Tom Graves / Tetradian

This one continues the recent theme of IT-centrism and why it’s such a problem for enterprise-architecture, but extends it into a slightly different direction, courtesy of a Tweet yesterday by Ron Tolido:

• rtolido: interesting stuff coming soon around a global Business Architect certification standard by The Open Group #ogsfo

Important to say here that I have enormous respect for Ron: quite apart from his senior role at CapGemini, he’s also an amazing innovator in IT-architecture and enterprise-architecture, with ideas such as Slow IT, the importance of a demolition strategy, and the SCOOTER metaphor. Yet I must admit I was absolutely horrified at that comment above, and said so:

• tetradian: @rtolido IT-centrism in TOGAF etc has crippled #entarch for half a decade: please don’t let OG do the same to #bizarch as well…

The point is that, given their track-record so far on business-architecture,  I can hardly think of any organisation that’s less qualified than Open Group to create such a standard. For Pete’s sake, even the Piddletrenthide Parish Parent-Teacher Panel would probably do a better job of it…

And no, I’m not being nasty here – I’m serious about this. The utter shambles that is TOGAF’s ‘Phase B: Business Architecture’ should sound clangorous alarm-bells about any such suggestion: it’s just a random collection of ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’, with no structure, no symmetry and no sense. If you want to see how so much of so-called ‘enterprise’-architecture actively increases the infamous ‘business/IT-divide’, you need only to take a careful look at the TOGAF specification for its ADM Phase B. And these people seriously consider themselves competent to define a global certification for business-architecture? No way! – please…?

Anyway, my Tweet-response above triggered a reply from Ron:

• rtolido: @tetradian it’s an IT thing to criticize IT-centrism but after all: #entarch is an IT people invention. Let’s try to do better with #bizarch

To which my first response was ‘What the…?‘, which came out in more polite form on Twitter as this:

• tetradian: @rtolido “it’s an IT thing… entarch is IT-invention” – disagree on both counts, but yes, please let’s do better with bizarch…

Let’s tackle Ron’s points in reverse order…

At least there’s an acknowledgement that we could do better with business-architecture than has been done with those current attempts at ‘enterprise’-architecture. That’s something. Good.

On “#entarch is an IT-people invention”, it isn’t. That’s a convenient myth that IT-people want to believe – though no doubt a fair few of them will want to throw various historical quotes at me to ‘prove’ their provenance. Sure, the term ‘architecture’ has long since been linked to IT – almost half a century, by now. And somewhen around a couple of decades back, some bright spark extended that idea to distinguish between a context-specific IT-architecture versus an IT-architecture at organisation-wide or enterprise-wide scope, as ‘enterprise-wide IT-architecture’ – at which point some idiot conflated that nominally-valid term to a no-doubt ‘simpler’ shorthand term as ‘enterprise-architecture’, without any awareness of just how misleading that would be, or how much damage that term-hijack would cause. Yet reality is that there are many long-established business disciplines such as systems-thinking and design-thinking as applied to the enterprise that have a much better natural fit with the term ‘enterprise-architecture’; the original meaning of ‘business-analysis’ was also probably very close, too. In short, ‘enterprise IT-architecture’ is arguably “an IT-people invention”; but enterprise-architecture most definitely is not.

On “it’s a IT thing to criticise IT-centrism”, I’m not quite sure what Ron means there – whether only ‘IT-people’ have the right to do so, or else that anyone criticising IT-centrism is inherently self-identifying as an ‘IT-person’. If it’s the former, then the fact that I’ve had perhaps 30 years experience in and around IT might qualify me to criticise? But more to the point, my background is as an explicit cross-discipline generalist – I’m one of the few people formally qualified as such, with an MA in General Studies from London’s Royal College of Art. And it’s in that sense, as a long-experienced practitioner of ‘design-thinking’ within a very wide variety of business contexts, that I see IT-centrism as such a problem. (And, for that matter, business-centrism – which I’ll come back to in a moment.) In terms focus of attention, the single most important fact in enterprise-architecture, or business-architecture, or any other architecture, is this:

Within any architecture, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time.

What happens in any form of ‘-centrism’ is that we keep on being dragged back to some specific area that claims to be ‘The Centre’ of the architecture. Rather than an ‘outside-in’ view – an awareness of the whole – we’re constrained to an ‘inside-out’ view, where everything in the architecture is seen only in relation to and in terms of that single ‘The Centre’. If there is no direct connection to that ‘The Centre’, or no direct impact, whatever-it-is is usually dismissed as ‘out of scope’, and often deemed not even to exist. Hence, in TOGAF’s inherently ‘inside-out’ view – in which IT-infrastructure is its actual ‘The Centre’ – we have no means to describe anything that is not-IT and that does not in some way impact directly on IT.

[To illustrate the point, try using TOGAF or its linked Archimate-notation to describe the physical activity of a production-line, the trucks and conveyor belts and other machines of physical logistics, the human activity of paper-based record-keeping, or the physical infrastructure - cooling, power-supplies and suchlike - of an IT data-centre: if you can do it all, you'll have to use some horrible kludges and fudged reframings of the supposed standards in order to do it... And yet all of these things would be essential in an enterprise-architecture for the respective industry.]

I need to reiterate that it isn’t only IT-centrism that creates this kind of problem: it’s any-centrism. What I’ve also been seeing recently is a lot more ‘business-centrism’ in enterprise-architectures, where ‘the business of the business’ is taken to be ‘The Centre’ of the enterprise-architecture. We see this, for example, in the insistence that financial metrics are the only metrics that count, and that return-on-investment (ROI) and the like can only be measured in financial terms – which might be valid within certain subsets of business-architecture, but are way too constrained to be valid in the far broader scope of enterprise-architecture. In some ways this trend worries me even more than IT-centrism, because by the nature of business it will tend to have even more of the wrong kind of credibility, making that much harder to counterbalance and correct within the architecture.

Anyway, Peter Bakker dropped in a useful comment at this point, pointing to a classic early essay by Christopher Alexander, famed author of A Pattern Language:

• pbmobi: @rtolido @tetradian #entarch & #bizarch just see the trees, we need architects who see the semi-lattices http://www.chrisgagern.de/Media/A_City_is_not_a_tree.pdf #ogsfo

• taotwit: @tetradian @rtolido erm.. Tom I think you’re mixing up what EA is with what should be!
• tetradian: @taotwit @rtolido if someone’s defining a new standard, surely it should be about what should be, not about preserving current mistakes?
• taotwit: @tetradian @rtolido good point – I hope they listen to the likes of Alec Sharp and Patrick Hoverstadt

Agreed with Nigel there: a business-architecture certification scheme would need input from people like Alec or Patrick, or likewise from other key figures in business-architecture or business-innovation such as Alex Osterwalder or Steve Blank. But, like me, none of them are members of Open Group – which means that not only do we not have a voice, but what we say will be ignored anyway. In other words, Open Group expressly locks out many of the people who are doing real innovation in business-architecture, and then wonders why there are real doubts about the usefulness or validity of what it then produces as its ‘standard’.

Which brings us to the disaster-area of certification. In principle it’s a good idea, even a very necessary idea: every profession needs some way to identify and validate core knowledge and the like. But when the certification for a discipline is managed by a group that evidently do not understand what that core-knowledge actually needs to be, then we have a problem… and that’s exactly what we have with Open Group and business-architecture.

Open Group are an IT-standards body: and they’re very, very good at what they do in IT. But they’re not a general business-standards body – and that fact is becoming extremely important here. In the days when TOGAF was solely about IT-architecture – as it was up until version 7 – then it made sense for the ‘enterprise IT-architecture’ standard to be maintained by the Open Group. But the problem with any enterprise-scope architecture is that, by definition, you have to take everything in the enterprise into account: hence an expansion out into data- and applications-architectures in TOGAF 8, and then, in TOGAF 8.1 ‘Enterprise Edition’, the addition of a loosely-defined ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’. Unfortunately they made two fundamental errors at that point: because that random bundle represented IT’s view of what it called ‘the business’, they labelled it ‘Business Architecture’; and they then described the whole IT-specific structure as ‘Enterprise Architecture’ – both of which sort-of made sense from their own inside-out perspective, but made no sense to anyone else, especially when looking outside-in. Oops…

Anyway, back to certification. So first, there is a real value in having a common language for specific types of architecture. In that sense, the TOGAF 9 ‘Foundation’ certification is genuinely useful, because it tests knowledge of that common language.

Likewise the practitioner-certifications such as ITAC, which assess someone’s practical skills and competence. Unfortunately it’s no use to me, though, as it still assumes that the only possible path to enterprise-architecture is via detail-level IT-infrastructure architecture, which I don’t do and never have. (I’ve done a lot of mainstream data-architecture in my time, but that doesn’t towards ITAC certification either.)

But to my mind – and in my experience, too – the mid-level certification, ‘TOGAF Certified’, is actually worse than useless: to be blunt, it’s almost a measure of how much someone is not competent to do enterprise-architecture. Yikes… there are some serious problems there…

That perhaps sounds a bit harsh: it’s not. There are two interlinked reasons why this is so.

The first is that ‘TOGAF Certified’ is a content-based exam. All it tests is how well people know the TOGAF specification – not architecture-practice. And to be blunt, the TOGAF specification is a long way from what’s needed to do enterprise-architecture – especially in any industry other than ‘the usual suspects’ of banking, finance, insurance, tax. (Why those industries? Because their business-models are built almost entirely around large volumes of simple structured information with automatable business-processes – in other words, strongly IT-oriented. Which doesn’t apply to most other industries.) I almost failed my TOGAF 8.1 exam because I answered several questions in terms of what I knew worked in practice, rather than what’s written in the book. And the ‘correct’ answer in the book was just plain wrong: I knew from real-world practice that it was exactly what not to do. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed when I was penalised in the exam for doing it right…

The second reason is that TOGAF is not a standard. This isn’t some arbitrarily-unkind assertion that I’m making: it’s not only common knowledge, but I’ve even heard several senior Open Group figures say so in public. (Exact quote: “Of course no-one uses TOGAF out of the box! – we always have to customise it one way or another”.) The best way to describe TOGAF is that it’s a somewhat-better-than-random cookbook of ideas and practices vaguely held together by a almost equally-vague structure of the Architecture Development Method [ADM] – and that’s it. There’s not much guidance in TOGAF itself on how to customise TOGAF: you get that from experience, with a bit of help from some of the better training-providers.

So what we have at present in the ‘TOGAF Certified’ exam is a way-too-simplistic multiple-choice test on the supposed content of a ‘standard’ that actually isn’t a standard and often doesn’t match up at all well with real-world practice anyway. So just how much use do you think that’s going to be? To anyone? Honestly? Hmm…

And given that, how much credence would you place on a certification-scheme by the same people on a domain which they demonstrably don’t understand much if at all, judging by the current content of TOGAF’s ‘Phase B: Business Architecture’? Oops…

Hence why I’m extremely wary of letting this current attempt by Open Group go unchallenged: they really are almost the least-appropriate group to do the job.

No question at all that we do need some very good work to happen on business-architecture, and urgently so. But please, not from Open Group? – at the very least, not until they’ve tidied up the utter shambles of ‘Business Architecture’ in the current TOGAF, and can demonstrate that that they can keep their reflex IT-centrism under better control than at present?

Sigh… Oh well… back to the grindstone, I guess…

Over to you for comment or whatever, anyway.

A kind of follow-up to the previous post ‘IT-oriented versus IT-centric‘, this one starts from a Tweet from the Open Group’s official TOGAF Twitter-account:

• togaf_r: TOGAF Resource: The TOGAF 9.1 changes overview and 6 other slide decks are now at http://t.co/Arm40mgA (free PDF) #ogsfo

The link points to the Open Group’s ‘public resources’ website for TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), which includes the respective slidedecks.

One of those slidedecks is ‘TOGAF Version 9.1 Management Overview‘ [PDF] – which turns out to be an interesting illustration of exactly how IT-centrism creeps into enterprise-architecture…

We’ll start with slide 18 (lower part of p.9):

What is an Enterprise?

• A collection of organizations that share a common set of goals

– Government agency

– Part of a corporation

– Corporation

• Large corporations may comprise multiple enterprises

• May be an “extended enterprise” including partners, suppliers and customers

They don’t give the source for that definition, but it’s one I’ve seen elsewhere – I think it’s used in FEAF, for example. Importantly, this definition explicitly does not regard ‘organisation’ and ‘enterprise’ as synonyms. In my view it doesn’t go far enough in that separation, but at least it’s clear that there is a difference, and that ‘the enterprise’ often extends well beyond the boundaries of ‘the organisation’. In short, so far so good.

Next, look at slide 19 (upper part of p.10):

What is an Architecture?
• An Architecture is the fundamental organization of something, embodied in:
– its components,
– their relationships to each other and the environment,
– and the principles governing its design and evolution.

As they say on the slide, that definition is adapted from ANSI/IEEE Standard 1471-2000, another well-known and much-used reference. Again, so far so good.

But note what happens in slide 20 (lower part of p.10), which purports to bring together those previous two definitions:

What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture is:
• The organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model. [MIT Center for Information Systems Research]
• A conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The intent of an enterprise architecture is to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives. [SearchCIO.com]

Which for me brings up an instant response of  ”Huh? Now wait a minute?”… The SearchCIO definition would make reasonable sense if it wasn’t arbitrarily constrained only to the view of the organisation – not the enterprise, as per that previous definition of ‘enterprise’. And in the MIT definition it’s constrained even further, with an unexplained emphasis on IT-infrastructure and “integration and standardization” – which doesn’t make sense at all.

One slide further on, and without any explanation or justification, we’re suddenly down in classic TOGAF territory, where the foundation for everything is IT-infrastructure, and where ‘Business Architecture’ is ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’. Oops…

And by the time we get to slide 22 (lower part of p.11), we’re presented with this:

Why Enterprise Architecture?
• Effective management and exploitation of information through IT is key to business success
• Good information management = competitive advantage
• Current IT systems do not really meet the needs of business
– Fragmented, duplicated
– Poorly understood
– Not responsive to change
• Investment in Information Technology
– Focussed on system maintenance
– Tactical developments rather than a strategic plan

All I can say to that is “You what???”… To be blunt, what has any of this got to do with enterprise-architecture, in terms of the definitions of either ‘enterprise’ or ‘architecture’ above? “Some but not much”, is the short answer. To illustrate the point, let’s deconstruct some of those assertions above:

–  ”Effective management and exploitation of information through IT is key to business success” – is it? Can you prove this? Given this arbitrary assertion about the importance of IT, can you show the connection – if any – to either ‘enterprise’ or ‘architecture’? And what do you mean by ‘IT’ anyway?

– “Good information management = competitive advantage” – possibly. But what about government and other organisations for whom ‘competitive advantage’ has little or no priority or point? And what about all the other non-IT issues – such as respect and trust – that might have far greater impacts on ‘competitive advantage’?

– “Current IT systems do not really meet the needs of business” – so what? The same is true of many other business-systems, such as the structure and design of core business models – which, architecturally speaking, would usually need to come before any fix-up of outdated IT-systems.

– “Investment in Information Technology [maintenance focus, tactical]” – again, yes, we know, but so what? The same is likely to be true about almost every other aspect of the enterprise – especially in multi-partner enterprises.

So let’s again be blunt about this: that slide above is best dismissed as mere marketing-puff – a sales pitch for large consultancies who want to sell ‘IT-rationalisation’ programmes to clean up the IT-mess that in all probability they themselves had created in the first place… In practice, there’s so much that’s missing from that ‘Why Enterprise Architecture?’ – such arbitrary and unjustifiable constraints on scope – that it really is all but meaningless. It describes only a tiny subset of the actual scope of ‘the architecture of the enterprise’, but somehow seems to purport that this is the whole. Which would be laughable if it wasn’t such a bad joke – or such a destructive one.

In other words, somewhere between slide 19 and slide 22, we’ve gone from enterprise and business, to a largely-spurious attempt at business-justification for one specific subset of enterprise IT-architecture. The remainder of ‘the architecture of the enterprise’ – especially about anything not-IT – has been erased from the story.

Which is why the TOGAF-style EA story just does not make sense to anyone who’s not already embedded and wedded to an IT-centric view of the world.

If you want to see how and why enterprise-architecture is still such a darned hard ‘sell’ to just about anyone in business, all you need to do is read that ‘Management Overview’. And quietly weep…

Surely by now we can do better than this? Please?

Earlier today I came across a Tweet from the Open Group that pointed to an interview with Dr Leon Keppleman at University of North Texas. Given that the note was from Open Group, no surprise that it was mostly about IT, but to me, the headline was somewhat of a breath of fresh air, and I said so when I reTweeted it:

• tetradian: RT @theopengroup: On @infomgmt about “Getting Holistic with Enterprise Architecture” http://shar.es/fWDYZ >strong recommend #entarch

To me the article is a very good illustration of the crucial distinction between IT-oriented versus IT-centric.

In essence, the whole interview is all about IT, and IT-education: nothing much more than that. And parts of it show the usual IT-type errors, such as ‘information-systems’ solely in terms of software and the like, without any apparent reference to the human side of information. And it doesn’t exactly off all that well, either:

We have a pretty strong and broad curriculum, the students get several different programming classes, good grounding in network technology and database technology and software.

Which is not exactly what those of us in whole-enterprise architecture would be likely to regard as a ‘broad curriculum’. At first glance, it can seem so much “Oh no, not again…” that I wasn’t much surprised when a colleague complained at me for reTweeting it in such glowing terms.

Yet there are several points that make it stand out from the crowd. Keppleman continues the above with these comments (with the interviewer’s question in italic):

But we also try to bring in the big picture, how it really fits together. Though most of our students take entry-level jobs working on a particular project or part of a system, whether it’s infrastructure or software or some combination, we want them to leave with some sense that the things they work on are actually part of a much larger enterprise. That piece they are working on needs to be not just a good piece, but a great piece that creates value for the whole.

That sounds like a sales pitch for enterprise architecture.

Yes, and in my career it came to me backwards, too. My original focus was software development and obviously the importance of getting the requirements right. Well, it turns out that to have the requirements right, you need what you are working on in the context of the whole because otherwise you might build a great system but it doesn’t create value. It might be adding redundancy or be the 73rd system to connect 72 other systems. Even if those other 72 systems are part of stovepiped business units and are perfectly aligned with them and serve their needs, as a whole the enterprise is wasting a ton of money and a ton of resources and talent. That experience is what brought me to the enterprise architecture space.

The way I read that is that whatever you’re doing in software or whatever, there’s no point in doing it if it doesn’t support the overall big-picture. Whatever we’re doing, it’s always part of the whole – so we have to be aware of the whole, at all times. Hence the need for enterprise-architecture – which, as can be seen from above, has to be a real ‘architecture of the enterprise’.

In many people’s view of ‘enterprise’-architecture, IT presents itself as the centre of the business-world, the one undisputed core around which everything else revolves. ‘The business’, if mentioned at all, is described solely in terms of ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’. (If you don’t believe me, go ask anyone not from IT whether TOGAF’s so-called ‘Business Architecture’ makes any sense to them in business terms…) That’s IT-centrism, and it’s a really serious problem in current enterprise-architecture.

But the article above, and the overall mood of the piece, is not IT-centric.

Sure, it’s unashamedly IT-oriented – no doubt about that. Dr Keppleman’s unit is nominally part of a business-school, but as he says, “most of our students take entry-level jobs working on a particular project or part of a system… infrastructure or software or some combination”.  (There’s a mild mis-labelling there, perhaps – it’s not what many of us would think of as ‘business’ – but that’s about the worst that I can see of it.) It is what it is: it’s just IT – and it doesn’t really claim to be anything else.

And yet it does maintain a broader awareness beyond itself. It’s clear that IT is seen as an important role, yet also that it’s just one part amongst many within that greater whole:

“…help us change how we work together and communicate within organizations to be more integrated, more holistic”.

I’ll admit that I really don’t like IT-centrism: it’s been the bane of the EA industry for far too many years. But I’m definitely not ‘against IT’, as some people have portrayed me to be. In a true ‘architecture of the enterprise’, everything matters, in depth as well as in breadth: so I’m very happy to see a piece that’s as IT-oriented as this, and yet does also know how to play its part within them whole.

IT-oriented is not the same as IT-centric.

Okay, let’s go back to something that’s perhaps a bit less controversial than the past few posts…

This one starts with a ‘rant’ (as he put it) by Anders Jensen, about the ongoing hype over (gosh!) ‘the Cloud’:

• aojensen: As phk of FreeBSD says: #cloud is no different to the IBM mainframe. // It puzzles me why so many people put #entarch and #cloud in the same tweet. The former is a mgmt function, the latter a tech concern. // In other words, #cloud is a solution pattern and delivery mechanism. #entarch is about systemic management of all of the enterprise. // Thus, #cloud architect is nothing but a fancy word for solution architect. // Okay, rant over. #entarch

• tetradian: @aojensen: “puzzles me why .. people put #entarch and #cloud in same tweet” – is valid if about enterprise strategy or strategy-to-tactics
• aojensen: @tetradian true, but then it is still a delivery mechanism realising a certain strategic/emergent intent.

• tetradian: @aojensen for viable biz-strategy, #cloud needs #entarch much more than entarch needs cloud – cloud can be biz-lethal without proper entarch
• dougnewdick: @tetradian @aojensen couldn’t agree with Tom more – whether you are talking EITA or “proper” EA

And Doug Newdick is right here, too: this isn’t just a ‘real-EA’ issue. It applies just as much to an IT-oriented or even IT-centric ‘enterprise’-architecture, because it’s about the organisation’s strategy for managing its business-critical information.

I’ve seen some people – okay, probably only the most hype-ridden and IT-obsessed, admittedly – who’ve argued that the availability of cloud-storage and cloud-based applications means there’s now no need for any enterprise-architecture. Let’s just be blunt about this: that’s dumb. Stupid – seriously stupid. Demonstrates an almost complete inability to grasp the role of enterprise-architecture – and probably of the role of cloud, for that matter. Various other irritated epithets… definitely worthy of Anders’ ‘rant’… mumble mumble grumble grrr…

Okay, back off for a moment. Cool down, Thomas. Etcetera…

For the moment, let’s just assume a ‘classic’ TOGAF-style ‘enterprise’-architecture, focussed solely on IT. (It’s perfectly adequate for this purpose, so for once I’m not going to complain about ‘IT-centrism’ etc here. ) It has four distinct domains: IT-infrastructure, Applications, Data, and ‘Business’, which in essence is a ‘none-of-the-above’ relative to the other three IT-specific domains. Let’s assume, then, that we now believe the cloud hype, and hence that we can do everything via the cloud:

• IT-infrastructure: don’t need any, it’s all ‘bring your own IT’
• Applications: don’t need any, it’s all in the cloud, accessed via browsers and apps
• Data: don’t need to define any, it’s all defined in the cloud
• ‘Business’ (process-workflows, business-models etc): we can build it all around what’s already available in the cloud

So: get rid of the IT-department, because there’s nothing for them to do any more. And get rid of all the enterprise-architects, because they’re just part of the IT-department that we don’t need any more. Simple, right? Huge savings in costs, too.

Hmm. Right. Let’s take just a few points that are missed in those glib assertions above:

• Who’s going to test the apps on all that range of different hardware and software and screen-resolutions and everything else?
• Who’s going to help people when their ‘bring your own IT’ doesn’t work?
• Who’s going to help people understand how to access those cloud-apps, to understand the security-issues, and why leaving their iPhone in a cab could be a lot more serious than just the loss of a few of today’s Tweets?
• Who’s going to choose which apps to use? Why will they choose those apps, from which providers?
• Who’s going to design the workflows that bridge between all the different apps? Who will be responsible for the end-to-end business processes that jump around between different apps and different cloud-providers?
• Who’s going to identify the business-metrics that bridge across those end-to-end business-processes? How will you gather those metrics, and ensure that they make business sense?
• Who’s going to manage the reverse-backup, where you back up your own cloud-data in local storage? Who is going to be responsible for information-security, for end-to-end business-continuity and disaster-recovery, for escrow and recovery when (not ‘if’) one of your cloud-providers goes out of business, or when (not ‘if’) one of your providers starts getting too greedy, or for deciding what to do when your cloud-provider is taken over by one of your own competitors?

That list goes on, and on, and on, and on: and you won’t be able to answer many, if any, of those questions, without a solid enterprise-architecture. You’ll probably discover that you do indeed need that IT-department, too – a lot more than you’d realised. Oops… perhaps throwing everything into the cloud isn’t such a good idea after all…

(There’s not much difference between this IT-oriented analysis and one coming from a ‘real-EA’ perspective. The latter would cover a rather wider scope that’d throw up yet more crucial issues that cloud-providers, uh, somehow seem to forget to mention, but that’s about all, really.)

The key point is this: cloud is just another outsourcing arrangement. Anders is right: in many ways it’s just a reversion to the IBM ‘data-processing’ bureaus of half a century ago – brought up to date a bit, of course, and with a few more fancy bells-and-whistles such as ‘access by anyone from just about anywhere’, but otherwise the core principles are almost exactly the same.

So if it’s ‘just another outsourcing arrangement’, we need to handle it architecturally much as for any other outsourcing arrangement. In other words:

• Never outsource your business-vision.
• Never outsource your strategy.
• Never outsource your business-critical information – and especially, never outsource the ownership or control of your business-critical information.
• Know what you’re getting into, and why.
• Know what it will cost, in every sense – including all of the myriad hidden costs that no-one seems to notice until too late.
• Know what rules and regulations apply, under which jurisdictions.
• Know how to ensure alignment between your organisation’s business vision and values, and those of the outsourcing provider.
• Know how to ensure customer ‘single-view’, end-to-end continuity and suchlike whole-enterprise requirements.
• Know who’s responsible for what, when, where, how and why – and how to plug the inevitable gaps between boundaries of responsibility across the overall partly-outsourced business-structure.
• Know what can go wrong, and what impact each type of ‘going wrong’ could have.
• Know what to do when (not ‘if’) things go wrong.
• Know how to get out of what you’re getting into.

(That’s another list that goes on and on, too… and again, that’s why enterprise-architecture exists, to help you resolve each item on that list.)

What’s scary is the number of business-folks and IT-folks who’ve never even looked at that list, for any kind of outsourcing arrangement: they seem to buy into all of the sales-hype of the latest ‘fad-du-jour‘ instead, and apparently just hope for the best… Perhaps not the wisest strategy, shall we say?

There’s no question that cloud is great for a typical start-up – because there you do usually have to outsource everything you can, to keep the initial costs right down. Yet in a more mature business, things get radically different. Sure, you can scale cloud-apps themselves, and data-storage in the cloud, and so on. But not the way in which information itself is used across a 5,000-person company: that’s a different ball-game entirely.

What we find in practice is that, yes, some parts of the business do still need to be as nimble as any start-up – and hence, at first glance, would be seem to be ideal candidates for cloud-apps and the like. But some parts of the business need to be very stable, in some cases for decades or more – as in health, for example, or retail-banking, or some aspects of pharmaceuticals, or some types of engineering. After half a century and more of IT practice in organisations large and small, we do know how to manage that kind of data, those kinds of processes – and one of the things that that tells is that those kinds of requirements are not a good fit for cloud. And it’s different for every industry, every organisation, every size of organisation – whereas the best that most cloud-providers seem to offer is a kind of vaguely-customisable one-app-fits-all which in some ways combines all of the disadvantages of the different options with almost none of the advantages, other than some surface-layer cost-savings that may well evaporate and worse once Reality Department barges its way into the real picture. Hmm… Tricky, that…

To make it even more difficult, most large organisations have organisation-specific taxonomies and schemas that do need to be enforced across all usages throughout the business – which may well not be supported in the kind of prepackaged schemas offered by many providers. As a result, we’d have to do some potentially-tangled to-and-fro translations between the internal schemas, and the providers’ schemas – all of which is doable, of course, but increases the cost and the risk-potential, and reduces the actual savings from the outsourcing arrangement.

To make sense of all of this, we need a solid understanding of backbone versus edge – of what must be maintained strictly according to standard, or what must be managed internally for strategic reasons, versus what can be much more freeform; and the transitions and translations and governance-issues between them; and how all of the respective choices are guided in turn by enterprise-strategy. Which, again, is where a solid enterprise-architecture really needs to be part of this outsourcing picture.

Which brings us back to Anders’ point with which we started: cloud is ‘just another outsourcing-arrangement’. And as with any other outsourcing arrangement, the business needs a solid strategic understanding of all the implications of that outsourcing-arrangement – its potential advantages and disadvantages, its costs and revenue-possibilities, its opportunities and risks, its impacts on business-processes, and much, much more. And almost the only way to identify whether that outsourcing arrangement does or does not make strategic sense is via a well-described enterprise-scope architecture-description, fully linked to enterprise strategy.

Outsourcing everything – or anything, actually - to the cloud could be lethal to the business: yet without a proper enterprise-architecture, there’s no way to know what is a risk, and what is not. As Anders says, cloud is just a solution-pattern: there are usually plenty of other options that can be used instead. But enterprise-architecture is a management-function, a strategic function: not wise to try to run a business without it…

So cloud isn’t actually necessary to any business: but an enterprise-architecture certainly is. In that sense, cloud needs enterprise-architecture much more than enterprise-architecture needs cloud. Might be useful for everyone if some of the current clutter of cloud hype-merchants were a bit more willing to grasp that point?

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?

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…

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?

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?

This is in part a follow-on to ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘.

As a discipline, enterprise-architecture is still in the throes of a multi-year struggle against IT-centrism – in our context, the dangerous delusion that enterprise-scope IT-architecture somehow ‘is’ enterprise-architecture. There are signs now that that struggle is at last beginning to be won: a much better recognition in Open Group conferences, for example, that business-architecture is not merely “anything not-IT that might affect IT”.

But we need to be aware, and wary, of the next trap: business-centrism. Business-architecture is, and should be, the architecture of the business. But it is not the architecture of the enterprise: the two are fundamentally different. Or, more accurately, business-architecture is a detail-layer subset of enterprise-architecture – and exactly as with IT-architecture, it is essential not to mistake any subset for the whole.

Let’s take a classic business-architecture frame, Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas:

Business Model Canvas [(cc) Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur et al.]

This provides an excellent way to describe a commercial organisation’s business-model: products and services, how the customer is contacted, revenue-streams, supply-chain concerns, costs and so on. We definitely need all that information in a business-architecture, and in considerable detail.

But what this doesn’t do is show how this expands downward into the fine-detail of implementation and operational-management – which is what we need in order to realise that business-model. For example, for the IT-related components of that business-model, that’s where the IT-architectures would come into play: information-architecture, data-architecture, applications-architecture, infrastructure-architecture and so on. We would also need to connect with BPM (business-process management), security-architectures, skills-mappings and a whole load more, especially on the ‘human’ side of business practice. So on its own, a business-centric architecture could be misleading: a big-picture that’s useful, and usefully descriptive, but not actually usable in real-world practice.

And that business-oriented ‘big-picture’ is not actually big enough: it ignores a whole swathe of information about the broader business-context, and hence is left to make arbitrary assumptions about that broader context – assumptions which may well turn out to be wrong. In essence, the Business Model Canvas – and almost every other business-architecture frame that I’ve seen – will summarise the core working of the organisation, its relationships with the ‘near-field’ aspects of the supply-chain, and some description of how it will relate to customer-prospects: but that’s usually as far as it will go. Which is dangerously incomplete in relation to the whole scope of the extended-enterprise:

Relationships with the ‘outside’ part of the extended-enterprise, beyond the core market, are primarily driven by values – not solely monetary concerns, which for the most part apply only at the market-transaction level. Failing to pay proper attention to those broader values can kill the viability of the business-model and even the business itself – even though those ‘transactions’ may not touch the actual business-model at all. We can perhaps see this best through what I call the ’market-cycle’:

Another cyclical view of the relationships between all these layers also illustrates the source – and danger – of the all-too-common ‘quick-profit’ short-cut version of the cycle, which is guaranteed to drive a business into the ground in the medium to longer term:

The greyed-out area described as ‘tactics + operations’ in that diagram is usually the maximum scope of a business-architecture. An enterprise-architecture must, by definition, cover the entire scope. A ‘business-centric’ version of enterprise-architecture would constrain us to the business-specific scope – which is why everything else would be left to arbitrary and often unconscious assumptions. Not a good idea – in fact actually worse than the IT-centric version of ‘enterprise’-architecture, because at least in the latter case the limitations are obvious to most people, whereas in the business-centric version the gaps are easier to miss.

One of the things that that unhelpful troll on LinkedIn mocked me for – and others have done much the same, in the past – was my attempt to explain that in an enterprise-architecture we must take into account the value-transactions and interactions: we can’t simply reduce it all to monetary terms. As should be obvious from the diagrams above, there are relationships between those value-transactions and the monetary-type transactions that come later in the market-cycle: but those relations are usually complex, non-linear and non-reversible, so we can’t start from a monetary view (as in so many conventional ‘value-proposition’ concepts) and return directly to a monetary view (as monetary ‘profit’). The transforms from there to the much-vaunted and apparently much-desired ‘shareholder-value’ are even more complex and non-linear: as Michael Porter once put it, the obsessive quest for ‘shareholder-value’ is “the Bermuda triangle of strategy“, in which so many companies sink without trace… Yet even Michael Porter misses the point in that article: he refers to ‘economic performance’, when what he means is ‘overall performance as measured in monetary terms’ – which is not the same thing. As business-architects we can sometimes get away with that kind of kludge: but as enterprise-architects, we can’t get away with it – especially at the Really Big Picture level.

So yes, heave a sigh of relief as we finally break free from IT-centrism in enterprise-architecture. But beware of the next trap – the trap of ‘business-centrism’ – and instead keep the focus and emphasis, at all times, on the extended-enterprise as a unified if always somewhat-chaotic whole.