Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Definitions are attention-seekers. And good ones. They get much more attention than they deserve. I’ve just read a post by Nick Malik called Many (flawed) Definitions of Business Architecture. There he does a very good job of analysing the existing definitions of Business Architecture. He comes to the conclusion that all of them need to […]
At @TheKingsFund today for a workshop on implementing healthcare reforms, with particular focus on the introduction of Health and Well-Being Boards. In this blogpost, I want to pick up the topic of Co-Production, which may appear at three logical levels:
There are various versions of Co-Production in the literature, in Healthcare and in other domains, but there are several related themes.
Coproduction provides a very interesting example of what I call organizational intelligence, involving a connected set of information gathering, feedback and learning loops. Paying attention to these collective intelligence loops helps us see how effective patient participation and coproduction should contribute to the quality and productivity of healthcare delivery, healthcare planning and healthcare strategy.
@BenP1972 tweeted that this sounded like a job for @patientopinion … “must b other existing models where feedback and user experience transformed service offering”. Meanwhile @PatientVoicesUK quoted Donald Schön (1988) “Storytelling is the mode of description best suited to transformation in new situations of action.”
Storytelling and sensemaking are vital elements of organizational intelligence. Professionals are trained to see the world according to a fairly prescribed set of narratives. These narratives give them considerable expertise and power, but they may also constrain thinking. For example, so-called “evidence-based medicine” may be dominated by professionally approved modes of evidence (double blind or triple blind studies) and it may be hard to accommodate the patient experience in this process. Interaction between different professional disciplines, together with the interjection of the (lay) patient voice, potentially brings in a much richer diversity of narratives.
But this diversity in turn calls for greater organizational intelligence – the collective ability to create a meaningful synthesis. What are the (organizational, political, cultural) conditions for successfully and flexibly integrating patient thinking with professional thinking?
Sources
Becky Malby, Involving service users in design: Four steps to co-production (Guardian, Aug 2012)
John Owens, Conflict in medical co-production: The challenge of combining professional and lay perspectives (Centre for Public Policy Research)
Alba Realpe and Louise M Wallace, What is co-production? (Health Foundation, 2010)
Wikipedia: Coproduction (public services)
Richard Veryard, Organizational Intelligence Primer (LeanPub, 2012)
Following on from the SCAN ebook, the next in the new series of ‘Tetradian Weblogs’ ebooks now hits the virtual streets – a selection of blog-posts on the Enterprise Canvas notation and model-type: Enterprise Canvas: the Tetradian weblogs Recommended price…
Not long ago, I attempted to create a refined definition of “business architecture.” I felt compelled to do so because the definition that I found in the Business Architecture Guild’s BizBOK (Guide to the Business Architecture B…
Frameworks, models and meta-models, governance policies, standards, boards, processes – these are the means to your architecture. Tools to help you get there.
They are the scaffolding that supports the building.
To observe some enterprise architects, one would be forgiven for thinking they were in the business of building scaffolding.
Should you design for bad behaviour or try to control it?
This is a very bad question. It leads you straight into the governance trap.
Advances in traffic engineering and automative safety have dramatically reduced road trauma in the developed world.
But no matter how much forgiveness is designed into a system, individuals will always remain accountable for their behaviour.
Good governance never trades one off against the other.
On Tuesday, September 18, The Open Group will host a special tweet jam to examine the topic of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) and current approaches to managing it. Please join us! Continue reading →
Recently, Judy Cerenzia, director of The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Consortium sat down with Defense IQ to talk about FACE and its support for open architectures. The interview is in conjunction with the Interoperable O…
As I have written in my last post I believe that Enterprise Architecture is inevitable happening, no matter if it is done the one way or the other. I personally sense a lot of tribal thinking in the Enterprise Architecture community where in the heat of the discussion I sometimes wonder why there is so much talk about two sides (e.g. EITA vs EA) or even three (three schools of EA) or towards others (IT vs Business). I personally believe that the whole is a circulatory system which is always happening:
So I believe the right discussion should be along the line: how do we make the flow through the circulatory system (GLUE is just a model to reflect that) optimal instead of focusing on setting up boundaries and controls to ensure that a specific role works in a specific box. So overlaps, as described in an earlier post, is not bad if you ask me, but in fact very healthy, because to succeed not one person can decide on his own limited knowledge, but it forces people into working together, ideally collaborating or at least cooperating.
Non cooperation is a quite common pattern here though, and that is exactly what I sense in the Enterprise Architecture Community way more often than I personally understand, because it leads to nowhere. This is a discussion no one can win, because both argumentation chains (or the three of them) are valid and will be valid forever. The reason is fairly simple: By choosing a leading approach to Enterprise Architecture (be it a framework or a person) which we then follow, we focus on the difference, the unified selling proposition of that specific framework or leader. That ultimately leads to a scattered approach to Enterprise Architecture, which is a joke by itself, given the fact that most Enterprise Architects preach for standardisation across all functions.
My almost 4 year old son was a source of inspiration (once again, as well as his siblings) for me, by making a great quote:
So what is my answer: I focus on the similarities, the common pattern. The things which unite Enterprise Architecture and are indeed the same. I think there is way more in common between the different approaches (and that includes Business Architecture, Project Management, Strategy, Innovation Management and many other things) than we allow ourself to accept and see. We kind of play the game of the three apes, and I wonder why.
Due to that I will focus in my future posts on something different than core Enterprise Architecture: What to learn from others is my leading theme for the next posts. Of course, as always, comments are welcome. So if you want me to look into something else which I only scratched so far then please let me know. Input from the community helps me to get my thinking straigthened.
Yes, I know I tend to write long; some others, though, tend to write such short Twitter-length phrases that there’s a real risk that what they say may be lost in the noise. Here’s a real example of something that…
A recent project has me at the front end of a large implementation effort covering multiple software components. In addition to the challenges of integrating 15-20 separate and new software components there is the challenge of integrating the portfoli…