Richard Veryard

We Ought to Know the Difference

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Is systems thinking really possible? Here’s one reason why it might not be.

One of the concerns of systems thinking is the need to avoid the so-called environmental fallacy – the blunder of ignoring or not understanding the effects of the environment of a system. This is why, when systems thinkers are asked to tackle a concrete situation in detail, they often hesitate, insisting that it is wrong to look at the detail before understanding the context.

The trouble with this is that there is always a larger context, so this hesitation leads to an infinite regress and inability to formulate practical inroads into a complex situation. Many years ago, I read a brilliant essay by J.P. Eberhard called “We Ought to Know the Difference”, which contains a widely quoted example of a doorknob. As I recall, Eberhard’s central question is a practical one – how do we know when to expand the scope of the problem, and how do we know when to stop.

C West Churchman went more deeply into this question. In his book The Systems Approach and its Enemies (1979), he presents an ironic picture of the systems thinker as hero.

If the intellect is to engage in the heroic adventure of securing improvement in the human condition, it cannot rely on “approaches,” like politics and morality, which attempt to tackle problems head-on, within the narrow scope. Attempts to address problems in such a manner simply lead to other problems, to an amplification of difficulty away from real improvement. Thus the key to success in the hero’s attempt seems to be comprehensiveness. Never allow the temptation to be clear, or to use reliable data, or to “come up to the standards of excellence,” divert you from the relevant, even though the relevant may be elusive, weakly supported by data, and requiring loose methods.

Like Eberhard, Churchman seeks to reconcile the heroic stance of the systems thinker with the practical stance of other approaches. But we ought to know the difference.

This is an extract from my eBook on Next Practice Enterprise Architecture. Draft available from LeanPub.

John P. Eberhard, “We Ought to Know the Difference,” Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning, Gary T. Moore, ed. (MIT Press, 1970) pp 364-365

See extract here – The Warning of the Doorknob. The same extract can be found in many places, including Ed Yourdon’s Modern Structured Analysis (first published 1989).

See also

Nicholas Berente, C West Churchman: Champion of the Systems Approach

Jeff Lindsay, Avoiding environmental fallacy with systems thinking (December 2012)

Updated May 14 2013

Business Architecture and Related Domains

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The following post is an extract from my draft eBook Business Architecture Viewpoints, available from @LeanpubThere are some things I don’t regard as part of the Business Architecture but as part of some other domain. One reason for these exclusions is…

Categories Uncategorized

Design Choice and Iteration

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There are two misleading ideas (espoused theories) about how architects and designers make decisions.According to classical decision theory (Herbert Simon), one or more designers develops a series of alternative options, working collaboratively or in c…

Enterprise as a … System

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Notwithstanding the earnest way some people use the phrase “enterprise-as-a-system”, I don’t see any great significance in regarding an enterprise or organization as a system.

Indeed, given the very broad way people commonly use the word “system”, it is difficult to think of anyway to regard an enterprise other than as some kind of system. A machine or complicated technological assembly is a system; a human activity or social unit is a system; an abstract legal or procedural process is a system. All of the chapters in Gareth Morgan’s book Images of Organization represent organizations as different kinds of system. And even if we don’t regard an enterprise as quite the same as an organization, what could an enterprise possibly be, from anyone’s perspective, other than some kind of system?

And many popular architecture frameworks claim to regard an enterprise as a system. For example

  • TOGAF considers the enterprise as a system (TOGAF9, Chapter 2) 
  • Enterprise architecture structures the business planning into an integrated framework that regards the enterprise as a system or system of systems. (TOGAF9 Chapter 6)

Elsewhere in TOGAF however, as well as in ArchiMate, we can find reference to systems OR organizations, which suggests that they do not regard the enterprise as a system.

    Some people claim to regard the enterprise as a system, and then offer a layered schema with System Layer near the bottom. This represents a shift in the use of the word “system”.

    However, when people use the phrase “enterprise-as-a-system”, they may well have a particular kind of system in mind. Here are some examples.

    Enterprise as a sociotechnical system

      Enterprise as a socio-cultural—techno-economic system

      Enterprise as a human activity system

        Enterprise as a self-organizing system

          Enterprise as an open or closed system

          Clearly it is the adjective that helps to make this phrase meaningful.

          See also
           
          Alan Hakimi, Addressing the Multi-Dimensionality Challenge on Thinking of The Enterprise as a System (Feb 2013)

          Linked-In Discussion Enterprises *NOT AS* Systems (April 2013 onwards)

          Categories Uncategorized

          Multi-Sided Platform Strategies

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          A multi-sided platform business has the following characteristic features.

          1. The platform serves two or more distinct categories of customer. For example, a credit card platform serves both cardholders and merchants. For example, a heterosexual dating agency serves both men and women.

          2. The platform provides a mechanism for connecting customers from different categories. The credit card increases the potential interaction between cardholders and merchants, as well as processing the transactions. And the dating agency brings men and women together.

          3. The value of the platform to one category of customers depends on the quantity and quality of the other categories. For example, the value of a credit card to the cardholder depends on the number of merchants that accept the card. Meanwhile, the value of the card to the merchant depends on the number of cardholders.

          Under certain circumstances, it might be possible to build one side of the platform first. For example, if you had some brilliant idea for a entirely new kind of credit card, and had a lot of funding and a persuasive sales team, you might conceivably be able to recruit a large number of merchants into the scheme before you had any cardholders at all. Or imagine persuading a group of men to invest all their spare time for two years building a nightclub that would (when finished) attract the hottest women in the city. But this strategy requires a considerable degree of confidence and trust. So in practice it usually makes sense to build up both sides at the same time.

          There are various strategies that can be used to create a multi-sided platform. Sometimes it is possible to start small. When Frank McNamara created Diners Club in 1950, he started in a small geographical area (Manhatten), with 14 merchants and a few hundred cardholders. Within a year, he had 300 merchants and 40,000 cardholders.

          When American Express wished to enter the market in 1958, it needed to create something quickly that could compete with Diners Club. One way to do this was to acquire and consolidate some existing schemes. But the key element to the American Express’s success was a marquee strategy – recruiting the most desirable customers (e.g. business travellers on expense accounts) and the most desirable merchants (e.g. high status hotels, restaurants and stores).

          A marquee strategy depends on a degree of exclusivity, real or imagined. In a multi-sided market, you don’t gain directly from the number of people on your own side, since they may be competing with you for the attention of the people on the other side.

          American Express is now much larger than Diners Club. So much for first-mover advantage then. The most desirable customers are not necessarily the ones with the greatest willingness to experiment with a novel platform. Novel platforms tend to attract early adopters and low-value customers (AltaVista, MySpace, OnSale). Once the platform concept is understood, a new entrant may be more successful in recruiting the high-value and mainstream customers (Google, Facebook, eBay).

          Among users of Facebook and Twitter, a gulf is emerging between celebrities and other users. Facebook is currently experimenting with charging a fee for ordinary users to send messages to celebrities. According to the Independent, Facebook plans to keep this money itself. Presumably the only benefit to the celebrity is helping to filter incoming messages. And of course many celebrities are now dependent on Facebook and Twitter for maintaining their public profile, so they are not able to walk away.

          The growing distinction between different categories of user marks a transition from same-side network effects (which assume a single category of user) into a multi-sided platform. Linked-In is another platform that is making this transition. Linked-In gets much of its revenue from the recruitment business, so it is essentially a market-making platform. Whereas Facebook and Twitter remain largely audience-making platforms.

          (For the distinction between market-making and audience-making platforms, as well as a third category of demand-coordination platforms, see David S Evans.)

          I shall be talking at the IASA UK Architecture Summit on 26th April on Architecting the Multi-Sided Business. There is more extensive coverage in my Business Architecture Workshop. Please contact me if you have any practical challenges in this area.

          Pieter Ballon, Platform Types and Gatekeeper Roles: the Case of the Mobile Communications Industry (2009)

          Mark Bonchek and Sangeet Paul Choudary, Three Elements of a Successful Platform Strategy (HBR Blog Network Jan 2013)

          David S. Evans, Managing the Maze of Multisided Markets (Strategy+Business Fall 2003)

          David S. Evans, The Antitrust Economics of Multi-Sided Platform Markets (Yale Journal on Regulation, 2003)

          David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Failure to Launch: Critical Mass in Platform Businesses (Sept 2010)

          Thomas Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Strategies for Two-Sided Markets (HBR October 2006)

          James Legge, Facebook now charges you for messages sent to celebrities and people you aren’t friends with (Independent 7 April 2013)

          Lisa O’Carroll, Facebook starts charging users up to £11 to contact celebrities (Guardian 8 April 2013)

          Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne, A Digital Postal Platform: Definitions and a Roadmap (MIT Jan 2012)

          Richard Veryard, The Component-Based Business: Plug and Play (Springer 2001)

          Understanding LinkedIn Business Model (BMI Matters May 2012)

          From Enabling Prejudices to Sedimented Principles

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          In my post From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices(March 2013)  I distinguished the category of design heuristics from other kinds of principle. Following Peter Rowe, I call these Enabling Prejudices.

          Rowe also uses the concept of Sedimented Principles, which he attributes to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the key figures of phenomenology. As far as I can make out, Merleau-Ponty never used the exact term “sedimented principles”, but he does talk a great deal about “sedimentation”.

          In phenomenology, the word “sedimentation” generally refers to cultural habitations that settle out of awareness into prereflective practices. Something like the “unconscious”. (Professor James Morley, personal communication)

          “On the basis of past experience, I have learned that doorknobs are to be turned. This ‘knowledge’ has sedimentated into my habitual body. While learning to play the piano, or to dance, I am intensely focused on what I am doing, and subsequently, this ability to play or to dance sedimentates into an habitual disposition.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Merleau-Ponty)

          This relates to some notions of tacit knowledge, which is attributed to Michael Polyani. There are two models that are used in the knowledge management world that talk about tacit/explicit knowledge, and present two slightly different notions of internalization. 

          Some critics (notably Wilson) regard the SECI model as flawed, because Nonaka has confused Polyani’s notion of tacit knowledge with the much weaker concept of implicit knowledge. There are some deep notions of “unconscious” here, which may produce conceptual traps for the unwary.

          Conceptual quibbles aside, there are several important points here. Firstly, enabling prejudices may start as consciously learned patterns, but can gradually become internalized, and perhaps not just implicit and habitual but tacit and unconscious. (The key difference here is how easily the practitioner can explain and articulate the reasoning behind some design decision.)

          Secondly, to extent that these learned patterns are regarded as “best practices”, it may be necessary to bring them back into full consciousness (whatever that means) so they can be replaced by “next practices”. 

          Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think (1980, 4th edition 2005)

          Peter Rowe, Design Thinking (MIT Press 1987)

          Wilson, T.D. (2002) “The nonsense of ‘knowledge management‘” Information Research, 8(1), paper no. 144

           Thanks to my friend Professor James Morley for help with Merleau-Ponty and sedimentation.

          From Enabling Prejudices to Sedimented Principles

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          In my post From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices(March 2013)  I distinguished the category of design heuristics from other kinds of principle. Following Peter Rowe, I call these Enabling Prejudices.

          Rowe also uses the concept of Sedimented Principles, which he attributes to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the key figures of phenomenology. As far as I can make out, Merleau-Ponty never used the exact term “sedimented principles”, but he does talk a great deal about “sedimentation”.

          In phenomenology, the word “sedimentation” generally refers to cultural habitations that settle out of awareness into prereflective practices. Something like the “unconscious”. (Professor James Morley, personal communication)

          “On the basis of past experience, I have learned that doorknobs are to be turned. This ‘knowledge’ has sedimentated into my habitual body. While learning to play the piano, or to dance, I am intensely focused on what I am doing, and subsequently, this ability to play or to dance sedimentates into an habitual disposition.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Merleau-Ponty)

          This relates to some notions of tacit knowledge, which is attributed to Michael Polyani. There are two models that are used in the knowledge management world that talk about tacit/explicit knowledge, and present two slightly different notions of internalization. 

          Some critics (notably Wilson) regard the SECI model as flawed, because Nonaka has confused Polyani’s notion of tacit knowledge with the much weaker concept of implicit knowledge. There are some deep notions of “unconscious” here, which may produce conceptual traps for the unwary.

          Conceptual quibbles aside, there are several important points here. Firstly, enabling prejudices may start as consciously learned patterns, but can gradually become internalized, and perhaps not just implicit and habitual but tacit and unconscious. (The key difference here is how easily the practitioner can explain and articulate the reasoning behind some design decision.)

          Secondly, to extent that these learned patterns are regarded as “best practices”, it may be necessary to bring them back into full consciousness (whatever that means) so they can be replaced by “next practices”. 

          Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think (1980, 4th edition 2005)

          Peter Rowe, Design Thinking (MIT Press 1987)

          Wilson, T.D. (2002) “The nonsense of ‘knowledge management‘” Information Research, 8(1), paper no. 144

           Thanks to my friend Professor James Morley for help with Merleau-Ponty and sedimentation.

          From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices

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          I have often asserted (on this blog and elsewhere) that principles are over-rated as a driver for intelligent action. However, that doesn’t mean principles are completely worthless. In this post, I wish to explore some of the ways in which principles may have some limited use within enterprise architecture.

          I am going to identify four rough categories of principle. There may be other categories, and the categories may overlap.

          1. Universal Truths
          2. Governance
          3. Style Preferences
          4. Enabling Prejudices

          This is a long post, and I think the final category is the most interesting one, so if you are short of time, please read that one first.

          Read more »

          Danish metamodels

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          My Danish friends @gotze and @aojensen comment on the latest release of OIO EA, which is a national enterprise architecture framework and meta-model published by the Danish Government Agency for Digitization.

          Both John and Anders feel that certain key artefacts have been placed at the wrong layer of abstraction. John writes

          “In my view, Business Rules should not be located at the strategic level at all. I would argue that Business Rules primarily “belongs” to the Business sub-architecture domain.”

          What is the basis for this argument? Anders points out a consequence

          “business rules are located in the government strategy layer and thus tightly coupled to the long term vision of the government agency”

          “Business rules are operationalisations of the long term strategy and strategic intent.
          Whilst the vision, mission, and purpose of the enterprise do not change very often (i.e. provide the best available services our citizens), the business rules and processes involved in realising this will definitely change.”

          and therefore

          “Business rules belong in the business architecture.”

          Thus Anders is basing his argument on a statement about the frequency of certain classes of change.

          This statement appears to be empirically testable, although I know from my own experience that it is a lot difficult than one might think to gather data to test this kind of statement.

          Part of the problem of measuring rates of change is that we don’t have a particularly robust theory of change in the first place. Let’s look at an example. From time to time, perhaps every year, Steve Ballmer restates the vision of Microsoft. Obviously he doesn’t use exactly the same words every year. And of course Microsoft-watchers will seek to interpret even the slightest change of wording or emphasis as a sign of a strategic change in direction. So even if Ballmer himself insists that the vision hasn’t changed, we might not believe him. Looking back in time, we might find that major changes in direction had already been hinted at in previous years. So at what point does an apparently minor change in wording become a substantially new vision?

          Conversely, when a company has been exposed as unethical, the CEO will go public with an apology and an assertion of a new ethical vision. (Recent example: Barclays Bank.) We might not believe him either.

          In both cases, we will probably judge whether there is a new vision or not by observing whether the company behaviour and rules changes or not. (And this is not just external observers – Microsoft and Barclays employees and managers are also making these judgements.) So the rate of change of vision might be epistemologically indistinguishable from the rate of change of behaviour.

          However, despite the difficulties in conceptualizing and measuring change, I think it does make sense to derive architectural layers from the idea that certain things have a characteristic rate of change, and that things with a different rate of change should be in different layers. This means that there is at least a possibility of subjecting an architecture to empirical evaluation. I have published this idea in articles for the CBDI Forum, and suggested that architectural theory needs to be based on the Pace Layering principle

          In contrast, Anders’ appeal to the IAF seems to be purely an argument from authority. The IAF establishes some “fundamental” categories, and so any framework that deviates from these categories must be wrong. I think this line of argumentation is weaker. Even though you may assert some attractive consequences of following IAF, I cannot see any reason for believing that these consequences follow only from IAF and not from any rival framework.

          Frameworks and categories may be embedded in metamodels. But how do we know what is the basis for choosing between alternative metamodels?

          John Gøtze, Metamodels (January 2013)
          Anders Ø. Jensen, Enterprise Architecture and abstraction layers (February 2013)

          Ethics, Barclays and totalitarianism (Catholic Commentary January 2013)
          Barclays boss tells staff ‘sign up to ethics or leave’ (BBC News January 2013)
          Did Barclays suffer an Ethics Meltdown? (CSR Zone, July 2012)
          Sure Kamhunga, Barclays to re-examine its core values(October 2012)
          Naven Johal, Barclay’s Does Something Right! (January 2013)

          Updated 29 April 2013

          Arguing with Mendeleev

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          @JohnZachman insists that his classification scheme is fixed—it is not negotiable. Comparing his Zachman Framework with the periodic table originally developed by Dmitri Mendeleev, he says, “You can’t argue with Mendeleev that he forgot a column in the periodic table”.

          Well, actually, you can. If you look at the Wikipedia article on the Periodic Table, you can see the difference between Mendeleev’s original version and the modern version. Modern chemists now use a periodic table with 18 columns. As Wikipedia states, “Mendeleev’s periodic table has since been expanded and refined with the discovery or synthesis of further new elements and the development of new theoretical models to explain chemical behavior.”

          What makes chemistry a science is precisely the fact that the periodic table is open to this kind of revision in the light of experimental discovery and improved theory. If the same isn’t true for the Zachman Framework, then it can hardly claim to be a proper science.

          Some observers have noted that early versions of the Zachman Framework had fewer columns, and see this as a sign that the number of columns may be variable and open to discovery. But the Zachmanites reject this; they say that the six columns have always existed, it was just that the early presentations didn’t mention them all. “Humanity for the last 7,000 years has been able to work with what, how, who, where, when, and why.” (This sounds like a Just-So-Story – “How the Enterprise Architect Got His Toolset”)

          Mr Zachman has a degree in chemistry, so he ought to understand what makes the Periodic table different from his own framework. However, some of his followers are less cautious in their claims. I found an article by one Sunil Dutt Jha, whose “proof” of the scientific nature of EA seemed to rely on two key facts (1) that Mendeleev transformed alchemy into chemistry by creating the periodic table, and (2) that the Zachman framework looks a bit like the periodic table, therefore (3) EA must be a science too.

          An earlier version of this comment was posted on Linked-In Is it true to say that “Enterprise Architecture” is a scientific basis for creating, maintaining and running an Enterprise?

          Erecting the Framework (Feb 2004) – John Zachman discussing his Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture in an interview with Dan Ruby

          John P. Zachman, The Zachman Framework Evolution (2009-2011)

          Sunil Dutt Jha, Biggest myth – “Enterprise Architecture is a discipline aimed at creating models” (January 2013)

          See also 

          Richard Veryard, Satiable curtiosity (September 2009)

          Alan Wall, Pattern Recognition and the Periodic Table (March 2013)


          Link added 24 March 2013