Tom Graves / Tetradian

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.

The ‘Really Big Picture’ for enterprise-architecture is a sustainable world that works well for everyone.

Okay, that’s a bit of a bald statement. Let’s step back a bit.

To me, every enterprise-architecture is anchored in a vision of some kind – a descriptor for the aims of the overall enterprise. (One classic example of an enterprise-vision is the one used by the TED conferences: “ideas worth spreading”.) To achieve what I regard as the core aim of enterprise-architecture – that everything works better when they work together, on purpose – we use the vision as a stable reference-point to which everything in the enterprise can align. All fairly straightforward, both in principle and in practice.

Yet enterprises intersect and nest within each other: each enterprise that we might work on in EA also depends on the enterprises ‘above’ it in terms of scope. Those ‘higher-level’ enterprises provide part of the context for ‘our’ enterprise and its enterprise-architecture. So what is the highest-level enterprise-scope? And what is the implied vision for that enterprise – the Really Big Picture for our own enterprise-architecture? It seems to me that that tag-line above is about the closest we would find to a vision-descriptor for that highest-level enterprise: a sustainable world that works well for everyone.

(We could quibble about some aspects of that enterprise-descriptor: for example, it implies a human-oriented scope. But remember, we always develop an enterprise-architecture about an enterprise but for an organisation – and the ‘organisation’ in context at present is probably no broader in scope than ‘all humans, through all time’… )

That’s the enterprise-architecture at the Really Big Picture level: technically speaking, everything else is a kind of ‘solution-architecture’, building on constraints that are imposed upon us by Reality Department, and other relatively-arbitrary constraints that we ourselves impose on the solution-design.

At that Really Big Picture level, the kind of constraints imposed by Reality Department include the fact that we live on a single very small ball of a planet with limited resources and a fragile overall ecosystem, and there aren’t any spare planets that we could plunder or run away to within conceivable reach at the present time. At the same Really Big Picture level, the self-imposed constraints mainly arise from what in causal layered analysis would be described as the ‘deep-myth’ layer: largely-unconscious assumptions and assertions about ‘how the world really works’. We see these latter constraints as the underpinnings of economics and politics – which combine and merge, for example, in the notion of ‘rights of possession’.

In principle, the enterprise-architecture discipline is a decision-support function, not a decision-making one. Yet it always ends up being somewhat normative, not least because that there are consequences that increase enterprise-risk every time we implement something that points away from the enterprise-vision. (My colleague Kevin Smith would describe that misalignment as increasing the ‘Enterprise Debt‘ – and too much Enterprise Debt can kill the whole enterprise, or at the very least the organisation’s place within that enterprise.) So we need to advise our clients and stakeholders of those consequences, and research and explore alternatives that will still fit all of the unavoidable constraints, yet will also help to minimise – and preferably reduce – the overall long-term Enterprise Debt.

The hard part, for enterprise-architects, is that that process of research will often involve challenging some deep-seated myths and assumptions… which can make us very unpopular if we’re not very careful…

At the Really Big Picture level, what we have to face right now is that probably the core assumption of our entire mainstream economics – the concept of ‘right of possession’ – simply does not work. In an all too literal sense, we’re possessed by possession. (I’m not saying that possession is ‘wrong’, or ‘immoral’, or ‘evil’, or whatever: all I’m saying is that it doesn’t work – it doesn’t and cannot align with the survival-imperative of that Really Big Picture enterprise-vision – and therefore puts everyone at ever-increasing risk.) And if it’s clear that that doesn’t work, we face a literally fundamental re-architecting and redesign of just about everything that we currently think of as ‘normal’ in our economics, politics and pretty much everything else as well. Not an easy fact to face: to be blunt, it’s a very scary picture indeed. Yet to also be blunt, we don’t have much time in which to do it: the morass of indicators on key concerns such as resource-availabilities all tell us that we have perhaps only a few decades at most – if we’re lucky – in which to make that change. Which means that right now, whether we want to or not, we need to be taking that Really Big Picture into account in every aspect of our current everyday enterprise-architecture.

It’s urgent. Really urgent. Yet the scale is so huge, and the scale of change is so huge, that there’s no way we can do it all at once. Instead, like most other aspects of real-world architectures, it’s iterative, tens and hundreds and thousands and millions upon millions of small steps all slowly yet steadily converging on the same overall Really Big Picture vision, yet all happening in the small details of the everyday. In that sense, it’s just like any other form of enterprise-architecture: “challenging, confronting, and intensely political”. But we do need to do it; and we do need to get started now.

So over the next few days I’ll write a series of posts summarising where I think we are now in terms of that Really Big Picture, various thought-experiments that we could explore to build a better sense of the implications, and how we can apply those understandings in our everyday work in enterprise-architectures and the like. (I’ll prefix each of these posts with ‘RBP-EA’ – Really Big Picture enterprise-architecture.) In reality this is about a fundamental shift in paradigm or worldview – the ways we think, the ways we interact with others, the ways we act on the world – but in practice it’s not that big a change, because we apply it in small adjustments to how we think and what we do in our enterprise-architectures and the like. Even at the end of this, everyday life will go on, much as before – because that is the way that things work. But those small tweaks will all help to re-align to the overall human enterprise, and help to reduce the overall human Enterprise Debt. And in the meantime, it should also lead to everyday enterprise-architectures that are more efficient and effective – which means that our existing architecture-clients will be happy, too. Everyone wins.

That’s what we’re aiming for here, anyway.

—

Where did this start? In reality, I’ve been working on this for years – as you’ll see if you scroll back through the earlier posts in this weblog, for example. But this particular exercise was triggered off after trying to explain yet again on one of the LinkedIn enterprise-architecture lists that we need to think more broadly than monetary terms alone when developing even the business-oriented layers of an enterprise-architecture. For some reason, US folks in particular seem really to struggle with the idea that there can be any other form of value than money – perhaps because US corporate law all but enforces this sadly lethal form of mercantile myopia. This time, though, it was one of the more annoying British-based ‘enterprise-architecture’ trolls who laid into me about this, gleefully launching into mockery and petty personal put-downs as a shallow pseudo-substitute for any form of analysis or thought. (The pointless persistence of those pathetic trolls is one of the reasons I’ve all but abandoned LinkedIn these days. Oh well.) There’s never any point in trying to argue with a troll, of course: everyone on the net has learnt that lesson the hard way. But in any case the responses to those questions would take a lot more space than LinkedIn allows: hence bringing the discussion back to here, where we do also have some means to keep the trolls at bay.

There’s a lot of work to do, to make sense of the Really Big Picture level and its implications for enterprise-architectures. I certainly don’t claim to have ‘all the answers’: the best I can offer is some of the perhaps more useful questions, and some themes and thought-experiments around which new ideas and new options might start to coalesce. And as always, the devil will be in the details – and there’ll be a lot of detail here. But it should be a start, at the least. And constructive comments and suggestions would be very welcome, too.

More later, anyway: Watch This Space?

This one’s for Oscar Berg, who this morning sent out the following Tweet:

My best ideas that I use at work are born outside of office hours. Who owns these ideas?

I commented on my reTweet that this was a “key fail of possession-economy”. It’s actually much more serious than a mere ‘fail’, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. First, some more follow-on Tweets from Oscar as he mused further on his experiences:

With social media people have tools that can serve as evidence that they got an idea outside of work before they used it at work

Here’s my idea: if my ideas are free & available for anyone to use, noone can own them -> I can use them as well for whatever purpose

Organizations are obsessed with owning ideas & knowledge

Enterprises should focus on becoming the best environments for ideas to be born, grow and successfully be brought to the market

RT @tdebaillon: “Claiming to own an idea is a political matter, a will to stay in control-and-command logic”

RT @EskoKilpi: “attribution is the new ownership” #ideas

This is indeed a question of ownership – and a highly political one at that, as Thierry de Baillon explains above. Perhaps the key point here is that there are two fundamentally different concepts of ownership: possession, and stewardship (the latter sometimes referred to, perhaps more usefully, as responsibility-based ownership).

Read more…

Another of those first-thing-in-the-morning ideas, which arose in part from a conversation on social-architectures that I’ve been having with gift-economy maven Alpha Lo.

Our whole economy is built around the idea of possession, and exchange of possessions; yet what do we really possess?

Things? Not really – a point made all too evident by the phrase “you can’t take it with you”…

Ideas? We don’t even know where they come from, so the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a bit moot anyway.

Relationships? They only exist when maintained by both parties, and they usually fail if anyone tries to possess them, so that option doesn’t work either.

Faith? Hope? Belief? A more likely kind of ‘possession’, though it tends to break down for the same reasons as for relationships.

What else?

The only themes I could find were time and responsibility.

We each have a certain amount of time. We have no idea how long that might be, or what will happen in that time, but it belongs to us alone. We can give our use of that time to someone else – hence all the mess of ‘employment’ and ‘compensation’ and ‘familial duties’ and the rest – but we can’t give the time itself to anyone else. It’s our possession alone: our responsibility as to what we do with it.

And we do each have our own responsibility, as ‘response-ability’ – our ability to choose appropriate responses within and to the context. Through responsibility, and through our responsibilities, we express who we are in what we do, how we think, how we relate, what we choose.

We possess our time, and our responsibility. They possess us. Everything else seems to be an option.

Comments/opinions, anyone?

Another follow-on to the theme about the economy as enterprise-architecture and the role of money within an economy. This one picks up from another direction, namely knowledge-management – specifically, a post on KMWorld by Phil Murray, ‘Everything is connected… really… Putting meaning to work‘.

The connecting link is that, in effect, money – or any other form of currency, ‘thing’-based, time-based or whatever – is essentially a form of quantitative information in relation to a belief about economic relationship. The crucial word there is ‘about‘ – the currency denotes something about the relationship, but in itself does not contribute in any way to the relationship.

There’s no doubt that a currency could contribute quite a bit to the overall operation of an economy: such as transaction-governance (‘a token of exchange’) and quantification of overall resources (though for money that’s always been in doubt, and in effect has ceased to function at all since the shift from the ‘Gold Standard’ to ‘imaginary-money’). But perhaps the greatest problem is that it exacerbates the delusion that the currency somehow ‘is‘ ‘the economy’, rather than merely information about the economy. So whilst the whole of Phil Murray’s post is relevant here, the following section seems particularly apposite from this perspective.

What really counts

It’s not that we should – or even can – shift our attention completely away from information (and unstructured information, in particular). It’s that we have failed to address meaning in the context of work. Yet, that is what we need to do in order to transform our economic activities, both as individuals and as groups working toward common goals.

In one of the great ironies of creation of value by humans, we looked at the byproduct of knowledge work – that is, information – and saw in it both the problem and the solution for the central socio-economic problems of our times. We stopped looking at what we do, how we do it and how we create value. Our reaction to knowledge work has been analogous to focusing on the shavings on the machine shop floor instead of on how we create products with those machines.

You cannot – and do not – act on words. You act on meaning. You always have to convert words into meaning before you act. It’s the meaning behind information that counts. And sometimes you don’t need words at all.

Meaning? Yes, “the thing one intends to convey especially by language,” according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. Not the language itself, not the text strings and symbols that fill our books and screens, but the significant stuff that language intends to represent so that we can communicate what we understand. The connections among things. Causes and effects. In the context of work: the relevance or importance of those connections. The subject of logic, argument and epistemology. A pervasive, essential aspect of rational human activities that is accepted as critical to creation of value and economic progress, and yet an idea routinely dismissed as unusable, elusive and unmanageable at the same time. And the missing ingredient in our understanding of work and the creation of value in the age of information.

Perhaps read it again, paraphrasing a bit, and substituting the word ‘money’ or ‘currency’ for ‘information’ throughout, as shown in [..] below:

What really counts

It’s not that [at present] we should – or even can – shift our attention completely away from [money] (and unstructured ['currency'], in particular). It’s that we have failed to address meaning in the context of work. Yet, that is what we need to do in order to transform our economic activities, both as individuals and as groups working toward common goals.

In one of the great ironies of creation of value by humans, we looked at the byproduct of [exchangeable] work – that is, [money] – and saw in it both the problem and the solution for the central socio-economic problems of our times. We stopped looking at what we do, how we do it and how we create value. Our reaction to [exchangeable] work has been analogous to focusing on the shavings on the machine shop floor instead of on how we create products with those machines.

You cannot – and do not – act on words. You act on meaning. You always have to convert words into meaning before you act. It’s the meaning behind [money] that counts. And sometimes you don’t need [currencies] at all.

Meaning? Yes, “the thing one intends to convey especially by language,” according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. Not the language itself, not the [numeric figures] and symbols that fill our [account-]books and screens, but the significant stuff that language intends to represent so that we can communicate what we understand. The connections among things. Causes and effects. In the context of work: the relevance or importance of those connections. The subject of logic, argument and epistemology. A pervasive, essential aspect of rational human activities that is accepted as critical to creation of value and economic progress, and yet an idea routinely dismissed as unusable, elusive and unmanageable at the same time. And the missing ingredient in our understanding of work and the creation of value in the age of [money].

Ouch…

And remember that all of the above applies only to exchangeable work (services delivering ‘things’, actions and/or information) within the constraints of a possession-economy: it excludes much or most of what really matters – such as feelings and faith, past and future – and, for the most part, the greater part of the population – such as parents, children, the elderly and disabled and their carers, or most ‘creatives’ such as artists, scientists, musicians, futurists and academics. Money is merely information about a subset of a subset of a subset of the overall economy: calling it ‘the economy’ is not merely a bad joke, but an increasingly dangerous one as well.

In short, in the current obsession with money and the like, we’ve allowed ourselves to focus on the dust and detritus of the economy, in the mistaken belief that that is ‘the economy. We might be able to patch something useful together from that detritus of the economy, if we recycle it appropriately, but it still misses the point: the real economy is not about the waste-product that’s left lying on the factory floor, but about what we were creating in the first place – that which is the real value, measured most by how we feel.

Money is ‘information-shavings’, the left-overs from real economic activity, real economic relations. Might help all of us if we put it in its proper perspective – and preferably sweep it up into the waste-bin where it has always belonged.