhaps, even some respect for the work we’ve had to do to get this profession to break out of its utterly inane IT-centric rut? :bleakwrygrin:

A slightly wary sigh of relief: hey ho. But yeah, good news. Worth the trip for that alone.