Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
A long time ago, I did some work for a client that had an out-of-date and inflexible billing system. The software would send invoices and monthly statements to the customers, who were then expected to remit payment to clear the balance on their account…
Data sharing and collaboration between different specialist areas requires agreement and transparency about the structure and meaning of the data. This is one of the functions of metadata.I’ve been reading a paper (by Professor Paul Edwards and others)…
A serious aviation incident in the news today. A plane took off from Birmingham last year with insufficient fuel, because the weight of the passengers was incorrectly estimated. This is being described as an IT error.As Cathy O’Neil’s maxim reminds us,…
It seems like everybody throws around the term “monolith”, but what do we mean by that? Sam Newman started the ball rolling yesterday with this tweet: My first response was a (semi) joke: I say semi joke because, in truth, semantics (i.e. meaning) is critical. The English language has a horrible tendency to overload […]
We work in a communications industry. We create and maintain systems to move information around in order to get things done. That information moves between people and systems in combinations and configurations too numerous to count. In spite of that, we don’t do that great a job of communicating what should be, for us, extremely […]
When I think about data, I can’t help but think about hockey. As a passionate hockey mom, it’s hard to separate my conversations about data all week with clients from the practices and games I sit through, screaming encouragement to my son and his team (sometimes to the embarrassment of my husband!). So when I recently saw a documentary on the building of the Russian hockey team that our miracle US hockey team beat at the 1980 Olympics, the story of Anatoli Tarsov stuck with me.
Before the 1960s, Russia didn’t have a hockey team. Then the Communist party determined that it was critical that Russia build one — and compete on the world stage. They selected Anatoli Tarsov to build the team and coach. He couldn’t see films on hockey. He couldn’t watch teams play. There was no reference on how to play the game. And yet, he built a world-class hockey club that not only beat the great Nordic teams but went on to crush the Canadian teams that were the standard for hockey excellence.
This is a lesson for us all when it comes to data. Do we stick with our standards and recipes from Inmon and Kimball? Do we follow check-box assessments from CMMI, DM-BOK, or TOGAF’s information architecture framework? Do we rely on governance compliance to police our data?
Or do we break the rules and create our own that are based on outcomes and results? This might be the scarier path. This might be the riskier path. But do you want data to be where your business needs it, or do you want to predefine, constrain, and bias the insight?
#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)
#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)
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