Tom Graves / Tetradian

An important email for me this morning, from management consultant Ray McKenzie, that’s triggered off a significant re-think on the role and label for one of the nine main cells in the Enterprise Canvas model:

While you labelled the bottom row of ‘Enterprise Canvas’ as Value, somehow as I read through the material I kept thinking ‘Governance’, not sure if this was your intent or just my imagination.

And yes, he’s right: of course it’s ‘Value-Governance’ – of course! Why on earth didn’t I see that before? I knew that ‘Management’ wasn’t right when I wrote it, but I couldn’t find the right alternative. Yet there it is, staring me right in the face: of course it’s ‘value-governance’! – in fact, given its role, at the intersection of ‘our value’ and ‘the past’, it really couldn’t be anything else. Using the term ‘value-management’ for that single cell gives it completely the wrong flavour – in fact that’s the main function of the ‘value-direction’ cell in the somewhat-external ‘guidance’ group, so it’s already covered elsewhere. Management is something that happens throughout the service, not just in one place – but it is fair enough to say that overall governance-activities for a service tend to be concentrated in one subdomain of that service, enacted via its own domain-specific roles.

Value-governance makes sense here in both directions on the Canvas’ grid. On the vertical ‘our value’ axis, ‘value-proposition’ deals mainly with what we will do (future); ‘value-creation’ is concerned with what we are doing (present); whilst ‘value-governance’ looks at what we will do, but perhaps even more at what we have done (past), to ensure that they match up correctly. And in the horizontal value-web axis, ‘value-governance’ sits on the backchannel – completions and the past – to hold the balance between what comes in as ‘value-return’ from the customer-side of transactions, and what goes out as ‘value-outlay’ on the supplier-side.

Hence duly-amended versions of the key diagrams – first, the ’service-cross’ version of the ‘brick’:

…and the ‘robot-chicken’:

Not many people use the shorthand two-letter codes for cells and flows, but these should change from VM to VG (for the cell-label), and XM to XG (for the flow-label). The XG flow now focusses primarily on matters relating to governance between the layers (rather than getting mixed up with overall management and direction, which should probably be associated more with the XD guidance-flow).

In all, this cleans up an inconsistency that had been bugging me for ages in the structure of the Canvas, but I hadn’t been able to see what was wrong or why. Hence, once again, many thanks to Ray McKenzie for this.

One of the most essential tasks in enterprise-architecture is that of enabling conversations on architectural issues, with any groups of stakeholders, anywhere across the enterprise.

Our toolsets play an important role in those conversations. The right tool used in the right way can really help the conversation, help create new shared understandings across the silos and the specifics of each distinct discipline.

But the wrong tool – or even the right tool used in the wrong way – may instead act as a real barrier against awareness and understanding. Getting the balance right is critical to creating the clarity we need – yet the requirements, and the balance, are different for every type of architecture-conversation.

We’ve long had a good range of frameworks and toolsets for IT-oriented architectures. Some were aimed more at systems-development; others more at taxonomy and ontology and metamodel-development; others again at modelling dependencies across IT systems and ‘business/IT-alignment’; and yet others at requirements-traceability, governance and project-management. Yet they all had one thing in common: their whole focus was about precision, about certainty – because that’s what system design and development really needs.

But as enterprise-architecture at last begins to break out of the IT-centric box that it’s been trapped in for the past couple of decades, we start to hit up against some real limitations of those toolsets:

• most of the underlying metamodels and model-types are still very IT-centric
• user-interfaces are usually complicated, abstract, often intolerant of error, and in some cases even downright ‘user-hostile’
• most of the tools – especially at the high-end – are too expensive for general use
• diagramming is usually abstract (‘boxes and lines’) rather than ‘real-world’ (trucks, people, machines, servers, cables etc)
• support for versioning and for tentative ‘what-if’ experiments ranges from poor to non-existent
• none of the user-interfaces are well-suited for use in real-time exploratory conversations

There’s also still no common exchange-language to transfer architecture-information between the tools that we already have – and even when we get one, we’ll need it to go wider than that, anyway. A lot wider.

When we look at how we actually work with executives or process-designers or security-architects or the like, the tools we most often use at present are a whiteboard or a sketchbook – nothing else has the flexibility that we need. None of the existing tools allow us to play ‘what-if?’ as well as we can on a whiteboard; and the precise formal rigour of model-validation is far more of a hindrance than a help in this kind of work, where half the time we don’t even know what kinds of architectural-entities are involved – the whole point is that that’s what we’re aiming to find out!

But we still need some kind of toolset-help here: images on whiteboards and sketchbooks aren’t easy to share – I’ve often seen people simply photograph the results and pass the image-files around as ‘the model’ – whilst office tools such as Visio and Powerpoint give a spurious illusion that the results have been captured with enough rigour to be re-usable (which they’re not), and are usually too slow and cumbersome for an across-the-table discussion anyway.

So here’s our challenge: develop a toolset for the ‘conversations’ end of the enterprise-architecture spectrum – one that will work on laptops and netbooks, on the new tablet and touchpad systems, and preferably right down to smartphones as well.

It needs to be able to cover any aspect of enterprise-architecture – from business-models to skills to security to process to disaster-recovery to operations to knowledge-management to applications to service-management to IT-infrastructure to building-infrastructure and anything in between.

It needs to be able to adapt itself to the needs and worldviews and language of each of those groups of stakeholders – and provide some means of translation between each group, too.

It needs to be fast, easy to use, engaging, enjoyable, preferably tactile too – yet have a fully-structured methodology and metamodel behind it.

It needs to allow freeform development of models and diagrams – yet still be capable of linking to the formal rigour of the ‘top end’ systems.

Coming the other way, it needs to help us explain the structures and reference-models that we already have in our ‘top-end’ systems – and explain the reasoning behind those models, too – whilst still keeping people actively engaged in the conversation.

And more and more, architects are beginning to recognise that spurious certainty is a real risk for the enterprise – so this also toolset needs to help our stakeholders become more comfortable with uncertainty and change.

Working with a loose consortium of colleagues – including Adrian Campbell, Kevin Smith, Milan Guenther, Nigel Green and others – we’ve done a fair bit of work on this already:

• preliminary metamodels and file-structures
• probable user-interface workflows on tablet (mouse/stylus) and touchpad (finger) interfaces
• probable user-experience interactions in multi-stakeholder conversations
• some suggested methodologies
• some key features, such as AudioNote-style synchronised voice-recording and Prezi-style zooming ‘infinite’ workspace
• support for a broad user-extensible range of model-types – potentially-unlimited, including user-defined types
• support for indefinite nesting/layering of models and model-types
• support for freeform-drawing, notes, embedding of user-selected icons and images
• support for reports that enable us to describe some or all of the enterprise as a story

There’s a lot more to do to get this even to an alpha-release state in any format or platform; and whilst all of us, in the group so far, have ‘done our time’ in software-development and the like, none of us is sufficiently available (or, in my case at least, really up to the speed or quality needed) for professional-level app-development on current systems. So we’re going to need help to make this happen.

I for one would prefer to see this as an Open Source or at least freeware/shareware type of development, so as to get this out into as general a usage as possible. (As I see it, this kind of toolset should have many other applications outside of enterprise-architecture, such as in strategy-development, tactical planning etc.) But if some commercial developer wants to take it on, that would be fine too, as long as we can keep the final end-user cost down to app-levels (perhaps $10-30 at most) rather than the three-, four-, five- or even six-digit sums we sometimes see for other toolsets.

So: over to you. Any offers of help or advice? Any other comments or suggestions?

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.

One tool to rule them all?

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?

Enabling interactive conversations on architectures

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:

• it’s not a presentation, it’s an interaction – a two-way or multiway conversation
• the interaction is kinesthetic – it involves touch (ie. handling and interacting with the device) as well as listening and seeing
• if practicable, the interaction itself should be recorded, as an annotation on the original presentation
• if practicable, it should be possible that the whole interaction can be shared

Beyond the whiteboard

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 the previous articles about context-space mapping with the Enterprise Canvas, we looked at the topmost layer, the extended-enterprise and enterprise-descriptor or vision; then the next layer down, summarising all the player in the enterprise ecosystem; and took a first high-level look at the organisation’s business model with an exploration of value-proposition and business-relationships. All of that was moving ‘top-down’ through the enterprise, so we took a brief detour to see how the same principles can be used for ‘bottom-up’ strategic review, where a re-think of existing technology can lead to a new strategy and even to a new enterprise.

We now do another sideways move, to explore how we might use a modified version of the classic Zachman framework to assess the content and activities of each entity (or service) in scope.

Read more…

So far in this series we’ve explored the key concept of the extended-enterprise, used that to summarise the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, and started to model the organisation’s value-proposition and business-relationships.

Up until this point we’ve been working top-down, starting from the most abstract layer, the ‘extended-enterprise’. But we do need to to remember that there’s no reason why we have to work only in this direction, and often many reasons why we should make use of the more freeform approach that context-space mapping will allow. And in the usual serendipitous way – via an article in IndustryWeek, ‘Assessing Product Innovation Assets: What’s in your attic?‘ – we now have a useful reminder that the vision and strategy for an organisation may also be reconstructed bottom-up.

Low-cost innovation doesn’t have to be boring or incremental. Sometimes true innovation is as easy (and inexpensive) as evaluating the technologies and capabilities you currently have and expanding them to a new industry or customer base. It is a particularly powerful product innovation strategy during an economic downturn, yet too few companies today are taking advantage of it.

[An] important message for business leaders: “Use something you already own to generate income in a whole new way.” Truly innovative and resourceful manufacturers can embrace this message by reevaluating their existing assets, intellectual property, and product lines to develop completely new streams of revenue with little investment. The assets are already in their “corporate attics.” All a company has to do is unlock the revenue-generating power of those assets.

So let’s use the examples from that article – and a couple of others – to see how this works, in terms of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas.

Read more…

So far in this series we’ve explored enterprise-vision (Enterprise Canvas row-0) and high-level business-context (row-1) in a fairly straightforward way. It’s been much the same as any other conventional ‘top-down’ strategy-development, except that we haven’t really mentioned our own organisation at all as yet. (That’s coming shortly. )

A few important points have come up in the comments to those two articles, though, which are worth reiterating here before we move on.

One is to remember why we’re doing all of this. It’s not about abstract ‘blue-sky’ thinking: it’s about building a stable platform for organisational change. In enterprise-architecture, this needs to be a platform in which all of the other architectures – business-architecture, process-architecture, skills-architecture, values-architecture, security-architecture and, oh yes, all the IT-architectures too – can all interweave and interlink and intermesh into a single unified, dynamic whole. But although we talk a lot about the extended-enterprise here – especially in these ‘higher’ layers – this isn’t actually for anyone else at all: unless someone seriously-senior decides otherwise, all of this is solely for our own organisation (or client, if we’re doing this work as external-consultants). Working this way, whatever we develop is always in the context of this broader extended-enterprise: but our own organisation (or client) becomes more and more the centre of our attention as we move down the layers. That transition of emphasis starts to happen here. In short:

In enterprise-architecture, we create an architecture about an enterprise, but for an organisation.

It’s really important to remember that point – not least because it’s the organisation, not the extended-enterprise, that’s paying our bills!

Another point that came up in the comments is that the usual nine-cell structure of the Enterprise Canvas can be a bit misleading in these upper levels. The nine-cell structure is really a kind of functional-decomposition – who’s handling what interfaces, and why. But functional-decomposition assumes or describes specific interfaces and relationships – and we haven’t even got that far yet. In row-0 and row-1 we only deal with each entity as a whole, without any internal subdivision into cells. It’s only here, in row-2, that we start to introduce the idea of relationships and roles between entities, which eventually leads us to relationships and roles within entities, which leads us in turn to that nine-cell structure. If you try to use the nine-cell structure in rows 0 or 1, or in most of the work in row-2, you may have missed the point somewhere: at those levels, it’s only about each entity as a whole.

And finally, I would hope that by now you’ll have realised that this can be a lot harder to do than it might seem at first glance. It’s so easy to fall back to organisation-centric habits, where the organisation is placed as the sole centre of everything. The blunt fact is that it isn’t that ’sole centre’ at all: in fact, the organisation only has a reason to exist if it’s placed within the context of its extended-enterprise. If we don’t understand that broader context, we would have nothing to guide us when that context changes – which, these days, can happen on a literally moment-by-moment basis. One of the keys here is that the description of that enterprise is literally emotive – it drives change. So although a lot of thinking and analysis will be needed here, ultimately it’s not a rational matter – it’s about what feels ‘right’, about identifying what is valued. This is especially true of the vision-descriptor: we need to keep exploring that context-space until we hit upon a phrase that can engender emotions and commitment that are literally strong enough to get people out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, time to move on: time to start looking at the business of the enterprise, and of the organisation itself. To summarise where we’ve gotten to so far with this example, we’d established a row-0 ‘Enterprise’:

We then started a Zachman-style row-1 ‘Context’ with a conventional market-based view of our enterprise, with our own organisation as its centre:

Which didn’t show us many options. But as we started to explore what that enterprise-vision meant in practice, and what kinds of stakeholders would be engaged in that vision, we realised that the actual enterprise was much broader than our current market:

Which should create many more strategic opportunities than we were able to see before. To make this work, though, we first need look more closely at the meaning of a common business-term: value-proposition.

Read more…

Yup, I screwed up badly over that last post on IBM’s definitely not ‘new’ Component Business Model. Within a matter of minutes I’d received a whole stream of Tweets warning me I’d been mistaken about the age of the model:

• miket0181: @tetradian IBM’s CBM isn’t new. I think it’s at least 5 years old…
• operninha: @tetradian aqui na empresa contratamos a IBM e eles usaram o CBM (“here the company hired IBM and they used the CBM”)
• seabird20: @tetradian I have seen CBM in RFPs for at least 5 years. Original work 10+ yrs. ago. Takes a while to get to rank and file though
• richardveryard: @miket0181 @tetradian … IBM’s CBM came sometime after my 2001 book on Component-Based Business http://tinyurl.com/23gelj7

So yes, I was wrong on that: badly wrong. A critique about outdatedness that would have made sense if the model had been ‘new’ just looks peevish and petty when it isn’t…

Even the critique about the structure of the model is barely fair. Sure, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model has been around since at least the mid-1970s, but the number of people who knew about it and were applying it in practice (and I actually could include myself amongst them by the mid-1990s) was and still is very small. It’s better-known these days, and its value and importance is much better-understood; but at the time the Component Business Model was devised, I would doubt that anyone in that IBM team would have even heard of it, let alone known why those kind of whole-of-system cross-checks are so crucial. The critique would definitely be valid for an equivalent model developed now, but most of the current knowledge on whole-of-enterprise impacts simply wasn’t available a decade ago. And whilst critiquing a (relatively) old model on the basis of current knowledge is valid enough, it’s only fair to do so when it’s clear when that fact of history is acknowledged – which I didn’t, because I didn’t know it was that old.

I know why I screwed up: after five years of constant struggle against IT-centrism in ‘enterprise’-architecture, I’m now seeing management-centrism promoted as an ‘improvement’, and it’s frustrating as heck… The fundamental point in all enterprise-architecture is that there is no centre – everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time. In true whole-of-enterprise architecture, making anything ‘the centre’ – IT, finance, management, processes, security, whatever, even the business-organisation itself – will guarantee failure of the architecture over the longer term. When I saw the Tweet that triggered this, I thought it was yet another example of this lethal mistake. So I over-reacted.

In my defence, I did check the IBM site with some care. But the annoying point there is that there are no dates on that part of the site – nothing to give any clue as to when the material was posted, or its probable vintage. (Compare that to, say Apple or Microsoft, where just about everything has a ‘Last Updated’ timestamp.) I looked quite hard for anything there that would give me any clue as to the date. What I didn’t do, though, was search elsewhere – and yes, that was a mistake too. So I misread the implication of the Tweet, and mistakenly assumed the model was new – after all, it still says so, several years later…

Moral(s) of the story:

• Fact-check everything, via multiple sources – not just the ‘official’ site for the respective information
• If key metadata-items such as dates are missing, fact-check elsewhere again, and treat any implied derivatives (e.g. ‘new’) as suspect
• Frustration is fine, and often all too understandable, but don’t let it rule the roost – engage doubt before pressing the ‘Send’ key…

Overall, though, the blunt fact remains that yes, I did indeed screw up there. Mea culpa…

(Another example of How To Lose Friends And Infuriate People, no doubt, but this does have to be said.)

[Update: this post was a reaction to a tweet I received yesterday, but Mike T. (@miket0181) tells me that the IBM CBM described here isn't new, in fact is apparently some years old, so my complaints on that regard are unfair. (Doesn't help that IBM don't put up any dates on their website-posts.) On that part, yes, I ought to apologise, and do - see 'How to screw up in one easy lesson...'. Yet the core critique still stands: it's not a complete model, and potentially is dangerously misleading if used as the basis for a business-architecture. That's my view for now an' I'm stickin' to it, anyways. ]

A couple of weeks back, as part of the ‘Patterns‘ section in the Enterprise Canvas series, I put up a an example of a variant of the Canvas which I said was definitely dysfunctional, all but guaranteed to be ineffective, and definitely not recommended – a kind of Taylorist-style model of the organisation and its (non-)relationship with its business-ecosystem:

I said explicitly that it was a stereotype, almost a parody – a guide as to how not to view an organisation, with quality-management and coordination subsumed into ‘management’, and rigid separation between the organisation and its broader shared-enterprise.

I was quite certain that no-one would be daft enough to try to model any real organisation in that way.

I was wrong.

Welcome to IBM’s new Component Business Model, where the organisation’s business-world is partitioned into just three layers: Direct, Control, Execute:

I’m going to have to be rude here, and describe this as a kind of ‘bastard child’ of Taylorism and TOGAF, combining many of the worst features of both and not many of their best. The one good item, and a definite improvement on TOGAF, is that the model does explicitly include People as well as Process and Technology:

Using the Component Business Model methodology, our consultants identify the basic building blocks of your business. Each building block includes the people, processes and technology needed by this component to act as a standalone entity and deliver value to your organisation.

But beyond that? – well, let’s compare it to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, which I regard as the minimum requirement for whole-of-business modelling:

• system-5, ‘policy / purpose‘ – uh… might be tucked away somewhere in IBM’s ‘Direct’?
• system-4, ‘outside / future‘ – sort-of in IBM’s ‘Direct’, but no reference to ‘outside’?
• system-3, ‘inside / now‘ – yup, right there in IBM’s ‘Control’ – lots of it
• system-3*, ‘monitor / audit‘ (including overall quality-management) – nope, not a sign of it – presumably squeezed into IBM’s ‘Control’?
• system-2, ‘coordination‘ – nope – no sign of it anywhere
• system-1, ‘operations‘ – yup, that’s IBM’s ‘Execute’ – probably…

In terms of the Enterprise Canvas model above, all it has is Staff-Management (what should be the guidance-services, but all scrunched up together in a nearly-unusable way), Line-Management (the Value-Management cell, blown up out of all proportion to its actual relevance) and, uh, Everything-Else…

In other words, there’s probably less than half of what’s needed to make sense of the organisation – but presented as if it’s the whole of it, much like TOGAF’s hopelessly-IT-centric model purports to be ‘enterprise’-architecture.

The four other worked examples are slightly better, but still dangerously incomplete: a Taylorist manager’s-eye view of the business-world, without any clue as to any of the glue-functions that hold it all together. You’ll also note that each one of those examples has a very different structure in its ‘horizontal’ axis – but no indication at all as to how it’s derived. Presumably only IBM’s own consultants could be considered competent to understand the ‘magic sauce’ needed to do this, and the rest of us mere mortals may do nothing else but bow down in awe?

What’s also irksome is that IBM have the temerity to present this as something ‘new’:

IBM’s Component Business Model is a new way of looking at your business. It represents the entire business in a simple framework that fits on a single page. It is an evolution of traditional views of a business, such as business unit, function, geographic or process.

Fact is that this is nothing ‘new’ at all: okay, it might seem new to IBM, but not to just about anyone else in ‘the trade’. We were doing it more than half a decade ago in Australia Post – certainly 2004, and probably earlier. It was only a Visio hack, but in business terms it proved straight away to be one of the most valuable artifacts from our Business Transformation team: just about every single manager in the whole organisation grabbed hold of their own copy and placed it, much annotated, above their desk. Since then I’ve done one or more of these models for just about every one of my enterprise-architecture clients: you’ll find a couple of (de-identified) examples in that VSM slidedeck referenced above, and in probably half of my other TOGAF-conference presentations over the past few years. I even published the instructions on how to build an ‘organisation-on-a-page’ map, complete with Visio templates, on my Tetradian Books website some two or three years ago. Aleks Buterman and his colleagues have had their own generic version – which they call an Enterprise Architecture Capability Map – up on their website for almost a year now. And it’s even built into some of the EA toolsets, such as Troux Metis, and, I believe, IBM’s own System Architect, and again has been so for years. So what’s ‘new’ about it? Nothing, frankly – other than the fact that IBM have finally cottoned-on to what the rest of us already knew anyway.

And I hate to think how much they charge for this ‘new’ approach… a lot, no doubt…

Sorry, folks, but I’d have to say I’m underwhelmed at all of this. Seriously underwhelmed. Oh well.

Bah.

In the previous post in this series we did a quick review of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas, and set out this into practice with a real-world example that, for me, is very close to home: rethinking my own enterprise-architecture consultancy business.

We started at the top layer, aiming to identify the core ‘enterprise’ within which I work. From exploring my own professional history, it became clear that the main focus of my work is about enterprises themselves, of any size, and always with the aim of enhancing enterprise effectiveness. From that, we ended up with an initial enterprise-descriptor – or ‘vision’ – of “creating more-effective enterprises”.

Notice, though, what’s happened right here, in that paragraph above. In trying to summarise that initial rather clunky vision-statement – ‘creating more-effective enterprises’ – we’ve accidentally hit upon a better one: ‘enhancing enterprise effectiveness’. It reads better, has a smoother flow to it, a poetry almost. It does describe what I’m passionate about – and finding that passion is central to the success of an enterprise. And ‘enhancing’ is actually a much more accurate term for what I do: I don’t often create enterprises in the sense that, say, an entrepreneur would do, but I do work to enhance their effectiveness. So note that this process is typical of what happens in context-space mapping: for example, we arrive at a ’solution’ – in this case, the initial ‘vision’-descriptor – which itself quietly dropped us back into the ’sensemaking’ space. So the trick here is to notice what’s happening, notice these little serendipitous events – and learning how to do that is a real skill in itself. To quote one of my favourite books, William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation:

If these discoveries were made by chance or accident alone, as many discoveries of this type would be made by any inexperienced scientist starting to dabble in research as by Bernard or Pasteur. The truth of the matter lies in Pasteur’s famous saying, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” It is the interpretation of the chance event which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

Anyway, that’s what we now have as the ‘row-0′ or ‘Enterprise’ layer for the Enterprise Canvas model of my own enterprise:

Now what? Very pretty and all that, but what do we do with this?

Read more…

The full Enterprise Canvas model is a complex beast, with many ideas, many layers, many ramifications and side-themes: it can perhaps seem daunting at first. Yet when we strip it right down to its bare essentials, it’s actually very simple indeed – and its real power comes from that underlying simplicity. So here’s a Really Simple Summary of the ideas behind the Enterprise Canvas:

Everything in the enterprise is a service.

The Enterprise Canvas is a generic map to describe any service, anywhere in the enterprise, together with its interdependencies and flows.

The Enterprise Canvas therefore provides a consistent means to model anything, anywhere in the enterprise.

To give a bit more detail, to make that Really Simple Summary more usable in practice:

Everything exists within one infinite ecosystem, which we might label ‘the universe’.

For practical reasons – and for sanity’s sake – we usually restrict our view to a much smaller subset of that ‘the everything’. (We do always need to remember that it actually is ‘the everything’, though.)

One useful option, especially for organisations, is to select the subset that describes that part of the ecosystem within which the organisation operates. This ‘extended-enterprise’ (or ‘enterprise’, for short) is always larger than the organisation itself, and coalesces around a single idea or descriptor, usually referred to as the ‘vision’ for the enterprise.

Within that enterprise, we assert that every entity represents a service.

Every entity delivers services, provides services, consumes other services. The ecosystem is made viable by this constant interchange of services.

This interchange occurs at every level. Everything is a service, from whole organisations to the faucet in the bathroom or a single line of program-code.

Everything is a service.

For each entity, it can be useful to divide the view into three partitions, in terms of role and relationship: the role, function and services of the entity itself; its relationships with the entities that provide the services that this entity consumes (’supplier-side’); and its relationships with the entities that consume the services that this entity provides (‘customer-side’).

For each entity, it can also be useful to divide the view into three other partitions, in terms of time: what is intended to happen (‘future’); what is actually happening (‘present’); and what has happened (‘past’).

These two sets of views are orthogonal to each other. We can therefore map this as a three-by-three matrix:

The relationships with other entities are symmetrical in the sense that every entity shares the same pattern: the only difference between ’supplier-side’ and ‘customer-side’ is the main direction of service-flow relative to the entity that is our current focus of attention.

The ‘future’-oriented relationships are essentially peer-to-peer, and bidirectional.

The ‘present’-oriented relationships are mainly about ’supply-chain’ transfer of goods and services from supplier to self, or self-to customer (i.e. left-to-right on the Canvas).

The ‘past’-oriented relationships are mainly about balancing the supply-chain transfer via a ‘backchannel’ from customer to self, and self to supplier (i.e. right-to-left on the Canvas).

We can thus describe the overall entity in terms of nine subsidiary ‘cells’ or sets of related activities:

• supplier-side/future: build and maintain relationships with potential and/or actual ’supplier’ service-provider entities, about things that need to happen in the future – supplier-relations
• supplier-side/present: receive goods and/or services from ’supplier’ entities – supplier-channels
• supplier-side/past: provide balance or compensation to ’supplier’ entities (e.g. pay for goods) – value-outlay
• self/future: identify what this entity will do and deliver, aligned to the overall enterprise purpose and values – value-proposition
• self/present: take all actions necessary to create and deliver the goods and/or services specified in the value-proposition – value-creation
• self/past: ensure the appropriate functioning of the overall entity, balancing past, present and future – value-management
• customer-side/future: build and maintain relationships with potential and/or actual ‘customer’ service-consumer entities, mainly about what should happen in the future – customer-relations
• customer-side/present: deliver goods and/or services to ‘customer’ entities – customer-channels
• customer-side/past: receive balance or compensation from ‘customer’ entities (e.g. payment for goods) – value-return

Each of these ‘cells’ delivers its own services to the entity, and could thus, recursively, be represented by and described on its own Enterprise Canvas.

Each entity may be described in terms of various layers on a spectrum between most-abstract (the enterprise as a whole) to most-concrete (the detailed-past).

Note that ultimately all boundaries are arbitrary, and in most cases exist for descriptive and/or administrative convenience only. Within the overall ecosystem, any or all of its services may be recombined and reconfigured in an infinity of alternate ways. The key criterion for success is not ‘correctness’, but effectiveness:

• efficient: optimises use of resources, minimises wastage of resources
• reliable: predictable, consistent, self-correcting, supports ’single source of truth’ etc
• elegant: clarity, simplicity, consistency, self-adapting for human factors
• appropriate: supports and optimises support for business purpose
• integrated: creates, supports and optimises synergy across all systems

Effectiveness occurs when everything supports everything else, all the way up to the enterprise vision or purpose.

The Enterprise Canvas does not attempt to describe every aspect of every service. Its role is to provide a consistent base-frame to link descriptions together into a unified whole. It would generally be used in conjunction with many other model-types, for example:

• use VPEC-T to model each of the flows to and from the entity in focus
• use modified-Zachman to model the assets, functions, locations, capabilities, events and decisions in each flow, in each cell and in the entity as a whole
• use SWOT to assess strengths, challenges, opportunities and risks in each flow, cell and entity

The Enterprise Canvas will also work well with other techniques for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and any other cross-enterprise concerns such as quality, security, safety and environment.

There’s a lot more to it than just the above, of course, but I hope this ‘really simple summary’ will give you enough to get started?