Month: May 2012

Conceptual Architecture: How

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How: Some Comments on Creating and Evolving the Conceptual Architecture
During early system conceptualization, we start to envision the form or shape of the system, its boundaries and interactions, its primary elements and their interactions. The sketchy shapes of these elements, expressed mainly in terms of their responsibilities, analogies, and drawing on patterns and experience, take […]

Organizational Intelligence in the Roman Catholic Church II

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In my piece on Organizational Intelligence in the Roman Catholic Church (April 2010), I discussed the crisis the Church is currently facing in relation to its handling of child
abuse cases, and explored some of the implications of this crisis for organizational intelligence within the Catholic hierarchy.

In his piece on Crisis in the Catholic Church (May 2012), Professor Tony Coady, himself a Catholic, argues that the handling of child abuse cases is only one of several major issues currently facing the Church hierarchy. Coady produces statistics indicating that the Vatican is increasingly out of step with the beliefs of lay catholics around the world, on a range of issues from the biological (artificial contraception, abortion and stem cell research) to the social (married priests, female clergy and gay relationships). The Vatican’s response is to become increasingly strident and doctrinaire, and to discipline any clergy who step out of line.

But this discipline contrasts uncomfortably with the gross lack of discipline in child abuse cases, and leads many catholics to worry whether the Vatican has its priorities right.

The Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay wrote admiringly of the Church of Rome and the
Papacy commending their ancient lineage and current vitality. Professor Coady thinks Macauley’s assessment now seems unduly optimistic.

“Scandals about
clerical sexual abuse of children and the associated official evasion of
responsibility as well as inflexible attitudes to so many of the values
and dilemmas of the contemporary world have combined to undermine to a
large extent the confident self-image and apparent cohesion that helped
sustain the durability and vigour that enchanted Macaulay. … The Catholic Church may well prove as vigorous and durable as Macaulay
anticipated, but that is likely only if the edifice is subject to
extensive repair.”

Coady sees a growing clash between authority and sincerity, which makes this repair seem increasingly difficult.

“There are more and more voices within the Church urging the revisiting
of the total ban on abortion but they are not being listened to by the
authorities. In this they face the same wall of disapproval and
potential sanction that confronts many other serious dissenting voices
on other rigorist bans, such as those on contraception, divorce,
clerical marriage, homosexuality, women priests, and most matters
involving human sexuality. The fact is that the Catholic Church’s
authorities do not want their arguments and rulings on these issues
contested because they have been backed into a corner.”

It is difficult to see how organizational intelligence can be maintained in this climate. But doubtless the Church has survived crises like this before, and may survive this crisis as well.

Declaration of interest: I am not a Catholic. My analysis is based largely on pro-Catholic sources, and I presume these are people who want the Church to survive and thrive.

Tony Coady, Crisis in the Catholic Church (Practical Ethics, May 2012)

#orgintelligence @ethicsinthenews

Architecture and a Boy Named Sue

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My Daddy left home when I was three,
He didn’t leave much, my ma and me,
This old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.

Now I don’t blame him ’cause he run and hid,
But the meanest thing that he ever did,
is before he left,
he went and named me Sue.
…

Architecture and a Boy Named Sue

by

My Daddy left home when I was three,
He didn’t leave much, my ma and me,
This old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.

Now I don’t blame him ’cause he run and hid,
But the meanest thing that he ever did,
is before he left,
he went and named me Sue.
…

4 Easy Ways to Kill Innovation

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How should we innovate? Business and technology leaders ask me this question a lot these days. I often respond with another question. Why do you want to innovate? Nothing kills innovation faster than a lack of focus. A financial services CTO established a technology innovation team to explore.  “Explore what?” I asked.  “Emerging technologies that might help us” was his answer.  Not convinced enough focus was there, we refined the scope of his efforts using […]

If you liked this, you might also like:

  1. Demystifying Business Innovation
  2. Business Innovation or IT Innovation?
  3. Medical Technology Innovation

The Next Big Leap: Everything is a Business Service

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Since the 1970s, authors like Alvin Toffler[1], Daniel Bell[2] and John Naisbitt[3] have predicted the post-industrial society. They forecast the end of the industrial era and the dominance of services and information. This is not a new message[6]; the entire service provider industry has reformed around this idea, and in the USA today non-manufacturing industries account for almost 90 percent of the economy. Virtually every product today has a service component to it and many products have been transformed into services.

One of the most interesting examples of this is the Amazon Kindle service which provides an integrated front end to a wide range of Amazon services. The Kindle service optimizes purchases of books plus access to library and new services and automatically synchronizes all the devices the user may use to access the services including the Kindle reader, smart phone and browser.

Amazon was a pioneer in use of Web services. They are well known for their internal policy of mandating that all Amazon systems functionality should be created as externalized services – that is ready for use directly by customers, and this has clearly been at the heart of their considerable success.

However few large enterprises are able to operate in such an agile manner. Amazon was built from the ground up to be an IT enabled business. In larger enterprises generally there is weaker connection between business and IT, plus the challenges of legacy application and infrastructure base and typically immature (application) service portfolios. And we can all observe the archetypical enterprise is becoming even more complex with pressing demands to respond to major market trends including mobile device based processes, analytics and real time business intelligence driven process behaviour. In this frenetic environment, how can we avoid purely tactical responses which simply generate more complexity and legacy?

CBDI suggested the answer to this problem over ten years ago. The basic service model provides an efficient and effective architecture that enables reusable capabilities that limit complexity and enable continuous change through separation of concerns. However to be truly effective the service model needs to be integrated into the entire business ecosystem where EVERYTHING IS A BUSINESS SERVICE where, like Amazon, all business capabilities are published as integral components of product and service delivery. To achieve this, the service model must be expanded way beyond the prevailing technology centric SOA approach and become an holistic business service centric model subsuming PEOPLE, PROCESS AND TECHNOLOGY.

Of course there will be decoupling between business services and software services; it will be vital that business services are formed from reusable, common software services that can be rapidly assembled into new business processes to allow rapid response to changing business needs.

Of course this all sounds very fine, but most readers will ask the key question “how do we manage the transformation to a service based enterprise?”  There are so many cultural, political, budgetary and legacy challenges that will stop such an endeavour in its tracks. Most business managers have already dismissed SOA as a technical exercise and remain focused on delivery of urgent business programs. Frankly this is THE CHALLENGE. We all read fine statements from F500 CIOs and CEOs who boast about their transformations, but in practice business as usual perpetuates conventional separation of business and IT.  We have to communicate this from the rooftops!

Some ten years ago CBDI defined a maturity model and roadmap approach that showed how SOA capability maturity moves through the stages of Early Learning, Applied, Integration, Enterprise and Ecosystem. Since then this methodology has been used by many large corporations worldwide, including notably Intel Corp[4]. In the Ecosystem maturity stage the service portfolio is integrated with business concepts and federated both internally and externally. However few enterprises have achieved this level of maturity. Amazon is a rare exception.

Many enterprises are embracing Cloud computing recognizing this architecture can introduce a critical level of virtualization and agility. In recent months there has been much interest in moving Cloud to the next level referred to as Everything as a Service (EaaS or XaaS).  HP, just one of the service providers making moves in this space defines this as “Through the cloud, everything will be delivered as a service, from computing power to business processes to personal interactions[5].” This is a very significant advance, however we need to emphasize that Cloud EaaS is a technology centric model, and there’s considerable effort required to integrate with the broader business and IT to avoid yet more legacy.

 

A first step in making this level of transformation is to establish a reference architecture that is entirely service based, spanning business and IT. Frankly existing reference architecture efforts such as TOGAF, OASIS, Zachman etc are not helpful in this area. Rather the service reference architecture needs to provide a mapping to a multiplicity of (stakeholder) views identifying key elements of pattern, standard and policy to ensure appropriate levels of consistency and governance.
Each of the views should also be documented in reference architecture, enterprise architecture, solution architecture and analytics levels of abstraction. You may be wondering why analytics? This represents a further level of cross cutting solution abstraction.
As discussed the reference and enterprise architecture views should be developed to achieve the minimum necessary level of consistency relevant to the business strategy context. 

Everything is a Business Service is the next big leap. Enterprises who have established effective SOA environments will be well positioned to make this move, but recognize it’s going to be yet more steps along a much longer journey than we CBDI articulated in our research 15 years ago.

  [1] Future Shock

  [2] The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

  [3] Megatrends

  [4] Service Oriented Architecture Demystified, Intel Press 2007

  [5] http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/initiatives/eaas/index.html