Search Results for: abstraction

An Overview of the Levels of Abstraction in Enterprise Architecture

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Organizations today are faced with an ever-increasing speed of change. To enable faster transformation, they implement agile methods, which impact the whole enterprise. Obviously, change need to be communicated, but one cannot document all the details …

Architecture Views & Layers of Abstraction and Details: How much is too much?

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by Francis Uy, TOGAF 9, PMP


As an Enterprise architect, I find myself doing presentations to various levels of the company I am working with.  These presentations aim to recommend actions in order to support the company’s goals.  

My job is to make sure that decision makers are empowered with the right information to make the best choice at any given time. The most effective way for this information to elicit a speedy but quality-based decision is to recommend with the perspective of the person making the decision.  

In the book “3 Laws of Performance” by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan they state that how people perform correlates to how the situation occurs to them.  This is very true also in how people make choices.  If you can understand how a particular situation occurs to your stakeholder and present information from that point of view, you are likely to get a better response from them.

For example, let’s say I am talking to a project management office (PMO) head.  It will be an easy conversation if I fully understand what his needs and concerns are. From a PMO’s point of view – his metrics are successful delivery of all the projects in his scope.  His concerns are that he has just in time visibility of project issues and risks so that he can support his project managers as soon as possible.  He would also want a tracking of the benefits each of the projects are promising and a visibility on when these will be met.

At his level, the layer of abstraction he needs will be primarily focused on the project views, the program views, or even perhaps the portfolio views. He would not need to see further details as what a project manager would see such as the work breakdown structure — unless one item there is now causing the delay of the benefit being delivered by a project.

Example below shows 2 levels of abstraction for the same set of projects.  The image on the left is a set of projects with their detailed steps.  The image on the right focuses on a summary of the total project health (status, costs, resources, etc)


On the other end of the spectrum, talking to a chief executive officer (CEO) of the company and understanding his concerns vis-a-vis the projects of the company will also ensure being able to successfully support him.  While, similar to the PMO, he does care about the benefits of all the projects in the company, he realistically only has bandwidth for the top 10-30% of them.  Hence ensuring that a filter is provided focusing on that will support his decision making.  Unlike the PMO though, his concerns are looking broader across the whole organization and even extends outside – specially if the company is listed on the stock market.  A key concern for the CEO is change management.  And inside change management a question of – will the projects or initiatives drive the right behavior we need in order to be a more competitive company. He will need views that show a holistic landscape of how all the projects are impacting various parts of his company.  Are we doing too many changes in one particular capability thereby decreasing the returns potential of a particular project?  Are we doing enough on the other important parts of the business?

Clearly, showing the CEO views beyond the whole company perspective — things like detailed design strategies or software details that software engineers and process owners use is definitely too much details.

The example below shows a view that the CEO would care about.  It is the business capability model for his company which shows the key capabilities (parents of business processes) needed to ensure business operations excellence.  Comparing this to the earlier views, a useful perspective is to see how many projects are in flight to improve the cost, risks, or business value of below capabilities. (see numbers overlaid on the capability)


Conclusion:

To be an effective architect, you need to know the key concerns of various levels and functions of the organization.  Presenting your data from their perspective will allow for an easier connection, collaboration, and decision making.

My challenge:  Next time you need to present or influence a key stakeholder stop first and think from their perspective and understand how is the issue or the situation occurring to them.



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Layers of Abstraction

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When talking about abstractions to IT architects I am naturally always reminded on the inner-platform-effect that is defined as:’ The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customisable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using.“ So layers will … Continue reading Layers of Abstraction →

Enterprise Architecture and abstraction layers

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I recently read John Gotze’s thoughts on the updated national enterprise architecture framework and its underlying meta-model published by the Danish Government Agency for Digitisation. The framework is named ‘OIO EA’ and has evolved over a number of years into the official national government architecture approach. In his critique, John highlights that the updated meta-model …read more

The perfect abstractions or just Lost In Translation?

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All people have their own “filters” that they apply unconciously in interactions with other people. This means that two people sharing the same experience can have different opinions on what actually happened. In order to better understand each other we need to realize these differences in perception. As architects we also apply filters to our surrounding […]