Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
For me it is always astonishing to see the tendency of passing the buck, as well as to switch off any thinking. I often see many architects arguing with an Analyst report instead of using their own reasoning, usually this happens most with enterprise, business and solution architects or all those architects that help in … Continue reading On stupidity – Follow analysts and take things for granted →
My last post explained how a WiFi-enabled system on a chip (SoC) and a node.js open source software stack can be used to turn anything into a client or a
The post Power over WiFi: An Internet of Things Enabler appeared first on Enterprise Architecture Professional Journal.
To start and stop the EA function every so often reminds me of Windows we used to turn on and off to make it work.
QualiWare will be at the Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2015 in London on 15-18 June 2015. Kuno Brodersen participates in a panel session about How Practitioners and Vendors can Co-create Value from the Succesful Application of EA Tools. John Gøtze will speak together with Milan Guenther about Models that Matter. Our customer Statoil will speak about A […]
When thinking of a digital workplace strategy, you might—understandably so—expect that it primarily involves technological change. However, at last week’s European Conference on Information Systems, a panel of academic and industry experts led by MIT CISR research scientist Kristine Dery pointed out that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Technology can be potentially disruptive […]
I am not aware if you know much of London, especially about the city of London that only covers the central square mile. The city has the most interesting way to be governed, as while every person living there (these are virtually nil) also all the businesses have a vote. The mayor and the two … Continue reading The Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters →
#orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.
Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial (“misplaced confidence”, “kidded themselves”), believing that “organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership”. Following the election, “a danger now is oversteering the other way”.
Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).
Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in ‘blue collar conservatism’. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts “is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments”. Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne’s plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative’s relationship with the working classes.
What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.
Steve Richards goes further …
“During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. … In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery.”
… and insists that “the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate”.
One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.
Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour’s inner circle.
“Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. … [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control.”
But that’s not enough.
“The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”
Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated ‘spads’, and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as “leader”. Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.
Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.
Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government’s role in the 2008 economic crisis.
“The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers.”
Sources:
Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)
Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)
Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)
Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)
Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)
Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)
Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)
Related Posts:
Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012)
Dark Politics (May 2015)
Updated 6 June 2015
#orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.
Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial (“misplaced confidence”, “kidded themselves”), believing that “organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership”. Following the election, “a danger now is oversteering the other way”.
Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).
Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in ‘blue collar conservatism’. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts “is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments”. Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne’s plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative’s relationship with the working classes.
What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.
Steve Richards goes further …
“During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. … In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery.”
… and insists that “the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate”.
One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.
Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour’s inner circle.
“Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. … [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control.”
But that’s not enough.
“The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”
Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated ‘spads’, and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as “leader”. Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.
Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.
Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government’s role in the 2008 economic crisis.
“The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers.”
Sources:
Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)
Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)
Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)
Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)
Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)
Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)
Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)
Related Posts:
Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012)
Dark Politics (May 2015)
Updated 6 June 2015
The Internet of Things (IoT) came into sharper focus for me at a PADNUG meetup during a presentation from Jeremy Foster, a Microsoft developer evangelist. Jeremy connected a battery-operated toy
The post Tweet Monkey Shows That Anything Thing Can Join the Internet of Things appeared first on Enterprise Architecture Professional Journal.
‘Going to the cloud’ seems to be a hype amongst CxO’s. Since its potential is so widely acknowledged and advertised and its opportunities seem endless, digitization of the organization is the New Normal. But what exactly does this digitization comprise? And, more importantly, can we exploit all this potential? Answering those questions seems far more difficult than following the hype and ‘just doing it because everybody else is’.
What’s a quick way to keep reminding ourselves about effectiveness in the enterprise, and that tagline of “things work better when they work together, on-purpose”? My suggestion for this is the somewhat-contrived acronym LEARN: eLegant – clarity, simplicity, consistency, ‘feel’, self-adapting…
As with any activity in the enterprise, there must somebody in charge of the
– work definition and planning
– work repartition, delegation and coordination
– decision making
– general team and financial management
– budget planning and spending
-…