Tom Graves / Tetradian

Just been reading (via Tweet by Bill Ives) a post by Anne Marie McEwan on ‘Loosening the Taylorist Stranglehold on the Workplace‘. Within a much larger context in a very good article, this one brief section caught my attention:

The Japanese concept of ‘ba’ came up in one of the face-to-face conversations. … Nonaka et al say that ‘ba’ roughly means place”. It is a here-and-now coming together of physical, virtual and mental spaces, which together constitute a shared “context in motion” for tacit knowledge to become explicit.

In other words, a concept of place associated with ‘ways of knowing’.

I then remembered that although Snowden’s concept of Cynefin is, in current practice, primarily viewed as “a model used to describe problems, situations and systems”, the term likewise literally translates as ‘place‘ – and that, like Nonaka’s ba, that concept also arose out of work on utilising and sharing tacit knowledge.

One problem with both of those translations is that they’re very ‘thin’: the rather bald English word ‘place’ does not really convey the richness or layered nuance of either of the original terms. (Snowden himself has made this point several times, and I strongly agree with him in this.) To gain some sense of the deeper complexity and meaning there, one of my favourite resources is the work of the small English charity Common Ground, and in particular their Rules for Local Distinctiveness, such as:

– Let the CHARACTER of the people and place express itself. Kill corporate identity before it kills our high streets. Give local shops precedence.

– Defend DETAIL. Respond to the local and the vernacular. No new building or development need be bland, boring or brash.

– Local DIALECT should be spoken, heard and seen.

The other thread that comes up here is the notion of buildings and other places as anchors for both explicit and tacit knowledge – physical structures interweaving with conceptual structures, as described by Frances Yates in her classic The Art of Memory, and typified by the post-Renaissance ‘memory theatres’ of Guilio Camillo and his contemporaries. This in turn links back to a much older concept of ‘the art of memory‘, “a loosely associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and ‘invention’ of ideas” – a concept that can probably be found in some form or other in just about every culture.

Hence, to architecture, and to enterprise-architecture. If these represent the humanness of our interactions with physical, conceptual or relational space, what does that say about our present buildings and information-systems – almost all of which seem to conform to that description of “boring, bland or brash”?

Seems to me that there’s a lot that we might need to rediscover in our architectures, about the relationships between ‘place’ and collective knowing, collective remembering…?

Out on the fringes of enterprise-architectures and the like, we’re seeing some of this starting happen more now in the social-media and ‘social-business’ contexts, with much more emphasis on serendipity, tagging, cross-linking and cross-collaboration. As Dr McEwan indicates in her article, there’s more awareness of the human implications of the ‘Taylorist stranglehold’, its failures in the fundamentally-flawed concepts behind so much ‘business-process re-engineering’ and the like, and what we can learn as we rethink the entire idea of ‘the workplace’. And we’re seeing it, too, in the upsurge of interest in ideas and methods such as design-thinking and human-oriented systems-thinking, in holism, in panarchitecture and the like.

But perhaps one more useful place to start would be with concepts such as ba, cynefin and ‘local distinctiveness’, to re-remember what ‘place’ actually means in our working lives – and how we use the richness of place to anchor our shared memory.

Yet how do we do this in practice? How can we reclaim and rebuild ‘the art of memory’ into our places and workspaces, our information-systems and our collaborative relationships? Comments/suggestions, anyone?

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.