Tom Graves / Tetradian

I’m currently sifting through my past blog-posts of the past five years or so, with a view to republishing some of them in ebook-format, to make them more accessible in a more convenient and more portable form.

So far there are well over 400 blog-posts here on enterprise-architecture and related themes, plus a few more on the companion Sidewise weblog. That’s a lot of material – probably somewhere upward of half a million words, with literally hundreds of diagrams as well. Kinda big, even in EPUB format, and not easy to navigate in one go, given that that the various themes have been weaving through each other in different forms and with different emphases over the years.

So the idea at present is to publish them in the form of small anthologies, each of perhaps 15-30 related posts that focus on a single theme at a time. Some posts might appear in more than one anthology, but that probably won’t matter too much, I hope? – especially as keeping it simple will keep the costs right down, to perhaps $2.00-3.00 (£1.50-2.00) each.

Themes for the first few anthologies would include:

• the Enterprise Canvas set, including the simplified notation for Enterprise Canvas
• rethinking Zachman and the TOGAF ADM for whole-enterprise use
• foresight, futures and ‘really-big-picture’ enterprise-architecture
• the human side of enterprise-architecture, including management-structures and tacit-knowledge
• narrative and story in enterprise-architecture
• business-architecture and enterprise-architecture (including ‘translation’ between Business Model Canvas and enterprise-architecture notations such as Archimate and Enterprise Canvas)
• taxonomy, ontology, (meta)metamodels and toolsets for enterprise-architecture
• sensemaking with context-space mapping and SCAN

These should start to appear on Amazon and elsewhere in the next few weeks – I’ll post more details here as they become available, of course.

Any other requests for ebook anthologies? Any comments about pricing, formats, availability or anything else? Over to you, if you would?

Many thanks, anyway.

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

I’ve just finished editing yet another book on enterprise-architecture, and set up its production via my Tetradian Books publishing setup. But you won’t see it on the site, and in fact it may never be published as such in its present form – though you will see it coming out quite soon under someone else’s imprint.

As you can imagine, there’s a story behind this. (A happy story, I hasten to add!) But first, here’s the book-cover that you probably won’t see much elsewhere:

The Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture Framework, or PEAF for short, is the brainchild of my neighbour Kevin Smith. (‘Neighbour’ here is a relative term – he actually lives about fifteen miles away from where I’ve been staying in England for the past few years. But given that the EA community is pretty small, and so scattered around the globe, fifteen miles is pretty close. ) We have irregular ‘HEC meetups’ – where ‘HEC’, of course, is the ubiquitous English pub-lunch of ‘Ham Egg & Chips’.

For me these meetings have been great, because we tackle such different aspects of the enterprise-architecture domain. I work mostly on ‘big-picture’ theory, these days with a strong emphasis on the ‘people-stuff’ of the enterprise, whilst Kevin concentrates on the day-to-day practicalities of doing enterprise-architecture. And that’s the whole point of his “Pragmatic EA’ – it’s all about the pragmatics. It’s all about “cutting EA to the bone”, as Kevin puts it, so that people can get started and get moving on EA, within the very real constraints and tortuous politics of large organisations. We’ve talked a lot about this EA ‘world’, using our mutual misunderstandings of each other’s approach to get a better sense of the EA whole.

That’s the backstory. Onto the story itself…

Two weeks ago as I write this, we were having another HEC-meetup. We talked about the upcoming AE Rio 2011 conference in Rio de Janeiro, where Kevin had been booked as one of the lead presenters, and for which I’d harboured some ambitions to go. (That is now happening for me, courtesy of much help from AOGEA-Brazil‘s Roberto Severo and Alan Rodrigues, but that’s another story for another time.) Somewhen during that discussion, I’d talked about how I use my books as a key part of my business-marketing: as many people will know, I often turn up at EA conferences with a great stack of books to give away. Which, of course, led to the idea that Kevin needed a book too. Preferably in time for AE Rio. Which, at that point, was effectively just over three weeks away.

Well, you can pretty much guess what happened next.

We’d previously talked about setting up a publishing-operation for Kevin’s own business, but it hadn’t really got very far. I’d looked at publishing the existing PEAF materials, but I’m not comfortable about publishing others’ work, with all the nightmare complications of record-keeping and royalties that any ‘real’ publisher would have to deal with. And the PEAF material includes a lot of large-format graphics, almost all of it in colour – which would be insanely expensive to produce in print as-is. All of that material is readable online for free, anyway. So the only practicable option for a book that would also add some real value would be a simplified Introduction, summarising all the PEAF material in an immediately-usable way.

Yet although it ought to be published under Kevin’s own imprint, setting that up would take more time than we had – hence, for now, the only viable option would be to use my Tetradian Books imprint, my production-templates, and so on. It would need to be at least eighty pages, and preferably more than a hundred, in order for the book to have a conventional paperback-style spine. And given the known production lead-times, we would have less than two weeks at best to get it to press.

From start to finish, I did it in just twelve days. Yikes…

If POD-printers Lightning Source live up to their usual excellent performance, we should have the first hundred copies late next week, in time to take to Rio. Once we get back, we’ll go through all the usual rigmarole – ISBNs, trade-accounts, British Library registration and the rest – to set up Kevin’s new imprint to publish PEAF and the other upcoming ‘Pragmatic’ materials. And at that point I’ll be able to hand over all the master-files and set everything up for Kevin to (re-)publish it himself. And once that’s done, this first version will quietly disappear from view – as it should, because although, yes, I did edit it, and write all of the summaries from scratch, too, it really isn’t mine to publish. The real work on PEAF is Kevin’s – and that’s where it belongs.

It’s been an interesting challenge, not just the sheer physical effort of getting everything done in time, but also getting my head around what is still a somewhat alien style of thinking about a very different part of the business ‘world’ that I work in. It’s been a very worthwhile challenge, too. Yet not, I think, something I’d want to repeat for anyone else any time soon?

Everyday Enterprise Architecture, the latest book in my Tetradian Enterprise Architecture series, is now available on Amazon:

• ‘Everyday Enterprise Architecture‘ on Amazon.com
• ‘Everyday Enterprise Architecture‘ on Amazon.co.uk

Note that Amazon have an unfortunate habit of listing print-on-demand books as ‘out of stock’: all that it means is that it takes at most one extra day for delivery.

The publisher-blurb is as follows:

All of architecture comes down to one simple idea: things work better when they work together, with clarity, with elegance, on purpose. Yet how do we express that ‘one idea’ in practice, within our organisations? With what results, and for what business-value? This book describes the down-to-earth detail of everyday enterprise architecture, to show what architects actually do to deliver value fast, across the entire enterprise.

Working step by step through a real ten-day architecture-project, this book explores the activities that underpin sensemaking, strategy, structures and solutions in the real-time turmoil of an enterprise-architect’s everyday work.

Topics covered include:

• • how to use enterprise-architecture to tackle executive-level business-problems
  • how to develop an agile architecture practice that can keep pace with the real-time pressures of the real business world
  • how to identify the business-reasons and business-value for each activity
  • how to thrive on the inherent uncertainties of the architecture process
  • how to use context-space maps to guide sensemaking and solution-design
  • how to apply architecture ideas and activities to describe what actually happens in a real enterprise-architecture project
  • how to enhance architectural skills, judgement and awareness, for continuous improvement across the enterprise and in the architecture itself

If you want your enterprise to flourish and prosper in the midst of relentless change, this is one book you’ll definitely need.

The book describes the actual thinking-processes and business-activities that typify real architecture-work at an enterprise-wide scope and scale. The structure of the book is a walk-through of a simultaneous pair of architecture projects, using an agile-style adaptation of the well-known TOGAF Architectural Development Method. Both of the projects need to be delivered in parallel, and fully completed within a ten-day period. One of the parallel projects focusses on ‘the architecture of architecture’; the other – adapted from real whole-of-enterprise architecture-consultancy assignments – tackles a serious business-strategy problem for a fictional bank.

The book also introduces a new sensemaking technique for enterprise-architectures, known as ‘context-space mapping’. The technique draws on systems-theory and complexity-theory to enable a much richer view of the architecture context, yet still deliver actionable results in tune with the timescales of the real business world.

The book-cover includes an illustration from the Dover Collection, indicating the kind of stress under which most enterprise-architects work! The aim is that the book should help to ease some of the overload, and make it easier to describe to others what it is that enterprise-architects actually do.

At present you can also download the full ebook version for free from the Tetradian Books website; note that this offer will only be available for a few more days, after which the the full ebook will be replaced by a  ’sample’ edition, containing contents and sample-chapters only.

I’ve now published the annotated version of my film-script ‘Wombat & Cockie‘ in book-form – see the Tetradian Books website here for the book-info, and here for the free-download PDF e-book.

Set in the drug-gangs culture of present-day Melbourne, it’s an odd mixture of a cops-and-criminals black-comedy, merged with a Dreamtime motif in which all of the players enact the characteristics and character of the respective bird or animal Dreaming.

Of all my scripts, this is the one most likely to reach production: a colleague spent some time a couple of years ago developing it further, but I haven’t heard from her since. Not that it matters: it’s just a bit of fun, really, though there are some serious themes behind it, using fiction to explore the complexities of interlinked transactions of violence and abuse at a societal level.

My regular outing to make use of Lightning Source’s annual ‘free setup’ promotion, it’s technically vanity-publishing – but I spent at least six months writing the script, so it seems worthwhile to get something tangible out of all that work! It won’t be available in printed form, other than direct from me, but anyone is welcome to download the e-book for free.

Hope it helps, anyway: “Share and Enjoy”?

A very definite “Thank you” to POD printers Lightning Source, who’ve not only turned round my new book The Service-Oriented Enterprise in the startling time of just under four days from first uploading the initial source-files to the first box of books arriving at my door, but have also just notified me that my ‘low priority’ order for some other books has already been shipped after just two days, and should be with me tomorrow morning.

I’ve always been impressed by their service, but this time they’ve really done me proud. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the books in time before I had to leave for the TOGAF conference next weekend, but I’m now a week ahead of schedule on that. Many thanks.

Recommended.

There’s something special about holding a brand new book for the first time…

The first set of Silos came back from print-on-demand providers Lightning Source today – impressed, as I hadn’t expected them to deliver before Christmas. Quite odd, really – holding something so tangible that’s come out of a lot of hard work but has in many ways been otherwise entirely virtual.

Will be sending copies off over the next few days to various colleagues scattered around the globe who’ve contributed ideas and critique. But this one was hard in unexpected ways, and took a surprisingly long time – almost seventeen months from start to finish, compared to less than three months for Disciplines, and barely a month for SEMPER and SCORE (though that one was more of a glue-it-together process, since I had most of the material already in other forms). So yeah, an odd kind of extended labour: doesn’t compare in the literal maternal sense, of course, but a valid metaphor at least.

Odd… nothing quite like it… the pleasure of holding a new book…

Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks back I finalised an agreement with IT Governance Ltd for on-selling my Tetradian Enterprise Architecture Series books. That includes both print editions and e-book editions (which is why I pulled the full e-book versions of those books from the Tetradian Books website and replaced them with ‘sampler’ versions).

IT Governance are able to promote the books to the industry in ways that I just don’t have the skills or time to do, which leaves me free to concentrate on writing! Links are as follows:

• Real Enterprise Architecture: beyond IT to the whole enterprise: print and e-book
• SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness: print and e-book
• Power and Response-ability: the human side of system: print and e-book

I’m at last in the final stages of finishing Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects (just writing the last chapter now – hooray! ), so that’ll be available on the IT Governance site pretty much as soon as it’s done.

They’ve also commissioned me to do two small books in their Pocket Guide series – one on enterprise architecture, the other on business architecture.  Scheduled to deliver those by end of February, so will write more about those when we get closer to the time.

Moving on, anyway.

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.

Been working flat-out on yet another book-project, a collaboration with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, with a working title of Disciplines of Dowsing. Reason for the rush is that we want it ready in time for the next annual conference of the British Society of Dowsers, in late September – which is something like five to six weeks away, and we still have a lot to do…

We describe it as being about dowsing, but in fact it applies right across the board to pretty much every type of subjective discipline – anything from dowsing to healing to archaeology to art and a heck of a lot more besides.

Main aim is to challenge the current frequently-abysmal standard of quality in dowsing and the various related disciplines. For example, my old field of earth-energies research is still not far off crippled by mangled misinterpretations of the supposed ‘Michael & Mary’ lines (Miller and Broadhurst – the original researchers – can’t be very pleased about that mangling, either), and perhaps even more by the dire influence of newage-laden nonsense such as ‘spiritual dowsing’ and the like.

P’raps more to the point, not so much to challenge the abysmal quality, but to make some concrete suggestions as to what to do about it, by providing a consistent framework within which something resembling disciplined quality might be possible to achieve… (Yeah, I admit I’m being a bit cynical, but I’m feeling more than a bit jaded about the whole field, to be frank… :wrygrin: )

In the meantime, Liz and I have been coming up with some new ideas and radically new techniques to link between dowsing, archaeography and archaeology. More details on that when the book’s out and done, though.

Quick summary of contents, if you’re interested:

• Introduction: Background; Dowsing in ten minutes; A question of quality
• Disciplines: The disciplined dowser; The dowser as artist; The dowser as mystic; The dowser as scientist; The dowser as magician; The integrated dowser
• Seven ‘sins’ of dubious discipline: The hype hubris; The Golden-Age game; The newage nuisance; The meaning mistake; The possession problem; The reality risk; Lost in the learning labyrinth; Cleansing the sins
• Practice: Fieldworker’s senses; Setup and fieldwork; Some worked examples

More later when we’re closer to publication, anyways.