Tom Graves / Tetradian

Guy Kewney died this morning. One of the legends of computer-journalism.

Unlike some of his colleagues such as David Tebbutt, I never knew Guy personally, so there’s really nothing I can add in that sense. Yet reading through the comments in David’s wonderful ‘Some words for Guy’ weblog, I came across a pointer to Guy’s very first column for the British computer-magazine Personal Computer World, way back in 1978. (Warning: the whole file is over 16Mb: GoogleDocs version is here.) The article is on p.14, and the last part of it seems amazingly prescient:

“Yet that potential [of the computer] is nearly ended. It was extended by the ignorance of semiconductors designers who decided to imitate computer memory with transistors, rather than looking at the whole field of computer architecture and saying ‘what have we here?’.

“What we have here is a computer which , when asked for the one faulty item in 10,000, has to check all 10,000 to see which it is. How much better to have a computer which merely says to its component parts, ‘Any faulty items report here at once.’

“The ability to give memory that processing power has existed for something like five years already. Associative processing has been largely ignored because the markets for supplying cheaper forms of Von Nuemann components were easier to satisfy – but the limitations of a sequential processor have nearly been reached.

“But not by us, the private users of computers. We are only on the edge of a revolution which will make the printing press, the telephone and the motor car look like minor items on a shopping list, as the population gets ‘on line’. And from here on, the history of computing will be the history of society, not just of calculators.”

His comment about ‘the limitations of a sequential processor have nearly been reached’ might at first seem a bit off, but I think he’s right: all that’s actually been done over the last thirty years has been to try to bypass those limitations by cramming more and more and faster and faster items with the same limits into the one unit of space and effective-time – the limitations haven’t been addressed at all. If so, then we’ve barely even started yet: the past thirty years have been a side-excursion down a wrong-turning, as usual for the wrong reasons (i.e. that it was the cheap-and-quick-and-easy option rather than the most fruitful one), and it may take us some time to get back to the main track again. Very interesting indeed…

Which brings me to another point: about how to do more than merely celebrate a great thinker’s life? Personal reflection is one side of this, yet professional reflection is something different again. The usual suggestion, especially in this context, would be to re-publish selected items from that person’s work: I know some people are already planning to do this with Guy’s writings. Yet what interests me even more is about what we do with a great person’s legacy – how would we continue that legend?

Guy used LiveJournal to document the later progress of his life; it seems to me that there would be real value in an equivalent to record new ideas that are linked to a specific person after their passing. Kind of like academic attribution, or with a blog, the same way that we would use web-links to reference an current article or tweet. Citations not for a completed idea by that person, but to acknowledge further ideas that are in part derived from or influenced by or extend the original work.

So is there some equivalent of LiveJournal that we could create for this, around which references to a specific person could coalesce? The technical side is relatively trivial – some practical problems around security, and ensuring that the work is treated with respect, but that’s about all. Conceptually it sits somewhere between LiveJournal and Wikipedia – much like Wikipedia, in fact, though with different guiding principles.

Seems an idea worth exploring, anyway –  comments or suggestions, anyone?

[And, of course, credit to Guy Kewney for triggering the idea.]

Just realised that I’m doing a whole load of posts to the LinkedIn forums – particularly Serge Thorn’s The Enterprise Architecture Network and Greg Suddreth’s Business Architecture Community – when I really ought to post them here as well.

So here was a question from Bala Somasundaram at Honeywell Technology Solutions in India:

How Enterprise Architecture can enable Business Innovation?
I understand Enterprise Architecture is best positioned to be an innovation enabler leveraging its Business-IT alignment, Technology competency and Understanding of the Business Model. Would be interested to hear from fellow members on their viewpoints/experiences.

In the hope that it’ll be useful to others here, this was my response:

The first requirement – and usually the hardest for anyone working in IT in general – is to accept that EA is only peripherally about IT, and that an IT-centric approach to EA and innovation is as likely to destroy the business as it is to enable it.

EA is, first and foremost, the architecture of the enterprise as a whole – not solely its IT. That was the painful lesson of so many failed attempts at BPR (business process reengineering) – you must start from the values, vision, functions, processes and services of the enterprise, not from IT-based ’solutions’. If you put the ’solutions’ first – as so many BPR proponents did, and as we’re now seeing with web-services and cloud-computing – you end up forcing the business to fit the ’solution’: the enterprise loses its way, forgets what it knows or even what it’s in business for, and the whole thing falters and may collapse completely. That’s definitely the wrong kind of ‘innovation’… efficient, perhaps, but not very effective…

One reason for starting EA in IT is that – particularly after repeated mergers and acquisitions – the IT landscape of an enterprise is often a complete shambles, with many incompatible legacy systems and a proliferation of small point-applications to solve local problems. In effect, there are four distinct IT-EA maturity-levels:

Level 1 (e.g. TOGAF 7): ‘horizontal’ optimisation of the IT base, cleaning up the legacy mess and moving towards ’single source of truth’ etc – any further IT-innovation will create increasingly intractable problems until this is done.

Level 2 (e.g. FEAF, TOGAF 8.1): integration with IT-related aspects of business strategy – IT-innovations are useful, but must be linked to and in response to top-down business strategy, not bottom-up ‘technology for technology’s sake’.

Level 3 (e.g. some aspects of TOGAF 9): bottom-up integration with CMDB etc for disaster-recovery planning and real-time impact-analysis, and cross-integration with service-management, quality-management etc as key sources of innovation.

Level 4 (e.g. Agile business-oriented variants of TOGAF 8.1 / 9): ’spiral-out’ analysis to resolve business ‘pain-points’ and whole-of-enterprise opportunities for innovation; because we need to address true complexity and emergence here, many solutions at this level may involve little or no IT as such, or be more strongly cultural than technical (e.g. Enterprise 2.0)

EA is the custodian of a body of knowledge about enterprise structure and purpose. It has a key role as a bridge between strategy and implementation, via a Programme Management Office or equivalent. It does need to be proactive about innovation – but that innovation may come from anywhere, not just IT, and must always be linked back to enterprise purpose.

Innovation alone is not a substitute for enterprise purpose. If there isn’t clarity about purpose, and its implications and impacts across the enterprise – one of the key roles for EA – then no amount of innovation is going to help. Use EA to help sort out that concern before pushing for any further business innovation.

Once again been brought face to face with my failings as a theorist, a writer, a publisher, in some senses even as a human being. Just had another really solid reminder that I don’t fit here, in any sense – or even in any ‘here’, it seems.

After yet another farrago for my would-be publishing, where the planned launch for the new book Disciplines of Dowsing at the British Society of Dowsers congress didn’t actually happen – everyone involved just kind of forgot, I guess – I’ve been taking stock of the actual results of my Tetradian Books venture, and together with that, the whole of the last couple of years’ work and being. Not exactly inspiring, really.

Some examples:

• Total sales at Megalithomania, back in May, where we supposedly launched the new edition of Needles of Stone: eight books (of which only four were the new book); total income, perhaps £70 at best; total cost to go there, a bit more than £300; overall loss, around £250 or so.

• Total sales at BSD congress, this weekend: eleven books retail, plus perhaps 20 wholesale; total income, perhaps £250 at best; total cost to go there, about £350; overall loss, around £100 or so.

• Total online sales of all six titles since May: 67 books; total income, somewhat under £500; total setup cost, somewhat over £1100; overall loss to date, around £650 or so.

So the effective financial result of six months’ flat-out full-time work since March, when the first title went off to press, is that I’ve wasted yet another thousand quid or thereabouts. That’s not including any of the frightening costs of living in this obscenely expensive country, either. Not exactly pension-fund material, shall we say.

In terms of impact, towards creating constructive change anywhere, all my efforts have fared just about as well as my finances. Precisely one (count ‘em – one) person in this benighted country has come close to a real understanding what I’m trying to do in enterprise architecture. If I’m lucky, the best I get from most people in ‘the trade’ is stares of blank incomprehension; if I’m less lucky – which has happened quite often here in Britain – I get a full-in-the face denigration not just of my work but myself as a person, for the unacceptable sin of ‘thinking different’. Not far off the same with most of the dowsers, and the rest of the pointless, pathetically self-obsessed ‘alternative’ scene: it’s painfully clear that most want to cling onto their delusory newage just as long as they can, and have no wish or intention to face any form of reality. Which, in turn, is equally true of the IT industry – utterly lost in their own self-important delusions, wasting everyone’s time, money and everything else, selling dreams that they know damn well they can’t deliver. Same is true, in fact, of pretty much everything else I’ve looked at professionally over the past decade – just don’t get me started on the failings and outright fraud of the domestic-violence ‘industry’, for example…

And I must admit I’m utterly sick of it all. I’ve been struggling too long, too hard, in too many areas and contexts, trying to get anyone to think, to see how ludicrously stupid so many – almost all? – of the usual approaches and models and frameworks really are, and that we really must do better, really, really urgently…

But I have to accept it ain’t going nowhere. Pretty much no-one is interested in what I do or what I say; and certainly no-one here is willing to pay for it. So in practice I’m back at being the Outsider again: as far as this society and culture and milieu is concerned, it seems, I have no societal function, no purpose, no role to play, and no place anywhere within it, in pretty much any sense of the word. Hence, unsurprisingly, no support either. And the endless loneliness out here on the Outsider edge hurts like hell: it always has, always does.

Quite where that leaves me, right now, I don’t know. Somewhere not exactly pleasant, that’s clear. Some painful choices up ahead, that’s also clear.

So yeah, a bit dispirited at present.

Oh well.