Enterprise Architecture

When identical is not the same as equal

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Is ‘identical’ always the same as ‘equal’? Not in service-design – and one of the issues we need to watch for is to ensure that identical service-provision does not lead to far-from-equal service-outcomes. If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues […]

Changing the Congressional Budget Office to the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Office

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The Current Mission of the CBO
Currently, the mission of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):

“is to provide Congress with objective, timely, nonpartisan analyses needed for economic and budget decisions and the information and estimates required for the Congressional budget process” [from CBO TESTIMONY Statement of Robert D. Reischauer Director Congressional Budget Office before the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress,[the] Congress of the United States]
The director broke that into three operating strategies:
1. Helping the Congress formulate a budget plan;
2. Helping the Congress stay within that plan; and,
3. Helping the Congress consider policy issues related to the budget and the economy.
The Problem with the Current Mission
This Mission and Strategies is part of the economic, political, and social problems currently facing the United States, and, potentially, a source for the solution of those problems. The reason that the CBO is part of the problem is that finance engineering has influenced Congress to emphasize the “financial” part of an overall Enterprise Architecture. That is, Congress proposes functional and component changes to the US Federal Government and the CBO responds with an analysis, which Congress can choose to spin-doctor to its political purposes. Consequently, Congress can choose to support any industry; examples include agriculture (subsidies) and housing (mortgage deductions, etc.), gambling (gambling deductions), and so on.
A Solution the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Office
As I demonstrate in my book, Organizational Economics: The Formation of Wealth, the body performing the controlling (see IDEF0 post) and governing functions of any organization has three Missions, Security, Standards, and Infrastructure.  This is particularly true of any organization that has a spatial domain.  These missions appear in the Preamble of the US Constitution and throughout that document.
Given these three high-level missions, and my discussion of the role and responsibilities of the Enterprise Architect (as a sub-discipline of Systems Engineering), what the US Federal Government needs is a real implementation of the FEA Framework and a formal Enterprise Architecture process.  This process aligns the departments’, agencies’, and other organizations’ of the Federal Government with the three high-level missions of government. 

Additionally, Enterprise Architecture proposes where develop, transform, reform, end or otherwise change the organizations’ missions, strategies, processes, and tooling.  For the US Federal Government, (or any other organization of this scope and size), the EA process must be recursive, but traceable and integratable.  The CBO is in the position with some of the responsibilities for doing this. 

Why not have Congress empower them as the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Offiice?

Changing the Congressional Budget Office to the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Office

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The Current Mission of the CBOCurrently, the mission of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):”is to provide Congress with objective, timely, nonpartisan analyses needed for economic and budget decisions and the information and estimates required for t…

Domains and dimensions in SCAN

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What are the sensemaking-domains in SCAN? What are the boundaries between those domains? A great challenge in an earlier comment from Roger Sessions, where he asked me for the mathematical basis for those domains and boundaries. I think he was a bit shocked when I said there wasn’t one – but in fact there is […]

On sensemaking in enterprise-architectures [3]

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How do we make sense of uniqueness? How can we use uniqueness? And how do we make appropriate decisions when some or all of a context is inherently unique? In the first post in this series, we skimmed through Max Boisot’s I-Space and its impact on sensemaking in relation to complex-adaptive-systems. I then added a […]

SOA, Cloud Computing, and Event and Model Driven Architecture

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SOA and Cloud Computing, the Predicate to Model and Event Driven ArchitectureIn a recent post (see Functions Required in the Cloud PaaS Layer to Support SOA), I discussed two SOA patterns and two Cloud Computing patterns and showed how they are, in fac…

SOA, Cloud Computing, and Event and Model Driven Architecture

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SOA and Cloud Computing, the Predicate to Model and Event Driven ArchitectureIn a recent post (see Functions Required in the Cloud PaaS Layer to Support SOA), I discussed two SOA patterns and two Cloud Computing patterns and showed how they are, in fac…

Taking Decisions In The Face Of Uncertainty (Responsible Moments)

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By Stuart Boardman, KPN Ruth Malan recently tweeted a link to a piece by Alistair Cockburn about the Last Responsible Moment concept (LRM) in Lean Software Development. I’ve been out of software development for a while now but I could … Con…

How not to use IT in services

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Several people picked up on this one after Gerold Kathan sent out a note about it, but perhaps David Sprott said it the best: davidsprott: RT @gkathan: John Seddon – a master class in how NOT to use IT in services. Optimize value, not cost. Brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/dygdcpg It’s a 40-minute video (split into three parts) […]

Maslow’s Hierarchy isn’t a hierarchy

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Maslow’s Hierarchy isn’t a hierarchy. Spiral Dynamics isn’t a spiral. They’re not levels in a stack; they’re not linear progressions. They’re dimensions. I was reminded of this by an excellent post on the Psychology Today website, by Pamela Rutledge: Social Networks: What Maslow Misses. She makes the point that none of the ‘levels’ in the ‘hierarchy’ make […]

On sensemaking in enterprise-architectures [2]

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How do we make sense of uniqueness? How can we make sense of what’s happening at the exact moment of action? In the previous post in this series, I looked briefly at Boisot’s I-Space – promoted by some as ‘the answer’ to everything in the information-space – and discovered that, useful though it may be […]