Tom Graves / Tetradian

After the sour taste of the McAfee farrago, it’s been a real pleasure to come across some solid fact and solid sense on ‘Enterprise 2.0′, from renowned usability expert Jakob Nielsen. (Thanks to Oscar Berg and others for the link.)

Nielsen’s ‘Alertbox’ post on ‘Social Networking on Intranets‘ summarises his team’s extensive research on how so-called ’social software’ is actually applied within real-world enterprises. Perhaps the most important point that comes out of that research is that McAfee’s definition of ‘Enterprise 2.0′ is either flat-out wrong, or too misleading to be usable in practice. McAfee, and, of course, all the vendors on McAfee’s ’social software’ bandwagon, assert that the tools should be the centre of all attention; but as Nielsen demonstrates, the tools are actually almost peripheral [emphasis as in the original post]:

People instinctively latch onto specifics to illustrate broad concepts. With Web 2.0 ['Enterprise 2.0' in this context], the specifics are the tools. … But in truth, social software isn’t really about the tools. It’s about what the tools let users do and the business problems the tools address.

A uniform finding across all of our case studies is that organizations are successful with social media and collaboration technologies only when the tools are designed to solve an identified business need. … Although picking the tool to support the need sounds obvious, it runs contrary to the technology fetishism that characterizes much talk about the latest Internet fads.

So, rather than saying: “[tool] X is hot on the Web, let’s get it on the intranet,” say: “We need to accomplish Y; can X help us?”

In other words, the focus must always be on the business needs and the human issues – not on the tools. (Hence the importance of business-architecture and a true ‘architecture of the enterprise’, to identify business needs and existing business capabilities.) And Nielsen also warns that:

An old lesson that holds true with social software is that a bunch of stand-alone tools will provide a disconnected user experience, causing employees to waste inordinate amounts of time moving between environments. For more than a decade, we’ve talked about the need for a unified intranet user experience, consistent design, and features organized around humans rather than technology. All still true.

The other key issue is communication within the enterprise, in the broadest sense of both those terms [again, emphasis as in the original]:

Widespread use of internal social media breaks down communication barriers. That sounds good, but it can threaten people accustomed to having a monopoly on information and communication. Ironically, corporate communications departments sometimes resist the move to broader communication. They’re better served, however, in finding ways to increase the value of new media rather than in trying to suppress it.

Corporate communications must adapt to social media’s real-time culture and become much more proactive than in the past. Procedures that required days or weeks for approvals need dramatic streamlining, or the story will run away on its own. Yet again, business and organizational change is what it’s about, not just the “2.0″ tools themselves.

Nielsen’s research also indicates that behind communication – or lack of it – lies corporate culture, hence a few interesting warnings about the dangers of ‘control’:

Before implementing intranet collaboration tools, you must consider company culture. If people are strongly committed to the “knowledge is power” tenet and don’t want to share, then sharing technologies will obviously fail.

It can be unnerving for traditionalist executives to see employees freely discussing company strategies. But loosening control of information on the intranet is a way to control a much bigger risk: that employees will spill the beans on Internet-wide social media. When people have internal media at their disposal, they’ll post their questions and comments there, as opposed to going outside.

And finally, a reminder that, perhaps unlike what happens on the Internet, changes in the corporation must be allowed to take their own time:

When you consider that successful adaptation of Enterprise 2.0 tools requires the organization to change its ways, it becomes clear why these projects don’t happen overnight. Yes, pilot implementations can go live in a matter of days, but the political and cultural changes needed for useful and widespread use take longer.

Although there’s no single answer, across our case studies, 3–5 years seems to be a common timeline for social intranet projects. This is a good time to remind you of the French general: when told that it would take a hundred years for newly planted trees to grow big, he said, “better get started now.”

If you want to know more about how ’social software’ really works in a real-world context, go read the whole post: very strongly recommended.

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.

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.