Tom Graves / Tetradian

Also launched at the Integrated EA 2012 conference was my new book ‘The enterprise as story‘:

Full title: The Enterprise As Story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture

ISBN: 978-1-906681-34-0

Description:

Most current approaches to enterprise-architecture describe everything in terms of structure. Yet people work better with story than with structure – and people are the enterprise. As we expand the architecture towards a true whole-of-enterprise scope, we need to describe the enterprise as story. Story is everywhere in the architecture – even the enterprise itself is a story.

This ground-breaking book places story at centre-stage for the architecture, itself using a narrative structure to explore the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. Via business story-structures such as the Market-Cycle, and genres such as We Sell Certainty, it shows how stories underpin every aspect of the enterprise – and how we can use story within the architecture to enhance overall enterprise effectiveness.

Topics covered include:

• how to use story and narrative to assist in sensemaking for architecture
• how to create engagement in the architecture through story
• how to balance structure and story for better business results
• how to identify and use business-story genres to guide overall architecture
• how to change the organisation’s relationships with its ‘anti-clients’ from business-risk to business-opportunity
• how to use story-patterns to identify and resolve strategic business-issues
• how to leverage your own experience to create stronger architecture stories

If you want to create real engagement in the architecture and the enterprise, this is one book you’ll definitely need.

—

You can already order the printed book from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, and presumably most other book-retailers as well.

(Ignore the comment on Amazon about ‘Temporarily out of stock’: Amazon say that for any print-on-demand book that they themselves don’t produce… It’s at most a couple extra days’ delivery-time, that’s all.)

I’ll also be adding it to the book-set deals on Kevin Smith’s Pragmatic EA bookshop: should be set up within the next few days, anyway.

And new - you can now buy the e-book from Leanpub, as a complete set of PDF (portrait-format), EPUB (for iPad, Sony-Reader etc) and MOBI (for Kindle).

I’ll be doing a lot more publishing via Leanpub from now on: not just e-books of the existing books, but also smaller more focussed e-books on topics such as SCAN sensemaking and modelling with Enterprise Canvas. More details on that in an upcoming post, anyway.

‘The enterprise is the story‘ – my presentation from the recent Integrated-EA enterprise-architecture conference in London – is now online on Slideshare:

The slidedeck is just under 80 slides, split into five sequences:

• “What’s the story?” – introducing the idea of story as a way of working within enterprise-architectures, using the example of Carnaval, in Rio de Janeiro
• “A cast of thousands!” - describing the ‘sharedness’ of enterprises and the enterprise-story, again using Carnaval as its example
• “The plot thickens…” - linking story to process and the practical details of the enterprise
• “To be continued…” - exploring the structure of story, and strategic-structures that cause failure of the organisation’s story
• “Every picture tells a story” - a plea for stronger support of story in our enterprise-architecture toolsets

For once, I did a slidedeck that’s more about visuals than words – and it certainly seemed to go down well with the audience, which is always good fun.

The conference is, for me, one of the highlights of the year, because they cover architectures with such an enormously varied scope: most of the attendees are from defence / security contexts or high-reliability areas such as rail-transport or air-traffic control. I put in a a few sort-of visual jokes that I put in specifically for them – which seemed to go down well, too.

I also did a audio-recording, but it’s a bit crackly. I’ll try to clean it up and, if so, attach it to the slidedeck to make a bit more of a standalone presentation.

Share and enjoy, anyway?

‘Tis the season for… something, probably?

For many people, it’s ‘the ‘Holiday Season’, or Christmas, or New Year, or something like that. A calendrical marker-point, anyway. Something to celebrate, perhaps.

The culture I come from is nominally Christian, hence ‘Christmas’ and suchlike, so that’s the label others around me tend to use. (Though it doesn’t quite have the same sense for me, I’ll admit: in religious terms, my family-background is in the Quaker tradition, which historically regards Christmas as ‘just another day’.)

[These days 'Christmas' in this country seems barely Christian anyway: it's much more about families - which sadly doesn't have much relevance for me - and, even more, about the real 'state-religion', the Church of Conspicuous Consumption, which I try to avoid as much as possible...]

As a perennial Outsider, my real colleagues are scattered around the globe: I have stronger connections with people in the Netherlands, Australia,Guatemala, Brazil or the US, for example, than with just about anyone in this town. Those friends and families and colleagues all follow different faiths, different traditions, different worldviews: even the Christians amongst them will celebrate their Christmas on different dates, from 1st December right through to 6th January (‘Twelfth Night’, also known in England as ‘Old Christmas’). And even a nominally-secular marker such as ‘New Year’ can be almost as problematic: there seem to be dozens of different definitions of ‘New Year’, few of which make much sense to anyone else.

So it’s kinda tricky knowing what to ‘celebrate’, or know which date-marker to use. For purely pragmatic reasons, I tend to focus on astronomical markers such as solstices and equinoxes, because they’re probably the ‘safest’ in social terms. Hence today, being the solstice closest to the most-acknowledged festival in these parts, and also closest to the New-Year point for this culture.

Even so, which solstice? It’s winter-solstice here, but summer-solstice for my friends down south; and solstices don’t mean much anyway to my friends in the tropical-regions, whose ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ and the like align with other real-world markers. Hmm… see what I mean by ‘kinda tricky’?

So what can a not-particularly-social not-particularly-anchored-anywhere soft-of-digital-native do or say these days, in terms of others’ societal celebrations?

I guess the best I can offer is that however, whatever and whenever you choose your celebrations to be, have fun, and Have A Happy Whatever!

Enjoy! – and thanks again for sharing this journey with me over the passing year.

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects.

The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years or so: more than 40 posts here on various aspects since ‘The enterprise is the story‘. And as in the post ‘The no-plan Plan: architecture as story‘, it’s one of the five key-themes in my ‘no-plan plan‘ for my current and future work-direction. So it’s something I need to get down on paper, in more direct, usable form.

There’s a definite deadline of end of February for this one, because I’ll need it available in time for my presentation ‘The enterprise is a story: a narrative approach to enterprise-architecture‘ at the Integrated EA conference in London on 6-7 March 2012.

The second has a working-title of The business-anarchist: enterprise-architectures for the edge of chaos. This has perhaps been a less prominent theme on the blog, but it’s turned up quite a few times, such as in the post ‘Analyst, anarchist, architect‘. In essence, it’s about being deliberate and responsible about working with disruption in the business-context, preferably before that disruption is thrust upon us – a concern which is rapidly becoming more and more important almost by the day.

I’ve been nibbling at this one since mid-2009, and even wrote a fair chunk of it at various points last year, but didn’t finish it then, in part because it didn’t feel like the right time. Now, post-Occupy and suchlike, it does feel more like the right time, so I need to get it done. It’ll have to come after The enterprise as story, but with luck and lack-of-distraction it should be ready somewhen in April.

There’s also another enterprise-architecture book I’ve been working on for quite a while now with a colleague in Guatemala, Michael Smith. We don’t have a working-title for this one yet, and it’s rather further away in time – somewhen mid to late next year, probably – but it’s probably worth mentioning at this point. It’ll focus on the Five Elements theme that comes up in quite a few places in my work – for example, the structure of the effectiveness model used in SCORE strategy-assessment and the book Real Enterprise-Architecture, and the core of the market-cycle that’s used in conjunction with Enterprise Canvas.

Will let you know when any of the books become ready and available, but thought I’d keep you up to date with this part of work-in-progress, anyway.

When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture.

Am I giving up? No, not at all.

Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll just have to put up with that. )

So what exactly am I doing, then?

All I’m doing here, metaphorically speaking, is that I’m moving along the road a bit: a few metaphoric houses up the road, if you like. Similar sort of work to what I’ve always done, in many ways, but a much bigger picture this time. A much bigger picture. I’m not going to be looking (much) at the ‘enterprise’-architecture of some small bits of detail-level IT any more: I’ll be looking at the ‘enterprise-architecture’ of the whole darn planet…

Arrogant sucker, ain’t I?

In a way, yeah, of course it is, to say something like that. But if you look around on this blog and elsewhere, in effect that’s what I’ve already been doing, for years. All that’s really different now is that I’m making it a bit more explicit.

And to be blunt, looking around a bit, it really does feel as if I’m one of the few people anywhere who has a freakin’ clue about what’s really going on out there (answer: an MQ-9 mythquake [kind of like a worldwide Richter-9 earthquake, only worse]), what chance we have to stop it (answer: none at all), what won’t work (answer: just about everything we might think of as ‘normal’ or ‘business-as-usual’), and what might work (very-tentative-suggested-answer: something on the lines of a responsibility-based service-oriented enterprise model for a global economics, with systematic eradication of any concept of possession – including all concept of ‘rights’ – and total restructure of every possible aspect of politics at every level. In other words, just a few minor changes here and there… ). Seems like there might be a real need, then, for someone with my kind of background in futures, social-dynamics, skills-development, creativity, complexity, innovation, sensemaking and strategy, across a whole swathe of different companies, climates, cultures and continents. Oh, and there’s also enterprise-architectures, of course: reckon that might possibly be useful, too.

Yes: a real big need for that.

Kind of a big anti-want for it, though.

A very big anti-want.

Oh well.

But no problem, really. Do I think I can make a living out of it? Nope, of course not: I’m not that crazy. But I’m not making any kind of viable living out of enterprise-architecture, either, so what’s the difference? As long as I can pay my way somehow in this increasingly-insane ‘economic system’, that’s all I’ll need. And given that I’ve survived somehow for all these years, without ever having suffered the indignity of being a so-called ‘permanent’ employee, I reckon I’ll manage to keep going for a while yet. Somehow. Doesn’t really matter that I don’t know how: the way things are going, pretty soon no concept of a ‘plan’ is going to make sense any more, so perhaps I’m just getting in early to beat the rush?

Yeah, sure it’s lonely at times: I don’t have any real support at all, no family, no partner since literally decades ago, and at my age pretty unlikely ever again. Good: it means that there’s no-one else to get hurt on my behalf if I screw things up.

Sure it’s scary, desperately insecure: I don’t even have a home of my own any more. Good: nothing particularly to lose, then; nothing of that kind that can be used as leverage against me. And I can just up-sticks and go anywhere that I’m needed. Easy. (In principle, anyway… )

I’m useless at organising anything, events, stuff like that. Good: instead of desperately pretending that I can do everything myself, let other people do that stuff instead – they’re much better at it than I’ve ever been or ever will be. Just do my part of the work, and let others get on with theirs. Simple. (Interesting challenges on trust, of course… )

Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. Live this stuff that I’ve been talking about: rather than ‘making a living’, much better to go for ‘making a life’.

Crazy? Sure. Of course it is: never said it wasn’t. But then I come out of a family-background with a long anarchist-style tradition (of the more constructive if occasionally-quixotic Quaker variety, rather than the brainless bomb-throwing kind), and it’s about time I put those principles into real-world practice. Time to give something back – especially as, at age 60, I probably don’t have that many years left in which to do so. That fact matters, a lot. It also brings its own rather interesting sense of urgency…

So what does all this mean, in plain, ordinary, everyday terms?

Various things I won’t be doing:

1. I won’t do any more work here on detail-layer analysis of IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture such as TOGAF or Archimate (unless anyone specifically asks me for an opinion or whatever).
2. I won’t be presenting myself for any more contract-work as an ‘enterprise-architect’. (I’ll still be available to do spot-work commercial consultancy or training for most types of EA, in just about any industry that isn’t finance, banking or insurance – but I will expect to get paid for that, every time.)
3. I won’t offer any more ‘free’ advice on enterprise-architecture or whatever to people who can darn well afford to pay for it. (I’ll still be more than happy to help anyone in any other way – especially any of the upcoming ‘new generation’ of enterprise-architects.)
4. I probably won’t be going to any more ‘enterprise’-architecture conferences, not least because I won’t be able to afford it (unless someone pays at least my expenses, of course).
5. I won’t pander any more to people who to me seem arrogant, bullying, unwilling to think, and otherwise acting in an asinine or irresponsible manner (and yes, there’s been a lot of them I’ve put up with way too often over the past few years…)

Various things I will be doing:

1. I will be doing a lot more research and exploration on ‘big-picture’ themes, developing new types of tools and techniques to tackle those issues in a much more constructive way than as at present; and working with others to develop new toolsets and training-materials for these needs. (It’d be nice if someone else paid for some of that work, but being realistic I wouldn’t expect it, unless anyone else that I’m working with is getting paid for it too.)
2. I will be doing various types of consultancy-work with non-profits, citizen-groups and other organisations that are reaching towards a more constructive world. (Again, it’d be nice if I got paid to do some of that, but I’d only expect it from commercial organisations or government bodies, who should be able to afford to subsidise some of that other work at least.)
3. I will show the EA community and others how to apply those ideas, tools and techniques, within the conventional business context, such as with Enterprise Canvas and the like. (It would likewise be nice if sometimes people would at least offer to pay some of my expenses for doing this, but I do acknowledge that there are too many of us already in this same boat that I am with regard to ‘real-EA’.)
4. I probably will be going to a wide variety of conferences and other gatherings on broader-scope societal-change topics. (As ever, the real limit here will be my probable near-nonexistent income: so if you really want me at your gathering, please do find some way to subsidise my travel-expenses at least.)
5. Much of my work and writing will be a lot more ‘political’ and challenging for a lot more folks: in which case, sorry, but that’s just too bad, because none of us can afford to tolerate outright irresponsibility and abuse any more. (I am very clear about what is and is not abuse in the social context, by the way: see the ‘manifesto‘ on that, from my book Power and Response-ability.)

So that’s it: getting down to work in a different garden – a garden that’s a rather better fit, than that of current mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, for this admittedly somewhat-strange kind of toad.

Comments / suggestions / requests, anyone?

Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes…

My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an overgrown tangle, and they didn’t have much of a clue about gardening, but it seemed a friendly sort of place. It even had its own toad, hiding in the humid dankness underneath a sprawl of strawberry-creepers that had crept in from under the fence from next-door.

It didn’t take long to see why the toad was there. Next-door’s garden was regimented, ordered, everything under control, just so. And all a bit sad, because nothing was thriving there. Beneath all that would-be perfection, the strawberry-patch was a mess of slugs and snails, stunting all the growth; what few fruit were left were all tiny. Yet over on my parents’ side of the fence, those same plants were producing a lush spread of abundant greenery, enough strawberries to keep a grocery going all on its own – and one very happy toad, who’d made very sure that there was not a single slug to be seen.

My mother realised what was happening in the next-door garden, and even offered to send ‘their’ toad over there. But the neighbour was adamant that she wasn’t having “that disgusting creature” in her perfect space: no way! And continued to fret over the fact that her once-imagined idyll was indeed dying…

Hence interesting that I’ve been writing about ‘the toad in the road‘, because I guess that’s what I am myself right now, in this garden we call ‘enterprise architecture’. A toad in the road: right idea, wrong place. Right idea for somewhere, I’d hope. But wrong place for here-and-now. Oh well.

Yeah, enterprise-architecture. You know, this could be a really nice garden? Especially if you got rid of most of this mess of concrete, and let those tired plants in their cracked concrete tubs get their roots down into the dirt at last. Plenty of potential and all that: to get the water flowing again, you might have to take a stick of dynamite to that ugly-looking paddling-pool that the last lot of kids built for themselves, over in the corner called ‘IT-centrism‘, but hey, it’s all here. Why not do it?

You’d wondered where all the wildlife went, but can’t you see there’s not much that can thrive in this kind of desert? A few bugs and wood-lice and a lizard or two, perhaps, but that’s about it. If you want it to work, perhaps plant a few things that can actually grow here: get a bit of shade going an’ all that. There’s a few plants of my own that might grow well here too, if given a halfway-decent chance: the Enterprise Canvas, perhaps, or that notation-agnostic metamodel; or maybe even a bunch of ideas about value-trees, about the service-oriented enterprise and the structure of management – kinda strange-looking at first, I know, but they really do work in this kind of climate. Only a suggestion, of course: it’s your garden, after all.

I’ll have to admit, though, that this isn’t really my kind of place that you’ve got here. Partly my fault, perhaps: I do know I’m kind of an Outsider – always have been, I guess – though I really have tried, I promise you. It’s just I really can’t cope with all the broken-down bits of machinery parked all over the place, and the possessiveness that still pervades everything: they do kinda get in the way all the time. And a bit too grey, too cold, too lifeless: too corporate, I suppose you could say? I’m gettin’ old, I s’pose: I need somewhere that’s a bit more comfortable with having real people around the place, a bit more aware of the anarchic nature of, well, nature itself? I guess I could do with a bit more of the bigger picture, too: and I don’t mind all those mythquakes that we can see coming down the road a ways, though I know they do worry some other folks a lot.

I’ll still be around, of course: if you need me, you know where to find me. And I’m always happy to drop by in your garden – especially if you find a way to bring it more back to life again.

But yeah, I gotta face the facts: this kind of ‘enterprise’-architecture garden ain’t no place for the likes o’ me – and out here at present I’m just another toad in the road.

So it’s “goodbye and thanks for all the slugs”, I guess? – because it seems like it’s time for this old toad to be a-movin’ on.

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…

Following on from the previous post on ‘Simplifying the Enterprise Canvas‘, a few more notes on how to use the notation, and some practical matters on modelling.

Perhaps not quite as technical as some of the other recent posts, but I’ll admit that if enterprise-architectures and the like are not of much interest to you, you might want to skip this one. If that is of interest, though, please do read on!

Read more…

The Enterprise Canvas is a model-type for use in enterprise-architecture, that can be used to describe any aspect of the enterprise, providing a consistent, unified view all the way from strategy to execution. But can we simplify it so as to build support for it in existing EA toolsets?

The full specification for Enterprise Canvas is in my book Mapping the Enterprise, which at present you can still download for free from here; there’s also a free two-page summary-sheet in PDF format. It incorporates and unifies themes from a wide variety of other model-types in common use in EA, such as Zachman, Archimate, Business Model Canvas, VPEC-T, Viable System Model, Market Model and many others, at first glance it can often seem a fairly complex beast.

The image above summarises the core service-entity and its relationships, but in addition to that, services can be described at seven distinct levels of abstraction, services-flows take place over several distinct phases (the ‘Market Cycle’), and so on. It’s a powerful way to model what’s going on within an enterprise, but there’s a lot to it; and I’d have to admit it’ll seem a bit daunting at first…

And there’s a real problem that at present there’s no EA toolset that implements it. Hence the only way to use it at present in EA modelling is via pen and paper, and then manual transfer to other more constrained, context-specific model-types. Which kind of defeats the object of the exercise, about unifying across the whole enterprise space…

So there’s a real challenge there: compress it all down into a simplified form that can be implemented on an existing EA toolset.

And courtesy of a great meeting yesterday with Alex Yakovlev, it looks like we’ve cracked it:

• one main entity-type (Service)
• one subsidiary entity-type (Exchange)
• three relation-types (flow, composition and realization)

There are also two more subsidiary entity-types (Vision and Value) that are probably optional because they’re only used in one specific context and can be simulated anyway by other entity-types (Service and Exchange respectively).

That’s it.

And it’s all close enough to common model-types such as UML, Archimate or BPMN that it can be implemented via a few minor tweaks to entity-types and relation-types that already exist within those models. Which means that we should be able to translate automatically to and from those other model-types. That’s definitely good news. (For me, anyway. )

So, here goes: formal details for a simplified variant of Enterprise Canvas that can be implemented as a UML Profile or equivalent metamodel in any EA toolset that supports that kind of metamodelling. (Alex is aiming to get an initial UML Profile for Sparx Enterprise Architect done in the next few days – I’ll post here when it becomes available.)

Read more…

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…