Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
We’re excited to announce the formation of a new forum, specifically designed to advance The Open Group vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ by helping enterprises to take advantage of these convergent technologies. This will be accomplished by identifying a set of new platform capabilities, and architecting and standardizing an IT platform by which enterprises can reap the business benefits of Platform 3.0. Continue reading →
Once upon a time, people thought of an information model as defining the structure of the stuff you want to remember. Nowadays, this definition is too restrictive: it might possibly be adequate for a system/database designer, but is not adequat…
Let’s do a fun problem. Consider the following problem stated by Rudolf Arnheim (I’ll give the full reference later): One morning, exactly at 8 A.M., a monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a … Continue reading →
There is a growing interest among enterprise architects in systems theory or thinking. (In this context, the words “theory” and “thinking” seem to be for all intents and purposes interchangeable.) There are several possible reasons for this interest.1….
In recent years, organizations have pushed risk management and business support functions to the forefront in their efforts to improve company operations and performance. The finance department was typically the first to adopt new practices in process and quality improvement, … Continue reading →
In the professional world, inhabited by pretty much anyone likely to be reading this, we tend to borrow words from natural language to describe very specific concepts. Sometimes the usage is often a form of metaphor or analogy, but with familiarization that fact becomes forgotten and it becomes just another word we take for granted. Continue reading →
Below is a copy and paste of the document where i note down all my thoughts on what i’m calling ‘Open work’
I thought i’d share the raw shizzle in the interests of practising what I preach and trying to be as open as possible as I work these thoughts through (hopefully) into something coherent, useful and publishable. Enjoy! all comments welcome
Open Work
What is openness?
Openness is the freedom that is felt at a personal level and experienced in an organisational context to share thoughts feelings, opinions and information
Openness is also the receptiveness to receive what is shared
Openness is the culture that pervades social interactions that are based on freedom
Later on I need to talk about freedom and how to enable that freedom.
Leverage social proof
Don’t judge the sharer, judge the hoarder
Hoarding
The construct that i describe as Openness has both an organisational and personal element
because the Silos can be both be structural and interpersonal
show an organisation, function, team, interpersonal siloes
siloes that can be vertical within hierarchy or horizontol across functions.
graphic of horizontal and vertical partitions.
Ask yourself how many edges do I have, how many edges does my team have? My department? Directorate? How removed am I from these?
What pattern can you apply to break these down? link to fast iterations of virtual structures,
that revolve around hubs. what are the hubs?
Who are the hubs?
WHY?
Symptoms
Where does your orgs ideas come from?
E.g.g corporate goals
Who sponsors your change activity?
are two people/temas working on the same thing in isolation?
Are two intiatives unknowingly working to undermine each other?
are two changes competing for the same resource?
Is there conflict between business units, functions, teams people caused by competing goals?
Do you get different answers if you ask different employees what the organisations top 3 priorities are?
top down
bottom up
top up
bottom down
top bottom
up down
What is wrong with these words where is the width? (Flanking)
These words are part of a language of hierarchy that is anachronistic.
-Reject closed language
Recognise the language you use that is not open.
Compare contrast open/closed phrases, investigate the etymology of these words
E.g.
Buy-in
Post
Role
Function
Directorate
Structure
Organisation
Group
Alignment
Influence
Direct report
Subordinate
Meeting
Conference
Desk
Office
Work
Strategy
Outcome
Lead
Manager
Senior
1:1 (like its something special)
Presentation
Promotion
Hot desk
Go for a coffee
Deadline
Cascade
All hands
Rush hour
Deliverable
Stakeholder is there someone who isn’t a stakeholder?
Influence
Performance review
Transparency: of many things e.g. committments
Lunch and learn is a broken concept, why not learn the rest of the time, and why not in work time
Staff survey, do you share the results and raw data?
concepts/principles
Should I split these into, attitude, enablers, constraints, principles?
Leadership = openness
Be brave
‘Open Argument’, argument is not negative!!!
Conflict too strong word, but the debates are open and lead to a better position, rather than seething resentment
Task over structure
Negatives/things to look out for
Openness needs accountavility or you create cracks. May be counter uintuitive
Also decision making
Signal/Noise and noise reduction.
What are the mechanisms for noise reduction?
Timeliness
Context, tagging or do I need to go there
Cones of interest, sharing those up front. What do I need to know
-Context
Bring the contextual baggage to a conversation.
Move conversation through different mediums for maximum value e.g. Start conversation on desktop, continue on mobile
Relate data and meta data to conversations, e.g. Here is the conversation that led me to talk to you.
Design for collision
-radical/extreme/progressive sharing/shariarchy
-channels of discovery
-foster emergence
-Social architecture: (thinking stack/zachman etc)
-connectedness (connectivity and psychological sense by what? shared vision?
-finding
-serendipity design for
-ego-less
-embrace criticism but by embracing criticism how to avoid paralysis (too many arguments)
-Clear threshold for decision making – stops paralysis
-radical un-secrecy
-Virtual Structures
– finite structures, rapid iteration of create, grow, destroy
– task/problem networks (mayfly)
-Now-ness – relate to the when/tenses of sharing future, past, present
-Presence
– hire for compatibility, culture is context context is people, understand organisational context.
– Energy
– feel time
-ownership
-positively reinforce sharing
– Your goals -> our goals
reward/incentivise colab and sharing, how? measure engagement.
– Shared goals are your compass goals are your culture, the thing direction of travel
Embrace emerging structures
– space is not a barrier, space is not as big as it used to be
there are tools to enable skype, vc units, desktop vc mobile vc
Current State:
-No opportunity for serendepity
-Closed networks
-Entropy
Trends:
-Privacy as commodity/desensitisation
-Hyper sharing
-High bandwidth communication/consumption
-Open source, social networks,
– task/problem networks
Thoughts:
There is no reason not to share
There is no impediment to sharing
appendix
valve handbook
open business cushman 90/10?
References:
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-10-principles-of-open-business.html
http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/24/why-radical-openness-is-unnerving-reshaping-and-necessary-a-qa-with-ted-ebook-authors-don-tapscott-and-anthony-d-williams/
http://www.ted.com/pages/tedbooks_library#TapscottWilliams
http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1.html
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671797/from-zappos-4-simple-hacks-to-foster-office-collaboration
gore tex
http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/culture/index.html
http://www.managementexchange.com/story/innovation-democracy-wl-gores-original-management-model
http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/25/facebook-twitter-or-email-what-do-we-share-online-and-why-3508887/
Katy Steward of @TheKingsFund asks What Makes a Board Effective? (Feb 2013). She’s looking specifically at the role of the Board in the National Health Service, but there is much that can be generalized to other contexts. She asks some key questions for any given board.
In this post, I want to develop this line of thinking further by exploring what the concept of organizational intelligence implies for boards.
1. Boards need to know what is going on.
2. Boards need to make sense of what is going on.
3. Boards need to ensure that all decisions, policies and procedures are guided by both vision and reality. This includes decisions taken by the board itself, as well as decisions taken at all levels of management.
4. Boards need to encourage learning.
5. Boards need to encourage knowledge-sharing
6. Boards work as a team, and collaborate with other teams
Note: The six points I’ve discussed here correspond to the six core capabilities of organizational intelligence, as described in my Organizational Intelligence eBook and my Organizational Intelligence workshop.
See also
Brian Robertson, The Sociocratic Method. A Dutch model of corporate governance harnesses self-organization to provide agility and a voice to all participants (Strategy+Business Aug 2006)
Steve Waddell, Wicked Problems, Governance as Learning Systems (Feb 2013)
Updated 1 March 2013
Katy Steward of @TheKingsFund asks What Makes a Board Effective? (Feb 2013). She’s looking specifically at the role of the Board in the National Health Service, but there is much that can be generalized to other contexts. She asks some key questions for any given board.
In this post, I want to develop this line of thinking further by exploring what the concept of organizational intelligence implies for boards.
1. Boards need to know what is going on.
2. Boards need to make sense of what is going on.
3. Boards need to ensure that all decisions, policies and procedures are guided by both vision and reality. This includes decisions taken by the board itself, as well as decisions taken at all levels of management.
4. Boards need to encourage learning.
5. Boards need to encourage knowledge-sharing
6. Boards work as a team, and collaborate with other teams
Note: The six points I’ve discussed here correspond to the six core capabilities of organizational intelligence, as described in my Organizational Intelligence eBook and my Organizational Intelligence workshop.
See also
Brian Robertson, The Sociocratic Method. A Dutch model of corporate governance harnesses self-organization to provide agility and a voice to all participants (Strategy+Business Aug 2006)
Steve Waddell, Wicked Problems, Governance as Learning Systems (Feb 2013)
Updated 1 March 2013
As a lot, Enterprise Architects are not terribly humble people. We name frameworks after ourselves, and sometimes go to great lengths to correct the “misinterpretations” of others who describe our work in a way that we don’t agree with.
Yet, recognizing that the field is young requires that we should be willing to change as the field of EA changes; that we should be willing to look back on our models, developed in the past, and admit that we missed a few steps that we wouldn’t miss today.
I recently had the opportunity to discuss, on LinkedIn, a blog post that I made five years ago. I look back on that blog post and must admit that my opinions are a bit different now than they were five years ago. I still agree with my post, but I would certainly use different words today than I used in the past. I am more than willing to admit it.
I also look at the efforts of Alexander Osterwalder whose Business Model Canvas has proved both practical and flawed. He missed the fact that he needed to create a differentiation between the customer’s needs and the value proposition of the business offering to fill some of those needs. Did he go back and create an updated canvas? Nope. He created a new canvas to describe demand as though it fits with his older one (hint: it’s a mess).
The venerable John Zachman, probably one of the most humble men I’ve met, also made this same mistake. While his original model was only a couple of columns, and was updated only a few years later into the table we see today, the field of EA has changed. The table is no longer representative of companies with multiple business models (most of them) and the lack of a “customer” row simply relegates his “ontological table” to the dust bin.
Neither man will change. They have “legacy” models, with their names attached. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, humble is as humble does.
I would like to think that my willingness to upend my EBMM and replace it periodically with new versions shows my willingness to admit that (a) I’m often wrong, and (b) I’d rather learn than become stale. That said, I’m no paradigm of humility, myself.
After all, a truly humble EA would not have written this blog post.
(As my teenage daughter would say: Oh snap, you pwned yourself!)
I did well in school (after High School cough, cough). I especially liked the sciences and courses that involved analytical thinking.
If A = B, and B = C, then A= C.
This is a simple axiom that most of us learned when we took that one required …
#kfleadership Excellent lecture at @TheKingsFund this evening by Professor Michael West. Here are some of my notes.When he left college West was short of money, so he took a job in the coal mines. Productivity was important to everyone, and the pay at …