#eavoices

A rant against 1:1

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Everey now and again, I get really annoyed with sites that assume you have only one of something. “Please enter your email address” is a common request – except that I have several, and would like to have the opportunity to use any of them as my login …

EA Heuristic #3: Talk to more blind men to know the elephant

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(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)
Picture of an elephant in a gentleman outfit. Enterprises are like elephants, much bigger than this one, thus a lot harder for any person to get a correct whole picture of.
photo credit: Murilo Morais 
Enterprises are like often like elephants and the enterprises’ employees and stakeholders are like blind men in the classic story; they are each touching a different part of the enterprise and they will each describe the enterprise differently, sometimes in significantly different ways.  As such, though it might seem obvious, it is important to talk to multiple people, and if possible representatives of various stakeholder groups.  Moreover, what EA often reveals is the breakdown in information flow across the enterprise.

In our EA exercise, we got employees of the organization to suggest ideas.  In order to encourage more ideas to be contributed, we make it safe for idea contributors by not tagging names to ideas.  Later, when we evaluated the ideas, we observed that some ideas suggested by one employee was labeled as “we are already doing this” by another employee.  Clearly the initiative in question was seen as an area of improvement in the eyes of the first employee, but seen as completed in the eyes of the second.  This was a good example of different perspectives on the state of the enterprise.

Modernizing Enterprise Architecture: Address The Neurosis of IT

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“TCP/IP and Ethernet will not be accepted as a valid network implementation as SNA and Token Ring are our preferred standards.” – circa 1993 by nameless corporate Information Systems expert. I was shocked when I had heard this, and images of ostriches with their heads in the sand immediately came into mind. I was new…

EA Heuristic #2: Guess, Validate, Iterate: Time-bound architectural efforts

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The spiral. Architectural efforts should use this shape as the guide, doing quick iterations that each bring the effort closer to the end goal, but never getting held back from progress by attempts for perfection.
photo credit: the pale side of insomnia

(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)
It is very difficult to document various aspects of an organization to the lowest level of detail or even to document the high level views correctly. To begin with, people have different views of the organization so the one correct viewpoint might not exist. As such, it is important to recognize that EA artifacts are living documents and they will never be 100% accurate. 

Consequently, time-bound architectural efforts to ensure consistent progress. Guess and validate later when there is missing information. Allow for iterations to gradually refine EA artifacts.

In our EA exercise, we planned a survey early in the exercise to solicit information on stakeholder importance. The organization rejected the survey, so we created the stakeholder importance chart based on our assessment. During subsequent presentations, the organization’s executives provided inputs that helped us refine the chart. Reflecting on the incident, it would have caused us unnecessary time and grief if we did not move on but instead wait on getting that chart right first.

Event Distribution and Event Processing

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I have recently been involved in several discussions (sales opportunities perhaps), where the answer seems to be, “We need a CEP engine”. Of course if one chooses solutions based on products there’s something wrong. And then working with the sales forc…

Event Distribution and Event Processing

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I have recently been involved in several discussions (sales opportunities perhaps), where the answer seems to be, “We need a CEP engine”. Of course if one chooses solutions based on products there’s something wrong. And then working with the sales forc…

EA Heuristics #1: Looking for gaps? Push from top, guide from bottom.

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A police helicopter. Police helicopter helps police gets a big picture of the city, so that the police knows what to focus on. The police still need to rely on people on the ground for details. A situation similar to the heuristic described in this article.
photo credit: metropolitan police
(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)

When looking for gaps in the current stage architecture, a useful approach is start by “pushing from the top”—start with the enterprise’s strategic objectives, then use the objectives’ linkages with other views to assess if there are any gaps, and then gradually move down through views level by level.

It is important to start the search for gaps from the top, as gaps more closely related to enterprises’ strategic objectives would be uncovered first. This approach decreases the likelihood of missing important gaps or being distracted by less important ones.

While pushing from the top, it is useful to “guide from bottom”—use anecdotal evidence to focus the search for gaps. During our EA exercise, we gathered a number of pain points through conversations with the organization’s employees and reviewing customer satisfaction survey results. However, when we did the analysis by “pushing from the top”, we were puzzled as we could not find those pain points. We analyzed the issue further, focusing on areas where the anecdotal pain points should have shown up, and finally realized that it was because there were missing metrics, and this discovery helped us uncover a second issue—the metrics were not granular enough.  If not for the knowledge of the pain points from “the bottom”, our “push from the top” analysis would have yielded nothing.

12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting

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Photo of a compass. The heuristics that I present in this articles will be like a compass for my future enterprise architecture exercises, guiding me in what to focus on.
photo credits: i k o

Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise.   In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.

Each lesson is captured as a heuristic, a rule of thumb that I want to remember so that I can use it to guide me for future projects.  They are not truths, and will get refined with more experience and insight.  I definitely hope to hear your experiences that relate to these heuristics, regardless of whether they support or invalidate a heuristic.

What made this EA exercise interesting is that, though it is not my first EA exercise, it is the first one I took a lead role in.  Also, this exercise made use of a methodology new to me, from MIT course “Enterprise Architecting” taught by Professor Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Donna Rhodes. In addition, ideas from the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” also crept into the EA exercise, as I was concurrently attending a class by the book’s co-author Dr. Jeanne Ross. 

What platforms has social media created for us, and how should we use them?

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Complexity of networks and the opportunities they bring
Photo Credit: GustavoG

There is no doubt that social media has made a significant impact on our lives. Consumers get their information socially via articles and videos recommended by their friends, they buy things based on their friends’ recommendations but also often based on “strangers’ recommendation” like on Yelp and Tripadvisor, and some even offer products and services on sites like getaround, airbnb and prosper, but here again more to strangers than to people in they know.

From the earlier description, we can see two types of social network. One that is made up of people we know (simplistically referred to here as friends), while the other is made up mostly of people we don’t know (referred here as strangers). The key values of friends networks are trust and relationship. These are people that we know, so we are more trusting of the truthfulness of their recommendations. Note though we might not believe in their suitability at making particular recommendations, for example we would not trust computer advice given by our technology-challenged friends. Friends networks also hold people we care about. We want to know how they have been recently; we are interested in their photos, etc. and we want to share highs and lows of our lives with them.

The key values of stranger networks are size and diversity. When we need advice on a niche topic, it might be hard to find someone in our friends network who can help us but because of comparably much large size of the stranger network, it is likely that we can find someone there who can help us. Moreover, if we need help from a lot of people, say to complete the one million pixel project, the stranger network is more right-sized for the job compared to our friends networks.

Are there other types of networks? There are professional networks, now championed by linked-in. There are also interest-based networks, like customer networks. What values do these networks offer? The article “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media[1]” seems to offer a good framework for analyzing different types of social media. Hopefully I will get to reading it and then I can share my thoughts.

What are the implications of these networks and how should we make the best use of them? I think every individual and organisaton need to be more aware of these different types of networks, their functions and values, and then think about how best to use them. For example, recently I have grown to see more of the value of LinkedIn, as it is a better platform than Facebook for building a community of practice around my expertise. I can join in discussions related to my professional interest area and also build my reputation, something that is harder to do on Facebook as the content there is more informal and I might not be connected to colleagues that I am connected with on LinkedIn (and for many relationships I want to keep it that way). What are other networks I can tap into? What are the opportunities there?

[1]Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media  – Jan H. Kietzmann *, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, Bruno S. Silvestre 

Process Architecture and Information Architecture – The Missing Link

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Maximizing the effectiveness of your business architecture and business capabilities, requires you to develop your process architecture and information architecture together in lock step. Most will agree that processes and information are intricately linked. For example, the effectiveness of process decisions depends on quality information and the quality of information depends on the processes that

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