Oops… badly behind on this, definitely need to do some catch-up. Oh well. A somewhat-delayed collection of Tweets and links, anyway. Usual this-that-and-the-other, with first the usual ‘Read more…’ link:
…because the new day that starts in less than an hour’s time now is when I would stereotypically get that infamous bus-pass.
(Except that in this country I don’t actually get it for another 17 months: the governments here play an ever-popular game called ‘move the goal-posts so that we don’t have to provide what people have already paid for’. Bah.)
Yes. Tomorrow is the day I turn 60.
Sixty years of age.
Kind of scary, really. Officially ‘old’.
I’m glad to say that I don’t actually feel old. In some ways I’ve never felt better (although this week’s thoroughly nasty bout of something had me decidedly uncomfortable for a while… 
), and I certainly do feel I’m doing some of my best work ever, helping to create new capabilities and options for an entire industry.
Doing it again, in fact – because, looking back over the decades, I’ve actually done so several times.
Back in my twenties I contributed a fair bit to the revival of the then somewhat moribund-discipline of dowsing. I’d long been interested in ideas that were on the outer fringes of any of the sciences or elsewhere, because even back then, coming from a design background, I knew that that’s where the most interesting possibilities were likely to reside. (Back then, too, I had little patience for ‘half-baked’ hype-merchants, on the one side; on the other side, the ‘over-cooked’, the self-styled ‘skeptics’ whose grasp of actual science was often worse than abysmal; and, worse, those who somehow merged all those incompetences together into one inedible mess – equivalent to the endemic IT-centrism or business-centrism of so much ‘enterprise’-architecture of today.) I was doing research on skills-education at the time, as part of my Masters degree: I chose dowsing as my test-case, because it’s an example of an almost ‘pure’ skill, in that almost its entirety resides in judgement and interpretation rather than in manual or conceptual dexterity. To prove the research, I wrote up part of the thesis test-case as a ‘teach-yourself” book on dowsing – which actually became a best-seller for a time, and in somewhat adapted form is still in print, 35 years later. I’ll admit I’m not actually that good as a dowser: I’ve always been much more interested in the methodology behind it – the internals, the ‘theory in support of practice’ – rather than deep-involvement in the practice itself. A systems-view, if you like: a theme that comes up later in many other forms, of course.
Some years later, into my thirties, I was back to the other roots of that work, in graphic design. My then partner and I were running a pre-press bureau, using the then new technology of phototypesetting. The machines could run much faster than we could type: it was obvious that we could use more than one input terminal. But the manufacturers’ systems were fantastically expensive, and frankly crude – even cruder than the nascent microcomputer systems that were just beginning to appear on the market, at less than a tenth of the price the manunfacturers expected. Which – as things things do – led sideways into learning a lot about microcomputers, and the joys of software-development in assembly-language with inadequate software-tools, absurd constraints on hardware capabilities (yes, we did indeed manage to squeeze an entire microcomputer operating-system into 2Kb of memory, and a complete typesetting application into less than 40Kb), and, of course, clients who changed their requirements every few minutes… But we could typeset from just about any of the dozens of micro-based systems that were available at the time (remember WordStar, anyone?); and we had a perhaps rudimentary but proven and respected form of fully pagefitted desktop-publishing in daily use at least a year or two before the first Apple Mac made its appearance on the scene. Things changed a lot after that, and I sold the company on to one of our competitors; but I can justifiably claim to have been one of the pioneers – in Britain at least – of what is now the huge industry of desktop-publishing. (I also remember being told by the CEO of one of the largest manufacturers of typesetting equipment that “there is no market for printing from computers, and there never will be!”. Hmm…)
Over the years, I seem to have done this same kind of ‘business-anarchist‘ disruption in a few other disciplines. Perhaps the most notorious of these was around the fraught field of research on domestic-violence (‘DV’) resolution, where a simple five-minute thought-experiment of swapping gender-pronouns in the text showed that the so-called ‘standard’ model – mandated by law in more than half of the US states – was so deeply flawed in its fundamentals that it was completely unfit for purpose, in most real-world practice was causing more harm than good, and should never have been used at all. To prove the point, I prepared a simple rewrite of the ‘standard’ that used a more straightforward whole-of-system perspective, that resolved each of the fundamental flaws of the original in a methodologically-defensible way. The politics of the field being what they are, this was not exactly popular… but in fact that rewrite is starting to be used more often now. The core of that analysis also resurfaced in my later book ‘Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems‘ – nominally written for the business context, but in reality the underlying issues are exactly the same as in DV.
And, of course, the same disruption to the field of enterprise-architecture, with all the books and blog-posts and presentations and the like, trying to pry it free from the dead-weight of IT-centrism and remind everyone that ‘enterprise’ means ‘the enterprise’ – not just ‘the IT’ or even ‘the business’. We’re getting there at last, I think, but it’s been a long hard slog – again. And a lot of work still to do, on metamodels, toolsets and a whole lot more.
But am I getting too old for this game? I do have to wonder sometimes. And yet I’m reminded of an amazing woman called Mary Sheridan, who I worked for as an medical-illustrator in the early 1970s, and who started the public part of her career in child-development studies when she retired from the Schools Medical Service at the same age as I am now. (Her classic Children’s Developmental Progress is still in print, in fact regarded as the standard work on the subject, though sadly the current edition doesn’t use my illustrations any more.) When I look at what she managed to achieve in the time that she had, well, yes, I have to admit, there’s still a lot more I could do too.
But what could I do? Or should? (If ‘should’ is the right word here…?) That’s perhaps what I’m struggling with most right now.
So might be wise to use this, uh, somewhat-scary milestone as a moment to reflect on things a while… And maybe even use that not-quite bus-pass, perhaps? 
Another somewhat-delayed week’s-worth of Tweets and links, organized in the usual way with the usual categories and the usual ‘Read more…’ break:
It’s another week. Which means another (slightly-delayed) week’s-worth of Tweets and links. Usual categories, usual ‘Read more…’ link:
Catch-up time again, with another (somewhat delayed) week’s-worth of Tweets and links. Usual sort-of-categories in the usual sort-of way, with the usual no-quite-sort-of ‘Read more…’ link first:
Oh not, not again… looks like the Open Group members are about to muddy the enterprise-architecture pool once more, this time around business-architecture… Please, please, we desperately do not need another taxonomy-disaster like the infamous ‘four architectures’ of the ADM: please can we get it right this time? Please can we keep it simple instead?
Yes, I know I’m probably over-reacting again, but this was the set of tweets from the current Open Group conference in Austin that triggered this off, including a reference to something new from Open Group apparently called the Business Architecture Method Framework:
Kris Meukens and Pat Ferdinandi gave good answers to the ‘MBA’ question:
But I’ll admit that some of this worries me a lot. For example, how can it not be obvious to everyone that connections between organisations must be a central theme in business-architecture, just as it is in enterprise-architectures? And whilst I haven’t seen ‘the Definition’, I would definitely agree with @systemsflow here: we should long since have gone past any question about “does #bizarch include technology as well?” The short answer, of course, is ‘No’: but the fact that people above are still talking about ‘technology and operations domains’ as if they’re included parts of business-architecture suggests very strongly that there’s still way too much confusion between the distinct roles of enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and all the other domain-architectures that we work with in business…
I’m sorry to have to reiterate this, but it needs to be understood everyone that whilst the TOGAF ADM does work well for IT-architectures, it has a number of fundamental flaws that mean that it should not be used ‘as-is’ beyond that scope. (I’ve described in several places how we can adapt it for use beyond an IT-specific scope: although quite a few people do use those extensions now, it’s still not yet part of the ‘official’ standard.) The most important flaws are the fixed ‘four-architectures’ of Phases B, C and D in the ADM – business, applications, data, IT-infrastructure – and the way in which it treats ‘business-architecture’ as a scrambled, undifferentiated, unintelligible mess of ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’,with little if any connection to business as such. And the blunt fact is that Open Group is an IT-standards body: that’s its reason to exist, to “make standards work” in the realm of “boundaryless information-sharing” – but not necessarily anything else. It is very good at what it does, but it is not an architecture-body as such, especially not for outside of the relatively narrow domain of IT: and that fact is becoming all too evident these days. So I’m very, very wary of any ‘definition’ of business-architecture that might come from Open Group.
Instead, could we perhaps keep it much, much simpler? Please?
To do this, let’s go back to first principles,using the words themselves, and nothing more. (I’m using English here, but the same principle works just as well, if not better, in most other languages.)
Architecture: it’s about structure, creating structures that people use. Hence any definition we develop about architectures is going to be something about structure, and about people. (Technology enables architecture, but not is architecture: a rather important distinction…)
Enterprise: it’s not a business, it’s a commitment. It’s about emotion, feeling; about ‘the animal spirits of the entrepreneur’, and so on. In practice, at a collective level, it’s about how people come together to share their aims, and ways to achieve those shared aims. Hence enterprise-architecture is about the structures that people use to achieve their aims. Enterprise provides the ‘Why’ for what we do and how we do it.
Business is part of that: people do business with each other as a way to achieve their respective aims. Hence business-architecture is about the structures that people use to do business with each other, in support of their aims. Markets are obvious examples of structures that provide common space to do business; the law of contract is another kind of structure in that space; likewise exchange-mechanisms such as fiat-currency (money) and credit-cards, and social structures such as the ‘investor/beneficiary’ model that underpins so many commercial organisations. For an organisation, we could also say that its business-architecture is the architecture of ‘the business of the business’. And since it’s about how we achieve aims, clearly it comes under the overall umbrella of enterprise-architecture.
Security is about feeling safe. Hence, in an organisational sense, security architecture is about the structures that people use in order to feel safe whilst achieving their aims. For an organisation, clearly that too is part of its enterprise-architecture, but it’s kind of orthogonal to its business-architecture. In other words, architectures are not necessarily ‘layered’ – as in TOGAF – but intersect as a kind of multi-layered, multi-faceted Venn diagram.
Brands denote stories; likewise for other symbols of that kind. Within an enterprise-architecture and a business-architecture – but not necessarily in a layered way, as such – a brand-architecture is about the structure of how stories link people with their aims. The enterprise is a story: brands and the like form a key part of how we create that story. Brand-architectures are primarily enclosed within our business-architecture, but may well extend beyond: from the perspective of the shared-enterprise, for example, we are custodians of a brand, not the ‘possessors’ of it.
Processes are descriptions of what we do, in what sequence, and so on. They’re the ‘How’ of what we do. So process-architecture is about the structures of how people organise what they do to achieve their aims. Notice that this doesn’t inherently specify the ‘How’ of the ‘how’: it could be people, IT, machines, or any combinations of those. (‘Application-architecture’ is a specific subset of process-architecture where the ‘how’ is hosted on IT.) If we take Chris Potts’ aphorism that “people don’t appear in our processes – we appear in their experiences”, then it should be obvious that ‘process’ is both within and beyond our own organisation: always part of the enterprise-architecture, but not always solely enclosed our own business-architecture. In other words, another intersecting, interdependent set within this overall Venn-diagram of architectures.
We could say much the same for information-architecture: it’s about how people structure the information that they need to achieve their aims. Infrastructure-architecture is more about the ‘What’ of the enterprise: it’s about the structural ‘things’ that people use to achieve their aims. And so on, and so on, for all the myriad of other domain-architectures under the overall enterprise-architecture umbrella that links all of those disparate domains together.
There’s nothing complicated about this. There’s also almost nothing specific to IT about it; or money either, for that matter. It’s always about people, and about structures that help people to achieve aims. That’s it.
So let’s keep it simple? Please?
Almost catching up, for once – not quite a full week late. Here it is anyway: another week’s collection of Tweets and links, shuffled into the respective categories (or not, as the case may be). And, of course, the necessary ‘Read more…’ link:
One of these weeks I’ll catch up… Yes, iit’s the previous week’s collection of Tweets and links, sorted into the usual categories (or non-categories) and, of course, preceded by that all-too-necessary ‘Read more…’ link:
Yep, another somewhat-delayed collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories, of course, after the inevitable (and necessary) ‘Read more…’ link.
Another somewhat-delayed collection of Tweets and links: make of it what you will. Usual categories, usual ‘Read more…’ link. Need you ask for more?