Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
2014 was the year when digital became a significant priority for organisations, for the first time customers were becoming more advanced in the use of technologies and with this came a greater level of expectation. Customers (Including me) expected things in digital to be quicker, and just work. However most were left disappointed (including me) when Read More
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A Historical Look at Enterprise Architecture with John ZachmanAn Open Group Blog |
The following is copy of the Open Group’s interview tih John A. Zachman in prepraration for his tutorial on the synergy between The Zachman Framework™ and TOGAF® for The Open Goup – Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow Conference in San Diego – February 2-5, 2015.
By The Open Group
John Zachman’s Zachman Framework is widely recognized as the foundation and historical basis for Enterprise Architecture. On Tuesday, Feb. 3, during The Open Group’s San Diego 2015 event, Zachman will be giving the morning’s keynote address entitled “Zachman on the Zachman Framework and How it Complements TOGAF® and Other Frameworks.”
We recently spoke to Zachman in advance of the event about the origins of his framework, the state of Enterprise Architecture and the skills he believes EAs need today.
As a discipline, Enterprise Architecture is still fairly young. It began getting traction in the mid to late 1980s after John Zachman published an article describing a framework for information systems architectures in the IBM Systems Journal. Zachman said he lived to regret initially calling his framework “A Framework for Information Systems Architecture,” instead of “Enterprise Architecture” because the framework actually has nothing to do with information systems.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that business strategy work is often about constrained thinking. Thinking “inside the box” is nearly always rewarded well. After all, the person giving the rewards lives in the same box. One of the most pernicious kinds of constrained thinking is “brand thinking.” That is the notion that the value of your existing brand is the starting point for all your products. Living within the box of the brand is definitely constrained thinking.
Brand thinking says “everyone knows us for doing this one thing well, so let’s invest in variations on that thing.” That’s great. And it often works. For example, the Dell computer company has a great reputation for building good (but not wildly innovative) personal computers for individuals. So naturally, when they decided to diversify, they decided that they should build on that brand. They decided to build server computers for businesses. It worked fairly well. As they tried to become more innovative, they had problems with the brand. In some areas, Dell simply bought other brands (Alienware for gaming computers, for example).
On the other hand, brand-thinking also leads to a kind of situational blindness. Essentially, we choose not to see the things we think are outside the brand, or even the market, that we are used to. And in doing so, we nearly always miss opportunities. At least, until our competition points them out to us. Dell was good at electronics manufacturing to the home. Had they looked outside their brand, and focused on their abilities, perhaps in the 1990s, they would have been successful competing with Sony or Sharp for personal electronics. Brand thinking says “no.” They stuck to computing, moving into printers, laptops, and tablets. All have suffered from the “commoditization” of their market.
A strategist is a unique role. To be a successful strategist, you have to do everything you can to resist the boundaries of constrained thinking. But then your ideas have to be judged by people who are PAID based on constrained thinking. And that’s a tough sell.
When we do business capability modeling, we are looking not at the products of a company, or it’s brand, but at what that company can do. We look at what a company has the people to do, the processes to do, the information to do, and the tools or technologies to do. We bring together this knowledge into a complex model of elements, and summarize it as a capability map.
The value of doing this is typically revealed when creating initiatives for the execution of strategy. If a company is doing incremental strategy, there may be one or two areas that have slowed or prevented the company from achieving its goals with respect to its competition. But when a company is following an innovative strategy, there may be a dozen different capabilities that need attention. Some may have to be created from scratch. Capability modeling is a clearly valuable tool in this arena.
However, there is another use for capability modeling that is not often discussed, and that is the need for unconstrained thinking on the part of the strategist.
If you are over the age of 30, and live in a western country, you’ve probably heard of Eastman Kodak. Known for their near monopoly on film and film processing, Kodak was the undisputed king of photography for decades. In 1990, they held 90% market share. They were unbeatable. Remember this logo? It was a very successful brand.
Let’s assume Kodak had done a capability model back in 1990 and had actually paid attention to it. They would not look at their brand or their existing products, but at the things that they do very well. What would be on that list of “things they do well?”
Let’s be clear here. These capabilities were not just solid. They were the best in the world.
What’s not on here? Electronics. Electronics manufacturing. Electronics R&D. Electronics Marketing. Not on the list.
So when Kodak started to see the need to expand, they used brand thinking. People see the brand “Kodak” and think photography. So why not go into the manufacturing of digital cameras?
Do you see anything on that list of capabilities that deals with innovation and manufacturing of digital cameras? Heck, they didn’t make that many analog cameras (Nikon, Olympus, and Canon made most of the analog cameras). They had no distribution network, no reputation, no capabilities, no core skills to make cameras of any kind, and certainly not digital cameras.
Even though they were able to leverage their brand for a while, eventually their ability to sell digital cameras fell away and they lost money. Huge sums. At the same time that their analog film business was also losing money.
Now, look at that list again. What do you see? Ignore the fact that this is a film company. Do you see other things there?
The simplest capability to build is the ability to market to a new segment. The hardest is the ability to do R&D and manufacturing well, so let’s drop the marketing for a moment. Not completely, but let’s focus on the hard stuff. Could they have built products based on treated plastics and treated paper? Almost certainly. There’s an entire industry that makes sheets of plastic film for a wide array of different purposes from glass protection to window tinting. What about chemistry based R&D? Could they have created innovative consumer products to compete with companies like Clorox or Proctor and Gamble? Could they have leveraged their chops in chemistry to compete with companies like 3M? Maybe. But only if they had looked first at their core capabilities.
The important thing to note about these industries is that they have not been disrupted by technology the same way that camera film was. While these industries are not easy to compete in, the ability to leverage existing world-class capabilities is more critical to success than the ability to leverage the brand.
Eastman Kodak thought of themselves in the film and photography business. And it was their downfall. Unfortunately, it still is.
What about this brand? What are their core capabilities? And what can they be doing with those capabilities?
Are they on the precipice of disruption? You bet.
Last month I was in Barcelona at the HP Discover conference and I followed the coverage of DockerCon a bit as well. Two conferences, the first from one of the largest tech companies on the planet, a company which inception was one of the triggers of the start of what we now call Silicon Valley. The second conference organized by a relatively new company that you could consider a far offspring.
The post The rise of Rapid Application Delivery through Model-Driven PaaS appeared first on The Enterprise Architect.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that business strategy work is often about constrained thinking. Thinking “inside the box” is nearly always rewarded well. After all, the person giving the rewards lives in the same box. One of the most pernicious kinds of constrained thinking is “brand thinking.” That is the notion that the value…
Here is a quick interactive quiz from Good e-Learning on 35 definitions from the TOGAF glossary. There are 77 definitions in TOGAF Chapter 3, and further 92 definitions in Appendix A! This quiz focuses on some that are the most important for understanding TOGAF and passing the exam.
By The Open Group This is part two in a two part series. Professional development and training is a perpetually hot topic within the technology industry. After all, who doesn’t want to succeed at their job and perform better? Ongoing … Continue reading →
Back on the toolsets theme, what’s the Why behind all this focus on a new type of toolset? Why won’t the existing toolsets do the job? In practice, the core concern is as per the previous post ‘Toolsets, pinball and un-dotting…
Some years ago, I was engaged in a discussion with leadership peers on tackling a particularly challenging issue that seemingly had no answer to satisfy the trifecta of ambitions, resource constraints and ability to execute. We’ve all been in this meeting. You circle until one of two things happens. Some person or faction gives in, […]
While in every day operations the lack of proper management practices is easy to conceal, this would most likely fail the company at its first large transformation.
Toward the end of 2014 an American legend walked off-stage. Stephen Colbert wrapped his final episode of the pseudo-politically-charged Colbert Report before preparing to take over David Letterman’s Late Show post. I’m personally sad to see him go, as he brought political awareness to the masses, albeit it through a comedic lens. Throughout all the laughs, sarcasm and pageantry, one thing was certain: Colbert’s favorite pastime was ribbing the federal government for bureaucratic inefficiency.
It’s true that the government gets a bad rap for being inefficient, redundant and slow-moving. However, in 2014 we witnessed a spike in federal agencies innovating IT to fly in the face of that perception. We saw agency CIOs, CTOs and enterprise architects employing enterprise intelligence to make government IT operations more manageable, cost-effective and even secure.
For example, FedScoops’s Greg Otto interviewed Department of Energy Chief Architect Rick Lauderdale on how he used enterprise intelligence from Troux, hardware and software lifecycle data from BDNA and a team of just three data experts to deliver on-demand reports highlighting potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities related to end-of-life technology assets. Government Computer News (GCN) reporter John Moore also picked up on the story, noting that the DoE’s approach could be a revolutionary model for other branches:
“Dismissed as little more than ‘shelfware’ over the years, enterprise architecture is now getting a fresh look as an approach for addressing specific IT problems, including enhancing agency cybersecurity defenses,’ Lauderdale said.”
Another case of government organizations using EA to move in a more modernized, streamlined direction belongs to the Census Bureau, which implemented an EA initiative led by CTO Avi Bender and Chief Enterprise Architect Necarsia McKinnon. McKinnon also spoke with FedScoop about Census’ progress along its 10-step EA framework, which is allowing it to remedy “more than 1,500 IT products and 1,000 business applications that were either overly redundant or one-off solutions that could have easily been shared services.” This customized program is helping the Census Bureau’s internal development shops integrate and collaborate on making the census a purely digital data collection campaign by 2020.
If you read all the way to the end of the FedScoop article on Census, you’ll see that McKinnon is incredibly proud of the progress the agency has made thus far, but isn’t resting on her laurels. She already has plans to drive further innovation and results. That shared ambition by the DoE and Census for continuing to stretch the imaginative use-cases of EA is especially important as the role of IT evolves across the federal government – a prime example being the predicted trend of responsibility for federal cybersecurity falling to IT departments just as often as it does to CSOs.
Frankly, if Colbert was into IT, I’m pretty sure he (even in all his hilarity and wit) would have a tough time poking holes in the positive impact enterprise intelligence has had on the government of late.
For further detail on the EA program that Rick Lauderdale has seen such success with at the Department of Energy, check out this third-party case study written by an IDC analyst or listen back to the webinar we hosted with Mr. Lauderdale.
To find out more about how the U.S. Census Bureau is using the Troux Platform, please read our case study.
Download our whitepaper, The Power of Enterprise Intelligence, to learn more about how our solutions help decision-makers take a step back to see the big picture to understand exactly where they should be investing in their business.
By The Open Group This is part one in a two part series. Professional development and training is a perpetually hot topic within the technology industry. After all, who doesn’t want to succeed at their job and perform better? Ongoing … Continue reading →
