Richard Veryard on Architecture

On the misuse of general principles

2012-01-27T23:43:00.000Z

#entarch There is a common fallacy among enterprise architects that radical structural and behavioural change can and should be driven by a few simple and powerful ideas. Alas, the public sector is strewn with the disastrous consequences of this fallacy.

We can find countless examples from the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. For Steve Harrison, Honorary Professor of Social Policy at the University of Manchester, the idea that NHS reorganisations can be triggered by a few general ideas is one of the Seven Fallacies of English Health Policy. He points out that high levels of abstraction (beloved by academics and architects alike) do not allow proper assessment of the plausibility of claims about benefits of reorganisation and how the system will work. (HT @mellojonny)

Where do health reorganization principles come from? I asked a popular search engine, and was led to a paper called Basic Principles of Information Technology Organization in Health Care Institutions (JAMIA 1997); (I suppose from the high search ranking of this paper that it is a widely used source for such principles.) The paper concludes that all organizations MUST have certain characteristics, based on a single case study where these characteristics seemed to be beneficial; in other words, arguing from the particular to the general. (I'm sure there must be some more rigorous studies, but they don't seem to get as good search rankings for some reason.)

But many of the principles that govern sweeping architectural reforms of the public sector aren't even derived by thinly based generalization from such observed vignettes, but are derived from purely abstract concepts such as "choice" and "competition" and "justice", to which each may attach his or her own politically motivated interpretation.

This leads to several levels of failure - not only failure of execution and planning (because the generalized principles are not sufficiently refined to provide realistic and coherent solutions to complex practical problems) but also failure of intention (because a vague but upbeat set of principles helps to conceal the fact that the underlying vision remains woolly).

The Purpose of Enterprise Architecture

2012-01-11T21:15:00.000Z

@adrianrcampbell wants to explain #entarch to IT architects who don't see the wood for the trees (via @itworks). Adrian reckons that the primary Purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to support strategic change.

@nickmalik says that IT Archs still won't get it. "Need examples of individual activities that make a difference." So let's hope Adrian provides some useful examples in his subsequent posts.

In the meantime, I'm concerned that the phrase "supporting strategic change" lacks bite. What is support really worth? Let me look at a parallel case - sports coaching.

Let's say that the purpose of a sports coach is to support one or more athletes and help them win competitions. For example, Scottish tennis star Andy Murray has recently appointed another former tennis star Ivan Lendl as his coach. This follows Murray's lack of success at the highest level - his repeated failure to win a Grand Slam tournament. Perhaps Lendl's presence on Team Murray will make some unspecifiable difference to Murray's performance; but even if Murray's performance now improves, nobody can ever be sure how much difference is due to Lendl. Murray has survived without a coach for extended periods, and might possibly have won sooner or later anyway, so we have to regard the coach as an optional extra. There is a sense that the appointment of a coach is an admission of some inadequacy on Murray's part. (John Seddon would call this "failure demand".)

At this level considerable sums of money will change hands, and it is not clear how this is negotiated. What is a fair reward for the "support" of the coach? Does the coach get a flat fee or a percentage of winnings?

I don't think there are many enterprise architects who work on a no-win-no-fee basis. But there are certainly many executives who believe they can manage so-called strategic change perfectly well thank you, without having enterprise architects sitting in the player's box tutting and fretting. It's not just IT architects who don't appreciate enterprise architecture.

Teaching Enterprise Architecture

2012-01-05T19:59:00.001Z

#entarch @leodesousa asked if one had to teach a 1 wk mod on EA, what would be the approach?
@leodesousa asked if it was necessary to say what #entarch was before describing the value+process

I am not convinced it is necessary, and I started a discussion on Linked-In Does it matter what enterprise architecture is?

@nickmalik suggested tellimg story of a company without EA doing planning. Show class complex / silo happens. Do Root Cause Analysis ... then walk them through EA data collection, EA taxonomy, and models. ask class to make decisions again w/ data

Nick's solution to Leo's requirement assumes the goal is to appreciate the difference between EA and its absence. Yes, as foundation, says @nickmalik Build understanding as first step to empower collaboration between biz and #entarch

@leodesousa confirms that his objective is for the students to know there is an approach called #entarch that can help manage chg ... I would want them to know enough to ask for #entarch services to help the business - partnership ... which is a good way to explain the capabilities and value that can be derived from a planned approach

@aleksb6 is trying to cope with the idea that value of a planned approach needs to be explained ... can't we just tell people to go read The Art of War before they start learning #entarch ? :) ... imo #theartofwar is a pre-req for any strategy/planning function, not just #entarch

My idea of a learning objective is that the students learn to do something, not that they are persuaded of (the value of) something. What is more important for the students to be able to do at the end of the week - talk about architecture or solve real business problems? And if the students manage to solve some meaningful problems using the tools of enterprise architecture, this is surely more likely to convince them of the value of EA than any amount of theory and rhetoric?

How does reading The Art of War contribute to such learning objectives? Clearly there is a value in shared stories, and being able to refer to certain patterns of activity. @greblhad has been posting an EA version of the Art of War by instalments. Maybe when he's finished he can do an EA version of the Aenead: "De Architectura Virumque Cano".

(I don't know any Latin by the way; I just plugged the title of one work into the first line of another. Doesn't that always work?)

Unruly Google and VPEC-T

2012-01-05T11:04:00.001Z

Google has been hoist by its own petard: it seems obliged to ban its own browser from its own search engine for infringing its strict rules. Apparently the infringement resulted from some misbehaviour somewhere down the subcontract chain, unknown to Google itself or its prime subcontractor (which with fitting irony is called Unruly Media). A number of blogposts were created to promote Google Chrome, containing direct hotlinks to the Chrome download page. Google has recently penalized a number of other companies for such behaviour, including J C Penney, Forbes and Overstock. See also my 2006 post on BMW Search Requests.

A number of offending posts were discovered because they contained the magic words "This post was sponsored by Google", and the Google search engine dutifully delivered a list of webpages containing these words. (This kind of transparency was foreseen by Isaac Asimov in a story called "All the troubles of the world", in which the computer Multivac was unable to conceal its own self-destructive behaviour.)

As a number of search engine analysts have pointed out, there are two problems with the sponsored pages. Besides containing the offending links, they are also pretty thin in terms of content. (Google has recently developed a search filter code-named Panda, which is intended to demote such low-value content, but this filter is extremely costly in computing power and is apparently only run sporadically.) Many of these pages credit Google Chrome for having helped a company in Vermont over the past five years, despite the fact that Google Chrome hasn't been available for that long. None of them explain why Google Chrome might be better than other browsers.

So here we have an interesting interaction between the elements of VPEC-T.

Value	How is commercial sponsorship reconciled with high-value content? Does this incident expose a conflict of interest inside Google?
Policy	How does Google apply its strict rules to itself?
Events	How was this situation detected (with the aid of Google itself)? Will any future incidents be as easy to detect?
Content	What is the net effect on the content, on which Google's market position depends?
Trust	What kinds of trust have been eroded in this situation? How can trust be restored, and how long will it take?

Sources

Aaron Wall, Google caught buying paid links yet again (SEO Book 2 Jan 2012)

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome (SearchEngineLand 2 Jan 2012)

Charles Arthur, Will Google be forced to ban its own browser from its index? (Guardian 3 Jan 2012) Google shoves Chrome down search rankings after sponsored blog mixup (Guardian 4 Jan 2012)

Three or Four Schools of Enterprise Architecture

2011-12-23T22:11:00.003Z

#entarch @lapalj has written an interesting article on the Three Schools of Enterprise Architecture.

The schools are distinguished along two dimensions: scope and ends (purpose).

Scopes	Ends
Enterprise wide IT platform (EIT). All components (software, hardware, etc.) of the enterprise IT assets.	Effective enterprise strategy execution and operation through IT-Business alignment. The end is to enhance business strategy execution and operations. The primary means to this end is the aligning of the business and IT strategies so that the proper IT capabilities are developed to support current and future business needs.
Enterprise (E). The enterprise as a socio-cultural—techno-economic system; hence ALL the facets of the enterprise are considered – the enterprise IT assets being one facet.	Effective enterprise strategy implementation through execution coherency. The end is effective enterprise strategy implement. The primary means to this end is designing the various facets of the enterprise (governance structures, IT capabilities, remuneration policies, work design, etc.) to maximize coherency between them and minimize contradictions.
Enterprise-in-environment (EiE). Includes the previous scope but adds the environment of the enterprise as a key component as well as the bidirectional relationship and transactions between the latter and its environment.	Innovation and adaption through organizational learning. The end is organizational innovation and adaption. The primary means is the fostering of organizational learning by designing the various facets of the enterprise (governance structures, IT capabilities, remuneration policies, work design, etc.) as to maximize organizational learning throughout the enterprise.

Besides scope and purpose, I have always considered it important to identify a third dimension of perspective (viewpoint). (For example, I talk about these three dimensions in my 1992 book on Information Modelling, pages 16-22.)

Among other things, perspective helps us to address the question: What kind of system is the enterprise being understood as? For example, the (micro-)economic perspective views the enterprise as a production system (value chain or value network), while the management cybernetic perspective (such as Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model) views the enterprise as a thinking system or brain. Gareth Morgan's book Images of Organization contains a good survey of several contrasting perspectives.

Most enterprise architects in the first school adopt the traditional IT perspective of regarding the enterprise as an information processing system. Most of the well-known EA frameworks (such as those listed on the ISO 42010 website) are solidly within the first school.

Lapalme's second school explicitly invokes the socio-cultural perspective, and calls for all facets of the enterprise to be considered - this clearly implies going beyond the traditional IT perspective.

However, there is a considerable body of work that looks at the enterprise-in-environment, but remains within the IT perspective. This would include the Open Group work on the extended enterprise, as well as the Systems-of-Systems community. A key scoping question here is the exercise of governance over large distributed systems of systems. Mark Maier distinguished between directed and emergent systems (or we might think about directed and emergent enterprises), and this has been developed into a four-part schema by the US Department of Defense: Directed, Acknowledged, Collaborative and Virtual. Some useful work at the SEI, where this thinking has been connected into work on SOA and enterprise architecture.

Lapalme's article identifies James Martin as one of the leaders of the third school, based on a minor work published in 1995, but most of Martin's work belongs solidly within the first school. In his 1982 book, Strategic Data-Planning Methodologies, Martin shows how IBM's BSP methodology could be used to decompose the activities of the organization, as a precursor to planning IT systems. The primary aim of such methodologies from the 1980s onwards was to identify opportunities to install more computers and develop more software, and I think it is no coincidence that a number of the pioneers of enterprise architecture (from Martin to John Zachman) had worked for IBM. See my note on The Sage Kings of Antiquity.

So I think it makes sense to divide Lapalme's third school into two distinct sub-schools. There is clearly a lot of work in School Three A, which extends the scope of architecture without introducing the socio-cultural or other perspectives which Lapalme associates with School Two. There is as yet very little formal work in School Three B.

School One Single Enterprise IT Perspective	School Two Single Enterprise Multiple Perspective
School Three A Extended Enterprise System of Systems	School Three B Ecosystem Multiple Perspective

James Lapalme, "3 Schools of Enterprise Architecture," IT Professional, 14 Dec. 2011. IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MITP.2011.109

3 Schools of EA

View more documents from jlapalme
See also Linked-In discussion ("Considerate Architecture" group).

Enterprise Architecture Tempo

2011-12-08T17:44:00.001Z

#entarch Like many complex capabilities, enterprise architecture operates at several different tempi. (See my post on Enterprise Tempo.) A workshop at the SEI last year identified three tempi, which it called "Operating Modes".

At the lowest level, enterprise architects operate in an urgent response mode, reacting to crises as they arise.
Next, enterprise architects may operate in a continuous improvement mode, making incremental changes and generally avoiding crises.
Finally, enterprise architects may operate in a transformative change mode, collaborating with business leaders to enable new business capabilities and new business models.

The SEI observes that, in practice, enterprise architects are nearly always operating in all three modes, but suggests that the most effective organizations will spend less effort in the urgent response and more in transformative change.

Most of the process frameworks for enterprise architecture concentrate on the longer-term operating modes - sometimes called tactical and strategic planning. Some frameworks distinguish between solution architecture (with a typical cycle time of 6-18 months) and enterprise architecture (with a typical cycle time of 3-7 years).

But surely it is the less effective organizations, where more effort is devoted to urgent response, that are in greater need of process guidance? As I said in my post on Enterprise Architecture as Viable System, the dilemma for EA is how to appear useful in a crisis without (a) throwing all the EA professional discipline out of the window or (b) demanding at least four months to carry out a proper study. So what good is a process framework that simply tells such organizations that they really ought to put the urgent stuff aside and concentrate on long-term transformation? Or a process framework that is incapable of Learning from Stories?

John Klein and Michael Gagliardi, A Workshop on Analysis and Evaluation of Enterprise Architectures (pdf) SEI, November 2010.

Elsewhere the term "operating modes" has been used for the EA archetypes identified by John Gøtze and his colleagues, but this is completely different. See my post on the Dimensions of EA maturity.

Risk and Responsibility in Self-Service

2011-11-29T10:27:00.003Z

A cabbie asked @jkuramot to enter his destination into the GPS. @dahowlett suggests this is because he didn't speak good English. @jkuramot confirms that the driver didn't speak English very well but adds that "this was his go-to move".

The reason we are talking about this fragment of service design is that it is unusual in this context: we normally expect the driver to enter the destination into his navigation device. But the normal procedure is prone to error; the pasenger may not speak clearly, the driver may not understand correctly, there may be a lot of background noise: the passenger arrives at the wrong destination and it's the driver's fault.

However, if the passenger enters the destination directly into the navigation device, then any error is the passenger's fault. Many service providers in other areas now follow this pattern; shifting responsibility onto the customer may help to reduce administration costs, but more importantly reduces the service provider's liability. But if the customer is not able to perform these tasks easily and accurately, this kind of shift adds more to the cost and risk for the customer than it reduces for the supplier, and therefore diminishes total value. See my review of The Support Economy.

Asking the customer to do the work makes an assumption about the customer's capability. I don't know Jake personally, but he looks from his photo and his Twitter profile like someone who would know how to operate this kind of device. The driver may have had the same impression; it is conceivable that he would have treated Jake's grandmother differently. Whereas if the device (belonging to the driver) is unusual and difficult to use, we would always insist that the driver should operate it. Self-service only works if the interface design offers a reasonable level of usability.

The other difference between the passenger and the driver is the question of which is more familiar with the destination. When I get a cab home from the airport, obviously I know my address better than the driver does. But when I arrive in a strange city, I expect the cab drivers to be more familiar with the hotels than I am: if I get the name of the hotel slightly wrong, the driver should ask if I really meant something else, rather than drive for an hour to a hotel in the next city whose name exactly matches what I said.

By the way, Google has been correcting our searches for a long time now, but has now chosen to issue a series of advertisements in which this correction (and the collection of vast amounts of data to make this correction possible) is highlighted as a service enhancement feature. See my note Towards a VPEC-T analysis of Google. This kind of service enhancement is unavailable if the driver takes himself out of the loop, and regards his job as merely enacting a specification agreed between the customer and an electronic device.

Meta-Architecture (Yawn)

2011-11-17T17:12:00.004Z

#entarch people seem to spend a lot of time defining the building blocks of architecture, and insisting on the correct definition. Some of my friends have been doing it on Twitter recently, and I've certainly participated in this kind of debate myself in the past.

chrisdpotts

tetradian

On function, capability and service

davidsprott

Let's Kill the Confusion About Capabilities for Once and All!

There are several different reference models that attempt to answer such questions, at varying levels of detail and abstraction. Here are just a few of these models.

ISEB Enterprise and Solution Architecture Reference Model (BCS Version 3.0 pdf)
CBDI Service Architecture and Engineering Reference Framework (recently updated to include Cloud Computing)
SOA Reference Model (OASIS pdf)

The Wikipedia page on Technical Architecture contains the following paragraph on Meta-Architecture, lifted practically word-for-word from a white paper on the Visual Architecting Process (Bredemeyer Consulting, pdf) by Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer. Malan and Bredemeyer also appear to be behind the EWITA (Enterprise-Wide Information Technology Architecture) initiative.

"First, the architectural vision is formulated, to act as a beacon guiding decisions during the rest of system structuring. It is a good practice to explicitly allocate time for research in documented architectural styles, patterns, dominant designs and reference architectures, other architectures your organization, competitors, partners, or suppliers have created or you find documented in the literature, etc. Based on this study, and your and the team’s past experience, the meta-architecture is formulated. This includes the architectural style, concepts, mechanisms and principles that will guide the architecture team during the next steps of structuring."

Yawn. I can see that this kind of thing might be necessary for architecture management, especially across a large organization or sector. Tom Graves points out that we can view a reference model as a set of job descriptions. But explicitly allocating time to meta-architectural research??

My worry about meta-architecture is that it distracts from real architecture. If I have a lump of business activity, I'm not sure I understand it any better whether I label it as a function or a process or a capability or a service. What really helps me to understand this lump better, and to use that understanding in improving the business, is analysing how it varies by context (differentiation) and how it interacts with other lumps of business activity (integration). And it's more important to see whether a strategy or roadmap is any good than whether it's been correctly labelled. The challenge of architecture isn't classification, it is coordination and quality.

For my bootcamp next week, I don't want to spend any time on Functions versus Capabilities, Goals versus Objectives versus Principles, Strategies versus Roadmaps, and all that meta-architecture stuff. Some architecture courses seem to spend so much time on meta-architecture that they don't have any time left for real architecture. And one can waste a lot of time on the Internet trying to promote one's favourite definition of any of these terms. My winter's resolution - to keep out of these debates. (I may not always manage to do this.)

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Conceptual Modelling - Why Theory

2011-11-06T17:37:00.000Z

@dougnewdick asks Why Bother With Concepts? In his answer, he quotes the Gang of Four song Why Theory. "Each day seems like a natural fact/but what we think changes how we act."

I think there is a critical difference between two interpretations of the term "Conceptual Architecture". I'd describe Doug's sample conceptual architecture as essentially a component architecture, which happens to be at the "conceptual" level of abstraction. In other words, it provides a conceptual understanding of how the components work together.

That's not at all the same as understanding how the concepts themselves work together, which is what I think one needs to satisfy the Gang of Four requirement for an architecture-of-concepts, and which would also be implied by Doug's reference to the Wikipedia article on Philosophical Analysis.

The Wikipedia article mentions critiques of the traditional approach to philosophical analysis by Quine and Wittgenstein. I have used some of their ideas - although with no claim to profundity - in my own approach to conceptual modelling. See for example my 1992 book on Information Modelling.

To take a concrete example, if we are going to build systems and management practices to anticipate competitor behaviour, it might help have to have a robust concept of COMPETITOR. I once worked with a company that thought it knew which its competitors were, and were quite indignant when a competitive threat appeared from an entirely different quarter. Traditional philosophical analysis implies you can fully characterize a concept like COMPETITOR in advance, but Wittgenstein and Quine teach us to be cautious of monothetic, appearently objective conceptual definitions.

One of the problems with conceptual models is that they are often too generic, and therefore insufficiently meaningful. Anyone who has ever been on a data modelling course can produce a model with CUSTOMER and ORDER and PRODUCT. But proper conceptual analysis entails taking concepts apart to understand how they work in a particular business context. Where do products come from, what does it mean to be a product, how do products evolve, what are the essential and non-essential differences between products? Why do we have this many products, and what are the forces that would result in increasing or decreasing the number of products? What does the business know about products, and what does the business want to know?

Doug's post was prompted by Peter Bakker's post Factual Architecture, which expressed a concern that concepts can be too abstract and unverifiable – failing to connect with audiences, failing to connect with reality. The way that some architects try to verify concepts is to demonstrate how the concepts could be represented in some technical system - but I prefer to encourage stakeholders to verify concepts in the business domain itself. This leads me to a slightly different notion of Factual Architecture, which would provide an empirical business context in which the business concepts and knowledge can be grounded.

Is this really the way it is? Or a contract in our mutual interest?

Dimensions of EA maturity 2

2011-11-03T06:03:00.000Z

#entarch @Cybersal asked me to expand on my previous post on three dimensions of EA maturity.

Instrumentality

This is about regarding EA as a tool, a means to some ends. What outcomes are expected from EA?

For example, do we regard EA as a planning tool, a coordination and governance tool, or an asset management tool? Or some combination of these?

Agency

This is about the power and responsibility of EA as a function. What tasks are delegated to EA, and by whom? How is EA held accountable for a given set of outcomes?

For example, does EA play an advisory role or gatekeeper role? Does EA report to the CIO or the CEO?

Scope

How large is the system for which EA is accountable? What issues and concerns are a legitimate part of the EA agenda? Is EA restricted to formal IT systems, does it include informal IT systems (such as social networking), or does it also include business and organization issues? In other words, does Enterprise Architecture really mean Enterprise IT Architecture or Enterprise Data Architecture?

And does EA include ways of understanding the enterprise as a complex and dynamic human activity system, not merely as a fixed array of automated and bureaucratic functions?

In What is Enterprise Architecture? and What's Wrong With Enterprise Architecture?, I analysed EA from five perspectives, but not all these perspectives are relevant to understanding EA maturity. The three dimensions I'm defining here can be mapped as a rough simplification from these five perspectives for maturity purposes. When people (including myself) talk about Next Generation EA, this usually means some shift in one or more of these three dimensions.

Found in Translation

2011-11-01T21:49:00.000Z

Vaughan Merlyn explains Why the Notion of the IT Organization is Deeply Flawed!

"Having an IT organization that translates business requirements into IT specifications and solutions is always, at best, a flawed approach" [via Ross Jimenez]

Gartner's definition of enterprise architecture is also based on the concept of translation

"EA is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change." [via Nick Gall]

But we know that translation is prone to error (as Carl Bate and Nigel Green demonstrate in their book Lost in Translation) and indeterminacy (Quine).

*****

Deloitte Consulting uses the term "Lost in Translation" to market its enterprise architecture practice,
illustrated with what appears to be a Chinese version of the Zachman framework.

"Many IT infrastructures are set up without a common language in place that cuts across different enterprises, making it difficult for strategic decisions to be effectively translated into the organization’s technology foundation. That’s where enterprise architecture (EA) can make a difference."

"Deloitte has access to a full range of capabilities in consulting, tax, audit and finance worldwide. This broad range of capabilities allows us to provide services to assist with any enterprise architecture challenge."

But just because a large service firm has access to a broad range of different capabilities, it doesn't automatically follow that these capabilities are joined up, or that the firm is able to translate effectively between different professional disciplines. See my post From 'Organizational Intelligence' to 'Ability to Execute'.

Dimensions of EA maturity

2011-10-27T11:02:00.001+01:00

@gotze (John Gøtze) kindly sent me a copy of his 2010 paper Architecting the Firm (written with Pat Turner and Peter Bernus). My interest had been stimulated by Anders Jensen, who described the paper as follows in his blog on the Thinking Enterprise.

It has been a healthy evolution for EA to question its IT heritage and adopt a broader perspective of how commercial enterprises navigate and gravitate in their respective marketplaces. This healthy evolution has particularly been articulated by Turner, Gotze, and Bernus (2010) in their paper Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise, which argues the key role of architecture in executive management.

The paper offers four interesting EA archetypes, which are presented as a maturity model. As I see it, the four archetypes described in the paper differ along three orthogonal dimensions: instrumentality, agency and scope.

The first archetype ("Foundation") could be described as Invisible EA. In what sense is EA going on at all? Even the "struggle for existence" is largely invisible.

The second archetype ("Extended") describes EA in instrumental terms - as an instrument for managing assets.

The third archetype ("Embedded") describes EA in terms of agency - with EA taking authority and responsibility for certain things.

The fourth archetype ("Balanced") goes back to describing EA in instrumental terms - but with a much broader scope of application.

However, there seems to be little evidence of a development path passing through these four archetypes in irreversible sequence, nor any reason to suppose this particular development path to be either optimal or unavoidable. For my part, I prefer not to call this kind of thing a maturity model at all. In my post on SOA maturity models, I pointed out a key difference between an evolution roadmap (which says what you can do immediately and what you may defer) and a maturity model (which says what you can't do until). A roadmap is enabling and encouraging; a maturity model is parental.

Reading the paper, I wondered how the evolution of EA within one enterprise (possibly via these four archetypes) might relate to the evolution of EA itself (into Next Generation EA). The paper outlines "the vision of the right information for the right people at the right time ... coherency of information flow". But this doesn't exactly sound like EA questioning its IT heritage does it?

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Smart Content

2011-10-22T12:08:00.000+01:00

There are several characteristic features of so-called smart content.

Content enhanced to be fit-to-purpose ... content that is organized and structured for customer tasks and needs, not just for the production, packaging and distribution of physical documents. (Mirko Minnich, ex Elsevier)

Self-organizing and transparent content, organizing itself automatically depending on your context, goals, and workflow, and allowing you to see why it's doing what it's doing. (Mark Stefik, Xerox PARC)

Granular at the appropriate level, semantically rich, useful across applications, and meaningful for collaborative interaction. (Gilbane Group)

Has good metadata (not lots), fit for purpose, uses classifications to provide context and aid discoverability (Madi Solomon, Pearson)

And there are several characteristic technologies that are supposed to facilitate smart content, among other things. Some of these technologies are linked to Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Come on Tim!

Semantic technologies to cross-reference and cross-polinate with other kinds of content. (Madi Solomon, Pearson)

But in this post, I don't want to talk about the technologies themselves but about the emerging value propositions that may be supported by smart content. Last year, when he was a SVP at scientific and technical publisher Elsevier, Mirko Minnich talked about two key enablers for smart content. Firstly a value-adding process - transmuting content into scientific data, and transmuting scientific data into solutions. And secondly what he calls a product bridge, not only linking content with data but also linking the content business with the data analytics business. The product bridge appears to be a kind of platform, and Mirko was using the term "Smart Content" to refer to the platform itself as well as the content delivered on the platform.

Mirko's strategy at Elsevier represented a strong drive towards asymmetric design - in other words, recognizing that in order to deliver indirect value into a complex ecosystem you have to move away from a traditional product-based business model (in Elsevier's case, selling scientific journals) towards regarding your business as a multi-sided platform.

Mark Stefik (Xerox PARC) puts smart content into an organizational intelligence frame - the intelligence is now located (reified) in the content as well as in the people producing and consuming the content. Instead of the user asking "what content do I need", Mark wants the content to ask "who needs me?" Madi Solomon (Pearson) seems to be suggesting the exact opposite when he mentions the Big Shift from Push to Pull in his recent presentation on Smart Content. We can resolve this apparent contradiction only by understanding the intelligence as the property of the whole system rather than trying to locate it in one place - see my material on organizational intelligence.

Sources

Seth Grimes, Six definitions of smart content (Information Week, Sept 2010)

Technology in Publishing (Editors Update, Elsevier, Jan 2011)
Next Generation Clinical Decision Support (Elsevier Press Release, Feb 2011)

Madi Solomon, Making Information Pay (April 2011)

Five Views of Business Architecture

2011-10-17T02:04:00.000+01:00

#OMG #BAWG The Object Management Group Business Architecture Working Group has identified five key views of a business.

the Business Strategy view ("What the Business Wants")
the Business Capabilities view ("What the Business Does")
the Value Stream view ("How the Business Does")
the Business Knowledge view ("What the Business Knows", "How the Business Thinks")
the Organizational view ("What the Business Is")

Source: Business Architecture Overview

While working with the CBDI Forum between 2002 and 2009, I developed an approach to business modelling for SOA, which included an emphasis on decoupling the WHAT (what the business does, what the business knows) from the HOW (how the business does). We felt that this decoupling provided the best basis for managing differentiation and integration across complex enterprises, and for achieving appropriate economics of scale and scope.

In my more recent work on Organizational Intelligence, I have sought to further decouple "What the Business Knows" from "How the Business Thinks". Different enterprises operating in the same ecosystem may be able to share a lot of common knowledge and information, but may each arrive at different judgements about What-Is-Going-On.

I shall be presenting the latest version of this schema in my Business Architecture Bootcamp and Organizational Intelligence Workshop, and explore how this schema helps to address a range of practical business problems.

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Intelligence Failure at Kodak

2011-10-16T14:32:00.004+01:00

@mkplantes sees the demise of Kodak as an intelligence failure.

Put yourself in their Kodak leaders’ chairs for a moment and consider the four expectations of a leadership team and, more importantly, consider the speed with which they had to work though all of the expectations:

• Sense what’s going on around you? (“Digital is coming!”)
• Make sense of what you see, hear, and feel (“Film is dying, but we can’t kill it now. It’s too important!”)
• Decide on a course of action (“OMG! Nothing is as big as film is now. Let’s think about this and be careful.”)
• Act on your decisions (“Well, this is a big ship! Hard to change course overnight!”)

Kay Plantes, A sad “Kodak moment” business model failure WTN News 7 October 2011

This is effectively an OODA loop. Dr Plantes identifies a number of possible errors in this loop.

1. Incorrect estimate of the pace of change. "Successful companies often underestimate the speed of industry evolution."

2. Incorrect understanding of the value proposition from the customers' perspective. "People don’t buy film, they use film to capture the pictures they want."

3. Incorrect optimization of the basis of competition - commodity wars.

If it was a strategic error for Kodak to get caught up in a dogfight with Fuji, we should also ask how Fuji is faring? Has Fuji committed the same errors as Kodak, and is it suffering the same fate? Meanwhile, Stuart Henshall compares Kodak with HP: two inventive companies, who "failed time and time again to find a more agile footing". (HP - What's Your strategy? August 2011).

Dr Plantes complains that Kodak was focused on the product rather than the value received by its customers - in other words, a platform strategy. But Kodak has been trying to shift its business model from product to a service-oriented platform for at least five years. In November 2006, an article in BusinessWeek described this transformation, and outlined some of the big challenges then facing Kodak (Mistakes made on the road to innovation, BusinessWeek November 2006). In February 2007, Clayton Christensen and Scott D. Anthony saw the Kodak strategy as an ambitious attempt to implement Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation (Will Kodak's New Strategy Work? Forbes February 2007).

Antonio Perez (who spent much of his career at HP) has been the CEO throughout this period, and has watched the Kodak share price drop from around $25 to less than $1. We may infer that Kodak has failed to overcome the challenges identified by BusinessWeek and Christensen. But why?

What's missing from Dr Plantes' analysis is an appreciation of how these four steps operated as an effective OODA loop, with feedback and learning, rather than merely repetition. In a detailed analysis of Kodak strategy, George Mendes concludes

Kodak is an example of repeat strategic failure – it was unable to grasp the future of digital quickly enough, and even when it did so, it was implemented too slowly under a continuous change strategy and ultimately it did not fit coherently as a core competency.

George Mendes, What went wrong at Eastman Kodak (pdf), TheStrategyTank

There is a great deal on the Internet about Kodak's social media strategy - but it seems to be largely about Kodak marketing communications. Journalist Courtney Boyd Myers (@CBM) invites us to Meet the brilliant and beautiful woman behind Kodak’s social media strategy (September 2011). The woman in question is extremely photogenic and obviously good at self-promotion, but there is nothing strategic in the article. The big strategic error here is to regard social media and content management as a marketing issue, separate from the business model itself. This seems to suggest a lack of joined-up thinking - and ultimately a failure of organizational intelligence.

In 2007, Jacob McNulty thought that that instilling the elements of a learning organization would have strongly contributed to a different story for Kodak’s recent years.

A learning organization is one that learns from its mistakes and successes, spots trends in the market and acts on them by being nimble enough to do so. A culture of learning rewards knowledge sharing which reduces the chances that you’ll be blindsided by something like digital in 2007. Kodak could have presented themselves as a picture company many years ago - whether those pictures are on film or in a file it shouldn’t matter. Part of making that transition would require a company that is ready to learn and develop.

Jacob McNulty, Not a Kodak Moment (2007)

Other sources claim that Kodak is a learning organization. In which case, why has it failed to learn the things that matter?

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Google as a Platform (not)

2011-10-14T07:27:00.004+01:00

Google vs Amazon (again). @davidsprott reckons Steve Yegge's rant is spot on. Steve Yegge is a software engineer who used to work for Amazon and now works for Google, despite the supposedly accidental publication of a long and opinionated rant (his words) complaining that

'[what] Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms.'

(For more context, see Steve Yegge's second thoughts on Google+).

Waddya mean, Google doesn't get platforms? Surely Google is a major player in platform, especially in the so-called Cloud? Dion Hinchcliffe sounded fairly convinced when he was Comparing Amazon's and Google's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings back in April 2008.

"Amazon and Google have strategically built up an extensive set of services over the last few years and have made some very interesting assumptions that will determine who their customers are (consumers, startups, enterprises) and what type of business models can sit on top of them (advertising, subscriptions, cheapest source of outsourced computing resources). ... Google and Amazon have emerged to be the leaders in this space while Microsoft, IBM, and especially Oracle and SAP are either well behind or have unclear plans to enter the PaaS space. Both of these companies formed their DNA around the world of the Web and deeply understand how to leverage the enormous strengths of the Web platform."

So what went wrong? This guy (Yegge) sure knows one thing, says @pardhas, building platforms is not just collecting your products on one plate. For Yegge, platforms is about eating your own dogfood. Not just Amazon, but also Facebook - hey, even Microsoft understands platforms better than Google.

But there is something missing from Steve Yegge's account. He sees the (lack of) platform from an engineering perspective, but what he doesn't talk about is the enterprise/ecosystem perspective.

@davidsprott's tweet ends with the formula "SOA + platforms = competitive advantage". David and I have written a great deal about ecosystem SOA and ecosystem architecture, and we have long credited Jeff Bezos of Amazon as someone who "gets" ecosystem.

Among other things, "getting ecosystem" means understanding the variety of ways in which the social complexity of collaborations create value for the customer, and therefore how, from the perspective of the supplier, platform architectures can capture indirect value. See Philip Boxer's presentation on supporting social complexity in collaborative enterprises, as well as my presentation on Next Generation Enterprise Architecture, both from the recent Unicom EA Forum in London.

As I pointed out in my recent VPEC-T analysis of Google, Google is adopting a positional strategy - capturing some territory and defending it against its competitors. Amazon and Apple have shifted towards open source competition on their platforms (relational strategy) while Google is still closed-source.

In his post on Tomorrow's Networked Economy, @JDeragon praises Google+ for becoming an integrated portal. Er, wasn't that AOL's strategy? And Yahoo's for that matter? Maybe Google has greater ability to execute this strategy than they did, but it still looks more like yesterday's networked economy. Have you read Kevin Kelly's book?

For Apple's shift from product to platform, see my post on Disney, Pixar, Apple and Jobs from February 2006.

For the shift from positional stategy to relational strategy, see Philip Boxer and Bernie Cohen, Triply Articulated Modelling of the Anticipatory Enterprise and Philip Boxer, Architectures that integrate differentiated behaviours.

For more on Ecosystem SOA and Ecosystem Architecture, please browse the Ecosystem category on this blog. Here are some further links.

Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders (via Geekwire) (April 2011)
Bob Ellinger, Enterprise SOA vs Ecosystem SOA (April 2011)
Vaughan Merlyn, From Enterprise Architecture to Ecosystem Architecture (July 2008)
David Sprott, Introducing Smart Ecosystem Architecture (October 2009)

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Towards a VPEC-T analysis of Google

2011-10-10T14:14:00.004+01:00

#entarch Enterprise architects need to understand values and policies. VPEC-T is an approach that is particularly useful for situations where there are multiple conflicting values and policies, or multiple interpretations of What-Is-Going-On.

In this post, I want to look at Google. Can we infer its values and policies from its observed behaviour (over time).

We may start by asking what events we think Google is paying attention to. Here are some of the events that are available to Google.

1. You search for "XYZ"
2. You skip over the first few items, and click on the third item on the second page.
3. You look at a webpage and then come back to continue your search.
4 You rephrase and clarify your enquiry.

Google is pretty coy on its exact use of these events, but most Google-watchers assume that these events have an influence on its search algorithms and/or its advertising algorithms. In other words, we may presume that Google is generating valuable content from these events.

Google has indulged in a wide range of initiatives over the years, many of which have no obvious line to revenue. But all of them have the potential to generate vast amounts of rich content - much of it related to the observed behaviour of internet users. On this interpretation of Google's strategy, initiatives are dropped, not because they fail to generate revenue but because they fail to generate enough of the desired kind of content. Google is betting its future on building and maintaining this content through powerful positive feedback.

Google's strategy is therefore surprisingly traditional - it involves capturing some territory and defending it against its competitors. Here's an example - Google provides the Android platform to mobile device manufacturers. When Motorola wanted to use Skyhook's voice recognition instead of Google's, Google forced it to fall into line. Daniel Soar argues that this was not because Google executives feared losing revenue but because they feared losing access to an important source of content. As Soar puts it, "Google faced the unfamiliar problem of the negative feedback loop: the fewer people that used its product, the less information it would have and the worse the product would get." (Google has since bought out Motorola Mobility, which presumably resolves some of the trust issues as well.)

Daniel Soar, You can't get away from Google, London Review of Books, Vol 33 No 19, 6 October 2011

Can we understand Google's phenomenal collection and use of data as an example of organizational intelligence? Google is certainly seeking to differentiate each Internet user's experience, as well as integrate across multiple domains (web browsing, email, blogging, voice, video, satnav, and so on). Google already has an army of brilliant engineers as well as an alarmingly large carbon footprint. There is lots of evidence of Google's integrating these resources into one of the most innovative sociotechnical systems on the planet.

(By the way, when I asked Google itself about its carbon footprint, it recommended I look at a recent story in the Guardian (8 September 2011). I can see that Google has been asked this question many times before, because it pops up so quickly as an expected search term. But why should I trust Google's recommendation, and how can I ever discover what newspapers would be recommended to a browser with a different browsing history to mine?)

But a lot of this learning looks suspiciously like first-order learning. So the content gets better, based on better capture of events, but to what extent is there any systematic evolution of policies or questioning of values? There may well be some second-order or third-order learning, but it's not easy to see from the outside. There is also an important question about the relationship between Google's own ability to learn from its accumulated content, and Google's ability or willingness to provide a rich platform for learning by others in its ecosystem - in other words, a broader notion of collective intelligence.

I wonder if there are any lessons for other organizations? Sometimes firms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four) seem pretty far removed from most other organizations, but their platform strategies and operating patterns will surely become increasingly relevant in other sectors. A traditional retailer may now collect and analyse a much larger quantity of data about its customers' behaviour than ever before, even if this is still several orders of magnitude less than what Google does. A traditional telecoms or media company may now see itself as a platform business in a multisided market. Therefore instead of seeing Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four as impossibly remote and mysterious organizations, populated by unbelievably talented and creative engineers, we should start to think of them as harbingers of the enterprise of the future.

See also my post Google as a Platform (not)

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Business Architecture Bootcamp

2011-10-10T03:44:00.001+01:00

Most courses in business architecture (or any other methodology for that matter) start by teaching a set of generic principles, followed by a standard set of tasks and techniques. The tasks and techniques are then illustrated by some simplistic or contrived examples and exercises. Video store, anyone?

In my forthcoming business architecture bootcamp (Unicom Middlesex, November 22-23), I'm going to lead an exploration into some serious and non-trivial business problems, based on some real experience in a real company. The class will experiment with different ways of modelling these problems, spanning the Five Views of Business Architecture, in order to go deeper and deeper into an understanding of these problems and their architectural implications. I don't know exactly where we shall end up, but I am confident that this is a better way of learning the things that really matter to business architects.

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Early bird rates available until November 1st.

From Convenience to Consilience - “Technology Alone Is Not Enough"

2011-10-08T00:32:00.002+01:00

Wikipedia defines Consilience as the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), which has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process.

The word appears in an appreciation of Steve Jobs by @jonahlehrer, published in the New Yorker on October 7th 2011.

What set all of Jobs’s companies apart, from Pixar to NeXT to Apple, was, indeed, an insistence that computer scientists must work together with artists and designers—that the best ideas emerge from the intersection of technology and the humanities. “One of the greatest achievements at Pixar was that we brought these two cultures together and got them working side by side,” Jobs said in 2003. ... Perhaps the clearest demonstration can be seen in the design of the Pixar campus. ...

Jobs realized, however, that it wasn’t enough to simply create a space: he needed to make people go there. As he saw it, the main challenge for Pixar was getting its different cultures to work together, forcing the computer geeks and cartoonists to collaborate. (John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar, describes the equation this way: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”) In typical fashion, Jobs saw this as a design problem. ...

That emphasis on consilience, even if it came at the expense of convenience, has always been a defining trait of Steve Jobs. In an age of intellectual fragmentation, Jobs insisted that the best creations occurred when people from disparate fields were connected together, when our distinct ways of seeing the world were brought to bear on a singular problem. It’s what happens when a calligrapher designs a computer font and when an animator strikes up a conversation with a programmer at the bathroom sink. The Latin crest of Pixar University says it all: Alienus Non Diutius. Alone no longer.

Steve Jobs was widely regarded as an outstanding product architect - someone with exceptional aesthetic sense and attention to detail. The creation of the iTunes ecosystem probably ranks as solution architecture rather than just product architecture. But Jonah's account emphasizes Job's exceptional ability as an enterprise architect - putting people and organizations together to achieve a classical unity of knowledge, which Jonah calls consilience. According to Jonah, it was his secret sauce.

Other commentators have said similar things. When Jobs finally resigned, John @Gruber stated that "Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself." (Daring Fireball, August 2011) Building on this statement, Horace Dediu (@asymco) invites other companies to copy how Apple harbors the creative process and the technology processes under the same roof. If that occurs, Jobs will have left a legacy not just on his own companies (Apple, Pixar) but on all companies. (Polymath Asymco August 2011, reposted as Steve Jobs's Ultimate Lesson for Companies HBR August 2011)

See also my post Steve Jobs was not a visionary.

Learning from Stories

2011-10-07T14:17:00.000+01:00

#entarch @thepacketrat summarizes a presentation by @beamrider9 via @cgrant @cuttertweets

History is written by the victors. Ross Snyder, who describes himself as a code jockey at Etsy, recently gave an account of the evolution of Etsy's technical architecture from 2005 to the present. As Ross tells the story, a number of serious architectural flaws have now been sorted out. Ross attributes the former problems to trying to be too clever, and suggests that if you're doing something "clever" you're probably doing it wrong. However, he admits that future architects may well say the same thing about him.

I don't want to comment on the technical detail of the story, but I was interested in the (implied) architectural processes. And I wondered how effectively and efficiently any given architectural methodology would have either solved the problems experienced at Etsy, or avoided them in the first place. The first key question here is whether such methodologies actually help to focus the architect's attention on those issues that turned out to be critical in the Etsy case. And the second key question is whether a case study like Etsy allows us to perceive any significant difference in outcome between one methodology and another, or whether the supposed benefits of these methodologies is largely the result of Common Factors.

Sean Gallagher, When "clever" goes wrong: how Etsy overcame poor architectural choices Ars Technica October 2011

Content or Platform?

2011-09-28T09:26:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I was talking to a guy from a large media company about its social media strategy. The company is already successfully using social media for distributing and sharing content with its customers, but it doesn't have as much corporate presence as it might like. How might we use social media to talk about ourselves, to let people know about, say, job vacancies or our corporate ethics, he asked.

A media company is judged by its customers according to the range and quality of the content it provides - the company essentially provides a platform for this content. But how do you talk about the platform without interfering with the content? Will customers be turned off if we use the platform to talk about the platform?

At one extreme, there will be customers who really don't want to know about the platform at all. @dgwbirch tweets "I don't want to be friends with my bank, I want to be friends with my bank account. I want to follow my credit card, not my issuer".

But at the other extreme, there will be customers who may value other kinds of interaction. For example, a media company is always swamped with requests from young people for internships and work experience, and we can only grant a limited number of these requests. But suppose we could use social media to give a much larger number of young people the opportunity to develop some skills and show what they are capable of, provide them with decent feedback, and allow them to earn some token of experience that they could mention on their CVs.

Note how an innovative approach to strategy (in this case social media strategy) is driven by a quest - looking for different and innovative ways of creating direct and indirect value within our ecosystem. The widespread success of social media depends significantly on the fact that people are motivated by all sorts of things other than money.

When I was a teenager, I entered a DJ competition, for which I had to nominate three singles. I chose one current hit, one old hit, and one new release. I failed to win the competition, and I guessed that my choice had been too obscure for the mainstream. The new release I had chosen was a folksy cover version of a song by Joni Mitchell; several months later, it started to get some airplay and shot to number one. I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere.

Unicom EA Forum

2011-09-22T09:24:00.002+01:00

Here is my presentation from the Unicom Enterprise Architecture Forum in London on Thursday September 29th.

Next Generation Enterprise Architecture

View more presentations from Richard Veryard.

And here is Philip Boxer's presentation, which outlines his approach to what I'm calling the Third Agenda.

Supporting Social Complexity in Collaborative Enterprises

View more presentations from Philip Boxer

Notes on Interface

2011-09-21T18:45:00.000+01:00

At an architecture workshop in Vienna last week, I put together a few slides to address some questions about interfaces. I promised to post an expanded and cleaned-up version, and here it is. Some of this material was developed with my former colleague Lawrence Wilkes. If you have more questions please ask.

Notes on Interface

View more presentations from Richard Veryard

The Topography of Enterprise Architecture

2011-09-09T12:10:00.002+01:00

#entarch A lot of the terminology of enterprise architecture depends on some basic categories and distinctions, which help to define the dimensions for various schemas and frameworks.

Top-down / Bottom-up
Ideal / Real
Abstract / Concrete
Espoused / In-Use

But the meaning of these terms depends on your perspective. See for example my previous post What Does "Top-Down" Mean?

One popular categorical distinction is between “ideal” and “real”, with a progressive series of intermediate states. This category implies a process known as “realization” moving from the “ideal” towards the “real” (for which the Zachmanites prefer the mediaeval word “reification”), and a contrary process known as “idealization” moving from the “real” towards the “ideal”.

(The Zachmanites claim that this distinction derives from some unnamed ancient Greek philosophers, but I have not been able to verify this claim. The earliest sources I can find for this idea are mediaeval Christian and Arabic philosophers such as Ibn Arabi and Ockham.)

But it is interesting to see exactly what people regard as more “real”. For example, many people seem to think that the technology model is more “real” than the business model. In other words, a pattern of magnetic dots on a physical data storage device counts as more “real” than the flesh-and-blood customer that this pattern of dots represents. Such a technologically based notion of “reality” may be useful for some purposes, but it is inescapably a technological perspective. And no EA framework that uncritically adopts a technologically based notion of “reality” can claim to be free of a technological bias.

What does "Top-Down" mean?

2011-09-09T11:59:00.002+01:00

#entarch There seem to be several different ways people use the term “top-down”.

Management hierarchy. Top-down means traditional command-and-control. See my post on Multiple Styles of EA.

Decomposition/Refinement. Top-down means starting from broad vision and principles; bottom-up means starting with concrete detail and evidence.

Large versus small. Top-down means starting with the big pieces and assuming that the small pieces can be fitted into the gaps left by the big pieces. See Nick Malik's piece Should SOA be Top Down or Bottom Up, which I discussed in my post on Service Planning.

Planned versus emergent. Top-down means directed and planned, bottom-up means collaborative and emergent. See my post on Emergent Architecture.

TO-BE versus AS-IS. Top-down means starting from the future requirements of the business; bottom-up means starting from the available assets.

Generic versus Specific. Top-down means starting from an apriori (generalized, enterprise-wide or industry-wide) schema (Kant); bottom-up means starting from the specific local requirements (Hume). This is a possible interpretation of Ali Arsanjani's posts So is Kant right or Hume? and Back to Kant and Hume. See my post on The General and the Particular.

In very simple cases (such as the examples given in the books and training courses), these overlapping but logically distinct meanings of “top-down” may happen to coincide; but as things get more complex, the tension between competing notions of “top-down” will become more significant.

In a debate on community regeneration, Matthew Mckeague writes "What I don’t think can be forgotten in the ‘bottom up’ ‘top down’ debate is that it shouldn’t be a binary choice. There’s a balance to be struck and professional skills and networks can’t be underestimated. It’s where the balance sits that we need some further debate."

See also The Politics of "Top-Down"

Richard Veryard on Architecture

On the misuse of general principles

The Purpose of Enterprise Architecture

Teaching Enterprise Architecture

Unruly Google and VPEC-T

Sources

Three or Four Schools of Enterprise Architecture

School One

School Two

School Three A

School Three B

Enterprise Architecture Tempo

Risk and Responsibility in Self-Service

Meta-Architecture (Yawn)

Conceptual Modelling - Why Theory

Dimensions of EA maturity 2

Instrumentality

Agency

Scope

Found in Translation

Dimensions of EA maturity

Smart Content

Sources

Five Views of Business Architecture

Intelligence Failure at Kodak

Google as a Platform (not)

Towards a VPEC-T analysis of Google

Business Architecture Bootcamp

From Convenience to Consilience - “Technology Alone Is Not Enough"

Learning from Stories

Content or Platform?

Unicom EA Forum

Notes on Interface

The Topography of Enterprise Architecture

What does "Top-Down" mean?