It’s time to rethink enterprise architecture people. Well, at least here in Microsoft IT’s Enterprise Architecture Team it is.

… For the past year or so, I’ve led a crack team of experts focused on aligning IT and the Business, and from this journey I wanted to share with you my current thinking. My team is called Enterprise Strategic Planning and it is a service team dedicated to enterprise-wide strategy and planning. Our initial goal is to become critical to the planning process with the intention of providing data to qualify an optimal set of IT Programs to invest in. … In this article I wanted to share with you something that has occurred to us during our journey and describe some changes we are making that I think is ground-breaking in the Enterprise Architecture domain.

Assuming a primary goal of EA is to align IT to the Business, the problem is that most, if not all, EA Frameworks are not equipped to actually deliver on this goal. They are limited to drawing associations from IT things … to Business things … . Some of the more mature EA teams have partnered with their finance department to apply financial modeling … to these associations to help describe business value in monetary terms and possibly start a chargeback model. These are all great accomplishments but at best they only capture how IT ‘relates’ to the Business. That is, these EA Frameworks and methods are more about IT transparency, not alignment.

I would have to admit that my first response to this would best be described as ‘unprintable’…  (The polite version of ‘unprintable’ would look at certain key phrases in the above, such as “It’s time to rethink enterprise architecture, people”, “a crack team of experts” and “Assuming a primary goal of EA is to align IT to the Business”, and thence to make extremely disparaging remarks about Microsoft, about apparent arrogance, about a supposedly innovative company being literally years behind the leading edge of enterprise-architecture, about breakthroughs that aren’t, and about the vapidity and shallowness of IT-centric assumptions… Oh well…)

My second response, after I’d had a chance to calm down a bit, was perhaps a bit more charitable, if still more than a little sarcastic: something more along the lines of “Welcome to the club, glad to see you’ve woken up at last, any chance we can actually talk about enterprise architecture?” – because to most of us who have been working at that leading edge of EA-development, this supposed ‘breakthrough’ is very old news indeed. It’s actually the understanding that existed decades ago, before IT-architects came in and hijacked the entire industry; several of my IT-oriented clients had each reached that same point independently half a decade or more ago; and even the Open Group, after we’d nagged and bullied and cajoled them for so long, finally ‘got it’ late last year, with “evolving EA from IT to business” now becoming an explicit key theme of current Open Group (TOGAF) conferences. So in terms of the overall EA industry, there’s not a single thing that’s actually new in that Microsoft ‘breakthrough’: and hearing someone call it a ‘breakthrough’ is frustrating in the extreme.

But that second response still misses the point: this actually is a breakthrough – for Microsoft. Which, because of who Microsoft are, means that it’s also a real breakthrough in another sense as well.

Yes, it’s frustrating to note that, from what appears in the article, Morgan and his group seem not to know that much about any ‘prior art’ – not even from other Microsoft EAs such as Nick Malik, who writes a very good ‘Inside Architecture‘ column at the same MSDN weblog-host, and is even listed in the links on Morgan’s weblog. Yet there is real change here: important change. Take a look, for example, at the business-architecture references that Morgan lists later in the article:

• Porter Five Forces
• Balanced Scorecard
• Business Model Canvas
• Geoffrey Moore ‘Core vs Context’

There’s no IT directly involved in any of those models (unlike, say, Ross, Weill & Robertson’s much-lauded ‘Enterprise Architecture as Strategy‘, which still takes a strongly IT-centric view of business-strategy). For someone like Microsoft, whose whole business-focus is and revolves around IT, that absence of IT-centrism is huge… definitely a real breakthrough.

I also need to remember that my own role in enterprise-architecture is very different from theirs. Morgan and his team are practitioners, dealing with the day-to-day realities of real-world architecture in a very large organisation. I’m a practitioner, too, yes, but my own work these days is mostly about setting-up architecture practices, troubleshooting, and doing practice-refresh for existing architecture groups – it’s consultancy, not mainstream production-level architecture. So although I’m a practitioner, my practice is mostly about theory, futures, creating new tools and techniques: which means that if my work isn’t well ahead of the mainstream, I wouldn’t be doing my job properly. Yet that view gives me a rather jaundiced perspective of the industry: too easy to forget that it does take years – several years at least – for the ideas and themes and concepts that we’re working on now to filter down into everyday EA practice. In short, too easy for me to become arrogant about what I see as other people’s ‘arrogance’… Oops…

Coincidentally, Gartner published their current ‘EA Hype Cycle’ this week, described in a press-release and a one-page graphic. They state that there are now two distinct generations of EA: the ‘traditional’ IT-centric one, which has now reached what Gartner term ‘the Plateau of Productivity’; and an upcoming “more business-focused” version that will help to prevent EA from falling permanently into ‘the Trough of Disillusionment’.

To me, though, these two ‘generations’ respectively represent maturity-levels 2 (“clean up the mess”) and 3 (“top-down strategy”), out of five distinct maturity-levels, as described in my book ‘Doing Enterprise Architecture‘. There are at least two more ‘generations’ to go before we reach a fully usable architecture for the enterprise; and, worryingly, far too few architecture-teams seem to have properly implemented maturity-level 1 – “what business are we in?” – which in the longer term places the entire architecture at risk. (It’s not adequately addressed in either TOGAF or FEAF: TOGAF 9 does sort-of include part of it in a kind of half-baked form in the muddled mess that it describes as ‘Business Architecture’, but that’s about it. To me, the only major framework that does cover it properly is Kevin Smith’s Pragmatic EA, which is still not as well-known as it deserves to be.) So there’s a long way still to go – and a lot of repair-and-refresh to do, too, to clean up the problems caused by the IT-centrism of the existing ‘enterprise’-architecture frameworks.

But I’m wondering just how much this article of Morgan’s should change the view that Gartner shows us. Gartner shows ‘Business-Driven Architecture’ as having only just reached ‘the Peak of Inflated Expectations’: yet the TOGAF conferences, and now Morgan’s article, seem to show it much further on, more like the start of ‘the Slope of Enlightenment’. Fact is that Microsoft is just about as mainstream as they get: so if Microsoft’s EA has now turned beyond IT-centrism to a more explicit whole-of-business focus, what it really tells us is that business-driven architecture has just gone mainstream.

It’s still not a ‘real’ enterprise-architecture as I would understand the term: but it’s a heck of a lot better than than the old IT-centrism. That is a real breakthrough – and very good news indeed.

Watch This Space, at last?

First off, many thanks, and I do acknowledge that, to quote Malik, “the fact that the EBMM is property of Microsoft is an indirect effect of the fact that I work at Microsoft”. My response is that the fact that it can even be described as ‘the property of Microsoft’ is a very good reason for posting my reply here rather than on the EBMM website: something that aims to be a shared standard should never be described as or purported to be the exclusive property of any individual or corporation, because by definition private possession indicates that it is no longer shared. That’s what standards-bodies are for: to resolve that specific dysfunctionality of the possession-economy. (This isn’t an ‘anti-Microsoft rant’, by the way – the same would apply to every ‘exclusive property of’ assertion in this context, whether by Microsoft, Oracle, the US Federal Government or Pope John Paul. The only time that ‘property of’ assertions work for standards is where the property-assertion is responsibility-based, often for the purpose of ensuring that the standard is publicly shared and adhered: Philips’ patents on the audio-cassette and the CD format are good examples of the latter – and note, too, that Philips explicitly treated several forms of would-be copy-protection as a breach of the CD format, and hence enforced the removal of the ‘CD’ logo from non-compliant products.)

Malik also comments:

Your post implies a certain lack of affinity for the “possession economy.”

Well, yes, but it’s for good business reasons: it’s off-topic for here, but to put it at its simplest, the complaint is not that the possession-economy is morally or politically ‘wrong’ or suchlike, but that it doesn’t work from a business-model perspective. It’s possible to operate a possession-economy – property as ‘right of exclusion’ – when the asset-base of the economy is solely physical and ‘alienable’: land or physical ‘things’, as in classic economics. But it falls apart when we try to apply the same business-principles to assets which, by their nature, are not amenable to the same ‘alienable’ exclusions. Ideas and information are ‘non-alienable’: if I give it to you, I still have it – which is fundamentally different from what happens with physical objects. And to use the classic Open Source slogan, “information wants to be free” – it’s not ‘free’ in the sense of cost, but in the sense that it will naturally tend to replicate itself. Hence an exclusion-based model – the possession-economy – will only work for information-assets when we can rigidly bundle them with an excludable physical item – for example, a physical object such as a printed page or a disk, for the music, or a physical location such as a theatre or cinema, for film. As soon as we drop the physicality, and shift to pure information, the possession-economy model becomes non-viable – as the music and film industries are finding to their cost, in trying to force the real world to fit their existing business model rather than adapting their business model to fit the real world. Same applies to copy-protection schemes for software: ‘digital rights management’ and other access-controls introduce vast complexities into system-designs solely to try to overcome the natural tendency of information to replicate itself. If we want to remove that redundant complexity (and cost) so as to do business with information in ‘unbundled’ form – or for that matter with other non-physical assets such as relational or aspirational assets – then we need business models that play by the respective rules for those asset-types: an exclusion-based model (the possession-economy) will only work with assets that can be excluded, which means it will only work with physical objects or physicalised ‘bundles’. (Whether the ‘possession’ metaphor works well even with physical assets is another question entirely: personally I believe it doesn’t, but that’s another topic for another time. )

For the rest of Nick’s comment, there’s several hours’-worth of explanation that I’d need to do, but I’ll select a few key themes and specific points.

“The key innovation in the EBMM is the addition of the Business Model element”

But as it stands, the definition of Business Model in the EBMM applies only to for-profit enterprises, and probably only that (relatively small) subset of for-profit enterprises which use finance as their primary or sole value-measure (i.e. those to which US stock-market rules apply). Because of those constraints, it would be incomplete, inappropriate and possibly dangerously misleading to use outside of that fairly narrow context: it would be unusable for government, for not-for-profit, for for-profit organisations in stakeholder-model rather than shareholder-model legal contexts (i.e. most of Europe), or for any for-profit organisation which either chooses or is required by law to use multi-axis value-measures such as Triple Bottom Line or Balanced Scorecard. To be usable as a true generic business-motivation model, the EBMM’s Business Model component must be extended to cover the full range of enterprises – not solely the small subset of for-profit enterprises it serves at present.

“I do define an enterprise in a different manner, as a collection of business models. I also define a company in another part of the model, leaving open the possibility that an enterprise is not the same as a company (a fact that I have observed many times, but which most metamodels have no way to reconcile).”

There is a simple response to that comment in parentheses: if you’ve observed a problem with the existing metamodels, why did you make no attempt to resolve that problem in this one? – because if you don’t, the effect is that the architectural flaw is further enshrined in architectural practice, which is not a good idea… That aside, we clearly differ in our definition of ‘enterprise’, or rather our definition of its scope. Your definition, like that in the OMG BMM, is essentially organisation-centric: the world as seen from the perspective of the organisation. From this, ‘Business Model’, in essence, is how the organisation will ‘make money’ from its milieu. In turn, ‘the enterprise’ is seen solely in terms of how it feeds into the business-model. This is easy for business-folk to understand, especially if your focus of concern is the organisation and its business, but functionally and architecturally it is the wrong way round: it’s exactly the same as the mishandling of ‘business architecture’ in TOGAF, as ‘anything not-IT that might impact on IT’. To understand how business does impact on IT, we need to understand the business in its own terms; and then separate out the interfaces with IT at the respective levels (strategic, managerial and operational) – because those interfaces will change over time and with changing technologies, whereas the business itself will not (or not change as much, anyway, especially at the strategic level). The same is true here: to understand the business milieu, we need to understand the enterprise – that milieu – in its own terms; and then explore the interfaces with the business. Otherwise strategy will be solely organisation-centric – which is a guaranteed recipe for business failure in the longer term. Key definition: the enterprise is always at least one step larger than the organisation in scope: the organisation as player within a supply-chain, for example, or within an environmental or social milieu.

“All of the other negatives that you point out are negatives that exist in the source models. I did not insert a great deal of original research in the EBMM for very important reasons: I cannot show a use case where those additions would be interesting, valuable, or correct.”

All I can say there is that I’m shocked: I can only presume that the inability to perceive use-cases for alternatives or extensions arises from IT-centrism or the like. The failure to be aware of what would seem to be obvious use-cases such as government or not-for-profit indicates a surprisingly blinkered view of the business world, surely?

“I would like to hear more about the “fatal flaw” in the definition of Vision from the OMG BMM that I incorporated. You did not provide context for that comment, but it is quite interesting and I’d like to know more.”

At face-value, the BMM definition would seem valid: “A Vision is the future state of the enterprise, without regard to how it is to be achieved. A Vision is the ultimate, possibly unattainable, state the enterprise would like to achieve.” But note the danger: the world is not static, there is no state. And ‘enterprise’ is not defined – which leads straight into the ‘fatal flaw’, which is that the resultant Vision is likely to be organisation-centric rather than milieu-centric. Hence the BMM’s examples, such as “Be the car rental brand of choice for business users in the countries in which we operate”, or “Be the low-cost healthcare provider with the best customer service”, which encapsulate all of the proven ‘don’ts’ for visioning: organisation-centric, Role as Vision, and state-based. If you make a Vision organisation-centric, you literally provide no place and no reason in which customers and other stakeholders may connect with the organisation; if you make it Role-based, you lock out any means to understand relationships with the Roles of other players in the shared enterprise (i.e. mutual partnerships and mutual values); and if you make state-based, you kill motivation stone-dead as soon as the state is achieved. Strategically, these are fatal mistakes, especially over the longer term. Compare this with, say, the use of Vision in ISO9000:2000 – there, Vision is the ultimate anchor for the quality-system, ‘beyond’ the organisation itself, and is a ‘guiding star’ rather than an achievable ‘state’.

“You also mention “social context, reputation, geography or environment” as influencers for business strategy. I find that fascinating. Note that geography is part of the Business Model area, not the influencer area. The other concepts are interesting, but I’d like to hear the traceability from those concepts to a strategic influencer or driver.”

Yes, a Business Model occurs in a geography – though that ‘geography’ may be virtual as well as physical (e.g. business on Second Life etc). But there are also plenty of examples of geography as Influencer: for example, if you’re building a very large data-centre, you’re going to need a correspondingly large volume of coolant, which suggests placement close by a river or other large water-source. If you’re running an aluminium smelter, the only way to keep the costs viable is to have a huge, constant, cheap energy-supply with good infrastructure for ore-delivery, product-shipment and waste-management: which in practice at present usually means hydroelectric power, which means mountains, but with good access via road, rail or river, yet close to the ore source – which means you have very tight geographic constraints on your business-model. Geography and social context are fundamental to business-models in the fast-food industry – go ask MacDonalds or Starbucks. And you yourself gave a good example of an environmental influencer, with children selling cold drinks in warm weather. For reputation-as-influencer, consider the practical implications of starting a US-based business right now in an Islamic state: with the US’ international reputation still rock-bottom even post-Bush, that’s a significant influencer on how to set up and run that business, or even the decision as to whether or not to run it at all, regardless of other influencers. Such Influencers can only be ignored within a very narrow subset of business contexts – such as the simpler kinds of IT-centric ‘enterprise architecture’, for example.

“Note that “Brand” would be a subtype of “Products and Services” in the Business Model portion of the EBMM. If you feel that “brand” is an important concept to capture in a model at this level, I’m happy to discuss it with you.”

Brand isn’t a product (unless you’re selling a brand in its own right, in which case someone else will have done the work to develop the brand as brand in the first place). To some extent it can be regarded as an attribute of a product; but more accurately it’s the bundling of an aspirational-asset with another asset or set of assets (physical, virtual and/or relational) as represented by the product or service. (See the framework reference-sheet at http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/12/silos-frame-ref/ for a quick summary of the distinctions between physical, virtual, relational and aspirational assets.) I note you do include ‘Products and Services’ as sub-components of your Business Model entity: assets would need to link in there. I’ll admit I’m surprised to find that BMM does not not include product or service directly within the model, but does include it indirectly in its definition of Mission, and the ‘means’ set generally: assets belong in there, and also as inputs and/or outputs for Capability. Brand-value – as perceived by the customers etc, not solely from the organisation’s perspective – is also an expression of reputation, which in turn is an Influencer; like geography, it needs to be understood as going both ways.

Better stop there: it’s clear I need to write this up in book-form or the like, but my stack is already rather too full at the moment!

Hope this helps, anyway.

A quick summary: it’s an interesting attempt to unify various other business-motivation models, but with some gaping holes that will cripple it in practice, and a really nasty little ‘gotcha’ hidden away in its ‘purports to be open source but isn’t’ licensing.

Slightly less quick summary: Malik has attempted to link together three different motivation models – the OMG / Business Rules Group’s Business Motivation Model, the ‘business architecture’ parts of the TOGAF 9 Content Metamodel, and the work of someone I’d not heard of before, a certain Dr. Osterwalder – and meld them into a unified model and metamodel of business motivation, linked back to enterprise architecture.

The good part is that “for the first time”, as he puts it, the model includes the concept of ‘business model’ – the operating-model against which value-achieved should be measured. That’s definitely useful, especially as it’s then linked into a solid and consistent underlying metamodel.

But in terms of improvement on what’s gone on before, that’s the end of the good part. The bad part is, well, just about everything else ‘new’, really. A bit unkind to say that, I know, but… ouch…

As far as enterprise architecture is concerned, he falls over at the first hurdle: literally so, because in the very first words of the ‘Introduction’ he asserts, “Enterprise Architecture is an area of IT” – which it isn’t. (If anything, IT is a minor subset of enterprise architecture – the other way round entirely.) Not helpful – and every subsequent EA-related remark goes further and further downhill from there, as he remains trapped in the IT-centric box whilst trying to describe a world far outside of those narrow confines. Which kind of invalidates it as having much use for enterprise architecture. Oh well.

The main structural flaws, though, are a bit more subtle, because they concern what isn’t in the model.

One is that he assumes that the only possible business value is finance, which makes the model usable only for a mainstream profit-only business – which shuts out government, not-for-profit, cooperatives and a whole swathe of other more sophisticated business-models. (Just how many decades is it since Balanced Scorecard was first published? – because that’s how long it is since profit-only models were formally demonstrated to be incomplete even for for-profit businesses…)

Another is that, like the OMG/BRG Business Motivation Model, it’s organisation-centric: it barely acknowledges a world outside of the organisation, hence has no real grasp of the enterprise in which the organisation exists. He acknowledges just three kinds of external ‘Influencers’:

• Business Trend
• Competition
• Regulation

The second of those would (nominally, at least) be irrelevant to a government or non-profit, and in any case one of the skills of enterprise design and motivation is to identify a niche where there is no ‘competition’ – a concept which is seemingly outside the ken of this almost archaic view of ‘business’. And other than possibly by burying them rather inadequately within ‘Business Trend’, there’s nowhere to include a wide range of other key influencers such as social context, reputation, geography or environment. (Amusingly, his one example of an ‘Influencer’ is a story about kids selling lemonade because the weather was warm – namely environment as Influencer, for which there’s no means to describe within the model.) Other than one almost throwaway reference to ‘Alliances’ in the ‘Business Model’ section of the model, there’s no way to describe shared values and commitments in a value-web such as a consortium or supply-chain. There’s also no real concept of values, or of aspirational-layer assets such as brands or morale – which are fairly fatal omissions in themselves in terms of modelling motivation within and with an organisation.

Overall, the model is probably an improvement on the TOGAF model (though that’s not hard, frankly) and on the Business Motivation Model (though he retains the latter’s fatal flaw in its definition and use of ‘Vision’), and hence could probably be useful as-is for business-architecture (especially for the IT-centric bad-joke that TOGAF calls ‘business architecture’). But as it stands, it is unusable for anything than a very narrow class of for-profit organisations; and it gives no indication at all of the broader enterprise, whilst purporting to describe all Influencers and the like – and hence would be dangerously incomplete as a tool for true enterprise architecture.

So yes, it’s a good try, but it doesn’t actually take us much further along the road than the (inadequate) tools we already have. A pity, really.

In addition to the MSDN article, Malik has presented it on its own domain – www.motivationmodel.com – with a plain-vanilla WordPress blog behind it, at http://motivationmodel.com/wp/index.php/home/, describing the model in slightly more detail, and asking for comments to enhance it. It all looks very open-source, and no doubt that’s the impression it’s meant to give. So before you do join in, take note of the subtle sting in the tail tucked away in the ‘Licence to use the Model‘ page: it’s not open-source at all. From the wording, it seems fairly clear that in reality it’s entirely Microsoft owned, and any comments will become the intellectual property of the company. In other words, a neat way of getting the enterprise architecture community to work unpaid to correct Microsoft’s own fundamental failings in this field, which Microsoft can then legally sell on as their own exclusive proprietary model… A very neat scam…

Not impressed, frankly. It’s also the reason why I haven’t posted any comments to that site, and won’t. No matter how honourable Malik’s own intentions may have been – and I have no doubt they were – I definitely feel cheated and abused by this one. It’s been bad enough having the Open Group repeatedly ask me to pay them several thousand dollars a year for the ‘privilege’ of being allowed to correct the fundamental flaws in TOGAF; now here’s Microsoft playing what looks like an even dirtier game. I’ve been working flat-out on this for several years now, trying to find ways resolve the huge structural problems in most current attempts at ‘enterprise architecture’, without earning a damn cent from all that work; and now that it’s finally starting to get somewhere, the ‘big boys’ are all beginning to line up to claim that work as their own exclusive property. I know someone has to do the work of starting the wave, out there on the all too appropriately named ‘bleeding edge’ of development: but rather than yet again all but stealing from people like me in this so goddamn blatant way, I just wish that at least one of these damn groups and companies would actually have enough respect to pay for it, and enough foresight to recognise that without it they have no future.

The un-joys and dysfunctionalities of the ‘possession economy’ again, I guess. Hey ho…