complexity

Technology Vendor Selection – Best of Breed or Suite Based

by

I asked our teams in the IT Department at the American University of Sharjah to put together a short presentation to help me get to know the team members and to understand what their operational and project responsibilities are. In some cases, the teams worked on an integrated platform (suite) with the majority of the […]

The post Technology Vendor Selection – Best of Breed or Suite Based appeared first on Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education.

Regulation and Complexity

by

@timharford’s article So Many Numbers, So Little Time yesterday prompted me to think about the causal relationship between regulation and complexity

There are at least three contrasting ideas about this relationship.

1. Red tape directly causes compl…

Architecture-by-definition is an anti-pattern. The goal of a…

by

Architecture-by-definition is an anti-pattern.

The goal of a definition is to remove noise. 

You add another layer of noise when your definitions are model-specific sub-definitions for commonly understood terms. For example: service, product, capability, or system.

Special definitions introduce an additional cognitive load that easily outweighs the benefits of a more sophisticated model.

given up on balance

by
A blog post of Amanda Fenton about balance reminded me about a core concept I use in the space of GLUE and the change introduced via GLUE. In my post Fixing Flows I wrote about the joy of getting something to work and therefore eliminating a GLUE Disease. Maximizing the throughput in the GLUE Space in each and every domain is what I am aiming for and unfortunately the slowest domain decided upon the speed of the whole GLUE Space.

So what is my key to success here? I try to achieve balance (all domains do have almost the same throughput) by giving up on balance myself. Now that seems to be counter intuitive, but it is exactly what I do:
 
To achive balance I give up on balance!
 


The key aspect behind this thinking can be found in my way of tackling complexity:

  1. In the simple domain there is no need to give up balance.
  2. In the complicated domain there is limited need to give up on balance, but in a very controlled way.
  3. In the ambiguous domain there is permanent need to give up on balance, but action can be done one by one.
  4. In the Not-Known domain balance does not exist.

I like to use the analogy of walking:

  1. Standing on both feet in balance
  2. Decide where to go (“automatic” after the initial decision where to go)
  3. During the step out-of-balance
  4. continue with 1

Therefore to move the Architecture from one state to the other (As-Is -> Transition Architectures -> To-Be Architecture) the whole system gets out of balance all the time, because it is the only way to move. The whole GLUE Division Discovery is completely dedicated to out-of-balance behaviour, so the same flow as walking with GLUE terminology:

  1. GLUE Division Defence (As-Is)
  2. GLUE Division Destination (To-Be)
  3. GLUE Division Discovery (Transition, get to the target)
  4. continue with 1

In a perfectly running GLUE the next To-Be is close to automatic (or at least very fast), which translates into a system where the change between balance and non-balance is done so fast and automatic that everything is perfectly in flow. In most cases I find (or throw myself at) systems where the flow is out of balance, but the system stable (and unwilling to change). Here I give up my own balance (entering willingly Not-Known) to create a momentum to change.

And I do not know why, but this flow of events is kind of a Zen feeling for me: things happen unpredictable and real time around, with and due to me while I try to categorize (EPIC SCAN) them, set a direction (WISE SCAN) and support the execution (PACE SCAN). In most cases this require to be very flexible with the methods and tools and therefore I apply most of the time (80%) agile techniques. And here the technical tool I use is a whiteboard and markers.

Complexity SCANs in GLUE

by

In my lasts posts I was exploring complexity and how I tackle the problem of complexity by applying my GLUE thinking to it. Therefore here a short summary so that my thinking about complexity up to now is collected in one place. I am using the SCAN fra…

PACE SCAN

by

In my last posts I explored the world of complexity and started with Don’t Panic. An advice which does not only work for GLUE and Enterprise Architecture but is generally a fairly good advice. The some ideas collided in my head (which reminds me of the…

WISE SCAN – Revised

by

In my last post I was writing about EPIC SCAN, a combination of two great sources of knowledge including a reflection on how I use it. Emergent, Perverse, Irreducible and Contrived existing Complexity is SCANned for how complex it really is. According …

EPIC SCAN in GLUE

by

In my last post Don’t Panic i touched upon complexity, a topic which seems to be pretty hot at the moment by looking at various twitter messages and fairly recent blog posts. Richard Veryard has touched the topic in a quite interesting way in his post …