Tom Graves / Tetradian

So far in this series we’ve explored enterprise-vision (Enterprise Canvas row-0) and high-level business-context (row-1) in a fairly straightforward way. It’s been much the same as any other conventional ‘top-down’ strategy-development, except that we haven’t really mentioned our own organisation at all as yet. (That’s coming shortly. )

A few important points have come up in the comments to those two articles, though, which are worth reiterating here before we move on.

One is to remember why we’re doing all of this. It’s not about abstract ‘blue-sky’ thinking: it’s about building a stable platform for organisational change. In enterprise-architecture, this needs to be a platform in which all of the other architectures – business-architecture, process-architecture, skills-architecture, values-architecture, security-architecture and, oh yes, all the IT-architectures too – can all interweave and interlink and intermesh into a single unified, dynamic whole. But although we talk a lot about the extended-enterprise here – especially in these ‘higher’ layers – this isn’t actually for anyone else at all: unless someone seriously-senior decides otherwise, all of this is solely for our own organisation (or client, if we’re doing this work as external-consultants). Working this way, whatever we develop is always in the context of this broader extended-enterprise: but our own organisation (or client) becomes more and more the centre of our attention as we move down the layers. That transition of emphasis starts to happen here. In short:

In enterprise-architecture, we create an architecture about an enterprise, but for an organisation.

It’s really important to remember that point – not least because it’s the organisation, not the extended-enterprise, that’s paying our bills!

Another point that came up in the comments is that the usual nine-cell structure of the Enterprise Canvas can be a bit misleading in these upper levels. The nine-cell structure is really a kind of functional-decomposition – who’s handling what interfaces, and why. But functional-decomposition assumes or describes specific interfaces and relationships – and we haven’t even got that far yet. In row-0 and row-1 we only deal with each entity as a whole, without any internal subdivision into cells. It’s only here, in row-2, that we start to introduce the idea of relationships and roles between entities, which eventually leads us to relationships and roles within entities, which leads us in turn to that nine-cell structure. If you try to use the nine-cell structure in rows 0 or 1, or in most of the work in row-2, you may have missed the point somewhere: at those levels, it’s only about each entity as a whole.

And finally, I would hope that by now you’ll have realised that this can be a lot harder to do than it might seem at first glance. It’s so easy to fall back to organisation-centric habits, where the organisation is placed as the sole centre of everything. The blunt fact is that it isn’t that ’sole centre’ at all: in fact, the organisation only has a reason to exist if it’s placed within the context of its extended-enterprise. If we don’t understand that broader context, we would have nothing to guide us when that context changes – which, these days, can happen on a literally moment-by-moment basis. One of the keys here is that the description of that enterprise is literally emotive – it drives change. So although a lot of thinking and analysis will be needed here, ultimately it’s not a rational matter – it’s about what feels ‘right’, about identifying what is valued. This is especially true of the vision-descriptor: we need to keep exploring that context-space until we hit upon a phrase that can engender emotions and commitment that are literally strong enough to get people out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, time to move on: time to start looking at the business of the enterprise, and of the organisation itself. To summarise where we’ve gotten to so far with this example, we’d established a row-0 ‘Enterprise’:

We then started a Zachman-style row-1 ‘Context’ with a conventional market-based view of our enterprise, with our own organisation as its centre:

Which didn’t show us many options. But as we started to explore what that enterprise-vision meant in practice, and what kinds of stakeholders would be engaged in that vision, we realised that the actual enterprise was much broader than our current market:

Which should create many more strategic opportunities than we were able to see before. To make this work, though, we first need look more closely at the meaning of a common business-term: value-proposition.

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Another week gone by, hence another collection of Tweets and links, as usual. (There were also a whole stream of possibly-useful Tweets from the Open Group enterprise-architecture conference in Boston during the week – see here and here.) Usual categories, with extras as appropriate, as usual.

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Another collection of Tweets from the Open Group Boston conference, mostly from Day 3 (21 July 2010), and variously on business-architecture, the EA profession, cloud-computing and a few miscellaneous themes. As before, a few additional comments from me in italics.) Thanks again to everyone who Tweeted, especially Aleks Buterman (@aleksb6) and @rsevero.

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Yup, I screwed up badly over that last post on IBM’s definitely not ‘new’ Component Business Model. Within a matter of minutes I’d received a whole stream of Tweets warning me I’d been mistaken about the age of the model:

• miket0181: @tetradian IBM’s CBM isn’t new. I think it’s at least 5 years old…
• operninha: @tetradian aqui na empresa contratamos a IBM e eles usaram o CBM (“here the company hired IBM and they used the CBM”)
• seabird20: @tetradian I have seen CBM in RFPs for at least 5 years. Original work 10+ yrs. ago. Takes a while to get to rank and file though
• richardveryard: @miket0181 @tetradian … IBM’s CBM came sometime after my 2001 book on Component-Based Business http://tinyurl.com/23gelj7

So yes, I was wrong on that: badly wrong. A critique about outdatedness that would have made sense if the model had been ‘new’ just looks peevish and petty when it isn’t…

Even the critique about the structure of the model is barely fair. Sure, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model has been around since at least the mid-1970s, but the number of people who knew about it and were applying it in practice (and I actually could include myself amongst them by the mid-1990s) was and still is very small. It’s better-known these days, and its value and importance is much better-understood; but at the time the Component Business Model was devised, I would doubt that anyone in that IBM team would have even heard of it, let alone known why those kind of whole-of-system cross-checks are so crucial. The critique would definitely be valid for an equivalent model developed now, but most of the current knowledge on whole-of-enterprise impacts simply wasn’t available a decade ago. And whilst critiquing a (relatively) old model on the basis of current knowledge is valid enough, it’s only fair to do so when it’s clear when that fact of history is acknowledged – which I didn’t, because I didn’t know it was that old.

I know why I screwed up: after five years of constant struggle against IT-centrism in ‘enterprise’-architecture, I’m now seeing management-centrism promoted as an ‘improvement’, and it’s frustrating as heck… The fundamental point in all enterprise-architecture is that there is no centre – everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time. In true whole-of-enterprise architecture, making anything ‘the centre’ – IT, finance, management, processes, security, whatever, even the business-organisation itself – will guarantee failure of the architecture over the longer term. When I saw the Tweet that triggered this, I thought it was yet another example of this lethal mistake. So I over-reacted.

In my defence, I did check the IBM site with some care. But the annoying point there is that there are no dates on that part of the site – nothing to give any clue as to when the material was posted, or its probable vintage. (Compare that to, say Apple or Microsoft, where just about everything has a ‘Last Updated’ timestamp.) I looked quite hard for anything there that would give me any clue as to the date. What I didn’t do, though, was search elsewhere – and yes, that was a mistake too. So I misread the implication of the Tweet, and mistakenly assumed the model was new – after all, it still says so, several years later…

Moral(s) of the story:

• Fact-check everything, via multiple sources – not just the ‘official’ site for the respective information
• If key metadata-items such as dates are missing, fact-check elsewhere again, and treat any implied derivatives (e.g. ‘new’) as suspect
• Frustration is fine, and often all too understandable, but don’t let it rule the roost – engage doubt before pressing the ‘Send’ key…

Overall, though, the blunt fact remains that yes, I did indeed screw up there. Mea culpa…

(Another example of How To Lose Friends And Infuriate People, no doubt, but this does have to be said.)

[Update: this post was a reaction to a tweet I received yesterday, but Mike T. (@miket0181) tells me that the IBM CBM described here isn't new, in fact is apparently some years old, so my complaints on that regard are unfair. (Doesn't help that IBM don't put up any dates on their website-posts.) On that part, yes, I ought to apologise, and do - see 'How to screw up in one easy lesson...'. Yet the core critique still stands: it's not a complete model, and potentially is dangerously misleading if used as the basis for a business-architecture. That's my view for now an' I'm stickin' to it, anyways. ]

A couple of weeks back, as part of the ‘Patterns‘ section in the Enterprise Canvas series, I put up a an example of a variant of the Canvas which I said was definitely dysfunctional, all but guaranteed to be ineffective, and definitely not recommended – a kind of Taylorist-style model of the organisation and its (non-)relationship with its business-ecosystem:

I said explicitly that it was a stereotype, almost a parody – a guide as to how not to view an organisation, with quality-management and coordination subsumed into ‘management’, and rigid separation between the organisation and its broader shared-enterprise.

I was quite certain that no-one would be daft enough to try to model any real organisation in that way.

I was wrong.

Welcome to IBM’s new Component Business Model, where the organisation’s business-world is partitioned into just three layers: Direct, Control, Execute:

I’m going to have to be rude here, and describe this as a kind of ‘bastard child’ of Taylorism and TOGAF, combining many of the worst features of both and not many of their best. The one good item, and a definite improvement on TOGAF, is that the model does explicitly include People as well as Process and Technology:

Using the Component Business Model methodology, our consultants identify the basic building blocks of your business. Each building block includes the people, processes and technology needed by this component to act as a standalone entity and deliver value to your organisation.

But beyond that? – well, let’s compare it to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, which I regard as the minimum requirement for whole-of-business modelling:

• system-5, ‘policy / purpose‘ – uh… might be tucked away somewhere in IBM’s ‘Direct’?
• system-4, ‘outside / future‘ – sort-of in IBM’s ‘Direct’, but no reference to ‘outside’?
• system-3, ‘inside / now‘ – yup, right there in IBM’s ‘Control’ – lots of it
• system-3*, ‘monitor / audit‘ (including overall quality-management) – nope, not a sign of it – presumably squeezed into IBM’s ‘Control’?
• system-2, ‘coordination‘ – nope – no sign of it anywhere
• system-1, ‘operations‘ – yup, that’s IBM’s ‘Execute’ – probably…

In terms of the Enterprise Canvas model above, all it has is Staff-Management (what should be the guidance-services, but all scrunched up together in a nearly-unusable way), Line-Management (the Value-Management cell, blown up out of all proportion to its actual relevance) and, uh, Everything-Else…

In other words, there’s probably less than half of what’s needed to make sense of the organisation – but presented as if it’s the whole of it, much like TOGAF’s hopelessly-IT-centric model purports to be ‘enterprise’-architecture.

The four other worked examples are slightly better, but still dangerously incomplete: a Taylorist manager’s-eye view of the business-world, without any clue as to any of the glue-functions that hold it all together. You’ll also note that each one of those examples has a very different structure in its ‘horizontal’ axis – but no indication at all as to how it’s derived. Presumably only IBM’s own consultants could be considered competent to understand the ‘magic sauce’ needed to do this, and the rest of us mere mortals may do nothing else but bow down in awe?

What’s also irksome is that IBM have the temerity to present this as something ‘new’:

IBM’s Component Business Model is a new way of looking at your business. It represents the entire business in a simple framework that fits on a single page. It is an evolution of traditional views of a business, such as business unit, function, geographic or process.

Fact is that this is nothing ‘new’ at all: okay, it might seem new to IBM, but not to just about anyone else in ‘the trade’. We were doing it more than half a decade ago in Australia Post – certainly 2004, and probably earlier. It was only a Visio hack, but in business terms it proved straight away to be one of the most valuable artifacts from our Business Transformation team: just about every single manager in the whole organisation grabbed hold of their own copy and placed it, much annotated, above their desk. Since then I’ve done one or more of these models for just about every one of my enterprise-architecture clients: you’ll find a couple of (de-identified) examples in that VSM slidedeck referenced above, and in probably half of my other TOGAF-conference presentations over the past few years. I even published the instructions on how to build an ‘organisation-on-a-page’ map, complete with Visio templates, on my Tetradian Books website some two or three years ago. Aleks Buterman and his colleagues have had their own generic version – which they call an Enterprise Architecture Capability Map – up on their website for almost a year now. And it’s even built into some of the EA toolsets, such as Troux Metis, and, I believe, IBM’s own System Architect, and again has been so for years. So what’s ‘new’ about it? Nothing, frankly – other than the fact that IBM have finally cottoned-on to what the rest of us already knew anyway.

And I hate to think how much they charge for this ‘new’ approach… a lot, no doubt…

Sorry, folks, but I’d have to say I’m underwhelmed at all of this. Seriously underwhelmed. Oh well.

Bah.

A collection of Tweets from and/or about the Open Group conference in Boston. A few references to Day 1 – particularly the ‘unconference’ – but mainly about Day 2, where the Jeanne Ross keynote was obviously the highlight.

I’ve split this into sections, mainly around the current speaker. I’ve also added occasional comments of my own at the end of some tweets, shown in italics.

Many thanks especially to Dana Gardner (@Dana_Gardner), Brenda Michelson (@bmichelson), Aleks Buterman (@aleksb6), Lisa Melsted (@lmelsted) and @rsevero (apologies, I don’t know the proper name), who provided the bulk of the Tweets here.

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In the previous post in this series we did a quick review of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas, and set out this into practice with a real-world example that, for me, is very close to home: rethinking my own enterprise-architecture consultancy business.

We started at the top layer, aiming to identify the core ‘enterprise’ within which I work. From exploring my own professional history, it became clear that the main focus of my work is about enterprises themselves, of any size, and always with the aim of enhancing enterprise effectiveness. From that, we ended up with an initial enterprise-descriptor – or ‘vision’ – of “creating more-effective enterprises”.

Notice, though, what’s happened right here, in that paragraph above. In trying to summarise that initial rather clunky vision-statement – ‘creating more-effective enterprises’ – we’ve accidentally hit upon a better one: ‘enhancing enterprise effectiveness’. It reads better, has a smoother flow to it, a poetry almost. It does describe what I’m passionate about – and finding that passion is central to the success of an enterprise. And ‘enhancing’ is actually a much more accurate term for what I do: I don’t often create enterprises in the sense that, say, an entrepreneur would do, but I do work to enhance their effectiveness. So note that this process is typical of what happens in context-space mapping: for example, we arrive at a ’solution’ – in this case, the initial ‘vision’-descriptor – which itself quietly dropped us back into the ’sensemaking’ space. So the trick here is to notice what’s happening, notice these little serendipitous events – and learning how to do that is a real skill in itself. To quote one of my favourite books, William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation:

If these discoveries were made by chance or accident alone, as many discoveries of this type would be made by any inexperienced scientist starting to dabble in research as by Bernard or Pasteur. The truth of the matter lies in Pasteur’s famous saying, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” It is the interpretation of the chance event which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

Anyway, that’s what we now have as the ‘row-0′ or ‘Enterprise’ layer for the Enterprise Canvas model of my own enterprise:

Now what? Very pretty and all that, but what do we do with this?

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Finally catching up again: last week’s collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories unless otherwise noted.

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The full Enterprise Canvas model is a complex beast, with many ideas, many layers, many ramifications and side-themes: it can perhaps seem daunting at first. Yet when we strip it right down to its bare essentials, it’s actually very simple indeed – and its real power comes from that underlying simplicity. So here’s a Really Simple Summary of the ideas behind the Enterprise Canvas:

Everything in the enterprise is a service.

The Enterprise Canvas is a generic map to describe any service, anywhere in the enterprise, together with its interdependencies and flows.

The Enterprise Canvas therefore provides a consistent means to model anything, anywhere in the enterprise.

To give a bit more detail, to make that Really Simple Summary more usable in practice:

Everything exists within one infinite ecosystem, which we might label ‘the universe’.

For practical reasons – and for sanity’s sake – we usually restrict our view to a much smaller subset of that ‘the everything’. (We do always need to remember that it actually is ‘the everything’, though.)

One useful option, especially for organisations, is to select the subset that describes that part of the ecosystem within which the organisation operates. This ‘extended-enterprise’ (or ‘enterprise’, for short) is always larger than the organisation itself, and coalesces around a single idea or descriptor, usually referred to as the ‘vision’ for the enterprise.

Within that enterprise, we assert that every entity represents a service.

Every entity delivers services, provides services, consumes other services. The ecosystem is made viable by this constant interchange of services.

This interchange occurs at every level. Everything is a service, from whole organisations to the faucet in the bathroom or a single line of program-code.

Everything is a service.

For each entity, it can be useful to divide the view into three partitions, in terms of role and relationship: the role, function and services of the entity itself; its relationships with the entities that provide the services that this entity consumes (’supplier-side’); and its relationships with the entities that consume the services that this entity provides (‘customer-side’).

For each entity, it can also be useful to divide the view into three other partitions, in terms of time: what is intended to happen (‘future’); what is actually happening (‘present’); and what has happened (‘past’).

These two sets of views are orthogonal to each other. We can therefore map this as a three-by-three matrix:

The relationships with other entities are symmetrical in the sense that every entity shares the same pattern: the only difference between ’supplier-side’ and ‘customer-side’ is the main direction of service-flow relative to the entity that is our current focus of attention.

The ‘future’-oriented relationships are essentially peer-to-peer, and bidirectional.

The ‘present’-oriented relationships are mainly about ’supply-chain’ transfer of goods and services from supplier to self, or self-to customer (i.e. left-to-right on the Canvas).

The ‘past’-oriented relationships are mainly about balancing the supply-chain transfer via a ‘backchannel’ from customer to self, and self to supplier (i.e. right-to-left on the Canvas).

We can thus describe the overall entity in terms of nine subsidiary ‘cells’ or sets of related activities:

• supplier-side/future: build and maintain relationships with potential and/or actual ’supplier’ service-provider entities, about things that need to happen in the future – supplier-relations
• supplier-side/present: receive goods and/or services from ’supplier’ entities – supplier-channels
• supplier-side/past: provide balance or compensation to ’supplier’ entities (e.g. pay for goods) – value-outlay
• self/future: identify what this entity will do and deliver, aligned to the overall enterprise purpose and values – value-proposition
• self/present: take all actions necessary to create and deliver the goods and/or services specified in the value-proposition – value-creation
• self/past: ensure the appropriate functioning of the overall entity, balancing past, present and future – value-management
• customer-side/future: build and maintain relationships with potential and/or actual ‘customer’ service-consumer entities, mainly about what should happen in the future – customer-relations
• customer-side/present: deliver goods and/or services to ‘customer’ entities – customer-channels
• customer-side/past: receive balance or compensation from ‘customer’ entities (e.g. payment for goods) – value-return

Each of these ‘cells’ delivers its own services to the entity, and could thus, recursively, be represented by and described on its own Enterprise Canvas.

Each entity may be described in terms of various layers on a spectrum between most-abstract (the enterprise as a whole) to most-concrete (the detailed-past).

Note that ultimately all boundaries are arbitrary, and in most cases exist for descriptive and/or administrative convenience only. Within the overall ecosystem, any or all of its services may be recombined and reconfigured in an infinity of alternate ways. The key criterion for success is not ‘correctness’, but effectiveness:

• efficient: optimises use of resources, minimises wastage of resources
• reliable: predictable, consistent, self-correcting, supports ’single source of truth’ etc
• elegant: clarity, simplicity, consistency, self-adapting for human factors
• appropriate: supports and optimises support for business purpose
• integrated: creates, supports and optimises synergy across all systems

Effectiveness occurs when everything supports everything else, all the way up to the enterprise vision or purpose.

The Enterprise Canvas does not attempt to describe every aspect of every service. Its role is to provide a consistent base-frame to link descriptions together into a unified whole. It would generally be used in conjunction with many other model-types, for example:

• use VPEC-T to model each of the flows to and from the entity in focus
• use modified-Zachman to model the assets, functions, locations, capabilities, events and decisions in each flow, in each cell and in the entity as a whole
• use SWOT to assess strengths, challenges, opportunities and risks in each flow, cell and entity

The Enterprise Canvas will also work well with other techniques for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and any other cross-enterprise concerns such as quality, security, safety and environment.

There’s a lot more to it than just the above, of course, but I hope this ‘really simple summary’ will give you enough to get started?

More catchup on the backlog: another slightly-backdated list of Tweets and links. Usual categories, probably.

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