Tom Graves

Listening to a podcast with Patti Anklam on the InMagic social-knowledge website – ‘Today’s collaboration imperative: a podcast with Patti Anklam‘ – reminded me of her previous posts some months back on the ‘Three KMs’, three distinct layers of knowledge-management within the enterprise:

• Big KM is about top-down, structured and organizationally distinct “knowledge management”
• Little KM is about safe-fail experiments embedded in the organizational structure
• Personal KM is about access to tools and methods to ensure that knowledge, context, bits, fragments, thoughts, ideas are harvestable

It seems to me that much the same distinctions could usefully be applied to enterprise-architecture (EA), especially if we start from Patti’s definition of ‘knowledge-management’:

I have always defined KM as a “collection of disciplines, methods and tools embedded in an information infrastructure that supports creation and sharing of knowledge assets to achieve business goals.” The KM community within an organization is responsible for developing and constantly renewing a repertoire of KM tools and methods that are ready-to-hand to support emerging business needs. A small number of annual conferences [and other events] bring practitioners together to see and share experiences and practices and to keep raising the bar.

In effect, EA is a special category of knowledge-management: the EA community within an enterprise develops and maintains a body of knowledge about enterprise structure and purpose, and assists others in putting that knowledge to practical use, to enhance enterprise effectiveness. To do this, the EA community is responsible for developing and constantly renewing a repertoire of EA tools, methods, disciplines and skillsets that are ready-to-hand to support emerging business needs. And we use a conferences and a wide range of other real-world and online venues to see and share experiences and practices and to keep raising the bar. (The slowly-increasing awareness and acceptance of the fact that, to be effective, EA needs to be much wider in scope than just IT, is one such example of ‘raising the bar’.)

Like Big KM, Big EA is the formal representation of enterprise-architecture within the organisational structure. This is perhaps the most visible aspect of EA – indeed, what many people in IT, ‘the business’ and elsewhere would think of as ‘enterprise-architecture’. Big-EA is enterprise-wide, though as yet still usually constrained to enterprise-wide implementation and applications of IT-systems.  Big-EA is characterised by:

• formal structure – an explicit business-unit of some kind with ‘enterprise-architecture’ as or in its title
• formal roles with ‘enterprise-architect’ either as or in the job-title
• formal reporting-relationships at or to executive-level (typically the CIO, at present)
• formal business-processes and services to link architecture with implementation-design and change-management
• formal deliverables and ‘products’ of architecture effort
• use of formal frameworks such as TOGAF, FEAF and Zachman

Much like Big-KM, the services delivered by Big-EA would typically include:

• consulting to business units and business-partners on system-wide integration themes and practices methodologies, embedding architectural expertise into projects and business change-processes
• providing programme/project materials such as change-roadmaps and models
• supporting ‘top-down’ strategy, ‘bottom-up’ innovation and ‘horizontal’ whole-of-system optimisation
• architecture-content management, including publishing of models and support for online EA portals, typically via the use of large, sophisticated (and often horrendously-expensive) purpose-built ‘enterprise-architecture toolsets
• architecture advocacy and thought leadership on the application of EA enterprise structures, especially IT infrastructure applications and services
• supporting the development of  communities of practice on architectural themes
• providing learning and knowledge transfer on architecture through best practices, experiential learning practices for teams, and direct person-to-person engagement

Like Little KM, Little EA is “the quiet application of [architecture] methods to business problems in a way that just makes sense”. In effect, this is the informal collaborative practice of EA that – from sheer necessity – will always exist in some form in any enterprise, especially in the absence of any formal structures: as soon as two more projects or layers need to collaborate to each other, there’s an implied need for some kind of architecture. To paraphrase Patti Anklam, the identified need for architecture can then be mapped to appropriate EA methods, tools, or approaches; any part of an organization may apply an EA practice to design and intervention in support of an immediate opportunity or problem. To again paraphrase Patti Anklam, EA people connect ‘relentlessly‘. Since EA depends on its body of knowledge about enterprise structure and purpose, many of these methods resemble those used in Little-KM, including:

• learning before, during and after – such as the review-process in TOGAF Phase H
• support for communities of practice
• support for social-networks to link between organisational silos, projects, communities of practice etc
• knowledge-mapping, structure-mapping and interface-mapping
• knowledge-continuity and retention – the need for some kind of indexed reference-repository, even if only in paper form
• informal processes for collaboration, problem-identification and solution, and conflict-resolution, both within and beyond the organisation

Like Personal KM, Personal EA is something we all do all from time to time, and probably should all learn to get better at doing it. In essence, it comes down to the use and and implementation of a single idea: that we gain greater overall effectiveness (’efficient on purpose’, and the like) when we put in the extra effort to ensure that the various of a system work together well. So there has always been some kind of ‘architecture’ going on even in the most ‘unplanned’ of enterprises; the aim in Personal-EA is to bring those processes and ideas to the foreground, to make their use more intentional and their value more explicit.

To paraphrase Patti Anklam, Personal-EA is also about “the tools and strategies that we employ that make it easier for us to identify, locate and process knowledge” – specifically, for architecture, knowledge about the dynamic interplay of structures and purpose. The tools don’t have to be sophisticated: Visio and Powerpoint are still the most commonly-used ‘enterprise architecture’ tools, and every time we do a whiteboard-diagram or scribbled sketch of the relationships and interfaces between two or more systems, we’re doing Personal-EA. Every time we start a conversation with colleagues about how to link information or processes or ideas or systems together, we’re doing Personal-EA.

To paraphrase Steve Barth, the various EA-tools – which in practice may as simple as pen and paper – will help an project-manager, designer, architect or the like “to automate, accelerate, augment, articulate and activate the information and the ideas that he or she works with every day to perform their job”. It’s essential, though, to note Patti Anklam’s warning that “tools are only as good as the skills that exist or evolve to make the best use of them”. Steve Barth quotes a useful skills-toolkit – a set of skills for Personal-KM, which are equally important for Personal-EA:

• Accessing information and ideas: for EA, this includes sources of information about content, context and connections, and ideas on innovations and other options for the enterprise
• Evaluating information and ideas: for EA, this includes architectural review to assess quality and relevance to the current tasks
• Organizing information and ideas: for EA, this includes structuring the information for re-use, particularly in relation to a standardized descriptive framework or ‘hologram’ of the overall enterprise – “information and ideas become actionable knowledge by being internalized and integrated with what we already know and believe … to find patterns, trends and relationships”
• Analysing information and ideas: in EA, as in KM, this is much broader than analysis – it is more about ’sensemaking’ in a generic sense, using analysis, hypothesis, synthesis, telesis (”the study of design, purpose and intent”), deduction, induction, abduction and any other appropriate tools
• Conveying information and ideas: for EA, the emphasis here is on communication and sharing of architectural models, schemas and the like, either on-line or in person
• Collaboration around information and ideas: for EA, much of this too will be both in-person and on-line – and crucially, will often need to bridge across boundaries both within and beyond the organisation, to enhance and optimise overall effectiveness
• Securing information and ideas: for EA, this is not only about security from an ‘intellectual property’ perspective, but much more about ensuring that architectural information is managed, maintained, kept up-to-date, and used in appropriate ways within the enterprise.

Practical implications: Big-EA is the visible face of enterprise-architecture, but there are several serious concerns that can arise from that visibility, and from an over-focus on Big-EA itself:

• Positioning within the organisation: If Big-EA is the visible face of enterprise-architecture, it matters greatly where it’s placed within the organisation. Because EA will often have enterprise-wide impacts, it must have an enterprise-wide scope, with enterprise-wide reach and authority. At the least, it needs to report direct to the overall executive. If instead it is placed within a single domain (usually IT, reporting only to the CIO, or even not to any executive at all), its overall authority and credibility will be reduced, and the team may not have the required whole-of-enterprise awareness and expertise. Placing the EA unit (Big-EA) within a single domain will usually cause more harm than good, perhaps improving that specific domain, but damaging overall enterprise effectiveness.
• Over-emphasis on ‘control’ and architectural ‘purity’:  Given the real challenges of enterprise-architecture, there’s often a tendency for Big-EA to retreat into an over-focus on theory and ‘purity’ of models, and an over-emphasis on playing the role of ‘architecture police’, to the detriment of usable and actionable advice.  The risk here is that EA may become regarded as an academic-style ‘ivory-tower’ discipline, with little or no relevance to real-world practice, and even a hindrance to getting things done – which, in turn, may well lead to calls for closure of the EA unit. Which would not be not a good outcome.
• Over-centralisation of responsibility for architecture: The risk here is if architecture is over-professionalised, it is likely to become viewed as a Somebody Else’s Problem, the exclusive responsibility of specialist ‘enterprise architects’ rather than the responsibility of everyone in the enterprise. (Dave Snowden gives a similar warning about the dangers of over-professionalising knowledge-management, such as with the appointment of a ‘Chief Knowledge Officer’.) Professionalising architecture into Big-EA form can thus paradoxically lead to lower effectiveness and architectural integration across the enterprise.

To resolve these concerns, we need to place strong emphasis on the following points:

• Enterprise-architecture is best understood as a special-case of knowledge-management: it manages a body-of-knowledge about enterprise structure and purpose, and the application of that body of knowledge in business practice.
• The existence of any Big-EA, such as a formal ‘enterprise-architecture unit’, is merely an organisational convenience: a known place to gather together the appropriate expertise and manage the more sophisticated repositories and tools that will be needed for more advanced EA, especially in large organisations.
• Big-EA depends on Little-EA: the practices of collaboration, engagement, governance, negotiation and the like.
• Little-EA depends on Personal-EA: the idea of architecture, as a means to enhance integration and effectiveness, and the understanding awareness that architecture is everyone’s personal responsibility.

Or, to put it the other round, any Big-EA needs to support all possible forms of Little-EA; and Little-EA in turn needs to support and emphasise the importance of Personal-EA. If we ever get this the wrong way round – placing Big-EA as the centre of our attention – our architecture, and the enterprise itself, will be in trouble straight away.

Big-EA is useful; Little-EA is important; but Personal-EA is the core of all enterprise-architecture, and is the responsibility of everyone.

Simple as that, really.

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.