The importance of ‘also’

Link: http://weblog.tetradian.com/2013/12/16/the-importance-of-also/

From Tom Graves / Tetradian

“Every business is an information business.”

That was the first line of an infographic I saw this morning.

And yep, no doubt about it: every business is indeed an information business.

But there’s a rather important word that’s missing there: also.

Fact is that every business is just a business. Nothing else.

Every business is also an ‘information business’, in that it garners and works with and acts on information.

Every business is also a people business, in that the business itself is (to use Bob Marshall’s words) all about “attending to folk’s needs”.

Every business is also a relationship business, in that it ultimately depends on garnering and working with and acting on the relationships with all of those people.

Every business is also a marketing business, in that it ‘sells’ its idea, its purpose, its reason-to-be, through all of those relationships.

Every business is also an asset-management business, in that it must garner and work with and act on all manner of assets.

Every business is also an event-driven business, in that it responds to a variety of trigger-events.

Every business is also a purpose-driven business, in that it uses (variously-layered) notions of purpose to guide its decision-making about those events.

Every business is also a…

Yeah, you get the picture: we could go on indefinitely, couldn’t we?

Yet the core of it all is that every business is just a business is just a business – nothing else. ‘The business’ as a unified whole. Everything else – every prepended attribute such as ‘information’ or ‘marketing’ or ‘people’ or ‘asset’ or whatever – is merely one amongst an almost infinite variety of ‘also‘.

Without the ‘also’, there tends to be an implicit ‘only’: “is an information business” reinterpreted as “is only an information business”. The moment someone forgets the ‘also’, we’re straight into some form of ‘-centrism’. (As happened in that original infographic mentioned above, in fact: it started with “Every business is an information business”, and two lines later we were straight into full-on IT-centrism. Sigh…)

From an architectural viewpoint, reality is this:

  • things work better when they work together, on purpose
  • everything depends on everything else
  • nothing is inherently ‘more important’ than anything else
  • everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time

The moment we get any of that that wrong, we’d no longer be doing architecture – we’d be doing ‘solutioneering’. Which is not a good idea…

The architecture is in the connections and interdependencies between everything and everything else, on purpose.

Or, in short, the architecture is in the ‘also’.