Tom Graves / Tetradian

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?

Looking at your enterprise vision – or any kind of future intent – is it defined in terms of being for something? Or against something?

That distinction can sometimes seem subtle – yet it’s very important indeed…

On the surface, it always seems a lot easier to be ‘against’ something. Many NGOs define themselves this way; quite a few businesses will do so, too. Whatever it is that we’re against, it already exists – otherwise we wouldn’t be against it, would we? (In some cases what we’ll say we’re against is the risk of whatever-it-is occurring – in other words, it ‘exists’ only in imaginary form – but as we’ll see, this comes down to much the same in the end.) We want it to stop existing, or not exist: that’s the whole point. It’s real, definite, and wrong – because since we’re against it, it must be wrong. Which means in turn that, by definition, we must be right, we’re ‘in the right’. That’s a good feeling to have: certainty, righteousness, righting the wrongs of the world. Which creates a lot of emotion, a lot of drive. The kind of energy we definitely need in an enterprise-vision and the like.

But…

It’s all too easy for it to be subtly dishonest: we point the finger at others, blame others, show them up as ‘the bad guys’ – which means that, conveniently, there’s no attention placed on us, on how we also support that whatever-it-is that we say we’re ‘against’. (In fact, as Jung warns in his concept of the ‘Shadow‘, we may actually be the worst offenders here, using ‘Other-blame’ as a mechanism to avoid facing our own actions. For examples of this, look at the behaviour espoused or demanded by almost any ‘activist’-group that says it’s ‘against’ something, and compare that with the actual behaviour of that group in action…) Which also means that the only aspects of that which we’re ‘against’ is the parts that others do – not the parts that we do. After all, by definition, we’re ‘the good guys’, we couldn’t be doing anything wrong, could we?

Oops…

If we define ourselves as ‘against’ something, we then need that something to continue to exist, in order to be against it - otherwise we would have no apparent reason to exist. The more we succeed in being against it, the more we’ll find ourselves needing to re-create it, in order to still have something be against. Which, over time, leads us into the inevitable vapidity of the Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution“.

Oops…

In short, defining ourselves as ‘against’ something will feel strong, powerful, ‘good’; but it may well be subtly dishonest, and unfortunately it’s all but guaranteed to make things worse.

Not such a good idea, then…

Defining ourselves as ‘for’ something is usually a lot harder. For a start, it probably doesn’t exist as yet – in fact our aim would usually be to create it, to bring it into existence. But because it doesn’t exist, it’s not tangible, it’s often a bit amorphous, a bit blurry, uncertain. Because it doesn’t exist, we first have to imagine the possibility of its existence: and by definition, that can be a somewhat conceptual, abstract exercise. Which means that to make the intent emotive – which it needs to be – we first have to imagine the whatever-it-is, and then convert that imagination into emotion: which can be quite hard to do.

Tricky… definitely. But if we can do it, we can create something new, something valued, something we’re for – all literally ‘real-ised’ from nothing. It didn’t exist; yet when we succeed, it now does exist. That’s pretty impressive, when you stop to think about it.

So defining ourselves as ‘against’ something always seems the easier way: but it doesn’t work. Whereas being ‘for’ something may seem a whole lot harder, but it does work.

So whenever we define a vision or the the like, we need always to do so in terms of ‘for’, not ‘against’.

No doubt, though, that it is easier to start from a ‘being-against’. So to make it work, we need to convert – or invert – that initial ‘against’-definition into a ‘for’-type format.

For this, let’s use the example of workplace-bullying.

It’s easy to be against bullying in the workplace: very easy to see it as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘wicked’, and all the rest. Very emotive, obviously.

Yet it’s also all too easy to point to ‘Them’, ‘the bullies’ – and fail to notice how we ourselves do exactly the same… And being ‘against’ bullying typically means that the more successful we are in ‘naming and shaming’ the bullies (which, by the way, is itself a form of bullying…), the more we’ll need to keep hunting harder to find even the slightest scrap of bullying-type behaviour in others. Which leads, in time, to that style of bullying so typical of any form of ‘political correctness’; and from there, all too easily, to the workplace-equivalent of the Inquisition. Being ‘against’ slowly pushes us towards where we preserve – in fact become – the ‘problem’ to which we purport to be ‘the solution’. And yes, that really is what happens, time after time after time.

So to make it work, we need to turn it round: for, not against.

For this example of workplace-bullying, one place to start is not so much the undesirable behaviour, as the consequences of that behaviour. This is described well, for example, by Bob Sutton in his book The No-Asshole Rule: “After encountering the person, people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves”. If we’re against workplace-bullying, we would be against these consequences too, because they’re symptoms of the occurrence of bullying in the workplace.

So we now turn it round: what does a workplace look like if bullying isn’t happening? – because that’s actually what we’re ‘for’. So, for example, we might look at key themes of intrinsic-motivation, as described in Daniel Pink’s Drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Or we might look at the ‘equality’ column in the gender-pronouns version or gender-neutral version of the extended-Duluth framework, for a broader range of desired behaviours and outcomes: this shows us emotive themes such as safety, trust, respect.

We can now apply to this to the three-part structure for enterprise-vision:

• a descriptor for the content or focus for this enterprise - the ‘things’ or themes that concern everyone in the shared-enterprise
• some kind of action on that content or focus - what is to be done to or with or in relation to those themes or ‘things’
• an emotive qualifier that validates and bridges between content and action - why this matters, why is this of importance and value

If we put all of that together, we’ll end up with something like “we are for creating workplaces where everyone feels safe, supported, valued and productive in their work”.

To achieve those outcomes, yes, we’ll have to address workplace-bullying and the like: but to do so we keep the focus on the desirable outcomes, and behaviours that create those outcomes (the ‘for’), rather than the undesirable behaviours that work against those outcomes (the ‘against’). And by saying that these desirable outcomes apply to everyone, we’ve also avoided the ‘Other-blame’ trap – which makes it easier to engage everyone in creating those outcomes.

[Avoiding 'Other-blame' is especially important in this case, by the way, because one of the most common causes why people indulge in bullying behaviour is because they themselves have been bullied by someone else.]

So, the one-line summary:

always frame an enterprise-vision, or any other statement of intent, in terms of what you’re for – not what you’re ‘against’.

Hope you find this useful, anyway.

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…

When we talk about enterprise-architecture, what is ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, what is ‘enterprise’? Seems they’d be fairly foundational questions, yet most of the answers we see seem, well, kinda thin…

If we hunt around on the net, we’ll find plenty of definitions for ‘enterprise’: “a business venture”, “a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort”, “initiative and resourcefulness”, “a business organisation”. That last definition is a popular one with business-folk – the organisation as ‘the enterprise’ – which leads to the quite common view that enterprise-architecture would, at most, limit its scope of interest to the boundaries of the organisation itself.

But to me this misses the whole point of enterprise, the one that comes up in so many of those other definitions: that it’s about emotion. About commitment, to some kind of action or cause. As Chris Potts would say, it’s about “the animal spirits of the entrepreneur”. Almost the antithesis, in fact, of the obsessive need for ‘control’ that pervades so many organisations…

And when we look at enterprise-architecture from that lens of ‘animal spirits of the entrepreneur’, suddenly it’s clear that there isn’t just one ‘the enterprise’ at play in our organisation or whatever: there’s dozens of them. Hundreds. Thousands. An infinity of enterprises, perhaps. Enterprises everywhere. (Sometimes showing themselves mostly by a lack of enterprise within the organisation, but that’s perhaps another story… ) And all of those different enterprises competing like crazy for every small scrap of available attention… No wonder it’s hard to keep focus!

Those ‘animal spirits’ are each person’s hopes, fears, aims, intentions. Whatever they’re each committed to in the moment, that’s their enterprise. So every customer brings their own unique enterprise to the organisation each time they connect – and it may well be a different enterprise on every occasion. Every employee brings their own enterprise – or enterprises, rather, because they bring with them the current enterprise of themselves, their family, each member of the family, the community, every concern at every timescale. Everything that holds their interest in every fleeting moment – whatever it may be, it’s all enterprise.

If it’s an interest, it’s also an enterprise. Hence pervading through every organisation are vast numbers of collective enterprises: some are somewhat imposed from outside, by the communities and governments and pressure-groups that apply in the organisation’s context; some come from a more sideways direction, as professional communities-of-interest and communities-of-practice, each with their own worldview and language and mythos and everything else. All of them colliding and clashing and competing with each other, all within this one organisation that we might now almost laughably describe as ‘the enterprise’.

And from somewhere within that chaotic cacophony, the enterprise-architects must somehow find something that will help people make sense of this ‘the enterprise’. (If not the enterprise-architects, then someone still has do this task.) Because if that still-point isn’t found – the calm within the centre of the storm – then all we’ll have is the storm. Which ain’t pretty…

We’ve all seen what happens when that kind of storm wreaks its havoc across an entire organisation. If there’s no focus, then soon the only thing that will matter is what matters for me, right here, right now: not interested in anyone else, anything else. The clashes and confusions go out of control, pulling every which way at once, yet often also covert, concealed, the impossible un-joys of knife-in-the-back office-politics and worse. The organisation first splits into silos, then fragments further and further into factions and tribes. And by that point there is no organisation left that’s worthy of the name. Or enterprise, for that matter. In short, a mess. A big mess. A mess that’s no fun for anyone.

Which is why the idea of ‘the enterprise’ is important. As one of my clients put it, what they needed most was “a totem-pole to unify the tribes” – a shared focus around which everything could coalesce, as ‘the enterprise’.

Here, of course, we hit the obvious problem: whose enterprise? Who defines ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, who owns it?

Corporate law has very definite views on that last point: the interests of ‘the owners’ are paramount above everything else. (Except taxes, perhaps.) But it’s not simple as that, because it actually doesn’t work. Sure, we could legitimately say that ‘the owners’ possess the organisation – or the assets of the organisation, rather. But the organisation operates within a much larger business context, which is also an ‘enterprise’ – whereas the most that ‘the owners’ can possess extends only up to the boundaries of the organisation. In that sense, the scope of ‘the enterprise’ that matters most to the organisation is always larger than the organisation itself. And no matter how much they might wish to do so, ‘the owners’ can never really possess ‘the animal spirits’ of the employees, the customers, the suppliers and everyone else – which is an important point in itself.

Hence we come back to the notion that ‘the enterprise’ is a shared point of focus for everyone who might do some kind of business with the organisation. An enterprise is a commitment: so this ‘the enterprise’ – whatever it might be – is a kind of declaration of commitment, the chosen answer to the question “what does this organisation stand for?”. It gives the core reason for anyone or everyone to connect with this organisation – yet also identifies or implies the criteria, the values and principles, against which the organisation expects to be judged by all.

So as enterprise-architects, how do we choose this ‘the enterprise’? The usual way is through some sort of ‘vision-descriptor‘ that summarises the context, what’s being done within that context, and why it should be important to (almost) everyone to be engaged in that vision. But it’s crucial to understand that it’s not about the organisation – but about the organisation in relation to its broader context. It’s a statement of commitment to that enterprise: about how the organisation will behave in relation to that enterprise; about why it will behave that way; about how it will add value to that broader enterprise. This is why we might say that as enterprise-architects we create an architecture for an organisation, but about a much broader extended-enterprise.

But do we define the enterprise, as such? Not really: again, it’s a bit more subtle than that. The enterprise is: it’s not something that someone could define, or, even less, control. And yet even by the act of naming it, we sort-of bring it into existence, if only as a focus for shared attention, shared commitment, shared enterprise. We choose the phrasing that defines it – and that is a real choice that is well the organisation’s own purview. And yet it’s just a choice of words: it’s not the enterprise itself. We can choose to be responsible about that enterprise, and to that enterprise – yet no-one ever possesses it. In fact the moment anyone tries to possess the enterprise, tries to make their own private possession, that’s when it will ‘softly and suddenly vanish away‘ – into nothingness, as if it never existed. That’s the paradox of enterprise – and a real trap for any overly-controlling organisation.

This chosen ‘the enterprise is very real, and – when it works well – identifiably interwoven with yet also identifiably distinct from and greater than the organisation itself. And yet perhaps the strangest part of all is that it’s only ‘the enterprise’ because the organisation says it is – as its chosen “totem-pole to unify the tribes”.

An interesting twist, yes?

How do we use Alex Osterwalder‘s Business Model Canvas for the business of a not-for-profit organisation? Or, for that matter, the non-monetary aspects of a commercial organisation?

Over the past while have been asked by quite a few folks – Shawn Callahan, Alan Rodriguez, Robert Phipps and others – about how to use the Business Model Canvas in an NGO, government or other non-profit context. (Shawn’s client was a well-known international charity; I understand that Alan does architecture work for an independent but government-sponsored energy-trading exchange or something similar; Robert does data-architecture and other architecture-work in a government department in the social-services sector.) Hence seems that this might be a useful excuse to do a brief how-to, also linking Business Model Canvas to enterprise-architectures and business-process management via the Enterprise Canvas model.

‘Brief’ will likely be a relative term here, so continue after the break…

Read more…

Rethinking the enterprise from a customer-centric perspective was another theme that came up in that conversation with Robert Phipps last week, in this case with a bit of virtual help from Chris Potts.

The ‘conventional’ way of viewing an enterprise is that of the stock-market – and, apparently, US commercial law – which seems to regard the enterprise is as nothing more than a means of ‘making money’ from other people:

• “Our vision is to maximise our profit and maximise the returns to our shareholders”

Which is all well and good from the shareholders’ perspective, perhaps. Yet in a sense it gives prospective customers a really good reason to not engage with that organisation, because in essence the company has declared that the only thing they’re really interested in is taking as much money as possible from the customer – regardless of whether doing so is of any benefit to the customer at all… And it also doesn’t make any sense in a non-commercial or government context, where ‘value’ and ‘profit’ usually cannot be described in simple monetary terms anyway.

The other ‘conventional’ way of viewing enterprise vision and purpose is kind of ‘self-centric’, where the organisation regards itself as the totality of ‘the enterprise’:

• “Our vision is to be the leading provider of pig-nuts in the West Midlands district”

In principle, that’s all well and good too, in its own terms. Yet it still doesn’t provide customers with much of a reason to talk with the company, because the latter are, it seems, too busy talking about themselves to notice anyone else.

So what does work? What does create a connection across the broader-enterprise, such as to give the organisation and its customers and suppliers and other stakeholders some solid reasons to converse with each other? What – if anything – is the difference between ‘organisation’ and ‘enterprise’? And what is an enterprise, anyway?

This is where all that work about vision comes into the story. As I understand it, the enterprise-vision needs to be something that engages everyone in that shared-enterprise – not just the organisation. It needs to say what is of interest to everyone in that enterprise; what is being done to or with or about that ‘item of interest’; and why this is important to each of the players. To me, good examples of a valid enterprise-scope vision include that of the TED conferences – “ideas worth spreading” – and the IT-standards body The Open Group – “boundaryless information flow”, coupled with its tag-line of ‘making standards work’.

Once we get the vision right, a lot of things become a lot simpler for the organisation, and for everyone else, in their relationships with each other, within the market and beyond. For quite a long while now, I’ve been using a frame that looks like this:

The vision provides a link and reference-point for everyone in this space – including the non-clients and, especially, the anti-clients, who will hold the organisation accountable to that vision and its implicit values. If we want to understand enterprise-scope architectures – as opposed to organisation-centric or, worse, IT-centric architectures – then we’re going to need a frame like this to give us our bearings. Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas is another good example of this kind of broader-scope frame (though with somewhat narrower scope); likewise the SCOR supply-chain model.

To me, this is the typical view for enterprise-architecture: we create an architecture for an organisation, but about the the shared-enterprise(s) in which that organisation operates.

Yet in a sense this is still organisation-centric: it’s about the whole enterprise, but from the perspective of the organisation.

At that point, when talking about this with Robert Phipps, , Chris Potts‘ phrase came to mind: “customers do not appear in our processes: we appear in their experiences”. In that sense, how do people experience our vision, our organisation’s proposed way of viewing the shared-enterprise? What is that shared-enterprise, as an experience? And where does that experience fit, in relation to all the other experience-fragments that make up a total human experience? As in so many other contexts, Chris’ more customer-oriented view turns the whole frame upside-down.

It’s here that enterprise-architecture meets up with marketing – and vice versa, of course. Each enterprise-vision represents a story; in a sense, the enterprise is that story. Yet a marketplace consists of many stories or narratives, all of them not so much ‘competing’ as in ‘co-opetition‘ with each other – because without that underlying cooperation, the market itself would probably not exist. The market, in effect, is a narrative of narratives, a story made up of multiple stories.

The usual tactics for ‘positioning’ within a market include the conventional version of a ‘value-proposition’ – cheaper, faster, more economical, makes you look good and so on – or via brands – which act as a kind of precursor to and record of reputation, a proxy for the promise of experience. But the end result tends to be a bit like a raucous competition of ‘shouters’ at a street-market: “they are lovely now, come and buy, come and buy, fresh as the day they were laid, only two quid the punnet, come and buy”. That kind of competition may seem to look good and even sound good to each of the market-stall players – and seemingly a great place to grandstand the ego, too – but it actually doesn’t help people navigate their way through the market to meet their actual needs. In other words, their experience of the market – with various of the market-stalls appearing (and disappearing) within each distinct, unique and very personal experience. More often, that kind of grandstanding gets in the way of the customer-experience – but that fact is hard to see for each of the players themselves, because they’re too busy grandstanding to notice that it actually doesn’t work very well for anyone – especially over the longer term.

Yet if we re-frame the market not as a misplaced shouting-match, but as a place of story, we can see how a vision-based enterprise-architecture also re-frames the customer-experience. Each market-stall or, on a larger scale, each company or organisation, has its own distinct vision about where it sees itself within the market. It doesn’t need to shout: all it needs to do is expose and expound the respective vision. In turn, the vision provides clarity about how each player sees its respective role within that market – its role in the overall co-opetition – and also the values to which it expects to be held accountable. The classic ‘value-proposition’ and brands and so on become adjuncts or expressions of the vision and its implied values. The end-result is much more clarity about who is doing what, and how, and why; prospective customers gain a better understanding of what they can and should expect as part of their overall experience, when their personal narrative of experience touches the business-processes of that player.

This way, the company gets customers who want to be customers – in other words, ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ – and who are much more clear about what they expect to get. They’re engaged in the story – and hence likely to be willing to tolerate minor lapses, as long as the story itself is demonstrably upheld. Equally important, the company also dissuades the engagement of prospective customers who are not a good fit to their business-processes – hence significantly reduced risks in terms of customers disgruntled with the experience, and all the concomitant problems that would arise from that, including customer-service costs, damage to reputation and so on.

That’s the overall idea, anyway.

This is just a first testing-the-waters with this idea – there’s a lot more that needs to be done to flesh it out, to build a full cross-link with classic marketing, and so on. There’s also a lot that could perhaps be done to cross-map with Verna Allee‘s Value Networks and suchlike. But I think this slightly re-purposed version of Chris’ insight could be immensely valuable to us here: customers do not appear within a market; instead, those markets – and our organisations with them – appear in customers’ experiences.

Comments or suggestions, anyone?

I had an excellent time at the IRM-EAC 2011 conference in London this past week. Part of that was because Sally Bean and Roger Burlton had had the courage to bring their previously-separate EA (architecture) and BPM (process) conferences together, creating an immensely valuable mix across the whole business-change space. For me, the conference started with an excellent all-day workshop by Chris Potts, on ‘Driving Business Performance With Enterprise Architecture’, based on his rightly-acclaimed book ‘recrEAtion‘. There were many great presentations, too: for me, Alec Sharp on ‘the soft stuff’, Milan Guenther on crosslinks to design-disciplines [slidedeck here] and Jane Chang on applying EA beyond the enterprise were some of the real stand-out examples. And, of course, many great conversations, both with established ‘names’ and – perhaps even more important – the next generation of architects and designers, with some really exciting new ideas and experiences.

Each of these conferences brings their own special brew to the enterprise-architecture party. Open Group has its solid emphasis on the detail of IT-architectures; Integrated EA focusses on real complexity in the real world; AE Rio brings its own unique Latin flavour, with a stronger emphasis on business; yet IRM-EAC’s combination of EA and BPM was a heady brew indeed – definitely looking forward to next year on this one!

My own presentation was on ‘Respect as an architectural issue’, based on a real consultancy engagement some while back for a bank in Latin America – I won’t say exactly where or who, for obvious reasons The session went very well: some nice Tweets about it, at the least – though one of them said “@tetradian is light-years ahead of us …”, which is flattering yet also somewhat scary…! Anyway, here’s the slidedeck itself:

Description: The client: a large bank in Latin America. The business problem: loss of respect of the company in the market and the broader community, plummeting from highest to lowest in the region in a matter of months, with impacts throughout all aspects of the business. This real-life case study explores, step-by-step, the actual practices and underlying architecture principles that were used to tackle a major strategic issue with enterprise-wide scope, and set the groundwork for subsequent process development.

Key takeaways:

Hope you find it useful: Share And Enjoy, perhaps?

This one’s been brewing for a while, but the final trigger to get it down in writing was a tweet from yesterday evening:

RT @vernaallee: RT @timkastelle: Good post & important point by @jorgebarba – It matters how you play the game. Not just being first http://bit.ly/lbAi6q

Will recommend Jorge’s post – it makes some very good points about the importance of getting the business-model right. Yet the part that really caught my eye was this, right at the beginning:

A few weeks ago Techcrunch published an article about a startup that got seed money from a well known group of VC’s. And because this startup is working on a similar concept that my team and I are developing, it got my attention. I immediately sent it to my crew. Their reaction was interesting. Basically they thought that that was it for us. That we got beat to the punch. That we had spent a good amount of our time working on this and that now we got beat.

Ummmm… No.

What’s interesting here is Jorge’s attitude to the roller-coaster of emotion in business and elsewhere. His ‘crew’ seem to have gotten lost here in the roller-coaster, wildly down about an apparent ‘defeat’, as much as they would no doubt be wildly ‘up’ about some apparent ‘success’. But Jorge here seems to take it all in his stride: he keeps his focus on entrepreneurship as a whole, rather than any individual events.

In a sense we could split this into three distinct layers of emotion here: strategic, tactical and operational. For quite some while now I’ve been using a variant of the Five Elements model to describe that split, in a somewhat different way, in relation to the feel, think and do of the enterprise:

But it’s actually recursive, of course: that simple mapping above is useful, but there’s action, thought and emotion in all of those distinct domains, each with their own unique emphasis. So if, for now, we keep the attention on just the nature of emotion in each of those domains, something interesting starts to emerge from that mapping.

Emotion in the ‘Operations’ space tends to get caught up in the panic of ‘the NOW!’. (For one well-known example, go see the classic restaurant-kitchen on a busy Saturday night… ) We have systems and work-instructions and pre-planned processes and the like to try to stave off that panic: but as soon as we hit anything that doesn’t fit the structure’s assumption, panic is what will often ensue. And historically speaking, ‘panic’ is the correct word here: it’s the emotion that arises when we meet up with Pan, the place or space where everything and nothing is true at the same time, where every possibility exists and we don’t know what to do. What’s interesting is that – as we’ll see shortly – just about every tradition provides very clear instructions about how to prepare for that moment, and what to do in that moment: but unfortunately the awareness of that teaching tends to be forgotten in the panic of the moment. Especially so, it seems, in the business-context… Oh well.

Emotion in the ‘Tactics’ space tends to follow a somewhat slower-paced roller-coaster: ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ following perceptions of perceived ‘success’ or perceived ‘failure’, much as Jorge describes above. They don’t happen in-the-moment, as at the Operations layer: instead, they seem to rise and fall in response to reflection on news about seemingly ‘outside’ events. These emotions have a chance to settle in and drive tactical-decisions simply because there’s time enough to do so. But in the greater scheme of things – in other words, the concerns of strategy – these emotions are just as much of a distraction as is the panic at the Operations layer. And they’re rarely any more helpful in terms of guiding valid decision-making, either.

Emotion in the ‘Strategy’ space tends to be smoother in flow again, much more consistent – perhaps because it’s a better fit with the nature of strategy? It’s often described in something resembling meditative terms, quieter, more reflective, yet definitely ‘emotion’ in the sense of providing energy for movement. The key point is that it doesn’t seem to be subject to those wild swings: instead, the tendency towards labile reactivity is countered by a clearly-felt sense of vocation – often expressed as a vision or ‘mission’. And without those stable anchors, the strategy itself becomes unstable. Hence the very real importance of vision and the like in an enterprise-architecture.

In turn, a re-focus on vision helps to damp-out the wild swings of emotion in the tactical space, and help people to align tactical decisions with strategy. Down at the operations level, a clear vision or equivalent anchor is one of the few things that can help in managing the risk of panic: it provides a known point of certainty, a ‘centre’ or still-point of calm in the midst of the real-time chaos. That’s what every classical tradition tells us – about to reach and maintain that ‘still-point’ at the midst of the action. And again, it helps to ensure that each action is aligned with the chosen tactics and strategy.

But there is a practical problem here – an important one. This is that the emotions of the real-time panic, and those wild highs and lows at the tactical level – despite the fact that they rarely go anywhere useful – can and do become highly addictive. To be specific, it’s mainly an addiction to adrenalin, in any or all of its four modes – fight, flight, freeze or fornicate. (Watch the action at a typical stock-market trading-desk over a day or so to see all of those in action, sometimes all at the same time… ) Addiction to adrenalin provides a dangerous and often-destructive delusion of ‘feeling alive’ – whether or not what is actually being done is in any way helping towards the enterprise strategies or goals. Yet because it is an addiction, there will often be a lot of reaction against anything that would help to curb the addiction. For example, there will be lip-service paid to risk-management and so on, but in effect often passive or even active sabotage of such risk-reduction, because the resultant chaos provides opportunities for ‘hero’-style fire-fighting against metaphoric or literal fires; preventing fires is ‘boring’, not least because nothing ‘exciting’ will seem to happen.

So there’s a difficult balance here. In the enterprise-architecture, we need the vision and the like to provide a stable anchor for everything that happens in the enterprise, leading a real sense of aliveness, of collectively creating something that is meaningful and ‘greater than self’. Yet at the same time we need to allow enough space for that perhaps-illusory feeling of ‘aliveness’ that comes from the real-time roller-coaster. How to achieve that balance in real-world practice across all of a real organisation – not just a start-up, for example, but a huge multi-national corporation – is probably the hardest ‘ask’ and task any EA could face. But there are plenty of organisations where that does happen, to some identifiable degree, and with identifiable success: Zappos , Interface Inc or Ricardo Semler’s Semco are well-known examples that come to mind. So in principle at least, we should be able to do this in any organisation – by paying attention to the emotions that literally drive the enterprise.

I’ll leave the last words here to Jorge Barba, in his article cited above:

It’s easy to get caught up with emotions because some other startup appeared on TechCrunch before you did. It’s the nature of this thing called entrepreneurship. But just remember one thing:

Startups don’t become relevant by focusing on technology, they become big businesses by focusing on being better humans.

And it’s the big businesses or the startups that seem to think ‘they’ve made it‘ that consistently forget this simple principle.

Something to think about, anyway. Or, perhaps better, to feel?

A great conversation yesterday with Australian facilitator Helena Read, around the word ‘belonging’, and how it links with vision and enterprise-vision.

In the enterprise, vision is the anchor for everything: the quality-system, the business-purpose, the enterprise itself. It’s a very human focus, literally emotive: “that which gets me out of bed in the morning”, and so on.

Behind it, though – and the driver that creates that literal emotion – is the human need to belong. To be part of something that is ‘greater than self’.

Belonging, says Helena, is about longing, about deep desire, ‘to long for’. To belong to something – to be part of something greater than self – is a way to express that longing. And, in the longing, to be. Literally, to be, in the longing; to know oneself as oneself in and through the expression of that longing.

A longing is also about or for something that does not exist, that we wish did exist. We accept that ‘that which is longed for’ may in reality never exist: yet it’s that very tension that makes us reach out for it, strive for it, do whatever we can towards it so that it might somehow exist in some unknown future.

Belonging. Longing to be.

To what do you belong? What do you long for? And how do you express that longing in your life, your work, your enterprise?

So that’s what an enterprise-vision is really about: it provides an anchor for that longing, that need to ‘belong’.

Which is why that enterprise-vision is not a trivial matter.

And if you don’t take it seriously, don’t be surprised that people show little interest in belonging to your enterprise?

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.

Read more…