Another week, another twittering of Tweets and other connective coincidences of the … oh, whatever you want to call it. Usual categories, usual possibly-useful items, usual ‘Read more…’ link:
I fear I’ve overdone it this week – almost twice as many as usual. Still, that’s what I collected as the week’s Tweets and links, so here y’is, y’all. Usual categories, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link.
Architects are designers too. Application-architecture designs link across an array of applications, process-architects design ways to link processes together, business-architects design business-models and their linkage into the everyday practices of the organisation. That much should be obvious, I would presume.
Yet in practice – and certainly as the scope widens – more and more of our actual day-to-day work consists of creating and enabling new conversations: architectural conversations between business and IT and anyone and everyone else in the overall enterprise. The ‘one idea’ of all architecture is that things work better when they work together, with efficiency, with clarity, on purpose: and to make that happen, we need to get people to talk with each other. Simple as that, really.
One practical problem we face is that the architecture tools that we have available to us at present are not that well-suited to that purpose. For some conversations, yes – but those tend to be the most technical of the conversations. For the ordinary-yet-important conversations with everyday stakeholders, we’re not well-served at all. And as we move more and more out of the purely technical domains and towards a true ‘architecture of the enterprise’, the more that gap is going to get in our way.
What we really need is something that’s probably impossible in practice: a single tool that will cover the whole spectrum from the loose, freehand sketching and storyboarding of architectural issues and requirements, all the way through to the tight rigour and discipline that we need in specifications for real-world design and implementation.
We also need that imaginary ‘one tool’ to cover another whole spectrum of usages, from centralised repositories and very large ’scorecard/analysis’ displays through to multi-screen desktops to single-screen laptops to tablets and touchpads right down to handhelds and smartphones.
The big, expensive enterprise-architecture toolsets such as System Architect or ARIS or Troux Metis tend to sit over in one corner of the matrix between those two spectra: they embody the formal rigour of software-, system- or process-design and simulation, and they need big repositories, big servers and big displays to deliver their best performance. These are also definitely not tools that should (or even can) be used by general users – a fact I know from painful first-hand experience of the months we had to spend tidying up the mess that our business-managers made of our repository after we’d foolishly allowed them to play with it for a single week…
Then there’s the mid-range: toolsets such as Avolution or BizzDesign Architect or Sparx Enterprise Architect, or Alfabet or Essential. All of these are well suited to laptops and other larger single-screen systems, and each tend to emphasise particular themes: metamodelling with Avolution or Essential, for example, or Archimate business/IT-alignment with BizzDesign or Sparx, or IT-infrastucture configuration with Alfabet. They all have some kind of internal repository, which in turn supports some kind of diagramming; but it’s not always easy to share – especially across a whole multi-organisation enterprise. And these are still tools for specialists – not something that we can use with everyday business-folk, as I discovered the hard way when I presented a set of BPMN diagrams at an executive-meeting…
Down in the far corner, though, there’s almost nothing: no usable toolsets for idea-thrashing with ops-staff, developers, executives and all the other myriad non-specialists. Office tools such as Powerpoint and Visio are just-about-okay for documentation after the event – though they provide little to no support for architecture-rigour at all – but they’re far too slow and cumbersome for real-time discussion. So it’s no surprise that for most architects I know, their most important tools are a whiteboard and a sketchpad – and not only do those provide no linkage to formal architecture-rigour, but it’s usual not even possible to record and share the results. Which means that we have almost nothing with which we can engage people in the architecture itself – in the discipline of the architecture.
But what would such a toolset look like? What aspects of architecture-discussions could it cover?
One project that I’ve been involved in (as a member of its alpha-test team) is Alex Osterwalder’s iPad app for his Business Model Canvas framework – perhaps take a look at the videos on Alex’s post. That’s also a key reason why I developed the Enterprise Canvas concept, to extend the same basic idea to the whole-of-enterprise scope. And there’s also a swathe of iPad or smartphone apps that cover themes such as sketching or mindmapping or outlining or project-management, that do at least enable us to record in a form which can be stored and re-used later.
The real aim, though, is to get to some kind of toolset that is freeform enough to be used in live discussions, yet beneath the surface embeds at least some of the rigour needed for architecture-development. There are some great hints towards this in an article in HBR by Michael Schrage, ‘How Your Smartphone Will Transform Your Elevator Pitch‘, which are worth noting in some detail here:
… His [business-idea] was undeniably clever, but aspects of his business model weren’t clear to me. He had his elevator pitch answers down pat, but I wanted to learn more. Unprompted by me, Osman whipped out his smartphone and handed it over. I was watching a decent video clip illustrating his product’s features and functionality. I could tap to hear testimonials. I could tap to play with a simulation of the software. In a matter of moments, the device had transformed Osman from an entrepreneur I was having a conversation with to a guide and narrator of an interactive experience. My focus and attention alternated between what he said and what appeared onscreen. Sometimes he’d take, touch, and hand back the device; other times, I’d point to something onscreen and ask another question.
The object — and our interaction with it — became an intimate part of our conversation. We couldn’t have discussed either [his product] or his answers to my questions the same way without it. An idle part of me wondered how cool it would be if our conversation (and my questions) could be recorded and time-stamped along with what was appearing onscreen. Osman refused to allow his smartphone to decay into a sales tool or product pitch — although those elements were baked into the material — and instead used the device as a medium to both reinforce his conversation points and invite new questions and comments from me.
I can say without hesitation that this felt technically and interpersonally different from “laptop-on-the-table” presentations I’d experienced 1,000 times. We were standing up, drinking coffee, chatting, and taking turns holding, viewing, and manipulating this device. The kinesthetics, eye contact, questions, and interruptions revolved as much around the device as us. We would have been worse off without it.
And, further on in the article:
Elevator pitches are important. The ability to boil down the essence of your innovation into a tasty forty-second sound-bite remains essential. Only now, the pervasiveness, ubiquity, and visuality of mobile devices quantitatively and qualitatively changes the ecology of interpersonal interaction. It’s no longer about what you say and how you say it; it’s increasingly about what you hand over.
What do you hand over that transforms the conversation? What do you hand over that visually and interactively adds value to your spoken words? What do you hand over that complements and supplements your pitch? What do you hand over that invites and inspires the curiosity you want? What do you hand over that makes you more persuasive?
… “Hand-it-over” innovation pitches can be seamlessly slipped wherever your prospects desire. Indeed, an excellent measure of “hand-it-over” effectiveness is whether the person who you “hand-it-over” to actually asks you to send what they’ve been seeing and interacting with.
So let’s summarise some of the key themes there:
That’s what we need for that part of our enterprise-architecture work – a toolset that enables us to engage directly with our stakeholders. And it needs to go both ways, too: to take a model or diagram from the formal ‘big-system’ part of the toolset-spectrum and share it and discuss it; and also enable and capture discussions about requirements, about trade-offs, about different understandings and paradigms and worldviews and expectations and assumptions across all the myriad of different perspectives in the enterprise. Both ways. About anything – about any aspect of the architecture.
Which also means that we must have some kind of language to enable us to move information up and down through that spectrum, across different devices, different systems, different toolsets. (It seems very unlikely that one vendor will ever cover the whole range that we need – but the information itself must be able to move around in any form that we need, yet always anchored back to the formal rigour required by each architecture-domain.) So that’s another hurdle to cross, because no such language exists at present.
So, given all of this, how could we improve on the venerable whiteboard and sketchpad? How could or would we record that kind of interaction? And how can we support a form of diagramming that is as interactive and illustrative as a whiteboard-session, yet still enables the underlying rigour? The specialist EA toolsets may be too cumbersome for this kind of interactive use, but surely we can create something with more rigour than Powerpoint or Visio?
That’s our challenge here. Comments/suggestions, anyone?
In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides.
And don’t worry, I’ll aim to keep this one short(ish) 
[later: turns out it's another long one - sorry...] – though I’ll probably return to the theme quite a bit in subsequent posts.
The key point in the previous post was that no ‘alternative-currency’ would solve the socioeconomic problems that we currently face: the all-too-evident failures and failings of the money-economy are merely at the symptom level, and attempting to replace conventional state-issued currency with some other kind of home-grown alternative would be merely one more variant on the theme of ’shifting deckchairs on the Titanic‘.
Yet clearly we do need something that will enable us to operate the kind of global-scale exchanges that our current economic models allow – because without that, it’s obvious that the city-based cultures especially could quickly collapse into anarchy of the worst possible kind.
It might perhaps be a surprise that what I’m suggesting here as an alternative actually is anarchy – but anarchy only in a strict technical sense, and of a radically different form.
Let me explain.
In the previous post I hope I made it clear that there is no way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable. Therein lies the real economic problem: possession is a classic example of the antipattern that “for every complex problem there’s a least one clear, easily-understood wrong answer”.
Underpinning that ‘wrong answer’ is another even deeper ‘wrong answer’: the notion of rights. Possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. (In British law it’s more subtle again, in that it’s actually defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need: as the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone put it, “that “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.) But there’s a catch – a very important catch. To paraphrase Margaret Mead:
Rights are a social fiction; responsibilities are a social fact.
More to the point, it’s probable that responsibilities are the ’social fact’ – that the structure of a society is actually an emergent property that arises from the intermeshing of mutual responsibilities. A society – and hence that society’s economics – arise from those mutual responsibilities. A society’s economics represent its recognised means and controls via which its available resources are shared, exchanged and used – and those ‘means and controls’ are, in effect, defined and circumscribed by mutual responsibilities.
You might ask “So where do rights come into this?” But that’s the whole point: they don’t. Rights don’t even exist in any real sense: they’re just a convenient social fiction, useful for some circumstances – as we’ll see in a moment – but dangerously misleading in others. And economics and purported ‘rights of possession’ are a good example of where the rights-discourse is indeed dangerously misleading – as all of us are discovering right now…
Another week’s worth of Tweets and links – rather more than usual, this time. Same categories as usual, though, following the usual ‘More info…’ link:
One of the comments on the previous post on the unacknowledged risks of ’cooperative IT’ triggered off an essay-length response that really deserves its own post. So here it is.
The comment that started it off was from Ric Phillips. (I’ve trimmed it slightly, but you can see the original here.)
The innovations that led to mini-computers led to the increasing importance of information processing based on the technology’s ability to capture and model transactions (atomistic events). It really did change the nature of work and organisations and made a new kind of information available.
It wasn’t really the advent of PCs that changed things. If the information about the world that could be stored in them and used had not changed radically they would have simply replaced the niche occupied by terminals. But they allowed people to simulate sheets of paper and type writers. And spreadsheets – which were existed prior to software and were done on very large sheets of paper. Later came sound files, photographs, building designs, industrial machinery, complex electronics (like audio mixing decks) and a thousand other things that are now simulated in software.
In this wave computers became personal productivity tools. The changes to how personal productivity expressed itself in our lives when assisted by the new ‘virtual’ things PCs could provide is what changed our jobs, our professions and be extension our lives.
The internet started out as an extension of publication and communications models that already existed. But (in this case much more slowly that in previous transformations) our activity on the internet started to capture large amounts of information that previously wasn’t subject to computation – social information, information about opinions, subjective value, and what we might call (tentatively) knowledge.
There are intersecting trends (consumerisation for example). But mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on are all converging to create a new domain of information – information that allows us to model and manipulate in computers new and extremely complex things. Once again this will transform organisations. But this time maybe even whole societies.
I don’t see this as an impending disaster. Our world is changing again. As a strategic profession EAs need to get their heads around this. We are leaving the era of ‘information processing’ and ‘ICT’ and entering the era of social computing and Knowledge Technology.
Reading it again, I now realise that this critique has completely missed the point: all it’s doing is extolling the virtues of each of the transformations in technology, yet seemingly ignoring any possibility that there might also be vices associated with those virtues. Yes, each of those transformations are real and valuable to some context, and that is indeed a key driver for change. Yet the change itself is not the risk, and neither is the technology: it is the dependence on that technology that creates the risk.
So, as I put it in my response, I strongly agree that “mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on” are not in themselves an impending disaster. The same applies to their initial impact on organisations and “maybe even whole communities” – in general I see those impacts as desirable, even if certainly not something we can ‘control’.
What does worry me is what happens next. As an EA I’ve spent many months at clients tracking down all those small private-to-a-workgroup spreadsheets and databases and log-files and the like that were a) business-critical and b) unmaintained, undocumented, not backed up, inherently fragile [such as trying to use MS Access as a multi-user database, which it was never designed to do], unregistered, and in many other ways a real business risk. Whenever some key person changed jobs, or a single hard-drive failed, or a sysadmin triggered an automated application-upgrade, or any other of a myriad of seeming-trivial events, that business-unit would literally lose that part of its mind – and an entire business-process, affecting an entire cross-functional workstream, would grind to a halt until someone could work out what had gone missing and how to set up yet another kludged workaround.
When the business-application is non-critical, kludges usually don’t matter: it’s how people learn, it helps get things done, and it’s exactly what ’shadow-IT’ is for. The new mobile technologies and the like are brilliant for this – just as spreadsheets and single-user databases were (and still are). Everything’s fine as long as they’re essentially used in the same way as Lego bricks or a Meccano set or the like – a ’serious toy’ that can be used to knock out a quick prototype to test out an idea, or perhaps even to keep around as a vaguely-useful tool and talking-point. And as long as they’re used for that kind of purpose, it shouldn’t matter much when they do fail – especially if we can use that failure as a way to learn what to do differently next time. In other words, we accept failure as part of the deal – it’s ’safe-fail’.
But don’t try to use a ’serious toy’ for anything that’s business-critical. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s simply not ‘fit for purpose’: they’re not robust enough, resilient enough, agile enough, secure enough, and so on – which means that as a system we cannot set them up to ’safe-fail’ in such a context. Sure, you could use Lego to build a house (it’s been done), or Meccano to build a bridge (that’s been done, too), but the effectiveness of doing so is questionable at best, especially over the longer term.
It’s the ‘-ilities’ that usually matter most in architecture. The functional requirements for a system are usually much the same at any scope or scale, but the qualitative or so-called ‘non-functional’ requirements are what will usually make or break the system in practice. Building an IT system that can handle half a dozen strictly-sequential requests in half an hour or even half a minute is relatively trivial; building one that can handle thousands or even millions of parallel, interleaving, fragmented, potentially-incomplete requests every second is not trivial at all; and yet the functional requirements are essentially the same. That’s the difference between a ’serious-toy’ prototype, and serious engineering with serious architecture and serious service-management and support behind it.
What we have right now in mobile-computing, ubiquitous-information and cloud is a whole bunch of serious-toys desperately pretending to be more than they are, and – more worryingly – being sold and used as if they’re more than they are. Sure, the function is there – but that’s easy. It always is. Getting them beyond that ’serious toy’ stage is not easy – and because it’s hard work to get there, it hacks into the short-term profits, too, so it’s not exactly popular amongst the money-obsessed.
So we have here all the ingredients for a ‘perfect storm’: more and more of individual people’s lives and livelihoods being placed onto platforms that are inherently unstable and unsustainable, because little or none of the work to make them stable and sustainable is as yet in place or even in progress. If you’re not already seriously worried about what will happen when large chunks of our society literally lose their collective mind and memory through the failures of these kludged-together toys, you’re not thinking hard enough about the architecture of the enterprise… 
The lessons of history are plain to see, and it’s also plain to see that the level of unaddressed risk has been raised each time, with even the earliest-period risks still not fully addressed even now. You Have Been Warned?
A bit late again – got a bit distracted. Never mind, here’s another week’s-worth of Tweets and links, sorted into the usual categories, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:
Twitter-correspondent Craig Hepburn posted a Tweet this morning pointing to Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent ZDNet article, ‘CoIT: how an accidental future is becoming reality‘, about the current rise and rise of ‘consumer IT’ or ‘cooperative IT’:
It’s a story as old as the IT department: New technology arrives in the market, it makes some type of work easier to accomplish, the business asks for it, and IT reacts and delivers it. Not always however, and usually somewhat slowly. It was this way with PCs, it was this way with the Internet, and now IT is faced with what is turning out to be a veritable perfect storm of technology and social change. …
Today’s highly mobile, social cloud has set everyone’s expectations for how easy, powerful, and simple IT can be. The genie will never be put back into the bottle.
For once I’m going to stand firmly on the side of the IT-folks on this one – because no matter how wonderful this looks right now, this is not good news at all. Looking at this with a futurist’s eye, I’m wondering how long it will take before we wish we could put the genie back into the bottle… because what I’m seeing here is a full-on disaster-in-the-making. Or rather, a double disaster-in-the-making, given how much this will interact with the ongoing disaster that is ‘cloud-computing’…
One of the first lessons any futurist learns is to look back at history, to seek out any equivalent occurrences in the past. And the blunt fact is that we’ve been here before… not just once, but several times already. Each time that we came back to the same place – if perhaps from a slightly different direction – it’s clear that the fundamental lessons were not learned, in fact were wilfully ignored; and each time it took a lot of effort, a lot of skill, and a lot discipline, to tidy up the mess – just in time for the next batch of overly-excited idiots to trash the place all over again. This is the dirty end of Gartner’s ‘hype-cycle’: someone has to tidy up the mess. And yes, “it’s a story as old as the IT department”, because in every case so far, that ’someone’ has been the much-derided IT department – and also enterprise-architecture, in its broader sense, beyond IT alone.
Go back sixty years or so, to the first beginnings of mainframes and ‘big computing’. Watch the hype-cycle at work: slow adoption, then a huge take-off in ‘data-processing’ (we didn’t get round to calling it IT until quite a bit later). It will solve every business problem! Control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (COBOL, the IBM-360 architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…
Twenty years later, it’s the mini-computer boom. It will solve every business problem! Now even medium-sized businesses can control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except that it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (the C language, the Digital PDP-series architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…
Ten years later, we get the microcomputer revolution. It will solve every business problem! Now you too can control the world, right here on your desktop! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (disk-formats, file-formats, data-architectures, the IBM-PC architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…
Yup, you’ll be seeing the pattern here. The exact same sequence applied to the rise of the internet ten years later, the web five years after that (with a merry little hiatus called the Dot.Com.Bomb), the rise of cloud over the past few years, and now the rise of Hinchcliffe’s mobile IT or ‘CoIT’. In every case, there’s the same wild hype, the initial push from outside the IT-department (as ’shadow IT’) which gets the basic idea going to point where it’s usable.
(And to be fair, if that push hadn’t happened, those new developments would probably never have been usable: as Hinchcliffe implies, it’s actually quite rare that innovations arises from within the IT department itself. Because that isn’t it’s job: IT’s real job, unfortunately, is to tidy up the mess that will inevitably follow…)
In every case we see the same exuberance… then the slowly-dawning awareness that it isn’t quite as simple as that. It turns out that there’s a lot of work that’s needed in order to get standards happening – otherwise the new ‘revolution’ turns out to be something that can’t be shared, which means that the whole thing fizzles out quite quickly because we need that sharing to happen. We need clear standards for hardware, software, data-architectures, information-architectures, interchange protocols and much more besides. We need distinct disciplines around requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, quality-management, service-management and a whole swathe of other areas. And all of those, it’s now clear, need to allow for customisation, agility, security, versatility, adaptability, resilience and the like – none of which are easy to balance with conventional ‘control’-style disciplines.
So here I am, looking at the rise of Hinchcliffe’s ‘CoIT’ – particularly cloud-computing and mobile-apps. And what I’m seeing is an architectural disaster waiting to happen, if not unfolding right before our eyes:
I could go on… and on… and on… there’s no shortage of other nightmare-level architectural risk-factors that aren’t being addressed at all. Other than by the much-maligned IT-department, that is (who unfortunately tend to be able to see only the IT-related risks, which represent only a relatively small proportion of the whole); or by the few enterprise-architects who actually do think about whole-of-enterprise scope (and who are mostly derided, by the hype-merchants and their ilk, as doomsayers who’ve lost the plot). Not funny… Oh well…
Yes, it’s true that the excitement (or the oft-forlorn hope that it will finally be better this time?) is what gets people going to create new ideas; so yes, the exuberance does matter. Hence, in turn, I suppose, the hype does matter too. And safe-fail experiments are also always a good idea, because they show us where things will break but without causing much damage in the process. ‘Safe-fail’ can get quite extreme, too: for example, think of the buildings in a fireworks-factory, with very solid walls, very lightweight roofs – because when you know there’s a high risk that things can go badly wrong, you can indeed design for that fact. Yet there are also many types of structures that we can’t allow to fail: anyone who’s lived through a major earthquake or major storm-event will know that fact firsthand… Architecturally we need to be able to tell the difference between those two extremes, and design accordingly.
Yet that’s exactly what’s not happening here with cloud or CoIT: architecture of any valid kind, it seems, has all but been abandoned in the usual wild rush towards The Next Best Thing… So might it not be wise to take a brief pause for thought at this point, before we rush headlong into yet another insanely-expensive IT-disaster? Or is that too much to ask of anyone whilst the hype is in full flow?
This one starts from a Tweet by social-media guru Oscar Berg:
So easy to picture an angry boss yelling at employees around the water-cooler: “Oi! You lot – stop talking and get back to work! You’re paid to work, not socialise!”
But that tirade misses a key point: what is ‘work’ in the first place? For knowledge-work especially, what is the boundary – if any – between ‘work’ and ’socialise’? Or, for that matter, between ‘work’ and ‘play’?
Do we work at a new idea? Or do we play with it?
Since all new ideas depend on other ideas, and in practice also depend on critique from others, when is it ours alone? How and when do we ’socialise’ it? And is that ’socialising’ work, or play?
‘Social’ means ‘with people’. ‘Collaborate’ literally means ‘to work together’. By definition, collaboration is social. Preventing people from ’socialising’ in the name of getting more work done is usually an excellent way to prevent work being done: a strange behaviour for a nominal leader of work…
‘Collaborate’ means ‘to work together’. If there’s no real boundary between work and play, the exact analogue would be ‘to collude’ – ‘to play together’. Interesting, then, that ‘collude’ and ‘collusion’ often seem to have only negative connotations – kind of like ‘conspire’, which literally means ‘to breathe against’. Working together is good; playing together is bad: a strange twist of language, perhaps reflecting the dreaded Puritan hatred of pleasure, joy, creativity, laughter.
So yes, “social media would probably be easier to introduce in organisations if it was called ‘collaborative media’”. It would probably be much harder to introduce if it was called ‘collusive media’. For that matter, it might be easier if it was called ‘knowledge-exchange media’. And yet, in reality, they’re all the same: work, play, relate, learn. Just a difference in name; a word. Yet why does it make so much difference? Odd…
Just an idea to work with, anyway. Or play with. Or socialise, perhaps?
Another week’s collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories, mostly: share and enjoy?