Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
@opheretzion reposts a healthcare example from @jimsinur concerning resource allocation in surgeries.
The loop is as follows.
Decision / Planning Scheduling and resource allocation for the following day, using simulation and optimizatio…
“Cook did not respond with a detailed review of the products Apple made or the retail environments in which it sold them. Instead, he offered an impromptu, unscripted statement of what he and everyone at Apple believed — “as if reciting a creed he had learned as a child” in Sunday School.
“We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and thats not changing,” Cook declared.”We believe in the simple not the complex…We believe in saying no to thousands of products, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us,” he added.
“We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in ways other cannot…And I think that regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well,” he concluded.Its not what you sell its what you believe.”
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“In a provocative and saucy book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Spence explains the unique beliefs behind many of the one-of-a-kind organizations he has studied or worked with over the years, from BMW to Whole Foods Market to Southwest Airlines. Sure, these and other organizations are built around strong business models, stellar products and services, and (of course) clever advertising. But Spence is adamant that behind every great company is an authentic sense of purpose — “a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world” — and a workplace with the “energy and vitality” to bring that purpose to life.”
via Its Not What You Sell, Its What You Believe – Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review.
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“In a big company, you never feel you’re fast enough.” Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE, is talking to me by phone from the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California, where she’s visiting entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She gets a charge out of the Valley, but her trips also remind her how perilous the business climate is right now. “Business-model innovation is constant in this economy,” she says. “You start with a vision of a platform. For a while, you think there’s a line of sight, and then it’s gone. There’s suddenly a new angle.”
Within GE, she says, “our traditional teams are too slow. We’re not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change.”
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“The business community focuses on managing uncertainty,” says Dev Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of strategy firm Jump Associates, which has advised GE, Target, and PepsiCo, among others. “That’s actually a bit of a canard.” The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: “In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That’s something our current systems can’t handle.
“There’s a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve,” Patnaik continues. “Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems–when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.
“Uncertainty is when you’ve defined the variable but don’t know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don’t know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you’re not even sure what the variables are. You don’t know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything.” Businesses that focus on uncertainty, says Patnaik, “actually delude themselves into thinking that they have a handle on things. Ah, ambiguity; it can be such a bitch.”
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“Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They’re both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose.”
Yet while pessimists may be emotionally calmed by their fretting, it will not aid them practically. The pragmatic course is not to hide from the change, but to approach it head-on. Thurston offers this vision: “Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they’re used to speed. A world that slows down if there are fewer options–that’s old thinking and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal.”
Last week Facebook announced its plans for IPO and it certainly made me stop and think, would I invest my money in a company that has a socialist manifesto epitomized by “the Hacker Way”. Sure lots of people will make a lot of money, particularly M…
Last week Facebook announced its plans for IPO and it certainly made me stop and think, would I invest my money in a company that has a socialist manifesto epitomized by “the Hacker Way”. Sure lots of people will make a lot of money, particularly Mr Sugar Mountain, but is a company with 85% of its revenue based on ads worth a multiple of 20? Surely the world has grown up in the last decade and we won’t repeat the dot.com excesses?
The smart money right now is on Facebook being a hugely successful business. But I see a number of things in Facebook that worry me. Although it’s a huge network, it’s a very simple, single model business. There’s lots of plans – they could move into search, or games, or transactions. But it’s all speculation about how to spend the IPO money. They are in fact a very small company – some 3000 employees, and, as I said, it’s a hackers paradise. They have the basics of a platform idea where they host apps, but this is mickey mouse compared to Amazon. Similarly their technology is simplistic compared to Google. And their security engineering is plain immature. And that’s where I think they are in general – incredibly immature. They may boast their youth is a strength, but my experience tells me they don’t have a business platform to grow their complexity to expand their business model in multiple directions. The social media space is nothing if not faddish; sentiment could turn on a dime (sixpence) and the hackers wouldn’t know where to turn. Nearly a billion users doesn’t represent maturity, it represents business opportunity that Facebook has not yet leveraged.
I don’t want to bash Facebook per se. Rather I want to demonstrate the importance of the maturity model. If I am advising a huge company I ask myself what represents maturity in this business model. A bank may have relatively small workforce, but have tremendous complexity in risk, compliance and so on. Their workforce is highly skilled and largely comprised of information workers who manage significant architectural complexity. Equally Amazon has become a hugely complex business but with a very simple portfolio of external, customer facing services. They have used architecture to expose business services for the end consumer and platform partners and have cleverly leveraged and extended their core business model off an architectural base.
So while Facebook looks around for ways to spend its IPO money, I will be looking to see how they leverage off their current maturity level. You can’t buy maturity, you have to build it yourself. You can buy more mature companies, but then you have to have the maturity to integrate them successfully. I note Facebook has acquired 10 companies to date, but they have all been “talent acquisitions”. In fact Zuckerberg is quoted as saying “”We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people..” When I hear the CEO saying “we bought Xxxxx for their SOA platform and expertise, I will maybe consider them a buy. Until then I will just watch.
#entarch #bizarch Following a Linked-In discussion on business architecture and capability modelling, I was slightly alarmed to see how many contributions to the discussion were based on an argument from authority: IBM says this, Michael Porter says th…
#entarch #bizarch Following a Linked-In discussion on business architecture and capability modelling, I was slightly alarmed to see how many contributions to the discussion were based on an argument from authority: IBM says this, Michael Porter says th…
This one continues the recent theme of IT-centrism and why it’s such a problem for enterprise-architecture, but extends it into a slightly different direction, courtesy of a Tweet yesterday by Ron Tolido: rtolido: interesting stuff coming soon around a global Business Architect certification standard by The Open Group #ogsfo Important to say here that I […]
Today, I gave my talk at the Open Group conference that presents a step-by-step method for creating a core diagram that is useful for agile business. I will blog a series of posts on the topic to share this information to my friends and colleague…
Shatender Singh and Madhav Madaboosi, BP Plc., US Abstract: The Open Group has determined that Business Architecture is a critical input into the decision making for an Enterprise. This presentation will outline BP’s Business Architecture methodology and will also provide…
It’s common knowledge that an EA program has to create business value to be successful. So it is important to consider business architecture as an essential part of an EA program. However, it may not be clear how to leverage business architecture …
It’s common knowledge that an EA program has to create business value to be successful. So it is important to consider business architecture as an essential part of an EA program. However, it may not be clear how to leverage business architecture …