Tom Graves / Tetradian

My earlier post ‘IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture‘ seemed to touch a nerve with quite a few folks:

• tetradian: [post] IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture http://bit.ly/p8kfqf (thx @dougnewdick) #entarch
• tonia_ries: The only thing that should be at the center of any business is the customer. @krcraft @tetradian
• krcraft: Agree, if staff also inc. as customers RT @tonia_ries The only thing that should be at the center of any business is the customer @tetradian
• Tim_Flux: @tetradian I think 1 of IT-centrisms problems is, those guilty of it dont recognise it (in themselves), so will not respond to your argument
• tetradian: @Tim_Flux IT-centrism as ‘invisible to self’ – yes, unfortunately, very true (applies to all ‘-centrisms’, of course)
• chrisdpotts: The ‘centricity’ issue in #entarch: it is usually capital-centric, not enterprise-centric (economics; RecrEAtion) // A strategy of stopping all capital-centric #entarch has extremely low chance of success!  Better to demonstrate the alternatives.

But then a follow-on comment by Doug Newdick triggered a really good discussion around business-centrism, capability and process, with Doug, Alec Sharp, Kris Meukens, Chris Bird and others all diving in:

• dougnewdick: Excellent post RT @tetradian: [post] IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture http://bit.ly/p8kfqf (thx @dougnewdick) #entarch // @tetradian Hi Tom – that post is excellent, and I think much better for being more moderate in tone, though still passionate
• alecsharp: @dougnewdick @tetradian Tom – I’ve grabbed your post, and will read it with interest. It’s a topic much on my mind these days… // Frustrated by EAs who confuse the scene with “capabilities” (business processs) in trying to be “business oriented” // Most fields are guilty of reinventing (and renaming) the wheel, but EA has really done a disservice in recent years
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp You don’t like the term “business capability”? Or just the way it is used?
• alecsharp: @dougnewdick “Capability” is fine to describe abilities of a person or org. EA use of Biz Cap’y is indistinguishable from process // I have clients in a serious mess due to EA groups tossing BC into the mix when a process arch. was already in place
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp I suppose that if you had a good process arch in place, there’d be less need for business capability map // however I think business capability is a good way to describe something more than process: ability to deliver outcomes
• alecsharp: @dougnewdick I think the “business capability” concept is redundant – indistinguishable from process (which was there first.) // I can’t agree – a business process is nothing but a way to deliver an intended outcome. // MIke Rosen’s BPTrends article (inadvertently) demonstrated that “capabilities” are exactly the same as biz processes
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp You’d be proved right if capability analysis + process analysis gave the same answers, & I haven’t done that exercise // how do you address the qn of whether we have the right people with the right skills to do “x”? Surely not a process qn
• alecsharp: @dougnewdick My observation is they’re very close – the difference is in the rigor of the analyst, not the concept. // But that was my earlier point – “capability” is appropriate if describing abilities/skills of ppl and orgs… // … but all the “capability models” I see don’t address that, they describe processes… // …in my f’work, “skills” (HR) is an “enabler” along with IT, workflow design, motivation, policies/rules, workspace
• krismeukens: @alecsharp @dougnewdick business process is an ordered way to deliver outcome, but there are unordered ways as well // capability captures both, ordered and unordered
• alecsharp: @krismeukens @dougnewdick Disagree – business process spans the range, from transactional to totally unstructured // I think the problem we have in the BP field is that “automated workflow” is equated to “process”
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp Aha! You have explained my unease w many bus cap maps I’ve seen. They’re just process & I was expecting something else
• krismeukens: @alecsharp @dougnewdick people think of process as being linear and deterministic, I don’t like process as the catch-all term
• alecsharp: @dougnewdick Precisely! Orgs obviously need “capabilties” but they are different than “what the org does” which is processes
• krismeukens: @alecsharp @dougnewdick @tetradian the dangers is in what @snowded warns for: our favourite sense-making tool being used for anything
• alecsharp: @krismeukens @dougnewdick I agree that ppl often assume “process” is linear activity, but “capability” is even more open-ended // That’s why I have a kit full of sense-making tools. I’ll stand by what I’ve observed… // …which is that most capabilites I’ve seen EAs define aren’t, and cause much confusion as a result
• krismeukens: @alecsharp @dougnewdick agree, many misuses. I see capability as “what” one is capable of, process as a “how” to realize it
• alecsharp: @krismeukens @dougnewdick Understood. I see process as first being “what” (“Acquire Customer”) and then “how” (steps & decisions)
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp @krismeukens I’d agree with Kris capability = “what”, but also like Alec’s def’n of it as the “skill” of an org
• alecsharp: @krismeukens @dougnewdick I see capability as (surprise!) ability that enables process. That said, it’s hard to differentiate // In my framework, process is the “what” and a workflow (+sys, procedures, …) might be a one “how.” // I’m just sensitive because of hours spent trying to sort it out at clients.
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp @krismeukens Thanks for asking the hard questions Alec – I think I need to go away and think about this some more
• alecsharp: @dougnewdick @krismeukens I enjoyed the conv’n and learned from it. Wish we were all gathered around a whiteboard. Thx, Twitter!
• kdierc: @alecsharp @dougnewdick @krismeukens a twitboard?
• seabird20: @alecsharp @dougnewdick @krismeukens can I make the assumption that capabilities are what the org has available to do processes?
• alecsharp: @seabird20 @dougnewdick @krismeukens That’s how I’d see it. Not “we need the capability to Acquire Customer” – the process itself // There’s a process (what), how it’s done, & supporting enablers: tech, abilities, facilities,
• seabird20: @alecsharp @dougnewdick OK, then resource vs capability?
• alecsharp: @seabird20 @dougnewdick @krismeukens Ack! Resource and capability. What are you, Dick Cheney? My head is exploding…
• dougnewdick: @alecsharp @seabird20 @krismeukens My POV – Capability = the “what” of an org. We execute that using comb of people/process/tech
• krismeukens: @alecsharp @dougnewdick with a fractal organization that could work

Rather embarrassingly, it ended with various people thanking me for the conversation, when I hadn’t even been there:

• dougnewdick: Thanks @alecsharp @tetradian @krismeukens @seabird20 for the great conversations today!
• ebuise: @dougnewdick @alecsharp @tetradian @krismeukens @seabird20 Thanks for a much needed discussion! (apol. for all RT’s, but you trapped me)
• alecsharp: @ebuise @dougnewdick @tetradian @krismeukens @seabird20 Fun discussion. Now to read Tom’s post – he started it all! 
• tetradian: @dougnewdick @alecsharp @krismeukens @seabird20 @ebuise apols that i’ve not been in the capabilities conv – have been offline most of today

For the record, my own opinion is probably closest to Alec’s:

• a capability is the ability to do something, to some identifiable level of skill, as embedded in a machine, an IT-application and/or a real person
• a function is a conceptual ‘place’ or ‘space’ within which things are changed in accordance with specific business-rules etc with an identifiable interface or protocol, in accordance with an identifiable ‘contract’ or service-agreement
• a service is a linking-together of capability and function to provide the ability to deliver a specific outcome
• a process is a path that links together a sequence of service-transactions (where the service may be either predefined or not – Sigurd Rinde‘s ‘Easily Repeatable Processes’ and ‘Barely Repeatable Processes’), to create a desired set of changes in something

More details on this framework reference-sheet, if anyone’s interested.

Great conversation, anyway – many thanks, folks!

All right, I admit it: I allowed frustration to get the better of me in the previous post, ‘How not to define business-architecture‘.

But the real point is this: IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture. Gartner made that clear some months back (apologies, can’t find the link…) in their ‘Hype Curve’ on EA: the IT-centric view of EA is increasing the ‘business-IT divide’, not reducing it. And as IT necessarily becomes more and more interwoven into everyday business, that IT-centrism is triggering a serious pushback from everyone else. Sure, if we’re in ‘the trade’, it demands our attention, but we’ve indulged it now for far too long: the blunt fact is that the obsessive IT-centrism of too many – especially amongst the ‘big players’ - must stop, and stop now, or else there will be nothing left. It really is as serious as that.

First, though, I ought to acknowledge some of the Twitter-stream that came up in response to that last post:

• dougnewdick: Good points w/o the invective RT @tetradian: [post] How not to define business-architecture… http://bit.ly/p0mITZ #entarch #bizarch #togaf
• tetradian: @dougnewdick point taken about ‘invective’ – but how on earth else do we stop Open Group from trashing the industry yet again…?
• dougnewdick: @tetradian I think that you weaken your case and alienate some of your potential audience with the invective. // I think you stop them by publishing a compelling counter-arg that respects all. I’m an enterprise IT arch & I’m listening 2 u
• tetradian: @dougnewdick yeah, I do know… – but after 5 solid years of repeatedly ‘publishing a compelling counter-argument’ it gets a bit wearing
• dougnewdick: @tetradian fair call!  - but I’m starting here
• tetradian: @dougnewdick other point is that that arrogant IT-centrism is really annoying to non-IT folks – it’s causing a lot of damage to #entarch
• dougnewdick: @tetradian That’s a good point too. My POV is that non-arrogant bus-centric EITA is a good place to start and try to get a seat at the table
• tetradian: @dougnewdick strong agree: ‘non-arrogant bus-[oriented] EITA’ is essential – and ‘non-arrogant’ creates space for seat at table

There’s also a useful comment from Stuart Boardman back on the previous post.

What do I mean by ‘IT-centrism’? It’s the assumption (usually implicit) that IT is not only the centre of our own world and work (which is fair enough if we work in IT), but also necessarily the centre of everyone else’s as well (which is not ‘fair enough’). It’s the attitude that for every possible business problem, there is always an IT-solution; and that that solution will always be the ‘best’ solution, simply and solely because it’s IT. It’s the assumption that there are no limitations to IT, that it alone offers the golden dream of perfect control – and therefore has the ‘right’ to control all others. It’s the assumption that the world can be meaningfully divided into ‘IT’ and ‘the business’ – and that IT, by definition, is the only one that’s right. It’s the attitude that only IT-people know how the world works, and therefore we have the ‘right’ to tell everyone else how they should work, so as to best fit in with the way that we work. And it comes out in a myriad of other subtle, unacknowledged, amazingly destructive forms.

It is, in short, myopic, narcissistic, and arrogant: and it really annoys the heck out everyone else.

If you want to see how and where and why the ‘business-IT divide’ is created, and why it stubbornly persists as a wicked-problem despite all the best intentions of so many people on every side, all you need to do is watch how IT-centrism keeps coming back, and back, and back, in just about everything that comes out of the IT-consultancy industry and elsewhere.

I ought to emphasise here that this kind of ‘self-centrism’ is not specific solely to IT. For example, ‘business-centrism’ is beginning to be another real problem in enterprise-architecture, where ‘the business of the business’ demands to be treated as the sole centre of the architecture. Finance people do it; HR people do it; shareholders do it a lot; Health & Safety folks do it far too often too. Just about every domain does, probably, at some time or other. But it does seem to be particularly endemic in the IT-consulting industry; and since they still dominate the enterprise-architecture discipline at present, that’s where most of our current ‘-centrism’ problems arise, and why IT-centrism is such a serious problem for us right now.

A domain-architecture necessarily centres around a specific discipline: that’s why it’s a domain-architecture. A solution-architecture also usually focusses its attention on a single domain. But every domain and domain-architecture has to learn to ‘play nice’ with all of the other domains and their architectures – otherwise the whole will always break down into feuds and infighting, or fragment into fiercely-defended ‘us-against-the-world’ silos.

For architecture – the relationship between structure and purpose – there needs to be something, some form of discipline, that helps to hold everything together. And the only way that works is by accepting whilst everyone does need to be the centre of attention at some point, no-one can claim to be ‘the centre’ around which everything always revolves. It does not work – it really is as simple as that.

In a true enterprise-architecture, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’ all at the same time.

Hence we cannot allow IT-centrism to exist, or any other ‘centrism’ to exist, because it kills the architecture, every time.

Hence we must challenge it, every time we see it – in others, and especially in ourselves.

If we want our enterprises to succeed, there is no other choice: that IT-centrism has to go.

Which is why I’ve ranted so often on this point over the past five years or so. I apologise if it’s annoyed people a bit too much at times: but hiding from facts never helped anyone for long, and as a profession we really need to face this fact now.

That’s it, really. End of rant?

Oh no, not again… Having all but crippled enterprise-architecture for the past decade with a muddled mess of myopia and misdefinitions, it seems Open Group are hell-bent on making the same kind of mess in business-architecture…

I need to be upfront about this: I don’t regard Open Group as ‘the bad guys’. Far from it: they’re an extremely important IT-standards body, and they do very important work indeed throughout the IT space. Yet it seems that whenever they touch anything that isn’t explicitly IT, they bring with them a perhaps-understandable yet entirely inappropriate IT-centric view of the world: and as a result, make a complete hash of it. Every darn time… And for the sake of all of us – including themselves – they really need to stop doing this…

On this occasion, it’s about business-architecture, specifically a transcript of Dana Gardner’s panel-session at the last Open Group conference, back in July: ‘PODCAST: Exploring business-IT alignment: A 20-year struggle culminating in the role and impact of Business Architecture‘. There’s a lot of good sense in there – no question about that – and for anyone involved in enterprise-architecture it’s definitely a ‘must-read’. Yet when I look at the sections that attempt to define business-architecture, and its relations to enterprise-architecture and IT-architectures, all I can do is weep:

[Dave van Gelder] Currently in the Business Architecture Working Group, we see business architecture as something that brings the balance between all the other architectures in the company — that’s IT architecture, financial architecture, money, people architecture, and a lot of other architectures.  If business architecture is bringing the balance between the different aspects of a company, then business architecture is something that should be handled in the top of the organization, because balance should be created between all the different aspects in the organization.

(I was present at that start-up meeting Dave describes, by the way, at the Open Group conference in Lisbon back in 2006. A very good conversation then that unfortunately seems to have gone almost nowhere: the main point I remember was that I was perhaps the only person there who didn’t speak Dutch… )

Well, yes, that definition is fine, in its own way – except that that’s actually the linking role of enterprise-architecture. There’s no distinct ‘architecture of the business of the business’ here: in other words, no business-architecture. And it gets worse:

[Harry Hendrickx] When we look at the enterprise architect and the solution architect, the business architect focuses more on the complete implications of the strategy and technology trends on the operations, whereas the enterprise architect is more interested in the IT and the implications for the IT strategy and how IT should be deployed. The business architect is much more focused on the complete performance of the business operations.

In other words, despite Walter Stahlecker’s explanatory document for the Business Architecture Working Group back in 2008, and despite Len Fehskens’ excellent article on ‘Enterprise architecture’s quest for its identity‘ on the Open Group’s own weblog, the Open Group still fails to grasp the bald fact that enterprise-architecture is not an IT-role, and that the term ‘enterprise-architecture’ is not a synonym for ‘enterprise-scope IT-architecture’ – the latter being what is actually meant by ‘enterprise architect’ above.

As Len Fehskens makes clear in his article, enterprise-architecture is the architecture of the enterprise – and the enterprise (or extended-enterprise, if you prefer) extends not just beyond IT, but also a long way beyond the organisation itself. In enterprise-architecture, we develop an architecture for an organisation, but about the extended-enterprise or ‘ecosystem-with-purpose’ within which it operates. It’s also a much broader scope than the architecture of the ‘the business of the business’ – in other words, the domain-architecture that we would properly describe as ‘business-architecture’.

But what we have here is, unfortunately, yet another Open Group mess. Enterprise-architecture is sort-of defined as an IT role, tasked with bridging the gap between IT and ‘anything not-IT’. Business-architecture variously either takes on an organisation-centric variant of the real enterprise-architecture role (as in Dave van Gelder’s comment above), or a muddled mixture of ‘the architecture of everything not-IT’ (as in Harry Hendrickx’s comment) – the exact same IT-centric mistake as in Phase B of the TOGAF ADM. How this is supposed to help in bridging the infamous ‘business-IT divide’, when just about everything here will clearly increase it, I just do not know…

Perhaps the most worrying point, though, is this:

[Dana Gardner] Anyone else with some thoughts about how to make the certification and standardization of this stick?

[Mieke Mahakena] What we’ve been doing in the Business Forum, after we decided that business architecture has its own reason for existence, we described the business architecture profession – what’s the scope and what should be the outcome of business architecture. Now, we’re working on the practice of business architecture by defining a framework, looking at methods, and defining approaches you can use to do business architecture.

Parallel to that, if you know what the profession is and what the practice is, you’re able to create the business architecture certification, because those things help you define the required skills and experience a business architect needs. So, we are working on that in the Business Forum.

Why is this worrying? To see why, you need to click on the ‘Business Forum’ link. It takes you to a password-protected page – which, by examining the link, you’ll realise is only accessible to Open Group’s ‘Platinum’ members. The ‘big boys’: no mere mortals allowed here, thank you very much. Which should remind us, yet again, just how ‘open’ the Open Group actually isn’t: in fact, it operates a ‘pay for play’ membership, a straightforward hierarchy in which the only real rule is that the ‘big boys’ always win. So what we have in the Business Forum is a group of large IT-consultancies who’ve demonstrated over and over again that they have barely a freakin’ clue about anything beyond IT, supposedly defining the entirety of the business-architecture profession, discipline and certification, all of it behind closed doors, and with no input or review from anyone beyond IT. If you’re working in enterprise-architecture, and that fact doesn’t worry you, it should…

Again, some good ideas scattered throughout that transcript: but overall…? – well, perhaps the only word that could describe it is ‘yikes…’? Sorry, guys, but we definitely need to do better than this. Please?

Oh well.

The Archimate notation aims to be the standard to be used by everyone in enterprise-architecture and related fields. But what exactly is its anatomy – its underlying structure? And if it’s aimed at enterprise-architecture, what is it about that structure that makes it seem only to support IT-architecture, and in such an awkwardly IT-centric way?

(Apologies, folks, because, yes, this is going to be another one of those very long, very technical posts… Skip it if you’re not interested, of course, though I believe this actually is important for anyone involved in enterprise-architecture and the like.)

Read more…

Yes, I admit it: I’ve been kinda pouring out the posts lately. Sorry…

But why all this fuss about business-models and enterprise-architecture? What’s the point about the bottom-line not being the baseline to work from? If everyone’s selling something to someone, is there really any difference between a for-profit and a non-profit business-model? And who would want to go from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, anyway? Is anyone interested in any of this technical stuff?

I suppose it all comes down to this quote from Chris Potts:

The devil is in the detail, but the angel is in the architecture.

People like building business-models. It’s wonderfully abstract, and it’s fun – like playing with model-trains, where the passengers are only imaginary and the trains really can run on time. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the real world is a bit different from that…

Real-world detail can break the best-looking business-model without even breaking out a sweat. We need to know that detail – or at least have a better sense of that detail – before committing ourselves and others to a lot of hard work and ultimate heartache.

Yet we also need to avoid drowning in the detail – otherwise we’ll never get started. Analysis-paralysis, and all that.

Which is where architecture comes into the picture. Formal discipline, yet without overt formality. Patterns help us break through the problems. We simplify, without being simplistic. And we model to reduce the muddle, to cut through the chaos and complexity of all that devilish detail.

Perhaps even more, it’s about the story: the story of each action, and the story of the enterprise itself. If we get clear on the story, the sensemaking becomes a lot simpler.

As I understand it, architecture comes down to a single idea: everything works better when they work together, in pursuit of purpose, a clear aim in mind. Everything connects with everything else. It’s the detail of how everything connects with everything else, of how we get everything to work with everything else, that I’ve been focussed on here.

A lot of detail, I know: but sometimes that is the nature of the beast. Fact is that architecture isn’t all nice pretty abstracts and nice pretty pictures – sometimes there is a lot of petty picky detail, and sometimes we just gotta face that fact… sorry…

Hope it’s been useful to someone, anyway?

Okay, I think I’m finally getting somewhere, on looking for a way to connect a business-model to enterprise-architecture, to provide a full link between top-down intent and bottom-up real-world constraints.

This specific part goes from the business-model downwards, from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, and thence to BPMN, UML and other detail-layer models. (There’s another part needed to link upward, connecting that work back up through Business Motivation Model and the like to the core shared-enterprise, but I’ll have to deal with that in another post.)

As you’ll see, I’ve had to twist Archimate somewhat in a few places, to provide workarounds for its current IT-centrism, but otherwise everything exactly follows the existing standards. The keys that enable and to some extent validate those adaptations are two assertions:

• everything is a service (an assertion supported explicitly by the design of Archimate itself)
• everything is recursive (a principle that enables pattern-based modelling, such as the concept of ‘layers‘ used in Archimate, TOGAF etc)

The ‘how-to’ that follows after the break is the current outcome of a lot of exploration over the past weeks, months and years, a lots of posts and conversations on this blog and elsewhere, and a lot of in-person discussion with a lot of people, many of whom have explicitly asked to remain anonymous. I do believe it’s in a usable state right now, but it should still be regarded as ‘in beta’ at best: use with some caution, and please send me any feedback and suggestions.

In parallel with both Business Model Canvas and Archimate, this may be considered to be under a Creative Commons licence. It’s probably not yet stable enough to attach to a CC license-type in a formal manner, but for now please assume non-commercial, share-alike and attribution-requested for the parts described here.

More after the ‘Read more…’ break, anyway.

Read more…

Still plodding away on ideas for a systematic process to translate a business-model in Business Model Canvas down into real-world architecture and implementation. (This links up with quite a few previous posts, such as ‘More on business-models‘, ‘Enterprise-architecture – let’s keep it simple‘ and ‘Is Archimate too IT-centric for enterprise-architecture?‘)

[Note: this is a work-in-progress post, not a finished piece - I really do need discussion on this one!]

What’s come up this time is the usual struggle with the so-called ‘architectural layers’ in common EA frameworks such as TOGAF and Archimate:

• Business
• Applications (in Archimate) or Information Systems (in TOGAF)
• Infrastructure

The problem is that, for me, these are ridiculously incomplete, and lead directly to IT-centrism – where IT is deemed to be the sole centre and basis for everything. That IT-centrism what creates most of the much-lamented ‘business/IT-divide’.

The corollary is that, because IT is placed as the centre for everything, and applications only run on IT, everything else has to be lumped into ‘business-architecture’, because it’s the only place it can go. Hence in TOGAF, for example, high-level business-strategy is bundled together with mid-level process and detail-level manual work-instruction, without any kind of distinctions between them, solely because it’s ‘not-IT’. And technology and infrastructure that isn’t computer-based – lorries, fork-lift trucks, assembly-lines, plumbing and wiring and even the buildings within which everything operates – don’t even get a mention anywhere.

This brings serious problems even in IT-specific architectures: for example, how can we usefully describe the overall architecture of a data-centre without mentioning power-supply or cooling or access-pathways? What’s the point of arguing about instant-on virtualization for data-servers if it takes a minimum of six months to construct the building that houses them? How do we describe disaster-recovery processes for when the IT is out of action, when the only metamodels available to us can only describe IT? To anyone doing real enterprise-scope architecture in the real-world, the myopic inanity of IT-centrism gets really frustrating after a while…

Hence why I’ve been ranting and raging so much about the limitations of TOGAF and the like over the past few years. It’s not because I’m ‘anti-IT’ – as some people have dismissed me – but because I’m trying to get things to work in the real world. A messy, chaotic, uncertain world in which IT is often unreliable at best, irrelevant at worst, and which, for the most part, is not centred on IT. Sigh…

So, in short, the conventional concepts of so-called ‘business-architecture’ are an unusable mess, and the ‘application’ and ‘infrastructure’ so-called ‘layers’ are too narrow in scope to make practical sense for anything other than the most IT-centric of IT-architectures. Hence, also in short, not so much useless as probably worse-than-useless for most real-world purposes.

Which means that we need to start again. Properly.

But from where? Using what as the layers?

(Or do we even need layers at all? Is even the idea of ‘layers’ misleading?)

There’s the Zachman layers, of course: Contextual, Conceptual, Physical, Logical, Implementation, Operations. That does make practical sense as a description of the process of change, but perhaps not so much about the architecture itself – the interrelated, interconnected structure of that which is in use.

What about structural-decomposition – from abstract to detail? Well, yes, that’s useful, certainly, but it doesn’t really tell us much more than Zachman does, and doesn’t help us to differentiate between different kinds of ‘thing’ – the distinctions that come up, if somewhat erratically, in Zachman’s columns of What, How, Where, Who, When and Why.

The ‘Why’, though, does lead to another suggestion: Simon Sinek’s principle of ‘start with Why’, and its layering of Why, How and What.

Because if we start with Why, and tweak the ‘What’ slightly to ‘With What’, we end up with an almost exact match to the Archimate / TOGAF layering – but this time a layering that is not IT-centric. And which also lines up with key parts of the Business Model Canvas:

• Why? – about the choices and Value Propositions that drive ‘the business of the business’
• How? – about IT-applications, ‘manual’-processes and any other Key Activities that enact those choices and needs
• With What? – about any machines, equipment, buildings and other infrastructures and Key Resources upon which or through which those activities take place

At first glance this has some parallels to the long-established CapGemini ‘Integrated Architecture Framework‘ [IAF]:

(I have a vague recollection that there’s at least one more EA framework that uses a similar Why / How / With-What structure, but right now I can’t remember whose it is… – my apologies to that person, anyway.)

But if we look more closely at those layers in IAF, it’s clear that they’re just a re-labelling of Zachman layers, with the old TOGAF-style layers sideways-on, and deeper ‘cross-cutting themes’ such as security and governance further behind. (And actually that’s quite a good way to put it – which we’ll come back to in a moment.)

The point here is that if we use that Sinek-style categorisation of Why, How and With-What, we can cover just about anything that’s needed in the architecture: it doesn’t assume that the end-point is only about IT. And it still lines up well to Archimate: hence business-information (linked to Why) is represented in Archimate as a Business Object, its usage in processes (linked to How) is a Data Object, and its physical form (as a With What) is a Representation. Archimate doesn’t as yet have any entity to represent generic ‘physical Thing’ or ‘thing that flows through processes’ – such as we’d need to represent a parcel in a logistics context, for example – but the Why / How / With-What structure makes it easy to understand that Representation, Data Object and Business Object are just IT-oriented specialisations (in the UML sense) of each of the respective generic entities. It works.

But should we use layers at all – especially scope-defining layers such as ‘business’, ‘application’ and ‘infrastructure’? In a sense, the IAF suggests not – any fixed notion of ‘layers’ is misleading. A better way to describe is to say that the ‘layers’ are merely areas of emphasis of attention: we separate those areas in order to ‘black-box’ the internals of an area of scope so as to focus our attention on the interfaces between those areas of attention. The IAF shows a very good way to visualise this, with sets of viewpoints that are in effect orthogonal to each other. The only problem there with the IAF is that, yet again, it constrains the overall scope to IT alone – which renders it too limited for whole-enterprise architecture. If we imagine that, rather than that catch-all column labelled ‘Business’, we could have as many columns as we need – and as many ‘backplanes’ that we might need, equivalent to the existing ‘Security’ and ‘Governance’ but covering all values in context for the enterprise – then something like IAF would make good sense.

I would suggest, though, that that simple categorisation would be a good place to start:

• Why – ‘business’
• How – ‘applications’
• With What - ‘infrastructure’

Use each of these not-quite-layers as a viewpoint for focus into the overall enterprise context, and use an adapted version of Archimate or an equivalent to model both within those ‘areas of interest’ and to explore the connections between them.

Okay, that’s it for now: over to you, if you would?

Archimate aims to be the standard notation for enterprise-architectures. But has it become too IT-centric to be usable for that purpose? And is there any way we can get it to break out of the IT-centric box?

These questions came up for me whilst exploring the architectural processes we could use in expanding a business-model developed in Business Model Canvas out into the detail needed for real-world implementation. Archimate should be the obvious standard to use in describing an overall architecture: but at present it’s not so much IT-oriented as almost entirely IT-centric, and a real-world business-model involves a lot more than just IT. Yet if the only available standard only describes the IT, what on earth can we use to describe everything else? And how can we link everything else back to the IT? Therein lies the problem.

Let’s step back a bit. More like a decade, actually.

Archimate started out as means to solve some real architectural problems for users of large IT-systems in the Netherlands. A consortium of academics, IT-consultancies, business-users and government was brought together, to address how to link all the different layers of the IT-domains together, from the business needs, down through the IT-applications and data, all the way to the actual IT-infrastructure that supported all of those needs. In other words, the usual IT-oriented layering that we see in TOGAF and so many other ‘enterprise’-architecture frameworks.

That kind of layering does make perfect sense if the focus of concern is IT, and if the business of the business revolves primarily around information. In other words, it fits well with IT-architectures for information-centric businesses such as banking, finance, insurance and tax – hence the reason why the usual Archimate ‘demonstrator’ is an imaginary insurance-company called ‘Archisurance’.

But this doesn’t make sense – or rather, is far too constrained and constraining – if the focus of concern is anything other than IT, or for any type of business whose business is not centred solely around information. Which latter, in reality, is the case for most businesses – if not all of them, once we start looking at the deeper detail of most business-models.

Which means that, for those of us involved in real enterprise-scope architecture, business-architecture, security-architecture, process-architecture, or any kind of architecture that touches just about anything other than IT, we have a problem here. A big problem.

A problem which in some ways is actually getting worse.

Which means it’s a problem that, collectively, we need to do something about, right now. Urgently.

Why do I say it’s getting worse? Well, take a look at this section from Chapter 2 of the original Archimate Primer [PDF], from back in 2004:

In the enterprise-architecture modelling language that we propose, the service concept plays a central role. A service is defined as a unit of functionality that some entity (e.g. a system, organisation or department) makes available to its environment, and which has some value for certain entities in the environment.

It’s clear that ‘service’ here is intended to be generic – not solely IT. And service-orientation is a certainly good place to start for whole-enterprise architectures.

The chapter-text continues with a brief summary of that all-too-common IT-oriented layering of ‘Business’, ‘Application’ and ‘Technology’. The accompanying diagram and text, though, do make it clear that there’s more to the context than IT alone, and that we do need to take the broader enterprise into account, beyond just the organisation itself:

The Business layer offers products and services to external customers, which are realised in the organisation by business processes performed by business actors. … On top of the Business layer, a separate Environment layer may be added, modelling the external customers that make use of the services of the organisation (although these may also be considered part of the Business layer).

So far, so good. It’s about services, and about the broader enterprise; it’s IT-oriented, but not IT-centric as such.

Yet somewhere, things started to go badly wrong, from an enterprise-architecture perspective.

Somewhen around 2008 or so, with the aim of making the still-somewhat-prototype standard more available worldwide, Archimate was transferred to the ownership and aegis of the Open Group. That move no doubt seemed sensible enough at the time: but the problem is that the Open Group is an IT-standards body, not an architecture body – and that built-in orientation towards IT starts to show even in the very first sentence of the Archimate version 1.0 formal standard, published in 2009:

An architecture is typically developed because key people have concerns that need to be addressed by the business and IT systems within the organization.

And by the time we reach the standard’s chapter on Enterprise Architecture, that all-too-common IT-centrism is in full flood:

The primary reason for developing an enterprise architecture is to support the business by providing the fundamental technology and process structure for an IT strategy. Further, it details the structure and relationships of the enterprise, its business models, the way an organization will work, and how and in what way information, information systems, and technology will support the organization’s business objectives and goals. This makes IT a responsive asset for a successful modern business strategy.

Today’s CEOs know that the effective management and exploitation of information through IT is the key to business success, and the indispensable means to achieving competitive advantage. An enterprise architecture addresses this need, by providing a strategic context for the evolution of the IT system in response to the constantly changing needs of the business environment.

You could just about get away with that kind of myopia in 2009, though even then its absurdity was beginning to be more widely recognised. Two years later, it’s probable that most members of Open Group would acknowledge that there are some serious limitations there, and many – such as Len Fehskens and Microsoft’s Mike Walker – are much more overt in asserting the need to break out of the IT-centric box.

In short, we need an Archimate for enterprise-architecture – not just IT-architecture. We need – and need urgently – an Archimate that isn’t all-but-uselessly IT-centric.

And yes, the good news is that a new version of the Archimate standard is due for release Real Soon Now. Hooray!

The bad news is that this new version isn’t likely to help much at all. If anything, it’s likely to make it worse…

I’m not a member of the Open Group or the Archimate forum, so I’m not directly involved in the update. But from what I hear from colleagues who are involved, the new version will be just as IT-centric as the old one. That text above apparently remains completely unchanged in the new standard: which means that its definition of ‘enterprise’-architecture is not so much out of date as just plain wrong. I’m told there are a couple of new sections to the metamodel: one is on motivation, to sort-of link it to the well-known Business Motivation Model; the other is about projects and dynamics, linking to and in some ways improving on the TOGAF 9 metamodel. I gather that there are a few new generic entities, such as Location, which would be not so much useful as essential. And Product, which used to be defined as “a coherent collection of services, accompanied by a contract/set of agreements, which is offered as a whole to (internal or external) customers”, is now apparently defined in even more rigidly IT-centric terms, as something like “a collection of financial or information services, with a contract that gives the customer the right to use the associated services”. Which doesn’t leave any space for descriptions of physical product or service, or relationship-oriented services – which is what most businesses actually deliver.

In other words, fine for the relatively small subset of enterprise-architecture that focusses around IT, but almost useless for anything else.

Which is not good news for enterprise-architecture.

So what can we do about it?

One option, I suppose, is to yell loudly at Open Group, and try to make it evident even to the most IT-obsessed of their big-consultancy members that this is nowhere near good enough. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to work…

Another might be to ask the original Archimate group – Telematica Instituut and others – to retrieve the standard from Open Group, so that we actually have a chance to make it work again. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen either.

Another option might be to use the Profiles facility in Archimate to define a much broader metamodel, particularly around the physical and relational analogues to the information-space that IT partially covers. That at least is doable – but the problem is that without a standards-body to coordinate all the various needed extensions, we’ll soon have no standard at all. Not a standard that we could for interchange, anyway, and not one that we could get the vendors to standardise on, to at last enable us to move architecture-models between the various vendors’ toolsets. Yet it doesn’t seem to be in Open Group’s interest that this essential work takes place, and at present there’s no-one else to take on that role.

Which at present, and for the foreseeable future, leaves us without a notation/exchange standard that we can use for enterprise-architecture. Again. After all these years. Sigh…

Over to you, folks: any ideas for anything that can get us out of this metamodel mess?

This one started from a Tweet from Vince Outlaw, one of the attendees at the recent Gartner EA conference in San Diego:

• SMOutlaw: Hot IT job No. 1: Business architect http://ow.ly/5p44R Very timely as Enterprise Business Architecture is a HUGE subject at #GartnerEA

If you know me, you won’t be surprised that to me that was like a red rag to a bull. Yup, I admit it, I fulminated:

• tetradian: RT @SMOutlaw: Hot IT job No. 1: Business architect http://ow.ly/5p44R >Business Architect is _NOT_ an IT job!!! #entarch #fercryingoutloud..

Then Ivo Velitchkov (backed up by Patrick Lujan) came back in with a dose of realism. Unwanted realism, maybe, but realism nonetheless:

• kvistgaard: @tetradian Well, let’s face it: it is! “Business” is misused in #BPM and Business Architecture, same as “E..” in #entarch. So really, Business Architect, nowadays, sadly, is an IT job.

Whilst Nick Malik dived in from another direction:

• nickmalik: RT @SMOutlaw: Hot IT job No. 1: Business architect http://ow.ly/5p44R >Business Architect is _NOT_ above EA either!!! #entarch

…and, later, expanded on this with a post of his own:

• nickmalik: [post] Different Specialties of Architect http://bit.ly/iRmtCE  –> To reduce the arguments about #entarch

Which might well look like Yet Another Pointless Argument About Job-Titles… “Oh no, not again”, I hear you cry?

Actually, this is a serious problem, and all of those are valid responses, in their own ways. Enterprise business-architecture is a very important aspect of enterprise-architectures; done properly, it is definitely not an IT-role, but at present it is still all too often portrayed as such; and the relationships between the various roles have become very blurred, very messy, and very confusing, to the point where that confusion is causing a lot of damage to organisations and their business-related architectures – and to the profession as a whole. Oops…

The core of the problem is not merely one but two related term-hijacks:

• portraying enterprise-architecture as minor subset of IT-governance;
• portraying business-architecture as a kind of random grab-bag of ‘anything not-IT’ that might affect IT’.

The worst perpetrator of this, I’m sorry to say, has undoubtedly been the Open Group, aided and abetted by ‘the usual suspects’ – the big IT-consultancies and analyst-firms. All of whom have only just realised how much they’ve succeeded in getting themselves ‘hoist by their own petard‘, but have unfortunately caused (and are still causing) a lot of damage with their previous overly-myopic IT-centrism.

I hasten to add that some of the Open Group crew are well aware of the problem, and the damage that it causes. For example, the indefatigable Len Fehskens has been fighting this particular battle for even longer than I have: his blog-post ‘Enterprise Architecture’s Quest For Its Identity‘ is an absolute must-read for anyone involved in anything to do with enterprise-architectures. His nomenclature of roles is really useful here: xA, ExA, EA (about which more in a moment). In essence, the architect’s role consists of bringing things together into some kind of unified whole, for a chosen purpose. I’ve expanded on this a bit more in my earlier post ‘Making sense of architecture roles‘, but the key point is that to understand and describe the role, we need to understand both its scope (or ‘breadth’) and its direct skill-level (or ‘depth’). A domain is a region of scope and expertise: for example, IT-infrastructure, security, brand, organisation, process, logistics and so on. In Len’s nomenclature, ‘x is any specific domain:

• xA (e.g. applications-architect, brand-architect): a domain architect, with emphasis on a single domain or closely-related cluster of domains, almost always with high skill-level (strong depth) in that domain – i.e. deep, but probably not broad
  (a solution-architect is usually a domain-architect assigned to a specific project or change-programme)
• ExA (e.g. EBA, ‘enterprise business-architect’; EITA, ‘enterprise IT-architect’): an enterprise-scope domain-architect, with emphasis on how a single domain links with other domains; the skill-level is sometimes referred as ‘T-shaped’, deep-skill in one domain, but sufficient of knowledge of other domains to able to support good ability to converse with other domain-architects and other specialists from those other domains
• EA: a specific domain-architect whose domain is the enterprise as a whole, and for whom the core skill-set includes cross-context specialisms such as systems-theory, human-factors, futures, strategy and other ‘big-picture’ themes; the skill-level across domains tends to be broad rather than deep (i.e. ‘comb-shaped’ rather than ‘T-shaped’), but must include all domains that are in scope for the enterprise

(Note that in most countries, by law, the only people who can describe themselves as ‘architects’ – without any other qualifier – are building-architects. Everyone else in all other cross-context-linking or cross-domain-linking professions must use some kind of qualifier – hence naval-architects, civil-architects, security-architects and, of course, enterprise-architects.)

What the Open Group have done in TOGAF is to completely scramble that nomenclature: routinely, an IT domain-architect or, at best, an EITA is labelled as an ‘EA’, with business-architecture – which should be a domain that is business-focussed and functionally distinct from IT – parked somewhere entirely arbitrary ‘under’ the IT-centric ‘EA’ banner. Hence that ‘business-architecture’ is simultaneously both ‘below’ and ‘above’ that ‘enterprise-architecture’, in several different utterly confused and utterly confusing senses. It is, bluntly, a mess – an unusable mess. And whoever it was that insisted on incorporating that mess into TOGAF 8.1 and TOGAF 9 should be quietly taken out and have their noses rubbed in that mess every single day until they themselves have sorted out the mess, because the end-result is that it’s made it almost impossible even for IT-architects to do their jobs, let alone anyone else.

So yes, Ivo and Patrick are right: it may well be true that ‘business’ architect is currently described as an IT role. But the blunt fact is that it really doesn’t help to do so: it just perpetuates the mess. Every one of us needs to be emphatic about this, because it is probably the primary cause of damage to the profession at present.

And yes, Nick is right, too: business-architecture is a distinct domain – the architecture of ‘the business of the business’ – that must not be seen as ‘above’ the scope of the broader shared-enterprise in which the business operates. By definition, it’s sort-of ‘under’ EA, because EA provides (or describes, or maintains, or whatever) the overall umbrella (or coverage, or network, or mesh, or whatever) under which (or through which, or within which, or whatever) everything connects with everything else. But when only IT-architectures are described as ‘EA’, then there are some circumstances in which BA or EBA is ‘above’ that kind of ‘EA’. Yet also circumstances when they’re not – given the way that TOGAF describes BA and EA. Which again adds to the mess…

Which is where we come to the second term-hijack in TOGAF and similar IT-centric ‘EA’: defining ‘business-architecture’ as ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’. Reading the TOGAF spec – particularly the TOGAF ADM’s Phase B, ‘Business Architecture‘ – there is almost no distinction made between high-level strategy (whose main impact is at Zachman layers 3 and above), process-design (typically Zachman layers 3-4) and protocols and the like process-execution (typically Zachman layers 4-5): it’s all ‘not-IT’, hence all jumbled together into a kind of blobby blancmange with no functional meaning at all. Take a look, too, at the TOGAF description of ‘business scenarios‘ – somewhere around the Zachman layer-4 – and compare that to the business-usage of the term – which is more like Zachman layer-2. Hence, overall, no wonder that business-folk get seriously annoyed at IT-centric ‘EA’ and its daft description of ‘business’-architecture that makes no business sense.

So we have TOGAF – and just about everyone else in the so-called ‘enterprise-architecture’ space – describing an ‘enterprise-architecture’ that isn’t about the enterprise as enterprise, and a ‘business-architecture’ that has very little connection with the business of the business. Oops… not helpful…

So in that sense, no, I disagree with Ivo and Patrick: it may be ‘realism’ to say that “really, Business Architect, nowadays, sadly, is an IT job”, but it is definitely not wise to allow that misnaming to go unchallenged, because the consequences are very serious indeed. (The building-industry has long since discovered this blunt fact the hard way – hence the legal controls around the ‘architect’ term.)

And I also sort-of disagree with Nick – not from what he’s said as such, but more from where I know he’s coming from: when the business of the business is IT – as in his own business-context at Microsoft – it’s again all too easy to fall back into IT-centrism, and I do detect more than a hint of that in his follow-on post about ‘Different Species of Architect’.

Overall, though, I’d have to insist on this as a summary:

• business-architecture touches IT, but is not an ‘IT role’
• business-architecture is a domain-architecture – ‘the business of the business’ – and hence necessarily comes ‘under’ the broader whole-enterprise scope of enterprise-architecture

Any other way to describe the relations between business-architecture, IT-architectures and enterprise-architecture will merely compound the mess that TOGAF et al have already made of this profession. Sigh…

That’s my opinion, anyway. For what it’s worth. Over to you?

A busy week this has been. The Gartner EA Summit and the Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners conference were both on in London at the same time, little more than a few hundred yards apart. And a lot of other things starting to happen in the enterprise scene as well: more good news on the way.

The highlight, though, was a stream of great conversations on enterprise-architecture.

The first of these was with Nick Gall and Bard Papegaaij from Gartner, and independent-consultant Richard Veryard. As usual, I failed to take notes… apologies. But probably the key theme throughout was the shift away from IT-centrism: Nick with his concept of the panarchy double-cycle applied to architecture, as ‘panarchitecture‘; Bard with a strong emphasis on architecture in government, and on emotional-intelligence and human factors (the latter with some strong parallels to my own themes around ‘enterprise as story‘ and ‘enterprise as language‘); and Richard on expanding out to a broader concept of ‘organisational intelligence‘. There was also quite a bit of discussion on whether the panarchy-cycle of creation, exploitation, collapse and rebuild, could be applied to Gartner’s own ‘hype-cycle‘: Nick was adamant that it couldn’t and shouldn’t, but Richard and I both felt that perhaps it could – particularly if we see the hype-cycle as two iterations of a panarchy-cycle, with the hype-cycle’s collapse into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ representing the second half (‘destruction’) of the first of those panarchy-cycles. A discussion for another time, perhaps?

We followed through on the next day with a stream of what ended up as mostly one-on-one discussions: Richard was presenting at the Open Group conference and could only drop by for a few minutes, whilst Nick and Bard had speaking-slots at Gartner that were almost back-to-back.

With Bard, the conversation started around the work by his late wife Michal, linking the native-American model or metaphor of the Medicine Wheel, and how those concepts can be applied in a business context.  In some ways this parallels my own architectural use of the traditional Five Elements model, and also some Jungian-style concepts that I’ve used for many a year, though Michal’s ideas seem to go into even further depth. (We’d planned to meet up at their home in Brisbane earlier this year, and had all been greatly looking forward to it; but we’d had to postpone at the last minute, because she became very ill, and sadly that meeting never took place. A huge loss not just to Bard but – from what I’ve seen so far – a huge loss also to all of us in enterprise-architecture, I suspect. Oh well.)  Very interesting, anyway, and I hope at least some of it will surface as a Gartner Note or the like from Bard in the relatively near future.

Another key part of the discussion with Bard was the relationship between agility and stability, somewhat as described in my previous post ‘Agility needs a backbone‘. The hypothetical example that we explored – based on real-world contexts which we’ve both worked – was the classic clash between bureaucrats and politicians in a government department. The blunt fact is that few politicians can see beyond the short-term: they need to deliver quick results of some kind to convince the electorate that they’re doing something of value. That means that they demand agility, to change everything ‘now!’ – which soon leads to a horribly fragmented architecture, with all manner of half-completed projects pulling in all manner of different directions. By contrast, the bureaucrats crave certainty, stability – and they often do hold a true long-term view, albeit often an over-cautious one. Caught between these two opposing forces are the project-managers and process- and IT-system developers, who somehow have to sort out the resultant mess. The way out seems to be an architecture based on some variant of the backbone – which keeps the bureaucrats happy – providing consistency and support for a myriad of smaller agile projects out on the edge – agile enough to keep the politicians happy. The two types of implementations need different emphases: the agile side typically thrown together as ‘shadow IT’, whilst the core follows a more ‘traditional’ waterfall-style cautious-change model with much tighter governance. New services feed outward from the core, enabling new agile-style ‘mashups’ – the many GIS-linked ‘citizen services’ being a good example of this. And some of those quick-win services will also slowly migrate into the core. But in terms of dependencies, it’s a kind of spoke-and-hub relationship: in general, services from the core should never be allowed to break anything – especially not without warning – whereas there would often be no guarantees at all for relationships between agile-services out on the edge. This approach would give us a unified form of governance across the whole agile/waterfall spectrum – and a lot more certainty for the developers who’ve too often been caught up as pig-in-the-middle.

Then to the follow-up meeting with Nick Gall. Much of this was a review of what Bard and I had discussed earlier, but there were also two key points that arose from a brief review of my ‘Enterprise Canvas‘ model-type (from my book Mapping the enterprise). One point was a link-up between my understanding of the tension between ‘vision’ and the real-world, that drives the architecture, compared to one of Nick’s own models of architecture as a kind of wasp-waisted ‘double-funnel’ between near-infinite possibilities and near-infinite implementations, with architecture as the ‘waist’ where constraints for key choices are identified and applied. To me, everything in the enterprise is like a cone, extending downward from the single point represented by the vision. But as Nick pointed out, architecture describes a structure that could in principle be used for a very wide range of different purposes – in other words, similar structures that can support different enterprise-visions. The ‘cone’ represented by a layered Enterprise Canvas would thus be one instance of the range of possibilities of purpose represented by the upper-half of Nick’s double-funnel, selected out by that specific vision; a different vision could well lead to an almost identical-seeming implementation below the ‘waist’ of the double-funnel. Hence why reference-architectures and commoditised-services and suchlike do actually work in practice – even though they’re linked to different enterprise-visions.

The other point was an easy way to resolve the age-old argument about architecture versus design. They’re actually part of the same spectrum from vision to realisation, from ‘why’ to ‘how’ and so on. The only difference between them is which way they face: architecture tends to face ‘upward’, towards the big-picture,  the vision, or ‘why’, whilst design tends to face ‘downward’, towards the detail, the real-world realisation, the how and who and where and when and with-what. So in practice, almost no-one is ever solely and architect or designer: everyone will do at least some of both. What makes it confusing at times is that the ‘architect’ orientation at a detail-layer – a solution-architect or application-architect, for example – will usually have a narrower scope than someone nominally working in higher-layer business-design or process-design. Once we realise it’s the same spectrum, it makes things a lot easier to explain: the difference between architect and designer is one of orientation – ‘up’, or ‘down’ – on that spectrum, more than one of position in terms of Zachman-style layers. Architects mostly architect, and designers mostly design; yet the two roles will always meet somewhere within each person on that spectrum.

Next was a meetup with a director of the vendor of a mid-range enterprise-architecture toolset. I won’t say which vendor it was, for confidentiality reasons, but to me this was important: perhaps the first toolset-vendor to really ‘get’ the nature of whole-of-enterprise architecture, and the support that it needs from the the architecture-toolset. Like almost all of the vendors, they’ve come up from an IT-oriented base, and that’s still the core of their toolset; but they do understand about how all of that links upward into strategy and vision, and horizontally across the non-IT aspects of the enterprise – people and machines and non-IT assets and the like. Nothing else to report just yet, but definitely a Watch This Space, I think?

Leaving the Gartner conference-venue, a very brief meeting with two of the new generation of whole-enterprise architects, Gerold Kathan and Ondrej Galik. I had to run to catch a train at that point, so only enough time to talk whilst crossing Westminster Bridge, but good to know that the future of the field in Europe seems already to be in capable hands.

And likewise in Latin America. The last of this stream of meetings this week was with Roberto Severo, lead for the Brazil chapter of AOGEA (Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects). We met first at the Open Group conference-venue – I didn’t go to the conference itself, for reasons I’ve explained earlier. A long, rambling walk-and-talk through central London, covering a very wide rantge of enterprise-architecture topics – in particular, how to expand and embed whole-enterprise architecture ideas and techniques in the Latin market. One of the best ways to do this will be through a stronger emphasis on values, which aligns better with Latin culture than it does to, say, British or (especially) US business-culture, where – as I’ve discovered to my cost – it’s often very hard to get business-folks to understand any concept of value beyond money or the near-mythical ‘shareholder-value’. There’s still a constant struggle to combat the baleful influence of IT-centrism in enterprise-architecture (and I’ll have to be blunt here and say that for the most part the Open Group and most of the big consultancies are really not helping us in this… ), but it’s probably somewhat easier to resolve this in Latin America than in mainstream ‘Western’ cultures. We’ll see: but it certainly looks like an interesting year ahead.

Interesting times, anyone?