Richard Veryard

Autumn Events 2015

by

Open Group Conference – Architecting the Boundaryless Organization

This conference ran from 19th to 22nd of October in Edinburgh.  My talk was on Boundaryless Customer Engagement, and took place on the Monday afternoon. The material was developed in collaboration with my colleague Andrew Forsyth.

The business value of customer analytics and big data is not just about what you can discover or infer about the customer, but how you can use this insight promptly and effectively across multiple touchpoints (including e-Commerce systems and CRM) to create a powerful and truly personalized customer experience.

For most organizations, mobilizing this kind of intelligence raises organizational challenges as well as technical ones. I talked about how some leading companies are starting to address these challenges, and described the vital role of enterprise architecture in supporting such initiatives.

Key takeaways:

  • A reference model for omnichannel consumer analytics and engagement.
  • An architectural approach for closed-loop integration across multiple customer touchpoints and diverse data platforms.
  • A template business case for building and extending your business and technical capabilities for customer engagement. 

    Unicom Data Analytics Forum – Exploring the Business Value of Predictive and Real-Time Analytics

    Was held at the Kensington Hilton in West London on 2nd December.

    My talk was on Real-Time Personalization – Exploring the Customer Genome. Retail and consumer organizations have started to develop more personalized interaction with customers, based on rapid analysis of a broad range of customer attributes and propensities, known metaphorically as “genes”. These may be used to target campaigns more accurately, or to generate the next best action in real-time for a specific customer.

    For more details and registration, please visit the Unicom website.

    Here are the two presentations. There are significant overlaps between the two.

    Scotch Eggs and Feedback

    by

    A primary school in Essex has banned various “unhealthy” snacks from pupils’ lunchboxes. Teachers inspect pupils’ lunchboxes and confiscate banned items.The right-wing press is particularly aggrieved about the banning and confiscation of scotch eggs, w…

    Scotch Eggs and Feedback

    by

    A primary school in Essex has banned various “unhealthy” snacks from pupils’ lunchboxes. Teachers inspect pupils’ lunchboxes and confiscate banned items.The right-wing press is particularly aggrieved about the banning and confiscation of scotch eggs, w…

    Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

    by

    #orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.

    Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial (“misplaced confidence”, “kidded themselves”), believing that “organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership”. Following the election, “a danger now is oversteering the other way”.

    Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).

    Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in ‘blue collar conservatism’. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts “is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments”. Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne’s plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative’s relationship with the working classes.

    What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

    Steve Richards goes further …

    “During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. … In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery.”

    … and insists that “the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate”.

    One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.

    Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour’s inner circle.

    “Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. … [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control.”

    But that’s not enough.

    “The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”

    Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated ‘spads’, and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as “leader”. Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

    Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.

    Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government’s role in the 2008 economic crisis.

    “The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers.”

    Sources:

    Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)

    Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)

    Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)

    Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)

    Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)

    Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)

    Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)

    Related Posts:

    Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
    Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012)
    Dark Politics (May 2015)

    Updated 6 June 2015

    Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

    by

    #orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.

    Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial (“misplaced confidence”, “kidded themselves”), believing that “organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership”. Following the election, “a danger now is oversteering the other way”.

    Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).

    Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in ‘blue collar conservatism’. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts “is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments”. Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne’s plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative’s relationship with the working classes.

    What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

    Steve Richards goes further …

    “During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. … In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery.”

    … and insists that “the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate”.

    One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.

    Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour’s inner circle.

    “Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. … [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control.”

    But that’s not enough.

    “The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”

    Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated ‘spads’, and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as “leader”. Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

    Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.

    Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government’s role in the 2008 economic crisis.

    “The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers.”

    Sources:

    Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)

    Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)

    Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)

    Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)

    Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)

    Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)

    Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)

    Related Posts:

    Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
    Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012)
    Dark Politics (May 2015)

    Updated 6 June 2015

    BankSpeak

    by

    #WorldBank #DataModel I recently went through a data modelling exercise, underlining and classifying the nouns in a set of functional design documents for a large client project. So I was interested to read an article based on an analysis of World Bank reports over the last fifty years, based on a similar technique. Some of the authors’ key findings resonated with me, because I have seen similar trends in the domain of enterprise architecture.

    The article looks at the changes in language and style during the history of the World Bank. For the first couple of decades, its reports were factual and concrete, and the nouns were specific – investments created assets and produced measurable outcomes, grounded in space and time. The dominant note is of factual precision – demarcating past accomplishments, current actions, necessary policies and future projects – with a clear sense of cause and effect.

    “A clear link is established between empirical knowledge, money flows and industrial constructions: knowledge is associated with physical presence in situ, and with calculations conducted in the Bank’s headquarters; money flows involve the negotiation of loans and investments with individual states; and the construction of ports, energy plants, etc., is the result of the whole process. In this eminently temporal sequence, a strong sense of causality links expertise, loans, investments, and material realizations.”

    In recent decades, the Bank’s language has changed, becoming more abstract, more distant from concrete social life. The focus has shifted from physical assets (hydroelectric dams) to financial ones (loans guarantees), and from projects to ‘strategies’. Both objectives (such as ‘poverty reduction’) and solutions (such as ‘education’, ‘structural adjustment’) are disengaged from any specificity: they are the same for everybody, everywhere. The authors refer to this as a ‘bureaucratization’ of the Bank’s discourse.

    “This recurrent transmutation of social forces into abstractions turns the World Bank Reports into strangely metaphysical documents, whose protagonists are often not economic agents, but principles—and principles of so universal a nature, it’s impossible to oppose them. Levelling the playing field on global issues: no one will ever object to these words (although, of course, no one will ever be able to say what they really mean, either). They are so general, these ideas, they’re usually in the singular: development, governance, management, cooperation. … There is only one way to do things: one development path; one type of management; one form of cooperation.”

    I have seen architectural documents that could be described in similar terms – full of high-level generalizations and supposedly universal principles, which provide little real sense of the underlying business and its requirements. Of course, there is sometimes a need for models that abstract away from the specifics of space and time: for example, a global organization may wish to establish a global set of capabilities and common services, which will support local variations in market conditions and business practices. But architects are not always immune to the lure of abstract bureaucracy.

    In Bankspeak, causality and factuality is replaced by an accumulation of what the authors (citing Boltanski and Chiapello) call management discourse. For example, the term ‘poverty’ is linked to terms you might expect: ‘population’, ’employment’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘resources’. However the term ‘poverty reduction’ is linked with a flood of management terms: ‘strategies’, ‘programmes’, ‘policies’, ‘focus’, ‘key’, ‘management’, ‘report’, ‘goals’, ‘approach’, ‘projects’, ‘frameworks’, ‘priorities’, ‘papers’.

    We could doubtless find a similar flood of management terms in certain enterprise architecture writings. However, while these management terms do have a proper role in architectural discourse, we must be careful not to let them take precedence over the things that really matter. We need to pay attention to business goals, and not just to the concept of “business goal”.

    Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre, BankSpeak – The Language of World Bank Reports (New Left Review 92, March-April 2015)

    Related post: Deconstructing the Grammar of Business (June 2009)

    BankSpeak

    by

    #WorldBank #DataModel I recently went through a data modelling exercise, underlining and classifying the nouns in a set of functional design documents for a large client project. So I was interested to read an article based on an analysis of World Bank reports over the last fifty years, based on a similar technique. Some of the authors’ key findings resonated with me, because I have seen similar trends in the domain of enterprise architecture.

    The article looks at the changes in language and style during the history of the World Bank. For the first couple of decades, its reports were factual and concrete, and the nouns were specific – investments created assets and produced measurable outcomes, grounded in space and time. The dominant note is of factual precision – demarcating past accomplishments, current actions, necessary policies and future projects – with a clear sense of cause and effect.

    “A clear link is established between empirical knowledge, money flows and industrial constructions: knowledge is associated with physical presence in situ, and with calculations conducted in the Bank’s headquarters; money flows involve the negotiation of loans and investments with individual states; and the construction of ports, energy plants, etc., is the result of the whole process. In this eminently temporal sequence, a strong sense of causality links expertise, loans, investments, and material realizations.”

    In recent decades, the Bank’s language has changed, becoming more abstract, more distant from concrete social life. The focus has shifted from physical assets (hydroelectric dams) to financial ones (loans guarantees), and from projects to ‘strategies’. Both objectives (such as ‘poverty reduction’) and solutions (such as ‘education’, ‘structural adjustment’) are disengaged from any specificity: they are the same for everybody, everywhere. The authors refer to this as a ‘bureaucratization’ of the Bank’s discourse.

    “This recurrent transmutation of social forces into abstractions turns the World Bank Reports into strangely metaphysical documents, whose protagonists are often not economic agents, but principles—and principles of so universal a nature, it’s impossible to oppose them. Levelling the playing field on global issues: no one will ever object to these words (although, of course, no one will ever be able to say what they really mean, either). They are so general, these ideas, they’re usually in the singular: development, governance, management, cooperation. … There is only one way to do things: one development path; one type of management; one form of cooperation.”

    I have seen architectural documents that could be described in similar terms – full of high-level generalizations and supposedly universal principles, which provide little real sense of the underlying business and its requirements. Of course, there is sometimes a need for models that abstract away from the specifics of space and time: for example, a global organization may wish to establish a global set of capabilities and common services, which will support local variations in market conditions and business practices. But architects are not always immune to the lure of abstract bureaucracy.

    In Bankspeak, causality and factuality is replaced by an accumulation of what the authors (citing Boltanski and Chiapello) call management discourse. For example, the term ‘poverty’ is linked to terms you might expect: ‘population’, ’employment’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘resources’. However the term ‘poverty reduction’ is linked with a flood of management terms: ‘strategies’, ‘programmes’, ‘policies’, ‘focus’, ‘key’, ‘management’, ‘report’, ‘goals’, ‘approach’, ‘projects’, ‘frameworks’, ‘priorities’, ‘papers’.

    We could doubtless find a similar flood of management terms in certain enterprise architecture writings. However, while these management terms do have a proper role in architectural discourse, we must be careful not to let them take precedence over the things that really matter. We need to pay attention to business goals, and not just to the concept of “business goal”.

    Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre, BankSpeak – The Language of World Bank Reports (New Left Review 92, March-April 2015)

    Related post: Deconstructing the Grammar of Business (June 2009)

    Agile and Wilful Blindness

    by

    @ruthmalan challenges @swardley on #Agile

    Asked what is agile? It’s a method of reducing the cost of change when developing an uncertain act.
    — swardley (@swardley) April 21, 2015

    @swardley have you seen John Seddon’s quip: “Waterfall: doing the wrong thing righter. Agile: doing the wrong thing faster.”?
    — ruth malan (@ruthmalan) April 21, 2015

    @swardley in theory 🙂 What we’re paying attention to shapes what we perceive and pay attention to. etc.
    — ruth malan (@ruthmalan) April 21, 2015

    @swardley I was making a sophisticated/nuanced point. We canalize — we think we’re open to finding misdirection but it’s hard
    — ruth malan (@ruthmalan) April 21, 2015

    Some things are easier to change than others. The architect Frank Duffy proposed a theory of Shearing Layers, which was further developed and popularized by Stuart Brand. In this theory, the site and structure of a building are the most difficult to change, while skin and services are easier.

    Let’s suppose Agile developers know how to optimize some of the aspects of a system, perhaps including skin and services. So it doesn’t matter if they get the skin and services wrong, because these can be changed later. This is the basic for @swardley’s point that you don’t need to know beforehand exactly what you are building.

    But if they get the fundamentals wrong, such as site and structure, these are more difficult to change later. This is the basis for John Seddon’s point that Agile may simply build the wrong things faster.

    And this is where @ruthmalan takes the argument to the next level. Because Agile developers are paying attention to the things they know how to change (skin, services), they may fail to pay attention to the things they don’t know how to change (site, structure). So they can throw themselves into refining and improving a system until it looks satisfactory (in their eyes), without ever seeing that it’s the wrong system in the wrong place.

    One important function of architecture is to pay attention to the things that other people (such as developers) may miss – perhaps as a result of different scope or perspective or time horizon. In particular, architecture needs to pay attention to the things that are going to be most difficult or expensive to change, or that may affect the lifetime cost of some system. In other words, strategic risk. See my earlier post A Cautionary Tale (October 2012).

    Wikipedia: Shearing Layers

    Agile and Wilful Blindness

    by

    @ruthmalan challenges @swardley on #Agile

    Asked what is agile? It’s a method of reducing the cost of change when developing an uncertain act.
    — swardley (@swardley) April 21, 2015

    @swardley have you seen John Seddon’s quip: “Waterfall: doing the wrong thing righter. Agile: doing the wrong thing faster.”?
    — ruth malan (@ruthmalan) April 21, 2015

    @swardley in theory 🙂 What we’re paying attention to shapes what we perceive and pay attention to. etc.
    — ruth malan (@ruthmalan) April 21, 2015

    @swardley I was making a sophisticated/nuanced point. We canalize — we think we’re open to finding misdirection but it’s hard
    — ruth malan (@ruthmalan) April 21, 2015

    Some things are easier to change than others. The architect Frank Duffy proposed a theory of Shearing Layers, which was further developed and popularized by Stuart Brand. In this theory, the site and structure of a building are the most difficult to change, while skin and services are easier.

    Let’s suppose Agile developers know how to optimize some of the aspects of a system, perhaps including skin and services. So it doesn’t matter if they get the skin and services wrong, because these can be changed later. This is the basic for @swardley’s point that you don’t need to know beforehand exactly what you are building.

    But if they get the fundamentals wrong, such as site and structure, these are more difficult to change later. This is the basis for John Seddon’s point that Agile may simply build the wrong things faster.

    And this is where @ruthmalan takes the argument to the next level. Because Agile developers are paying attention to the things they know how to change (skin, services), they may fail to pay attention to the things they don’t know how to change (site, structure). So they can throw themselves into refining and improving a system until it looks satisfactory (in their eyes), without ever seeing that it’s the wrong system in the wrong place.

    One important function of architecture is to pay attention to the things that other people (such as developers) may miss – perhaps as a result of different scope or perspective or time horizon. In particular, architecture needs to pay attention to the things that are going to be most difficult or expensive to change, or that may affect the lifetime cost of some system. In other words, strategic risk. See my earlier post A Cautionary Tale (October 2012).

    Wikipedia: Shearing Layers

    Arguing with Drucker

    by

    @sheldrake via @cybersal challenges Peter Drucker on the purpose of business.”Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriat…

    Arguing with Drucker

    by

    @sheldrake via @cybersal challenges Peter Drucker on the purpose of business.”Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriat…

    From Coincidensity to Consilience

    by

    In my post From Convenience to Consilience – “Technology Alone Is Not Enough”  (October 2011), I praised Steve Jobs for his role in the design of the Pixar campus, whose physical layout was intended to bring different specialists together in serendipitous interactions.

    Thanks to @jhagel and @CoCreatr, I have just read a blogpost by @StoweBoyd commenting on a related project at Google to build a new Googleplex. Because this is Google, this is a bottom-up data-driven project: it is based on a predicted metric of coincidensity, which is sometimes defined as the likelihood of serendipity.

    With the right technology (for example, electronic monitoring of the corridors and/or tagging of employees), a corporation like Google can easily monitor and control “casual collisions of the work force”.

    But as Ilkka Kakko (@Serendipitor) points out, such measures of coincidensity cannot be equated with true serendipity. I wonder whether Google will be able to correlate casual meetings with enhanced knowledge and understanding, and measure the consequent quantity and quality of innovation? And then reconfigure the campus to improve the results? Hm.

    However, the principle of designing physical spaces for human activity rather than for visual elegance is a good one, as is the notion of evidence-based design. Form following function.

    Stowe Boyd, Building From The Inside Out (February 2013)

    Paul Goldberger, Exclusive Preview: Google’s New Built-from-Scratch Googleplex (Vanity Fair, February 2013)

    Ilkka Kakko, Are we reducing the magic of serendipity to the logic of coincidence? (April 2013)