Tom Graves / Tetradian

In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way?

Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and responsibilities to those ‘below’?

For that matter, why do we still prop up the misplaced myths of ‘above’ and ‘below’ anyway? After all, in a service-oriented view of the enterprise, there is no hierarchy - they’re all just mutual peer-level service-relationships, no different in nature from any other. And does anyone benefit from those myths any more? – other than people who need to prop up arbitrary and unwarranted delusions about their own importance?

This came up for me today from three different directions:

• reviewing several posts here on management-architectures, particularly ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘, ‘Management as ‘just another service’ ‘ and ‘Rebalancing top-down management-architectures‘
• a Tweet from SystemsWiki, pointing to a brilliant HBR paper by Gary Hamel, First, Let’s Fire All The Managers‘ [PDF]
• thinking about ‘bosses’ I’ve known – some good, some not-so-good, and some just plain incompetent

I’ll happily give names to the good ‘bosses’ – Helen Mills at Australia Post, for example, or Graeme Burnett at DSTO. For the others, well, I’d best be a bit more circumspect, hadn’t I? – which is an interesting point in itself…

But there’s one of the latter that comes particularly to mind. It was on a large engineering-project a couple of decades or so ago; almost all of the team were contractors, some of them world-class level, because it was a genuinely innovative system that had to do things that had never been done before. To make it all work, and to hold the team together, we needed a manager at the same kind of skill-level. What they gave us instead was – to be blunt – an incompetent idiot, a classic civil-service time-server, eking out his last years before retirement. Not a good choice…

He was way, way out of his depth and his comfort-zone – a fact that became painfully obvious even before the first day was out. He had no experience or understanding of the inherent anarchy of innovation: as an ex-military-type, all he knew was command-and control. Which really, really, really didn’t work.

We limped on under his endless incompetence for a few months, until one day it all came to a head. At a particularly fraught team-meeting, every one of the contractors blew up at him, saying that he alone was the reason why the project was so far behind schedule; furious, he rushed out, accusing everyone of insubordination, and yelling – and I quote – that “I’ll have all of you frog-marched out of the establishment!”

At that point, the executive realised they needed to intervene, kinda urgently… The team explained to them that whilst, yes, they would perform best with a good manager, they would actually be better off with no manager at all than with this guy. And for once – hooray! – we actually had senior-management who had some real grasp of what was going on – and they agreed. So for the rest of the project, we ran as a self-organised team, without any manager at all.

In short, our incompetent manager had been fired for insuperordination – failing to deliver the required management-services to the level needed within that context.

Looking around at most management-structures, it’s clear that that needs to happen a lot more often…

And this, of course, is where it can get v-e-r-y tricky for enterprise-architects and the like. We can see what’s not working. We can see why it’s not working. We know exactly what to do to get it working again. And yet we’re supposed to pretend that the myths of management-hierarchy are somehow sacrosanct, that insubordination is real and punishable, but insuperordination and plain management-stupidity is not. We’re allowed – in fact required – to ‘fix’ anything and everything except that which is the blatant cause of the problems, namely those myopic myths of management, which we’re not allowed to challenge at all. Hmm… About time we started being honest this, don’t you think?

Implications for enterprise-architecture

Insuperordination isn’t just lack of leadership: it’s a structural failure of the management-model to support essential symmetries of responsibility in mutual service-relationships.

And as a structural flaw – one that has serious impacts on overall enterprise risk – it’s very much a concern for enterprise-architecture.

The key requirement here is to stop thinking in terms of hierarchies. If we take a service-oriented view, it’s clear that management-services have a very real function, as information-aggregators and resource-distributors, dealing with the trade-offs across a functional-silo.

Yet those types of services are not well-suited to managing end-to-end cross-silo process-flows: there needs to be a separate category of coordination-services that handles that task – a fact which immediately implies matrix-relationships of some kind.

And those matrix-relationships need to be peer-to-peer – which doesn’t fit at all with any Taylorist-style concept of top-down management-hierarchies.

In short, top-down ‘command-and-control’ hierarchy is an overlay on top of a tree-structure that arises naturally from aggregator/resource-distributor relationships. The tree-structure provides a genuine service; the hierarchy, all too often, a genuine disservice. Don’t conflate the two structures: they’re not the same.

The way to separate them is that the tree-structure could be viewed in any orientation: top-down, bottom-up, sideways-in, centre-out – it’s all the same. But the hierarchy is always described as top-down: it can’t be made to (seem to) make sense in any other way.

The top-down management-model is essentially a leftover remnant of a supposedly long-dead feudal past, in which position in that hierarchy denotes ‘rights’ to demand subservience on pain of punishment for ‘insubordination’. As a structure based entirely on ‘power-over‘ – with all the dysfunctionality that that implies – it can only be made to seem to work as long as there is no need to engage the ‘subordinates’ actually in the work: “check your brain in at the door” is how one colleague described it. But when the work does require that kind of personal engagement – as is becoming more and more common throughout almost every business context – then the overall system will either operate only at low efficiency, or even fail to operate all, if that ‘conventional’ command-and-control hierarchy is allowed to remain in place.

It’s an architectural choice. Command-and-control hierarchy will only work with low-agility: if we need to preserve command-and-control hierarchies, we will not be able to achieve high-agility in that context. If the organisation – or some part of the organisation – needs high-agility, we must define a structure in which that section of management is peer-based, as ‘just another service’ – and in which the responsibility-failures of insuperordination must be recognised as exactly symmetric with insubordination.

In any given context, we can choose one model, or the other: they don’t mix well, and we can’t have both in the same context – as even current military doctrine [PDF] now makes clear.

If we want our organisations to work, we need to stop pretending that insuperordination doesn’t exist – and instead acknowledge that it’s one of the most serious sources of organisational risk.

That’s the message that we need to give to our enterprise-architecture clients.

Challenging, yes – but it’s the only way that this is going to work.

Comments/suggestions, anyone?

As the economy shifts ever onward from manufacturing toward services, how do marketing and market-relationships need to change with this shift? And what enterprise-architectures do we need to support this?

[In part this is a follow-on from Dave Gray's excellent Dachis Group article 'Everything is a service': I strongly recommend to read that post first before continuing here.]

As Dave Gray indicates in his article ‘Everything is a service’, many people in and around business are seeing a ‘Great Reset’ – a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy, and with it a fundamental shift in the nature of a viable business: a change in focus from products to services.

In a product-oriented economy, an organisation’s market is built around transactions, exchanges of goods and services. Within this metaphor, services are quasi-products, another type of ‘thing’ to be ‘consumed’ by a passive marketplace of ‘consumers’. Financial services, for example, are packaged as ‘products’; so-called service-organisations sell ‘solutions’ to often-unspecified ‘problems’ that a ‘consumer’ is presumed to face.

Producers produce, consumers consume: the roles are explicit, and explicitly separate and distinct. The role of marketing there is to create a market ‘want’ – often entirely artificial – for whatever product the producers want to sell. The role of enterprise-architecture and the like is to support creation of the maximum volume of product for the minimum necessary effort and cost.

The overall view – perhaps still illustrated best by the implied left-to-right flow in the structure of the Business Model Canvas above – is a linear structure of processes. A supply-chain (‘Key Partners’) feeds into the business-processes of the organisation (‘Key Activities’), the results of which are then sold on to ‘consumers’ (‘Customer Segments’). The sequence ends at the ‘consumer’, or more specifically at the moment that the customer has paid for the ‘product’; and everything is centred around the organisation, as ‘the enterprise’.

This view of the market is also often possession-based, with very unequal power-relationships assumed between the organisation and everyone else: we talk about ‘capturing’ a market, ‘owning’ market-share, and so on. This often leads in turn to a very combative relationship across the market, both between organisations competing for ‘possession’ of market-share, and between an organisation and its customers, employees and broader communities – all of whom, perhaps unsurprisingly, may well object to being treated as possessed ‘objects’ or ‘subjects’ of the organisation.

In business terms, one of the key drivers behind the ‘big reset’ or ‘big shift’ that Dave Gray describes is that this model of the market is rapidly becoming less and less viable. Most markets are either at or approaching saturation-point; the hidden-costs are becoming more visible, and harder to externalise; and the supposed economies of scale of mass-production and mass-marketing deliver steadily lower returns, especially relative to smaller and more adaptable technologies and business-models. And in bald economic terms, there are practical limits as to how much ‘stuff’ we can continue to make and sell on a finite planet – limits which in many cases we’ve already overshot. Some real problems there… – and yet they’re inherent in that model of the business-market.

A service-oriented economy is radically different, in that the market is built primarily around relationships. As Dave Gray put it:

A service is at its core a relationship between server and served. Service is work performed in support of another. At every point of interaction, the measure of success is not a product but the satisfaction, delight or disappointment of the customer.

Within this metaphor, products are best understood as proto-services, typically as part of the means for self-delivery of some service. Everyone in the market is both ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’: the roles blur, and are inherently much more equal or peer-based in nature than in the product-oriented economy.

This view of the market is also based much more on mutual responsibilities: we talk about co-creation, about partnering in a shared enterprise. The power-relationships are much more equal, and necessarily focussed on building and maintaining mutual trust – rather than the combative contracts of the possession-model, which mostly reflect an absence of trust.

The overall model still has transactions and processes and supply-chains, but the perspective is different. As Verna Allee describes it, that linear ‘supply-chain’ is actually one view into a much more nuanced ‘value-network’; and a product- or service-transaction is merely one phase within a much larger market-cycle:

Importantly, the fundamental focus of relationships is inverted, from organisation-centric to customer-centric: as Chris Potts puts it, “customers don’t appear in our processes: we appear in their experiences”. The sales-focus also shifts from ‘push’ to ‘pull’, from manipulating or even forcing the ‘consumer’ into a single once-off ‘the sale’, to building a continuing long-term mutual relationship. All of this requires radically different approaches to sales and marketing, but it can be done – and increasingly, is much more profitable than the ‘push’ model.

[For example, compare your experience of the usual soulless time-driven 'customer-as-product' sales call-centre - such as that which interrupted me just now whilst writing this, and who cut me off in the middle of saying "Thank you, but no" - to an intentionally relationship-oriented call-centre such as that run by US retailer Zappos, which focusses much more on respect and mutual trust. Which approach would you prefer to deal with in your business day? The answer's fairly obvious: which is why the conventional call-centre model is becoming less and less viable, no matter how much pressure is put upon the long-suffering staff.

Another first-hand example: a couple days ago I was looking at cameras in the local branch of a medium-sized national chain of camera-stores. The absence of pressure was really noticeable; and the saleswoman's quiet passion for photography per se shone through. The change in energy of the place was very noticeable, compared to the last time I'd been there, a year or so ago: more like an Apple Store than a 'normal' sales-obsessed high-street retailer.

Talking with her, it became clear that the company had made that crucial shift from product-orientation to service-orientation. The key was that they'd come to understand they made most of their money not from selling cameras as such, but from the ongoing photo-print service. Camera-sales became viewed as a means to support that service: it needed to be profitable in its own right, but it wasn't the primary focus for profit. Hence it became much more important to match the camera to the client's actual needs - and that emphasis on matching real needs itself became a key foundation for mutual trust, and hence for long-term relationships that would be profitable to all parties.

Contrast that with the usual high-street high-pressure retailer, where the emphasis is more likely to be about offloading the highest-margin object that the 'consumer' could afford, then dropping the attention instantly so as to move on to the next 'punter' as quickly as possible. "I worked in a place like that for three months", she said, "and I felt like I aged ten years while I was there. Soul-destroying, for everyone. So I know why I'm working here! - because I want to be here."]

So what kind of enterprise-architecture do we need for a service-oriented enterprise? How does it differ from the conventional product-oriented architectures – particularly in its business-architecture and process-architecture? Probably the key requirement is an awareness of the implications of one simple statement:

A service exists to serve.

But what does it serve? And whom does it serve? Architecturally, those are not trivial questions…

In the highly unequal power-relationships in the conventional product-oriented model, the answers are very clear indeed: there is often a thin pretence of ‘customer-service’, but in reality the ‘consumer’ is deemed to exist solely to serve the organisation and its perceived ‘need’ to sell.

[And the organisation in turn is deemed to exist solely to serve the 'needs' of the stockholders, but that's another story...]

But in a service-oriented enterprise, there are two fundamentally-different types of service going on: and the architecture needs to support both of these.

One type – which we might describe as ‘horizontal’ – is the conventional ‘supply-chain’ structure: the service-producer serves the needs of the service-consumer. The issues here that the architecture needs to support are that:

• the relationships between producer and consumer are essentially peer-to-peer
• the roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ will often blur or even swap over, especially in the ‘co-creation’ relationships that are common in a service-oriented model
• the overall relationships are built via the self-reinforcing loop of the full ‘market-cycle’, as above

The other type of service is more ‘vertical’: within the context of those ‘horizontal’ supply-chain service-relationships, every player in the shared-enterprise serves the same overall vision and values. The market exists within the context of a broader shared-enterprise, defined by a distinct purpose or ‘vision’ and its associated values.

Remember Chris Potts’ point above, that “we appear in customers’ experiences”: there’s a crucial difference here between the organisation and those with whom it interacts. Architecturally speaking, the organisation chooses the vision and values to which it will align. When customers’ experiences – and, for that matter, suppliers’ experiences – happen also to align with that same vision and values, there is then a basis for a shared connection. Serving the same ends – the same vision and values – creates the basis for mutual trust, which then starts the market-cycle rolling.

So the service is delivered through the ‘horizontal’ connection; but the connection only exists because both parties share ‘vertical’ alignment to the same vision and values.

Note that the customers’ experiences – or even supplier’s experiences – may only align with the organisation’s chosen vision for a brief period: think of a restaurant at lunch-time, for example. But whilst that alignment exists, there is the basis for conversation and connection – and hence the first stage of the market-cycle already in progress.

[Back to the camera-shop. The focus throughout the conversation was photography, what kind of photography I might need to do, about cameras in general. Firstly, there was a conversation - which in some stores doesn't even happen at all; and the conversation didn't have an all-too-obvious undercurrent of 'how can we sell you a high-priced camera that you don't need?' - which I've had all too often in the high-pressure stores. Instead, I felt listened-to, respected, safe, served - all of which increases the likelihood that I'd go back there when I am ready to buy another camera. In other words, that first part of the market-cycle is already in progress; and I feel safe in the belief that the closing 'post-sale' part of the market-cycle would be there, too.

Yet note that I wouldn't go there to buy a sandwich, or clothes, or anything that wasn't about cameras - because that isn't part of their vision or purpose that they present. They're clear about what they do and what they don't do, and demonstrate their vision and values in practice: so I know when to go there, and when not to go there. Sounds obvious, perhaps: but some organisations are so sales-obsessed that they give the impression that they'll sell us anything, whether they have it or not, just to make up their sales-quota - and that's really confusing, for everyone.]

Architecturally, the vision and values are the core of a service-oriented architecture: everything in the organisation needs to be understood as serving that vision.

Hence, for example, the value of a service-viability checklist that explicitly includes tracing of support for each of the values as they touch on every aspect of the enterprise.

Hence also the importance of ensuring that that same vision is carried across any partner- or outsourcing-relationships – especially where key customer-facing connections are handled by outsourced others such as an external customer-service centre.

And hence also the importance of keeping the focus on those shared-relationships overall, such as with Chris Potts’ aphorism above. As enterprise-architect Pat Ferdinandi put it, in a comment on an earlier post here:

That’s a brilliant line by Chris. It’s the corporation’s adjustment between customer service and customer loyalty. Customer service is viewed as a “fix” of problems. Customer loyalty is earned by the customer’s experience with the corporation but not necessarily from the corporation. The experience can be from word of mouse of a trusted friend. The experience can be from reviews by “specialists” in the area.

There’s a lot more on these themes scattered around on this site, and in the various books. For example, take a look at the post ‘Where marketing meets enterprise-architecture‘, or any of the articles here on Enterprise Canvas; and the books ‘The Service-Oriented Enterprise: enterprise-architecture and viable services‘, and ’Mapping the Enterprise: modelling the enterprise as services with the Enterprise Canvas‘. The chapter ‘Step 1: Know your business’ in the book ‘Doing Enterprise Architecture: process and practice in the real enterprise‘ also describes the practical processes needed to set up the initial architecture-models for a service-oriented enterprise. It’s all there: all we have to do is do it.

It’s simple, and straightforward: yet it’s often not easy at all. And the reason why it often isn’t easy is because it does require a real shift in perspective, a paradigm-shift – and no-one should underestimate just how hard those shifts are in real-world practice. Yet also don’t doubt that, as Dave Gray says, it is the way that the business-world is moving: so as enterprise-architects we do have to support our enterprises in that change, in whatever ways we can.

Enough for now, anyway: comments, anyone?

One of the points that came up in the previous posts on the management-architecture theme is that most management-structures are top-down, which doesn’t fit well with the ‘everything is just another service’ nature of most service-architectures – especially at a whole-of-enterprise scope. Yet if so, how can we create a better balance in the overall management-architecture? What can we do about that, in an enterprise-architecture sense?

Quite a lot, as it happens. There are a fair few models that are explicitly designed to tackle this rebalance problem, and plenty of practical real-world tactics, too. In this post I’ll summarise the mechanisms that support this in Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model; a real example from the 1960s that uses some of the same principles as in the VSM; and two more recent examples, one from an engineering research-laboratory, the other from current Army doctrine and practice.

(Not too long this time, I hope?)

Read more…

What do I mean when I say that, in a service-oriented architecture of the enterprise, we need to view management and the like as ‘just another service’?

This came up in a comment to the previous post ‘Why are the elite the elite?‘ The notion of ‘just another service’ is worth exploring more – especially as it has corollaries and implications that do have serious impacts on enterprise effectiveness.

(Just to make things clear: this is about enterprise architecture, not politics. Yes, as we’ll see, there are some significant sociopolitical ramifications from this, but that isn’t the focus here: the primary purpose is to explore some of the practical issues we encounter when scaling up a service-oriented architecture to a full whole-of-enterprise scope.)

Although I’ve said ‘enterprise’ above, what we’re dealing with here is mainly about management within ‘the organisation’ (organisation and enterprise are not the same).

What we’re actually dealing with is a paradigm-problem. On the one side, there are two fundamentally-different concepts of the organisation: organisation-as-machine, typified by Taylorism and the like; and organisation-as-living-organism, typified by various ‘systemic’ views such as those from Deming, Senge or Beer.

These two perspectives lead to two fundamentally-different views of the nature and role of management – which in turn have, as above, significant sociopolitical ramifications. But to get there, and to contrast those two views, we first need to do a couple of side-steps.

One of these side-steps is about purpose and the organisation.

In the machine-view, purpose is extrinsic: the purpose of the organisation is defined from outside the organisation. It’s just a machine: everything and everyone within it is, by definition, just another ‘purpose-free’ component of that machine. The machine itself is guided – or defined, perhaps – by the aims of the organisation’s owners, who provide the capital for ‘the enterprise’ and “the animal spirits of the entrepreneur” to set it in motion.

In the organism-view, purpose is intrinsic: the purpose of the organisation is defined from within the organisation. The biological metaphor here is the urge the survive and thrive, within a broader ‘enterprise’ represented by the ecosystem within which the entity exists. The organism is self-guided, self-directed, largely autonomous in the literal sense of ‘self-defined’ or ‘self-owned’. The classical concept of an external ‘owner’ doesn’t really make sense here – other than by stretching the view to include a metaphoric ‘farmer’, perhaps.

Which brings us to another related side-step about owners and rulers and property, because there are two fundamentally-different concepts there as well: feudal/hierarchical versus free-form/ecosystem.

(Note that this won’t suggest that one is somehow inherently ‘better’ than the other: they’re not. It’s more about ‘fit’ to the requirements of the context – ‘better’ only in a contextual sense, not an ‘absolute’ one. If you’re familiar with Spiral Dynamics model of social contexts, feudal/hierarchical is essentially Red/Blue, nowadays with a thin veneer of Orange; free-form/ecosystem requires system-awareness, and hence is in the Gold/Turquoise range. [Ignore the 'historical determinism' in Spiral Dynamics, by the way: to be blunt, it's garbage. But the core 'vMeme' model is sound, and can be very useful as a cultural-assessment frame in enterprise-architectures.])

A feudal/hierarchical culture is one in which there are strict relationships (‘fealty’) of roles that are ‘above’ or ‘below’ each other, and that identify respective authority, ‘rights’, responsibilities. A true feudal model has a single ruler (‘monarch’) at the ‘top’ of relationship-tree; a more literal hierarchy instead has some form of abstract concept (such as ‘God’, or ‘the Law’) that is nominally ‘above’ all others, but in essence and in practice comes to much the same as a feudal model. In both variants, each ‘inferior’ is the ‘subject’ of the respective ‘superior’ – literally, classed as a semi-autonomous extension of the ‘superior’, with no independent identity, existence or will.

(For an extreme near-present-day example, consider Gadaffi’s Libya, with Gadaffi himself as ‘Brother Leader’ who thinks for all, decides for all, and possesses all – and whose merest whim is Law. In principle, if fortunately not so much in practice, the Pope provides much the same role for the Catholic Church – subject only to the perceived ‘will of God’.)

‘Modern’ capitalism arose in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in cultures that in essence were still largely feudal – in practice, at least, if not necessarily in theory. Aristocrats still held most of the land; but increasingly, the new merchant class held most of the money, and hence could claim a near-equal stake at the top of the tree-of-control. Beneath them in the tree were a wide range of agents: the bailiff, the steward, the factor, and so on. In modern-day parlance, these were the ‘managers’. And beneath them, as the ‘subjects’ of everyone else, were the ‘workers’ – the providers of Labour, to use the term from classic capitalism.

Taylorism in essence reflects and embodies exactly this type of feudal model: a rigid three-tier class-hierarchy. At the top we have the owners, who actually don’t get much of a mention in Taylorism as such: they set the purpose for the ‘machine’, issue commands accordingly, and are deemed to have the exclusive ‘right of possession’ over everything and everyone else. (Note, though, that with the invention of the ‘limited-liability company’ and other related changes in law, the old feudal mutuality of responsibilities is gone: all others are still responsible to the owners, but not the owners to their ‘vassals’ or to anyone else. In effect, the ‘social contract’ becomes one-way only: an obvious huge kurtosis-risk that few now seem willing to acknowledge…) Beneath them we have the managers, who in Taylorism do all the thinking for the ‘machine’, and maintain control: they interpret the wishes of the owners, and relay them as orders to those who in turn are ‘beneath’ them. And at the base of the tree, we have the workers, who do all of the ‘doing’ of the ‘machine’, and in essence are classed as mindless robots, subjects of everyone else’s ‘rights’ to ‘command and control’.

So in Taylorism, as in the Victorian battlefield, everyone has a fixed role in a fixed structure of top-down ‘command and control’ – owners own; managers think; workers do – and no-one can move outside of those preordained roles. Everything and everyone is a component within ‘the machine’.

By contrast to all of this, the ecosystem-model has no hierarchy at all: no-one has ‘rulership’ over anything else, there’s no command, and in many ways there’s no control either. The organism or ecosystem simply is. Sometimes there’s no real order as such – as in a colony of extremophile bacteria, for example. Often, though, there is some form of apparent order or collective purpose that emerges from the interactions in the overall context: the structure of a human body is one example of which we all have direct first-hand knowledge. Within a human body, it doesn’t make sense to use a ‘rulership’ metaphor, that “the heart rules the head”, for example, or “the kidneys rule the throat”. (Okay, people may well use such metaphors, but they don’t actually make sense in physiological terms, anyway…) Instead, the most accurate metaphor is that each cell and organ and structure offers its services in support of the whole.

So: what next? – especially in relation to the organisation and its management?

On the one side, we have the machine-metaphor. In Taylorism and the like, this aligns with a feudal-style tree-structure of ‘command and control’, a hierarchy of ‘bosses’ and ‘subordinates’. All of this is bounded by predefined rules and algorithms – hence ‘scientific management’. Everything and everyone is considered only to be a component – a nested structure of components within components within components.

On the other side, we have the living-organism metaphor. This aligns with a network-type structure, often with fluid roles and dynamic changes in relationship and connection. There is no identifiable hierarchy as such; instead, relative ‘positioning’ tends to be derived in an emergent way from the interaction of the whole. Instead of predefined roles, each entity – at every level of granularity or decomposition – offers services that contribute in some way to the emergent workings of the whole.

So how do these two models apply in the real world?

On the surface, most organisations still seem to use the machine-metaphor: there are explicit ranks, each with authority ‘over’ others, and so on. The nominal role of management is still a Taylorist ‘command and control’.

However this type of structure is very unwieldy, and slow to respond to change – certainly far too unwieldy for anything involving fast real-time action or real-time change. Even armies don’t use it any more – not on the battlefield, anyway, where ‘command and control’ has long since been replaced by a much more free-form ‘Commander’s Intent’. The same applies in Agile-style product-development, or in successful customer-service: the classic ‘command and control’ call-centre is frankly despised by almost everyone, especially those who struggle to survive within them…

So in practice, most organisations still present themselves as top-down command-and-control. But the reality is that, other than in a few quite narrow contexts, that isn’t how they actually work. Instead, to get the speed of response that’s needed in a real-time world, just about everything is structured around services – except for management, which still tries to cling on to command-and-control.

One of the real problems is that if we move to a service-oriented model – which we need in order to support the required agility and emergence in the market-’ecosystem’ – one of the crucial side-effects is that management can no longer be viewed as ‘special and different’. It’s not like the hierarchies of Taylorism: a service-architecture is a network-structure with no top, no bottom, and usually no identifiable centre either. In a true service-model, management is just another service, one that happens to provide management-type services to the whole. (I’ve described those services in some depth back in the various posts on Enterprise Canvas, hence no need to repeat it all again here?) And since in a service-architecture there’s no hierarchy-tree, no top, no bottom, no centre, management has no reason whatsoever to try to claim automatic or inherent priority over anyone or anything else: it’s just another service.

In a classic business-architecture, the first thing we usually do is try to map out the ‘org-chart’. What we discover very quickly is that that tells us almost nothing about how the work is actually organised. To get any sense of what’s really going on, and what and how and why anything connects with anything else, our best bet is to turn to a enterprise-architecture that starts from one very simple principle: that everywhere and nowhere is the centre, all at the same time. In other words, a strategy that leads naturally into a service-oriented approach to the architecture.

That’s pretty much where we’re at now with enterprise-architecture, and why a service-oriented approach to the architecture gives the best fit for most current business needs. But we keep on hitting up against that huge stumbling-block and bottleneck that we’re apparently not supposed to notice: namely that the hierarchical concept of management, that everyone seems to want to cling on to, simply does not make sense any more. Instead, the only thing that does make sense is the view that management is just another service, no different in rank or priority or the like from anything else.

Unfortunately, the political ramifications of that fact are huge. For example, if management is ‘just another service’, is there any reason why self-styled ‘senior management’ should always get the top floor and the highest pay? The short answer is no: no reason whatsoever. Oops… Think that blunt fact will be resisted – especially by those who currently claim to have the ‘right’ of command-and-control over all others? You betcha… and it won’t matter one jot that that kind of clinging-on to something that doesn’t make sense will make things worse for everyone, including themselves. It’s very, very hard to let go of privilege, of a sense of certainty in entitlement – especially when the blunt reality is that never were any real defensible grounds for that privilege in the first place. Tricky, that one… very difficult indeed…

Yet before you launch at me with some arbitrary accusation that I’m some kind of crazy ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘anarchist’ or the like (okay, as an architect I might perhaps accept the ‘business-anarchist‘ label… ), notice that this is not about politics. It’s only about architecture – nothing else. All that I’m saying here is that a service-oriented architecture points us inevitably at the blunt fact that management is ‘just another service’. What we do with that ‘blunt fact’ is another question entirely: but that it is a fact is not in question.

Hope that makes a bit more sense, anyway?

Why is management the way that it is? Does it work well that way? And what part does the architecture of management play in determining how well it does or doesn’t work?

(This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… )

In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four seemingly-distinct themes:

• deeper exploration of the architectural idea that everything in the enterprise is or represents a service
• watching architecture colleagues in several different organisations struggle yet again with inane demands from management-hierarchies that simply don’t work
• deeper exploration of conceptual flaws in current economics, particularly around the concept of possession and ‘rights of possession’
• watching yet deeper cracks appear in the current worldwide economic system

For me there’s been a kind of nagging suspicion that there might be some strong interrelationships across all of that conceptual space. Which in turn leads me to several deeply-worrying questions – from an architectural perspective, if nothing else:

• If everything is a service, what services – if any – does management actually deliver to the enterprise?
• If everything is a service, why should management be assigned any priority over anything else?
• Why are management-services and management overall so consistently and notoriously inefficient and ineffective?
• What part does organisational-structure play in rendering management-services so seemingly-ineffective in practice?
• Why is it assumed that ‘promoting’ someone into management will necessarily improve overall service-delivery?
• Why is it so often assumed that the most effective way of organising management-services is a top-down hierarchy of supposed ‘control’ of all other services?
• Following the trails of prioritised service-relationships, why are financial-shareholders so often assigned priority over every service, when in many cases the only ‘service’ they offer seems, in essence, little different from a ‘protection-racket’ – enforced compliance to demands under threat of removal of ‘protection’?
• In the current socio-political context, what – if anything – can we do architecturally to make any of this work any better?

For that matter, what can we do to make it safe even to ask such questions…?

Hmm…

(Warning: this will no doubt be another long post…)

Read more…

One of the more valuable uses of the Enterprise Canvas is as a checklist to verify completeness and viability of services, in any context within the enterprise.

By ‘completeness’ I mean that we check that the service has all the connections and support and flows that it needs to play its full part in the respective layer of the enterprise value-network.

And ‘viability’ here is in the sense described in the Viable System Model, that the interdependencies that the service needs both to operate in the ‘now’ and to change appropriately over time are all in place and in action.

In a service-oriented architecture and and a service-oriented view of enterprise, everything is or delivers or represents a service. Which means that everything in the enterprise will rely on those interlinks and interdependencies. Which is why a model-type such as Enterprise Canvas, which explicitly sets out to model those interdependencies, could be very useful indeed.

So here’s an as-brief-as-I-can-make-it how-to introduction on using Enterprise Canvas for this purpose, creating models with the simplified version of the Enterprise Canvas notation.

Read more…

Over on the Enterprise Architecture list on LinkedIn, Bala Somasundaram asked about the concept of value-trees as a means of tracking compliance to enterprise values, and thence as a means for validating the value of enterprise architecture.

Value-trees are a key theme in the model I’ve used for describing the service-oriented enterprise. More specifically, they are the trails of ‘pervasive services’ that ensure compliance to enterprise values. In effect, they are the vertical, management-oriented analogue of the horizontal value-chains of the enterprise. But whilst the value-chains traverse through a single layer of the enterprise – the operations or service-delivery layer – the value-trees, must, by definition, pervade every part of the enterprise, from top to bottom, from abstract strategy to each individual process-step, each line of code. To give one example, we know from painful experience that quality-based themes such privacy or security or business-continuity cannot be patched on as afterthought once the design is complete: to make it work, we must include them right from the start. A key aspect of the value-tree is the trail of relationships and requirements that devolves downward from the enterprise values, and upward as confirmation that the value-requirements have been met.

In short, value-trees are the means by which the so-called ‘non-functional’ requirements are made functional in a business sense.

For the most simplistic example, assume that the only value in the enterprise is profit. (I did say it was a simplistic example. ) A suite of principles devolve from this value: for example, that the outcomes of value-chain processes shall be measured in monetary terms; that costs of all activities shall likewise be measured in monetary terms (hence Activity Based Costing, for example); and that verifiable mechanisms shall be used to contrast these two sets of measurements, to derive a measurement of the value in its specified terms – i.e. profit, in this example. To do this, we’ll need to aggregate (‘roll up’) all the outcomes and costs; and for management purposes, we’ll probably need to be able to disaggregate (‘drill down’) through the business-units and groups and clusters, all the way back down to individual activities. The connections and transforms for aggregation and disaggregation are the branches for the value-tree.

A classic PDCA (plan, do, check, act) approach to quality-management – i.e. management of the value-tree – means that the tree itself needs to be supported by four distinct types of activities:

• develop awareness of the value itself, and of the need to monitor the value
• develop capability to enhance monitoring of and improvement against the value
• measure compliance of activities against the value
• verify and audit to monitor and enhance compliance and continual improvement

(Note that some of these may be required to be kept separate, by law or other regulation – for example, financial reporting versus financial audit.)

Next, extend the example to a slightly more realistic set of values. This leads us to something like Balanced Scorecard, which defines enterprise value in terms of four distinct themes: together with the existing financial measures as above, we add perspectives for Customer, Internal Business Processes, and Learning and Growth. Each of these themes has its own value-tree. (One reason why Balanced Scorecard implementations sometimes fail to give the desired results is that the value-trees don’t reach down far enough into the enterprise: if we take a service-oriented view of the enterprise, every activity has a ‘customer’, has its own ‘internal business processes’, and its own capability and need for ‘learning and growth’.)

To extend this further, each of the ‘-ilities’ trails of ‘non-functional’ requirements implies a root-value – for example:

• quality (in terms of the delivered business services or products)
• security (in all its multitudinous variations)
• privacy
• trust and reputation
• health and safety
• environment and waste-management
• transparency and ethics
• efficiency and effectiveness

As described well in TOGAF, each of those themes devolves outward via a set of principles, which ultimately need to link to everything. But on its own, a principle does nothing: it must be applied in practice (hence the importance of governance), and needs to be testable – and that testability must likewise ultimately link down to everything. (Testability isn’t described as such in TOGAF’s definition for the structure of principles, but is described well in Volere, the requirements-modelling process recommended in TOGAF.) The requirement-trees are the means by which the ‘develop awareness’ of the value-trees devolves downward; the tests in those requirements form part of how ‘monitor compliance’ of the value-trees rolls upward.

So a value-tree consists of the following:

• explicit value or ‘theme’, as topmost anchor for the respective tree
• principles that express and describe the value in practical terms (upper branches of the requirements-tree)
• requirements and tests, all the way down to the finest-granularities (both goal-oriented [end-point] and mission-oriented [continual / continuing])
• measurements, with tree of transforms and identifiers for roll-up and drill-down
• support-processes (‘pervasive-services’) for ‘develop awareness’, ‘develop capability’, ‘monitor compliance’ and ‘verify’

Each tree is fairly straightforward in itself: the complications arise from the fact that many of them will present conflicting requirements (e.g. security versus trust, safety versus efficiency). Because of this, there needs to be a tree of relative priorities, some of which may be imposed from ‘outside’ (e.g. legal requirement for priority of health and safety before profit). Ideally, there needs to be one single ‘master-value’ which acts as the ultimate arbiter for priorities – hence the importance of an unchanging enterprise vision.

Better stop there for now: but as usual, comments/suggestions would be most welcome!

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.

Apologies, have been a bit quiet of late, whilst recovering from my merry computer-crash (now fixed, with many thanks to the repair-crew at Colchester’s The Computer Shop), and working flat-out trying to finish off the current book – The Service-Oriented Enterprise: enterprise-architecture and viable services – in time to get copies printed for the TOGAF conference in San Diego in two weeks’ time. That means it really has to be be ready to go to press sometime tomorrow – which was asking a lot, since I started this weekend with almost four chapters still to write, and quite a lot of illustrations and other content still to do.

As of right now, that’s been hacked down to less than one chapter to go, and one illustration – though it’ll likely be one of the most difficult of the lot. But still, I do now have a better chance of meeting that deadline than I thought I had two days ago.

More details when it’s all done, anyway.