Tom Graves / Tetradian

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why?

That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘:

On a selfish note… It’s apparent that the common thread to dowsing, printing and enterprise architecture is your ability to look at a field holistically and apply logical thought to extract inconsistencies and errors, as well as looking at new ways of doing something more efficiently to meet the original aims. That’s a rare skill. Have you given thought to documenting how you go about doing this? While I imagine it’s the application of a number of taught skills, the way you put these together must be far from ubiquitous. Have you considered teaching this? Personally, as a 27 year old, I want to soak up as much of your approach and thought process as you’re willing to offer.

(Warning, this is going to be another (very) long one, mainly because there’ll be several case-studies.)

Read more…

We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power.

In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to do work. Wherever there’s work to be done – in whatever form that that ‘work’ might take – there’s a need for the power to do that work. Should be simple enough to identify and model that within an enterprise-architecture, surely?

Unfortunately, no, it’s not that simple – because most social definitions of ‘power’ tend to be closer to ‘the ability to avoid work‘. Therein lie lots of, uh, interesting problems for enterprise-architecture…

Hence power is something that we really do need to address in enterprise-architecture – even in an IT-centric architecture, let alone one which covers a true whole-of-enterprise scope. Read on?

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As mentioned in the previous post, one of the key characteristics of ‘crossing the chasm’ to a viable whole-of-enterprise architecture is the explicit inclusion of people. In short, we need to be able to model and map where people fit in relation to the architecture.

But there’s a catch. A big catch. People should not be ‘designed in’ to the architecture.

We can see this well in building-architecture: there, the only case where people have been literally part of the architecture is that of the anchorite in the mediaeval church. An anchorite would choose to be permanently walled into a cell that was part of the fabric of the building, to act as a spiritual anchor for the people’s faith. Somehow I don’t think we’ll be likely to find many people willing to do the same for today’s for-profit enterprises…

Yet in most building-architecture, evidently, people are everywhere. Other than in certain special-cases – the equivalent of an IT-specific ‘enterprise’-architecture, perhaps – the building and its purpose and design will centre around people, about what people do, why they do it, what the building represents to people, and so on. And the equivalent of that ‘people-centrism’ is what we need in a viable enterprise-architecture.

But if we can’t design people into the architecture itself, how do we map people within the architecture? I would suggest four key themes:

• vision and values
• relational-assets
• roles and responsibilities
• capabilities and competencies

Let’s look at each of these in some detail.

Read more…

This one extends the models-for-enterprise-architecture theme from the previous post. Although for me this theme goes back a long way, the start-point here was a Tweet from Dutch EA consultant Martin van den Berg (@bergmart) that triggered off a veritable flurry of replies:

• bergmart: I’m more and more convinced that it should be forbidden to show ArchiMate diagrams to business management #entarch #bizarch
• EAatWork: @bergmart why should it be forbidden to show archimate diagrams to business management?
• blomr: @bergmart @eaatwork Depends on level/type of business management + depends on complexity of the diagram(amount of (different) objects&rel’s)
• ArchiTool: @bergmart I’m intrigued to know why. Are they infrastructure models?
• bergmart: @ArchiTool I’m not talking about infrastructure models but business / information models
• ArchiTool: @bergmart @EAatWork Then maybe break them down into smaller focussed viewpoints?
• bergmart: I think we need to find other ways. Business Model Canvas is a much friendlier way or use the operating model stuff of Ross
• ArchiTool: @bergmart Right. Higher levels. And ArchiMate could be used in addition for more detail if needed? // Hmm….Business Model Canvas in Archi? Development of the Sketch View? #archimate #bmc
• bergmart: @ArchiTool Yes, in the architecture & engineering communities
• ArchiTool: @tetradian Synchronicity is nudging me toward possible Bus Model Canvas & Ent Canvas implementation in Archi. Reading up on it now…
• tetradian: @ArchiTool aiming to have 2 new posts for you soon: models as anchors for discussion/decision-records; roles of tools in toolset-spectrum
• tetradian: @bergmart ‘don’t show Archimate diags to biz mgmt’ – in my experience showing them BPMN diagrams is an even worse idea…
• bergmart: @tetradian Can imagine!
• EAatWork: @bergmart too complex from a modelling language point of view (archimate) or too complex because the diagrams are too complex?
• bergmart: @EAatWork Both
• EAatWork: @bergmart  I think that the concepts are ok but the  different relation types are causing the confusion (look all similar) for bizz mgmt
• tetradian: @bergmart @EAatWork with BPMN diags, prob was need to translate from abstract to concrete – so overlay Archimate rigour w visual images?
• ArchiTool: @bergmart But with Business Model Canvas approach maybe managers are concerned with $$$$$$ rather than architecture and internal workings?
• ceri: @tetradian @bergmart To quote @wilm on Tuesday “never ever show the entire model to ANYONE, only the view that is relevant to them” #jiscfsd
• bergmart: @EAatWork Yes, the arrows are the main problem. The concepts are ok.
• bergmart: @ArchiTool Nice  with Business Model Canvas is the combination of $$$$ with coherency.

As mentioned in that back-and-forth above, I’ve had painful first-hand experience of what happens when we show ‘formal’-type EA diagrams to executives, as described in this quoted from my book Real Enterprise-Architecture:

In our first attempt to show the true value of [a proposed] logistics early-warning system, we made the mistake of showing the process-flows [to the executive] in the form of a Business Process Modelling Notation diagram. BPMN is great for the formal modelling rigour needed by software engineers, but not for a board-level presentation: the blank stares and silence from round the table sent us away in shame.

For the next meeting, we redrew the diagram, with the exact same process-flows, but replacing the bland BPMN boxes with clip-art pictures of trucks, conveyor-belts, fork-lifts, sorting-machines, delivery staff. This time it clearly made sense: we gained our go-ahead.

These senior people weren’t ‘stupid’: when we explained it in their own terms, they understood straight away what we were aiming to do. The problem before was that they didn’t have time to learn an abstract language and translate it back into their concrete world. As architects, we did need that level of abstraction: but it was also our responsibility to each audience to do the translation from the abstract into the everyday.

This is going to be a long one… sorry…

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A great discussion yesterday with Mike Turner reminded me that there are two radically different roles for enterprise-architects:

• the internal enterprise-architect
• the external enterprise-architect

They’re both focused on ‘the architecture of the enterprise’, but it’s important not to mix them up, because they require different temperaments and different approaches to business-relationships.

The internal enterprise-architect is actively responsible for the ‘enterprise DNA’ of a single organisation. They typically either report direct to the CEO (who has the ultimate authority and responsibility for that ‘DNA’, but in practice probably doesn’t have the time to do much about it), or else are attached to the CEO Office or a senior-level strategy-group.

The key point here is that, to use Kevin Smith‘s term, this enterprise-architect role acts as “the glue between strategy and execution” – which means that they need direct person-to-person relations with people at all levels and in all domains of the organisation and enterprise. Developing these relationships takes time, and a lot of time at that – often ten or more years in a typical large organisation. Hence the best people for this kind of role are those who’ve “come up through the ranks” and built a personal network on the way, or – even better – have grown up with the company, “have been in from the start” or suchlike. (The CEO can and should do the enterprise-architect role for a start-up, but once the organisation grows beyond about a dozen people the role will typically need to be part of someone else’s explicit responsibilities, and once we get past the crucial social-network boundary of Dunbar’s number – roughly a dozen-squared – it needs to be a distinct role in its own right.)

This role is about how the idea of enterprise-architecture – that “things work better when they work together, with efficiency, with elegance, on purpose, in practice” – is expressed throughout this organisation, in terms of this organisation’s business-purpose.

The external enterprise-architect (or consultant enterprise-architect) is actively responsible for promoting the ‘idea’ and practice of enterprise-architecture itself. It’s important that they maintain their independence as much as practicable, though for practical reason many will work via the auspices of a consulting-organisation of some kind. Their person-to-person relations are with other architects – again in many different domains and at all levels, but across many different organisations and enterprise-types.

Their primary role is practice-refresh for in-house enterprise-architects: they help to keep the overall architecture up-to-date on methods, practices, and frameworks, and help to lift the architecture-maturity and architecture-capability of the internal team. They also act as external peer-review, to reduce the risk of an insular and often destructive ‘groupthink’ developing within an organisation. This role too requires many years of experience, but this experience will have been gained across multiple disciplines in multiple organisations and, preferably, multiple industries.

The internal enterprise-architect deals with architecture in depth; the external enterprise-architect deals with architecture in breadth. An organisation’s architecture gains most from an appropriate balance of these two roles – not one or the other, but always some of both.

The worst possible combination of these two roles is unfortunately that which many large consultancies try to promote: full long-term control of an organisation’s enterprise-architecture by an external consultancy. An enterprise-architecture works right at the core of an organisation and enterprise: hence assigning responsibility for the organisation’s DNA to an external party is not a good idea… You Have Been Warned!

One of the comments on the previous post on the unacknowledged risks of  ’cooperative IT’ triggered off an essay-length response that really deserves its own post. So here it is.

The comment that started it off was from Ric Phillips. (I’ve trimmed it slightly, but you can see the original here.)

The innovations that led to mini-computers led to the increasing importance of information processing based on the technology’s ability to capture and model transactions (atomistic events). It really did change the nature of work and organisations and made a new kind of information available.

It wasn’t really the advent of PCs that changed things. If the information about the world that could be stored in them and used had not changed radically they would have simply replaced the niche occupied by terminals. But they allowed people to simulate sheets of paper and type writers. And spreadsheets – which were existed prior to software and were done on very large sheets of paper. Later came sound files, photographs, building designs, industrial machinery, complex electronics (like audio mixing decks) and a thousand other things that are now simulated in software.

In this wave computers became personal productivity tools. The changes to how personal productivity expressed itself in our lives when assisted by the new ‘virtual’ things PCs could provide is what changed our jobs, our professions and be extension our lives.

The internet started out as an extension of publication and communications models that already existed. But (in this case much more slowly that in previous transformations) our activity on the internet started to capture large amounts of information that previously wasn’t subject to computation – social information, information about opinions, subjective value, and what we might call (tentatively) knowledge.

There are intersecting trends (consumerisation for example). But mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on are all converging to create a new domain of information – information that allows us to model and manipulate in computers new and extremely complex things. Once again this will transform organisations. But this time maybe even whole societies.

I don’t see this as an impending disaster. Our world is changing again. As a strategic profession EAs need to get their heads around this. We are leaving the era of ‘information processing’ and ‘ICT’ and entering the era of social computing and Knowledge Technology.

Reading it again, I now realise that this critique has completely missed the point: all it’s doing is extolling the virtues of each of the transformations in technology, yet seemingly ignoring any possibility that there might also be vices associated with those virtues. Yes, each of those transformations are real and valuable to some context, and that is indeed a key driver for change. Yet the change itself is not the risk, and neither is the technology: it is the dependence on that technology that creates the risk.

So, as I put it in my response, I strongly agree that “mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on” are not in themselves an impending disaster. The same applies to their initial impact on organisations and “maybe even whole communities” – in general I see those impacts as desirable, even if certainly not something we can ‘control’.

What does worry me is what happens next. As an EA I’ve spent many months at clients tracking down all those small private-to-a-workgroup spreadsheets and databases and log-files and the like that were a) business-critical and b) unmaintained, undocumented, not backed up, inherently fragile [such as trying to use MS Access as a multi-user database, which it was never designed to do], unregistered, and in many other ways a real business risk. Whenever some key person changed jobs, or a single hard-drive failed, or a sysadmin triggered an automated application-upgrade, or any other of a myriad of seeming-trivial events, that business-unit would literally lose that part of its mind – and an entire business-process, affecting an entire cross-functional workstream, would grind to a halt until someone could work out what had gone missing and how to set up yet another kludged workaround.

When the business-application is non-critical, kludges usually don’t matter: it’s how people learn, it helps get things done, and it’s exactly what ’shadow-IT’ is for. The new mobile technologies and the like are brilliant for this – just as spreadsheets and single-user databases were (and still are). Everything’s fine as long as they’re essentially used in the same way as Lego bricks or a Meccano set or the like – a ’serious toy’ that can be used to knock out a quick prototype to test out an idea, or perhaps even to keep around as a vaguely-useful tool and talking-point. And as long as they’re used for that kind of purpose, it shouldn’t matter much when they do fail – especially if we can use that failure as a way to learn what to do differently next time. In other words, we accept failure as part of the deal – it’s ’safe-fail’.

But don’t try to use a ’serious toy’ for anything that’s business-critical. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s simply not ‘fit for purpose’: they’re not robust enough, resilient enough, agile enough, secure enough, and so on – which means that as a system we cannot set them up to ’safe-fail’ in such a context. Sure, you could use Lego to build a house (it’s been done), or Meccano to build a bridge (that’s been done, too), but the effectiveness of doing so is questionable at best, especially over the longer term.

It’s the ‘-ilities’ that usually matter most in architecture. The functional requirements for a system are usually much the same at any scope or scale, but the qualitative or so-called ‘non-functional’ requirements are what will usually make or break the system in practice. Building an IT system that can handle half a dozen strictly-sequential requests in half an hour or even half a minute is relatively trivial; building one that can handle thousands or even millions of parallel, interleaving, fragmented, potentially-incomplete requests every second is not trivial at all; and yet the functional requirements are essentially the same. That’s the difference between a ’serious-toy’ prototype, and serious engineering with serious architecture and serious service-management and support behind it.

What we have right now in mobile-computing, ubiquitous-information and cloud is a whole bunch of serious-toys desperately pretending to be more than they are, and – more worryingly – being sold and used as if they’re more than they are. Sure, the function is there – but that’s easy. It always is. Getting them beyond that ’serious toy’ stage is not easy – and because it’s hard work to get there, it hacks into the short-term profits, too, so it’s not exactly popular amongst the money-obsessed.

So we have here all the ingredients for a ‘perfect storm’: more and more of individual people’s lives and livelihoods being placed onto platforms that are inherently unstable and unsustainable, because little or none of the work to make them stable and sustainable is as yet in place or even in progress. If you’re not already seriously worried about what will happen when large chunks of our society literally lose their collective mind and memory through the failures of these kludged-together toys, you’re not thinking hard enough about the architecture of the enterprise… 

The lessons of history are plain to see, and it’s also plain to see that the level of unaddressed risk has been raised each time, with even the earliest-period risks still not fully addressed even now. You Have Been Warned?

Twitter-correspondent Craig Hepburn posted a Tweet this morning pointing to Dion Hinchcliffe‘s excellent ZDNet article, ‘CoIT: how an accidental future is becoming reality‘, about the current rise and rise of ‘consumer IT’ or ‘cooperative IT’:

It’s a story as old as the IT department: New technology arrives in the market, it makes some type of work easier to accomplish, the business asks for it, and IT reacts and delivers it. Not always however, and usually somewhat slowly. It was this way with PCs, it was this way with the Internet, and now IT is faced with what is turning out to be a veritable perfect storm of technology and social change. …

Today’s highly mobile, social cloud has set everyone’s expectations for how easy, powerful, and simple IT can be. The genie will never be put back into the bottle.

For once I’m going to stand firmly on the side of the IT-folks on this one – because no matter how wonderful this looks right now, this is not good news at all. Looking at this with a futurist’s eye, I’m wondering how long it will take before we wish we could put the genie back into the bottle… because what I’m seeing here is a full-on disaster-in-the-making. Or rather, a double disaster-in-the-making, given how much this will interact with the ongoing disaster that is ‘cloud-computing’…

One of the first lessons any futurist learns is to look back at history, to seek out any equivalent occurrences in the past. And the blunt fact is that we’ve been here before… not just once, but several times already. Each time that we came back to the same place – if perhaps from a slightly different direction – it’s clear that the fundamental lessons were not learned, in fact were wilfully ignored; and each time it took a lot of effort, a lot of skill, and a lot discipline, to tidy up the mess – just in time for the next batch of overly-excited idiots to trash the place all over again. This is the dirty end of Gartner’s ‘hype-cycle’: someone has to tidy up the mess. And yes, “it’s a story as old as the IT department”, because in every case so far, that ‘someone’ has been the much-derided IT department – and also enterprise-architecture, in its broader sense, beyond IT alone.

Go back sixty years or so, to the first beginnings of mainframes and ‘big computing’. Watch the hype-cycle at work: slow adoption, then a huge take-off in ‘data-processing’ (we didn’t get round to calling it IT until quite a bit later). It will solve every business problem! Control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (COBOL, the IBM-360 architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Twenty years later, it’s the mini-computer boom. It will solve every business problem! Now even medium-sized businesses can control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except that it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (the C language, the Digital PDP-series architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Ten years later, we get the microcomputer revolution. It will solve every business problem! Now you too can control the world, right here on your desktop! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (disk-formats, file-formats, data-architectures, the IBM-PC architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Yup, you’ll be seeing the pattern here. The exact same sequence applied to the rise of the internet ten years later, the web five years after that (with a merry little hiatus called the Dot.Com.Bomb), the rise of cloud over the past few years, and now the rise of Hinchcliffe’s mobile IT or ‘CoIT’. In every case, there’s the same wild hype, the initial push from outside the IT-department (as ‘shadow IT’) which gets the basic idea going to point where it’s usable.

(And to be fair, if that push hadn’t happened, those new developments would probably never have been usable: as Hinchcliffe implies, it’s actually quite rare that innovations arises from within the IT department itself. Because that isn’t it’s job: IT’s real job, unfortunately, is to tidy up the mess that will inevitably follow…)

In every case we see the same exuberance… then the slowly-dawning awareness that it isn’t quite as simple as that. It turns out that there’s a lot of work that’s needed in order to get standards happening – otherwise the new ‘revolution’ turns out to be something that can’t be shared, which means that the whole thing fizzles out quite quickly because we need that sharing to happen. We need clear standards for hardware, software, data-architectures, information-architectures, interchange protocols and much more besides. We need distinct disciplines around requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, quality-management, service-management and a whole swathe of other areas. And all of those, it’s now clear, need to allow for customisation, agility, security, versatility, adaptability, resilience and the like – none of which are easy to balance with conventional ‘control’-style disciplines.

So here I am, looking at the rise of Hinchcliffe’s ‘CoIT’ – particularly cloud-computing and mobile-apps. And what I’m seeing is an architectural disaster waiting to happen, if not unfolding right before our eyes:

• security – where is it? does it exist at all? (I’ve seen lots of hype and promises, but not much reality as yet)
• file-formats – half the iPad apps I’ve seen seem to embed their data actually within the app itself – they don’t even have a file-format other than perhaps plain-text or unstructured PDF
• interchange-formats -if they have a file-format at all,  most of the apps seem to rely on unpublished proprietary file-structures with no means to enable exchange between different apps, whilst cloud-providers will often deliberately make it difficult to exchange, so as to enforce ‘lock-in’
• escrow – information-lifetimes range between seconds and decades – yet no-one seems to be thinking beyond a year or more at most, and no-one at all seems to be planning for what happens when a cloud-provider or app-provider goes bust – which they will, often (over the long-term at least), and often very expensively
• system-standards – where are they? do they exist at all? – we seem to back in the worst days of early microcomputing, where just about every man-and-his-dog-in-a-garage could and did create an entirely different architecture for everything, often intentionally incompatible with everything else

I could go on… and on… and on… there’s no shortage of other nightmare-level architectural risk-factors that aren’t being addressed at all. Other than by the much-maligned IT-department, that is (who unfortunately tend to be able to see only the IT-related risks, which represent only a relatively small proportion of the whole); or by the few enterprise-architects who actually do think about whole-of-enterprise scope (and who are mostly derided, by the hype-merchants and their ilk, as doomsayers who’ve lost the plot). Not funny… Oh well…

Yes, it’s true that the excitement (or the oft-forlorn hope that it will finally be better this time?) is what gets people going to create new ideas; so yes, the exuberance does matter. Hence, in turn, I suppose, the hype does matter too. And safe-fail experiments are also always a good idea, because they show us where things will break but without causing much damage in the process. ‘Safe-fail’ can get quite extreme, too: for example, think of the buildings in a fireworks-factory, with very solid walls, very lightweight roofs – because when you know there’s a high risk that things can go badly wrong, you can indeed design for that fact. Yet there are also many types of structures that we can’t allow to fail: anyone who’s lived through a major earthquake or major storm-event will know that fact firsthand… Architecturally we need to be able to tell the difference between those two extremes, and design accordingly.

Yet that’s exactly what’s not happening here with cloud or CoIT: architecture of any valid kind, it seems, has all but been abandoned in the usual wild rush towards The Next Best Thing… So might it not be wise to take a brief pause for thought at this point, before we rush headlong into yet another insanely-expensive IT-disaster? Or is that too much to ask of anyone whilst the hype is in full flow?

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.

There’s a core theme that reaches right to the heart of every enterprise-architecture: what is the appropriate tradeoff between sameness versus uniqueness?

The classic Taylorist solution has been to emphasise extreme sameness: to force everything – and everyone – to be the same, because it keeps things simple, controllable and easily replicable. But we now know that it’s too simple to work well with the real complexities of the real world. In fact it only ‘works’ as long as we can maintain the delusion that it does work: and whenever it fails – which eventually it always does – there’s a tendency to collapse into complete chaos. Which is not much of a ‘solution’ at all.

Yet to focus only on uniqueness all but takes us back to a pre-industrial age where everything is custom-made, everything is different, nothing is actually designed to work with anything else, there are no possible economies of scale, and no certain means to communicate with each other – all of which would seem to be the antithesis of architecture. Which is likewise not a good idea.

Clearly there is an architectural tradeoff there: and hence we need something – some conceptual framework – to help us tackle it.

For at least the past half-decade, and probably longer – see, for example, Andrew Johnston’s 2005 article ‘Architects: Masters of Order and Unorder?‘ – enterprise-architects have turned to Kurtz & Snowden’s Cynefin framework for help on this. For many of us, the Cynefin categorisation of Simple [aka 'Known'], Complicated [aka 'Knowable'], Complex and Chaotic has proven extremely valuable, such as for identifying structural themes and potential problems in conceptual misalignment. One example of the latter, as Dave Snowden has also often pointed out, is the misuse of Simple-domain techniques such as Six Sigma: by definition, these depend on very high degrees of repeatability – literally millions of identical events, in Six Sigma’s case – yet there are frequent attempts to apply them in contexts that have little or no repeatability (‘Complex’ or ‘Chaotic’ respectively, in Cynefin terms), which makes no sense at all.

Beyond that basic categorisation, though, attempting to use Cynefin in enterprise-architecture can itself be problematic, particularly where we need to tackle inherent uniqueness. The explicit focus of Cynefin, and Snowden’s Cognitive Edge consultancy, is the application of techniques derived from complexity-science to inherently-complex areas such as policy. (Which, from a cross-map of Cynefin to the ISO9000 quality-standard ‘stack’, is exactly what we should expect: ‘Complex’ maps to the ISO9000 ‘Policy’ layer, in the same way that ‘Simple’ maps to ISO9000′s ‘Work Instruction’.) Yet whilst Cynefin uses the sciences to tackle complexity, what we also need in enterprise-architecture is some means to use complexity to tackle ‘chaotic’ uniqueness – which is not the same at all. Therein lie some serious problems – and some potentially-serious mistakes – if we try to re-use Cynefin concepts in contexts for which it was not designed.

I’ll admit that I’ve probably made some of those mistakes myself. Over the past couple of years I’ve written a number of articles on Cynefin on enterprise-architectures, which made a lot of practical sense to many people, but unfortunately also led to some extremely unpleasant arguments that I have no wish to revisit. What’s become clear to me over the past few months is that the beguiling simplicity of the Cynefin categorisation can blind us to the fact that although its descriptions of the Complex and Complicated domains are essentially the same as we would use for context-space mapping in enterprise-architectures, its definitions and usage of the Chaotic and Simple domains are fundamentally different to those that are needed to tackle uniqueness and sameness in architecture. It’s like comparing a cross-head screwdriver with a flat-head one: at a cursory glance they may seem to be the same, and it’s clear that they are related in the sense that they have similar functions – but in practice they’re not interchangeable, and trying to use them as such will cause a lot of frustration and possibly a lot of damage too. Not a good idea.

So I’d like here to explore what aspects of Cynefin can be used in enterprise-architectures, how and why and where it should not be used, and what we could use as an alternative in those contexts. [I perhaps need to emphasise here that this is not a critique about Cynefin itself, but solely about certain (mis-)uses of Cynefin in enterprise-architecture.]

This again will need to be quite long – apologies – but at least this time there’ll be a fair number of diagrams to break the verbiage into more manageable chunks.

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