Google and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric Enterprise architecture is about capturing, processing, organizing, and effectively presenting business and technology information to make it valuable and actionable by the organization for planning and governance.

Google is a company that epitomizes this mission.

After reading a recent article in Harvard Business Review, April 2008, I came to really appreciate their amazing business practices and found many connections with User-centric EA.

1. Organizing information--Google’s mission [is] ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’” Similarly in User-centric EA, we seek to organize the enterprise’s information and make it useful, usable, easy to understand, and readily accessible to aid decision making.
2. Business and technology go hand-in-hand—“Technology and strategy, at Google, are inseparable and mutually permeable—making it hard to say whether technology is the DNA of its strategy or the other way around.” Similarly, EA is the synthesis of business and technology in the organization, where business drives technology, rather than doing technology for technology’s sake.
3. Long-term approach—“CEO Eric Schmidt has estimated that it will take 300 years to achieve the mission of organizing the world’s information…it illustrates Google’s long-term approach to building value and capability.” Similarly, EA is a planning and governance function. EA plans span many years, usually at least 5 years, but depending on the mission, as long as 20 years for business/IT projects with long research and development cycles like in military and space domains.
4. Architectural control—“Architectural control resides in Google’s ability to track the significance of any new service, its ability to choose to provide or not provide the service, and its role as a key contributor to the service’s functional value.” This is achieved by network infrastructure consisting of approximately one million computers and a target audience of 132 million customers globally on which they can test and launch applications. In EA, control is exercised through a sound governance process that ensures sound IT investments are selected or not.
5. Useful and usable—“The emphasis in this process is not on identifying the perfect offering, but rather on creating multiple potential useful offerings and letting the market decide which is best…among the company’s design principles are…usefulness first, usability later.” In User-centric EA, we also focus on the useful and usable products (although not in sequence). The point being that the EA must have clear value to the organization and its decision makers; we shun developing organizational shelfware or conducting ivory tower efforts.
6. Data underscores decision making—“A key ingredient of innovation at the company is the extensive, aggressive use of data and testing to support ideas.” EA also relies on data (business and technical) for planning and governance. This is the nature of developing, maintaining, and leveraging use of EA through information products that establish the baseline, target, and transition plan of the organization. A viable plan is not one that is pulled from a hat, but one that is data-driven and vetted with executives, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders. Further, EA provides business intelligence for governance and decision making.
7. Human capital—“If a company actually embraced—rather than merely paid lip service to—the idea that its people are its most important asset, it would treat employees much the way Google does.” This concept is embedded User-centric EA, where the architecture is driven by the needs and requirements of the users. Further, Human Capital is a distinct perspective in User-centric EA, where people are viewed as the hub for all business and IT success.

In short, Google is a highly User-centric EA-driven organization and is a model for many of its core tenets.

Google and Enterprise Architecture

Analysis Paralysis and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is a planning (and governance) function. Planning is a valuable endeavor when it is used to drive meaningful change (outputs and outcomes). One of the worst things that can happen to a well thought out plan is for it to sit unused, collecting dust, until it is simply obsolete. What a waste of time and money. And what of the lost opportunities for the organization to grow and mature and serve it stakeholders better, faster, and cheaper.

Often, one of the reasons a plan never goes anywhere is that an organization is stuck in “analysis paralysis,” an unfortunate mode where leaders are not able to conclude the analysis phase, make a final decision, and move on—implement/execute. Instead, leadership is paralyzed by fear and indecision.

The Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2008, reports that “No Italian Job Takes Longer Than This Bridge: Proposed 142 Years Ago, Plan for Link to Sicily Is Now Campaign Issue.”

“Shortly after the birth of modern Italy in 1865, the government began preparing to build a two mile span linking the island of Sicily to the mainland. The bridge…was to be the physical symbol of the country’s unity. It has been in the planning ever since, and over the years. Experts have studied the bridge’s impact on everything from the Mediterranean trade to bird migration. But ground has yet to be broken, making the bridge an emblem of the chronic indecisiveness that links Italy to the past.”

Is the bridge the only example of analysis paralysis in Italy?

“With a price of nearly…$7.9 billion, the bridge is an example of profligate public spending. Many say Italy is littered with half-finished projects.”

Many argue that with its endless planning, the nonexistent Sicily bridge is little more than a costly ruse. ‘It’s a bottomless pit for funding.’…In more than 20 years of operation, the company created to build the bridge…has spent just $235 million…To be sure, nothing has been done with the money.”

So the Italian bridge that was supposed to unify a country, be a architectural marvel and an engineering feat (“because of the swift currents, earthquake-prone shores, and great distance) has been an endless series of plans, drawn up and thrown into the drawer.

Unfortunately, plans like this bridge—that never get finalized and go nowhere—are a defeat for organizational progress. They are a waste of resources and drain on people’s creativity, talent, and morale.

As an enterprise architect, it is an imperative to complete the plans that we start and to work with leadership to implement them. Of course, over time, we need to course correct and that is a natural part of the process. But if we never “get off the dime” and embark on the journey, then as an organization we may as well be doing something else—something worthwhile!

Analysis Paralysis and Enterprise Architecture

User-Centric EA Framework

 
User-centric EA guides all facets of the enterprise architecture. It starts from the capture of the information, which is based on a strict value proposition of improving IT planning and governance, and moves forward to a process that is collaborative and structured, to one that provides users with information views that are facilitated by principles of communication and design. The User-centric EA further affects how we manage the architecture, using metrics, configuration management, and a single information repository. It also affects how we enforce the architecture through policy and governance.

User-Centric EA Framework

Information Transparency and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture develops, documents, and communicates the baseline, target, and transition plan for an organization. EA makes information transparent to enable better decision making. Transparency leads to self-correcting behavior.

Here’s one case where transparency may be better left under wraps.

The Wall Street Journal, 9 April 2008, reports: “Candid Camera: Trove of Videos Vexes Wal-Mart.”

“For nearly 30 years, Wal-Mart stores Inc. employed a video production company here to capture footage of its top executives, sometimes in unguarded moments. Two years ago, the retailing giant stopped using the tiny company. At first, the decision threw Flagler Productions Inc. into a panic. Now, it’s Wal-Mart that’s squirming.

“Flagler has opened its trove of 15,000 Wal-Mart tapes to the outside world, with an eye toward selling clips. The material is proving irresistible to everyone from business historians to documentary filmmakers to plaintiff’s lawyers and union organizers.”

So what’s the problem with exposing some tapes of Wal-Mart executives?

“Among the revealing moments: a former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company’s corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in stores.”

“Unlike the polished presentations delivered at business forums, the videos provide an unvarnished look at Wal-Mart leaders…the videos deal with ‘everything anyone would want on Wal-Mart…They’ve got 30 years of people winging it.’”

A labor historian says, “When they are talking to themselves, and there aren’t any shareholders present, you get a level of things being revealed.”

This is a treasure trove for lawyers on various cases, unions delving into personnel policies and practices, and critics of the company. The question from an EA perspective is whether information transparency is really a good thing or not?

• On the positive side, only by getting the information out there or having the “threat” of the information getting out (like on the cover of the Washington Post or in Congressional hearings) are organizations and people forced to ensure they are doing the “right” thing, and therefore self-correct when they are off track.
• On the other hand, when information is too transparent (like the unscripted videos of Wal-Mart executives), the enterprise can be put at competitive, security, economic, judicial, and political risk, thus jeopardizing any future plans for the organization.

There are certainly risks to an organization when it makes information transparent. It is these very risks of “exposure” that breed and are the impetus for self-correction. While, self-policing mechanisms (like internal controls, inspections, and audits) can achieve similar self-correcting behavior without putting the organization at risk with external entities, it does not have the same potency as full transparency. Indeed, nobody wants to wake up in the morning and find their organization on the cover of The Washington Post as the poster child for organizational fraud, waste, and abuse!

Information Transparency and Enterprise Architecture

Prison and Enterprise Architecture

One would imagine that the enterprise architecture for a justice system would involve people convicted of serious crimes being punished and actually going to and staying for some time in jail. The EA would plan for how many prisons are needed to meet the justice system requirements and invest accordingly in prison facilities, guards, and so on (of course, within resource constraints). Well here’s an aberration…this is not what happens in Italy.

The Wall Street Journal, 8 April 2008, reports that “Italy makes it hard for [people to go to jail] and for jailbirds to stay in jail.”

“Less than two years ago, Italy’s prison system faced a crisis: Built to hold 43,000 inmates, it was straining to contain more than 60,000.”

So what’s a responsible government to do?

They hadn’t planned or resourced adequately. So they simply “swung open the prison doors and let more than a third of the inmates go free.” YIKES!

“Within months, bank robberies jumped by 20%. Kidnappings and fraud also rose, as did computer crime, arson, and purse snatchings.” WELL WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT!

What’s behind this insanity of letting dangerous convicted criminals out by the droves?

“The nation’s legal system has roots in the unforgiving codes of the Roman Empire, well known for crucifixions and feeding people to the Lions.’ LOOK OUT FOR THE BACKLASH!

“Since then it has evolved to to become infused with Roman Catholic notions of forgiveness along with a healthy dose of bureaucracy.”

The resulting penal system?

“The death penalty is considered abhorrent, and life sentences are rare. Defendants have the right to two appeals, and even traffic tickets can be appealed to the nation’s highest court. Italy’s courts are so clogged that the statue of limitations on most felonies expires before a final verdict can be reached.”

“In Italy, even for hardened criminals, hard time is rare.”

In one case a “henchman for one of Sicily’s fiercest crime families was released from prison and given house arrest because at 462 pounds, the prison simply didn’t have a bed big enough to accommodate their guest.

John Zachman used to describe EA as the engineering of the enterprise. If the Italy penal system is “the enterprise” here, then some serious reengineering needs to take place to bring a semblance of social order and justice back to the system.

Prison and Enterprise Architecture

Readability and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA is a strong proponent for developing information products that are useful and usable to the end-user. This is in contrast to traditional EA that often develops “artifacts” that are often difficult for the end-user to understand and apply.

There are a number of ways to make EA easier to use for the organization. One is to provide information in various levels of detail (profiles, models, and inventories), so user can drill-down to get more detailed information or roll-up to executive level summary views. Another method is to use information visualization to express information. As the adage states: “a picture is worth a thousand words.” And yet a third method is to explain the architecture in simple- to-understand language, so that it will be meaningful to both business and technology stakeholders, executives, mid-level managers, and analysts alike.

Others have expressed the need to make information more usable and readable.

The Wall Street Journal, 14 March 2008, reports on the usage of readability formulas “to quantify the ease of a work writing” to be read and understood.

For example, Microsoft Word follows a reading formula and provides a “result [that] is the supposed minimum grade level of readers who can handle the text in question.”

“Similar formulas are used by textbook publishers and in dozens of states’ guidelines for insurance policies.”

The way the formulas work is to look at readability items such as the average number of words in a sentence, the average number of syllables per word, and so on to come up with a grade reading level for the text.

Some argue that these readability formulas are flawed in that there are “more than 200 variables that affect readability. Most formulas incorporate just two, and not because they are most important, but because they are the easiest to measure.” Others argue, the different readability measures are inconsistent and can come up with scores that differ by as much as three grade levels.

The Flesch-Kincaid formula, used by Microsoft, is the most convenient and criticized. The formula was developed in 1948, revised in 1975, and again tweaked by Microsoft when it “incorporated it into Word in 1993”. The current formula provides readability scores up to grade level 14.

The idea behind all these readability formulas is to provide information that is clear, concise, and comprehensible to a wide audience. There are even templates online to help people communicate effectively in writing at the recommended reading levels.

Going back to enterprise architecture, what is often thought of and developed in terms of architectures is not simple to understand or useful to our stakeholders. Developing architecture using the ivory-tower approach and developing reams of shelfware and wall charts that are eyesores is not a wise architecture strategy. Rather, working collaboratively with users and developing information products that they can understand and readily use to aid decision making is where it’s at.

Readability and Enterprise Architecture

HP and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is always looking for ways to improve results of operations through business process improvement and technology enablement.

Joseph Juran (1904-2008) was a man who dedicated himself to these goals.

In the Wall Street Journal, Remembrances, 8-9 March 2008, it states about Mr. Juran: “Pioneer of quality control kept searching for ‘a better way’ to make and manage.”

While Edward Deming is perhaps better known for statistical methods of quality control, Joseph Muran emphasized the management aspects. Both worked at the same time for Western Electric Co.’s mammoth Hawthorne Works manufacturing plant, making telephone equipment for Western’s parent, the American Bell Telephone Co.

“Having noted that a small number of problems produce most quality complaints, Mr. Juran formulated his ‘80-20’ rule, which stated that 80% of a firm’s problems stemmed from 20% of causes. Management should concentrate on the ‘vital few’ rather than the ‘trivial many’. He called it his Pareto Principle.’”

Mr. Juran’s phrase was: “There is always a better way; it should be found.” “Although producing higher quality goods might seem costly, he argued it could pay for itself through fewer repairs and a better reputation in the marketplace.”

All too unfortunate that many companies these days, bowing to their shareholders’ desire for a quick buck and looking to maximize their executive paychecks, have cut quality to cut costs and have blasphemed the term “made in America.”

Here is a telling example of how corporate America has abandoned the teachings of the true quality pioneers, like Deming and Juran:

Just recently, I purchased a HP all-in-one printer and paid a pretty dollar for it, but I thought, hey it’s an HP, it’ll be worth it. Oh boy was I surprised when I got it and it printed horribly (not like the HP printers I remembered). I thought it must be the cartridge (even though the cartridge was also HP). So I bit the bullet, spent the money and ordered a new cartridge. Lo and behold, I received it, installed it, and the exact same lousy printing quality came out. I contacted HP after a little more than a month (since it took time to get the new cartridge) and when I called them, they basically told me too bad--no refund allowed past the 21 day refund period. Then they gave me another number for technical support (they couldn’t connect me) and I had to provide all my information all over again to the HP rep there. Then they told me they would connect me to a technical specialist for this particular printer, at which point I had to for the third time now give all my information yet again. They apparently had no customer records to access or note. It was appalling and pathetic for a company that is as large and at one time prestigious as the old HP to be so completely customer and quality berserk. HP’s Tech support put me through the ringer: testing pages, downloading new firmware, unplugging and plugging, and then finally, they had the gall to want to charge me $49 (which they finally agreed to waive) to get an exchange for the defective product they sold a month earlier.

HP did end up sending the replacement; they sent instructions to return the defective printer through UPS, but sent along a FedEx shipping sticker (yikes). They told me they would call me the day the new printer was to arrive to confirm that everything was okay, but called a day later (ok, so what?). They told me that the replacement printer would come with a replacement cartridge and it didn't (another boo-boo); when I told the technical rep, he checked on this and said he had made a mistake. Upon request and after a prolonged phone delay, he agreed to send me one because of their error.

While I appreciate the friendly and very decent technical rep that I finally worked with on the phone, HP as a company has become customer and quality clueless.

I used to love HP, so I hope they work to improve their quality and customer service.

Juran “lamented that quality control in America tended to consist of a limited project, while abroad it was treated as an evolving process.” The all too often shoddy state of quality of many American-made products (and poor service) these days has left people shaking their heads in disbelief. Unfortunately, those companies that seek short term profit at the expense of quality and service, damage their brand and put their long term survival at risk.

HP and Enterprise Architecture

Total Recall and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture plays an important role in corporate knowledge management. EA captures, analyzes, catalogues, and serves up information to end-users. In many cases, where more general KM endeavors fail, User-centric EA succeeds because it is a focused effort, with a clear value proposition for making information useful and usable.

Now, KM is being taken to whole new level. And rather than capturing information with clearly defined users and uses, the aim is total recall.

ComputerWorld, 6 April 2008, reports on an initiative for “storing every life memory in a surrogate [computer] brain.”

“Gordon Bello, a longtime veteran of the IT industry and now principle researcher at Microsoft’s Corp.’s research arm, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. Actually, Bell himself wants to remember—well, everything...he wants the ability to pull up any picture, phone call, e-mail, or conversation any time he wants”

“The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He’s trying to store a lifetime on his laptop.”

“The effort is about not forgetting, not deleting, and holding onto all the bit of your life. In essence, it’s about immortality.”

What about privacy of your personal information?

It “isn’t about plastering a Myspace or Facebook page with information…[It’s] immensely personal...you will leave a personal legacy—a record of your life [on a personal computer].

And Bell is not discerning, he stores painful memories as he does happy ones; this “would actually let people see who he was as a person.”

Certainly people have strived for eternal life from the time of the first man and woman—Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden apple in their quest for immortality—and since with the search for the “fountain of youth” and other elixirs to prolong life. Similarly, people have sought to live eternal by leaving a legacy—whether great men or nefarious one—from rulers and inventors to conquerors and hate mongers. The desire to influence and be remembered everlasting is as potent as the most parch thirst of man.

Bell has gone to extremes collecting and storing his memories—good and bad—from “every webpage he has ever visited and television shows he has watched…video’s of lectures he’d given, CDs, correspondence and an avalanche of photos…he has also recorded phone conversations, images and audio from conference sessions, and with his e-mail and instant messages.”

In fact, Bell wears a SenseCam around his neck, a digital camera that automatically takes a photo every 30 seconds or whenever someone approaches.

“Bell figures that he could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage.”

“In 20 years, digitizing our memories will be standard procedure according to Bell. ‘Its my supplemental memory and brain’. It’s one of my most valuable possessions. It look at this thing and think, ‘My whole life is there.’”

So is that what a human life comes down to—a terabyte of stored information?

While maybe a noble effort at capturing memory, this seems to miss the mark at what a human being is really about. A person is much more than that which can be captured by a photo or sound bite of the external circumstances and events that take place around us. The essence of a person is about the deep challenges that go on inside us. The daily struggles and choices we make through our inner conscience—to chose right from wrong and to sacrifice for our creator, our loved ones, our nation, and our beliefs. Yes, you can see the resulting actions, but you don’t see the internal struggles of heart, mind, and soul.

Also, while capturing every 30 seconds of a person’s life may be sacred to the person whose life is being stored, who else really cares? The high-lights of a person’s life are a lesson for others, the minutia of their day are personal for their growth and reckoning.

From a User-centric EA perspective, I believe we should focus KM initiatives for both organizations and individuals from being a wholesale data dump to being truly meaningful endeavors that have a clarity or purpose and a dignity of the human beings being recorded.

Total Recall and Enterprise Architecture

Wind Power and Enterprise Architecture

One great thing about enterprise architecture is that it’s forward looking and seeks to solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s solutions—that’s our target architecture!

Today, we have a problem with developing renewable energy resources, tomorrow we have one target solution that involves floating wind power.

MIT Technology Review, 2 April 2008 reports that “floating platforms could take wind farms far from coasts, reducing costs and skirting controversy.”

“Offshore wind-farm developers would love to build in deep water more than 32 kilometers from shore, where stronger and steadier winds prevail and complaints about scenery are less likely. But building foundations to support wind turbines in water deeper than 20 meters is prohibitively expensive. Now, technology developers are stepping up work in floating turbines to make such farms feasible.”

Is this technology viable today?

“Several companies are on their way to demonstrating systems by borrowing heavily from oil and gas offshore platform technology.”

How big a deal is the potential of wind power? Huge!

“If these efforts succeed, they could open up a resource of immense scale…offshore wind resources on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts exceed the current electricity generation of the entire U.S. power industry.”

“The global market for offshore energy could reach 40,000 megawatts by 2020—enough to power more than 30 million U.S. homes, and more than twice the scale of last year’s wind installations worldwide.”

Creative solutions—innovations (like floatable wind farms) are what keep our organizations, our nation, and the human race continuously on a forward track. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t ever any backsliding. Of course, there is. But then we pull out our creative energy and passion and build the next target architecture.

Similarly, as architects, our job is to solve problems and meet end-user requirements. When inevitably, we face what seems like insurmountable odds, we just keep climbing to the next rung on the ladder.

Is there ever an end to that ladder?

Frankly, I am a huge believer that at some point, we do exhaust the capability of this wonderful world, Earth, to sustain ever more billions of people. Whether with wind farms or a myriad other technological innovations, there will come a time, when to space and other worlds we must go. Of that, as an enterprise architect, I am certain.

Will we have the creativity to keep up?

Wind Power and Enterprise Architecture

Census is Back to Bean Counting and Enterprise Architecture

So much for EA enabling business process with technology enablement!

The Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2008, reports “Census Bureau Scraps Plans for a High-Tech Count.” Now census takers will have to “go back to paper-based canvassing to count the millions of households that don’t return their census forms.”

“The bureau’s decision to shelve technology that was supposed to make the count more accurate will add $3 billion to the cost of the count,” an almost 30% increase in cost.

Census’s EA plan was to “give hand-held computers to its half million census takers, who would use them first to verify and map every address in the country, and then to follow up on households that didn’t return the six question census form that will be mailed in March 2010. The census takers would then send completed questionnaires electronically to a database, saving the bureau time and money.”

What went wrong?

1) Unclear Requirements—GAO “has been warning for years that the Census Bureau wasn’t spelling out technical requirements for the devices and last month put the census on its short list of high-risk government undertakings.”

2) Requirements creep—“large scope of requirements changes,” which will now not only delay the use technology from use in 2010, but also will drive the contract cost with Harris Corp. up from $600 million to $1.3 billion.

3) Inexperience—“attributed some of the Census Bureaus problems to its inexperience at managing big contracts, especially big technology projects.”

4) Overconfidence—“’The Census Bureau might have been overconfident in how easy it would be’, said Terri Ann Lowenthal of the Census Project, a nonpartisan group.”

Why is getting the census count so important?

“The count has enormous political implications. Census data are used to apportion House seats, Electoral College votes and about $300 billion a year in funding.”

From an EA perspective, the success of achieving a target architecture and transition plan, such as the one at Census for hand-held computers for the census-takers, hinges in large degree of having clear and scoped requirements and line of sight all the way to the technical solution.

Certainly, many IT projects fail to meet their cost, schedule, and performance parameters precisely because of poor requirements management processes.

We cannot be successful with our IT investments and meeting EA transition plans if we don’t start with a clear and definite vision of where we’re going.

Census is Back to Bean Counting and Enterprise Architecture

Lessons from Mainframes and Enterprise Architecture

As many organizations have transitioned from a mainframe computing to a more distributed platform, they have become more decentralized and in many cases more lax in terms of managing changes, utilization rates, assuring availability, and standardization.

However, management best practices from the mainframe environment are now being applied to distributed computing,

DM Review, 21 March 2002, reports that “people from the two previously separate cultures—mainframe and distributed [systems]—are coming together to architect, develop, and manage the resulting unified infrastructure.”

1. Virtualization—“Developers of distributed applications can learn from the approach mainframe developers use to build applications that operate effectively in virtualized environments…[such that] operating systems and applications bounce from one server to another as workload change” i.e. effective load balancing. This improves on distributed applications that “have traditionally been designed to run on dedicated servers” resulting in data centers with thousands of servers running at low utilizations rates, consuming lots of power, and having generally low return on investment.
2. Clustering—“A computer cluster is a group of loosely coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer [like a mainframe]…Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability” (Wikipedia) The strategy here is to “reduce the number of servers you need with virtualization, while providing scaling and redundancy with clustering.”
3. Standardization—Distributed computing has traditionally been known for freedom of choice marked by “diversity of hardware, operating platforms, application programming languages, databases, and packaged applications—and an IT infrastructure that is complex to manage and maintain. It takes multiple skill sets to manage and support the diverse application stack…standardization can help you get a handle on [this].

Thus, while we evolve the IT architecture from mainframe to distributed computing, the change in architecture are not so much revolutionary as it is evolutionary. The lessons of mainframe computing that protected our data, ensured efficient utilization and redundancy, and made for a cost-effective IT infrastructure do not have to be lost in a distributed environment. In fact, as architects, we need to ensure the best of both worlds.

Lessons from Mainframes and Enterprise Architecture

Procter & Gamble and Enterprise Architecture

Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G) is a Fortune 500, American global corporation based in Cincinnati, Ohio, that manufactures a wide range of consumer goods. As of 2007, P&G is the 25th largest US company by revenue, 18th largest by profit, and 10th in Fortune's Most Admired Companies list (as of 2007). In 2007, P&G has revenue of $76 billion, net income of $10 billion, and 138,000 employees working in over 80 countries. (Wikipedia)

P&G has a plethora of billion-dollar brands including: Actonel, Always, Ariel, Bounty, Braun, Charmin, Crest, Dawn, Downey, Duracell, Folgers, Gain, Gillette, Head & Shoulders, Iams, Mach 3, Olay, Oral B, Pampers, Pantene, Pringles, Tide, and Wella.

What makes P&G such a successful consumer goods company?

P&G is an all User-centric EA company. P&G is focuses on satisfying the end-user and developing products that are truly innovative and improve lives.

Fortune Magazine, 17 March 2008, quotes P&G CEO A.G. Lafley stating that at P&G “we put the consumer at the center of everything we do…our goal is to delight our consumers at two ‘moments of truth’: first, when they buy a product, and second when they use it.”

“At P&G the CEO is not the boss—the consumer is.” Moreover, they “seek out innovation from

P&G is tailoring their target architecture to their end-users, by truly understanding their needs. And P&G has some terrific new ways of capturing their end-user requirements and building new products to meet those.

1. Innovation labs—“One looks like a grocery store, another like a drugstore, and another like different rooms in a typical middle-class American home…By watching how they navigate the aisles and what catches their eye, the company is able to unlock deeper insights into their behavior.”
2. “Living It”—“enables employees to live with lower-income consumers for several days in their homes, to eat meals with the family, and to go along on shopping trips.”
3. “Working It”—“employees work behind the counter of a small shop. That gives them insight into why shoppers buy a product, how the shopkeeper stacks the shelves, and what kind of business propositions are appealing.”

“The idea behind [innovation labs,] Living It, and Working It was to sit down with the [consumers and the] bosses to hear what they needed, even if they couldn’t articulate it directly.”

What a cool EA concept. We can’t always ask our user directly what they need to achieve mission results and conduct business processes—they may not be able to articulate their needs—so we can instead embed ourselves at times in the mission to learn and understand firsthand what the needs are—by using all of our senses (not just listening). Living It and Working It are terrific concepts for architects to better understand the businesses they are planning and governing. Asking about needs and requirements is a first step, but it isn’t enough. We need to see for ourselves what the business needs to be successful in the future.

Procter & Gamble and Enterprise Architecture

Hacker Camps and Enterprise Architecture

One of the perspectives of the enterprise architecture is Security. It details how we secure the business and technology of the organization. It includes managerial, operational, and technical controls. From an information security view, we seek confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy of information.

Who are we protecting the enterprise from in terms of our information security? From hackers of course!

How do we protect ourselves from hackers? By teaching our security professionals the tricks of the trade—teach them how to hack!

The Wall Street Journal, 1 April 2008, reports that “Hacker Camps Train Network Defenders: Sessions Teach IT Pros to Use Tools of the Online Criminal Trade.”

“In such sessions, which cost about $3,800, IT pros typically spend a week playing firsthand with the latest underground computer tools. By the end of the week, participants are trained as ‘ethical hackers’ and can take a certification test backed by the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants.”

“Overall more than 11,000 people have received the ‘ethical hacker’ certificate since 2003; nearly 500 places world-wide offer the training.”

Why do we need to teach these hacking tools to IT security professionals?

They need to understand what they’re up against so they can more effectively plan how to protect against the adversary. Know thy enemy!

How large is the IT security issue?

“The average large U.S. business was attacked 150,000 times in 2007…the average business considered 1,700 of these attacks as sophisticated enough to possibly cause a data breach. In addition, the number of unique computer viruses and other pieces of malicious software that hackers tried to install on computers and IT networks doubled to 500,000 last year from 2006…[and it’s expected] to double again in 2008.”

It’s great that we are advancing the training of our information security champions and defenders, but what about those who take the course, but are really there to learn hacking for the sake of hacking? How many of the 11,000 ‘ethical hackers’ that have been trained are really ethical and how many are using their newfound knowledge for more nefarious ends?

From an enterprise architecture standpoint, we need to ensure that we are not giving away the keys of the kingdom to anyone, including our own IT security staff—through hacker training. Also, we need to be careful not to rely on any one individual to maintain the security order of things. We need to plan our security using a system of checks and balances, just like the constitution lays out for the governance of the nation, so that even the chief information security officer (CISO) is accountable and has close oversight. Finally, we need to institute multiple layers of defense to work best we can to thwart even the determined hackers out there.

Hacker Camps and Enterprise Architecture

GPS To “Wrongwhere” and Enterprise Architecture

A good enterprise architecture is measureable in large part by results of operation or outcomes for the end-user such as cost-savings, cost avoidance, or performance improvements.

Well, when it comes to GPS, you’d imagine that the desired outcome would be getting from point A to point B in the quickest, simplest way (a performance improvement from taking a longer route or getting lost altogether).

According to the Wall Street Journal, 18 March 2008, if you follow GPS directions blindly, you may find yourself driving literally off a cliff.

“By blindly following the gadgets’ not-always-reliable directions, they’re [the drivers] are getting lost, hitting dead ends, and even swerving into oncoming traffic.”

With the price for GPS devices coming down to an average of $225 over the 2007 holiday season, there are now an “estimated 49 million navigation devices…in use in the U.S.”

“GPS technology was first designed by the Department of Defense in the early 1970s to improve precision weapon delivery, Today’s commercial devices receive information transmitted from a network of government satellites orbiting the Earth and can pinpoint a user’s location”—sounds like a great architecture plan that commercializes defense technology.!

So what goes wrong with GPS that results in the following types of mishaps:“

• Truck drivers erroneously sent to residential streets have crashed into fences and damaged walls and trees on narrow roads.”
• “”After a half-hour of hairpin turns…the road ended at a guardrail and a 200-foot cliff.”
• “Sent Mr. Wright off the highway and onto a paved road. The road turned first into gravel and then into a dirt trail littered with boulder and covered with overhanging branches…he dutifully followed the direction, which turned into a three-hour detour.”

“Map data companies…have employees in the field recording everything from street names to lane counts and speed limits…they also rely on sources including transportation departments, building associations, and public records. But the information can become outdated quickly as business move or close shop, new roads are built, and old ones are closed for repairs. Sometimes addresses are just wrong.”

“Map data companies say ensuring that information is accurate and up-to-date is a constant battle.” For example, one vendor has “about 5.5 million U.S. streets in its database. About 3 million changes are made to the maps each month.”

Some map data companies are encouraging users to report errors, so they can be corrected faster.

So following GPS directions and getting nowhere or to “wrongwhere” (my term)—is that an enterprise architecture problem?

It sure is. While it’s not a technology problem per se, it is a business process issue. And if the business processes are not in place to ensure current, accurate, and complete mapping information then absolutely, there is an EA problem that needs to be addressed with business process improvement or reengineering. So be careful the next time you take that road trip!

GPS To “Wrongwhere” and Enterprise Architecture

The Whopper Bar and Enterprise Architecture

First, let me start off and say that I am Kosher and have never had a big Whopper. Nevertheless, Burger King has announced plans for a Whopper Bar that sounds marvelous!

The Wall Street Journal, 29-30 March 2008, reports that “Burger King Holdings Inc. plans to start building a new version of its restaurants this year called the Whopper Bar that will sell a wider variety of its signature hamburger in a hipper setting.”

The menu “could include as many as 10 types of Whoppers…one menu sketch has a section called ‘pimp your Whopper,’ where patrons can chose from additional toppings.” Beer may be on the menu as well, especially in overseas markets where it already sells alcohol.

The Whopper Bar “is akin to McDonald’s Corp.’s creation of McCafe coffee bars, except that it is built around the chains signature sandwich.”

“Workers will place toppings on burgers in front of the customers ‘to put a little more theatre into it.’”

“Early design plans call for the bars to have chrome, wood, and exposed brick and plasma screen televisions with images of fire playing on them to evoke Burger King’s flame-broiled motto.”

The bars are planned “for places like casinos, airports, and other venues with limited space.”

The Whopper Bar tastes right from the start from a User-centric enterprise architecture perspective. Why?

Well traditional fast-food joints tend to be somewhat dirty and unsightly “restaurants” (and I use this term generously here). It is not unusual to find filthy bathrooms and the restaurants being used as shelter, especially in the inner city—how do I know, I’ve stopped to use the restroom on occasion.

From what I’ve seen, even if I was not Kosher, there is very little appeal in eating the food in these establishments. Moreover, the unhealthy stigma of the extremely greasy food is a Whopper of a turn-off.

This is exactly why the Whopper Bar is such a genius idea. It borrows from the success of Starbucks and their magic formula for creating a high scale ambience from a simple cup of joe. It also, elevates the unhealthy food by them making it in front of you—taking away the stigma of what goes on “in the back.” The result is more upscale and not-so-bad for you at least in perception.

The target architecture here is exactly what many customers want. A fast, cheap meal, but in a feel good environment. In fact, my advice to Burger King would be to roll out the Whopper Bar much more broadly, and replace their traditional eatery concept altogether.

In this case perception is everything!

The Whopper Bar and Enterprise Architecture

Speed is the Name of the Game and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is a way to manage change and complexity. Enterprise architecture establishes the plan forward and governs the decision-making process, one IT investment at a time, and one business process improvement at a time, toward fulfillment of the target state.

However, change can happen slowly or quickly. The faster the change, assuming is it made with clarity of purpose, intent, and discipline, the better.

In the book, Never Fry Bacon in the Nude, by Stone Payton, the author states that “today’s (and tomorrow’s) market leaders recognize that speed may very well be the most consistent and durable source of competitive advantage.”

Why is speed so important to an organization?

“In virtually every industry, the first to market enjoys as much as ten times (10x!) the profit of its nearest competitor…[further,] organizations that meet the most needs for the most people [measured in time] with an increasing ‘economy of motion’ dominate their respective markets.”

Speed is a cure for what ails an organization:

“Like a powerful antibiotic, speed travels through the corporate bloodstream neutralizing the debilitating diseases of procrastination, apathy, confusion, malicious compliance, blame, and victim thinking.”

Stagnation is death for an organization or a person. The world is moving ahead and if we are not moving with it or better yet, ahead of it, we will fall behind (like the sick and feeble) and eventually die—as the theory of evolution and law of survival of the fittest prescribe.

Like the law of inertia, “objects [or organizations or people] at rest tend to stay at rest; objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Make no mistake about it—speed breeds speed, and the fast get faster.”

In enterprise architecture, we develop mechanisms to govern information technology. These mechanisms include architecture reviews of proposed new projects, products, and standards. The findings from these reviews get fed to the IT investment review board, who decides whether a project will be funded and how much. These governance mechanisms could be seen as detrimental to the organization’s ability to achieve change quickly.

Therefore, it is important that governance not be employed in the organization arbitrarily and that it not impose undue burden or slow the pace of innovation and transformation. Instead, IT governance should be applied so as to ensure clarity of purpose so that “good decisions are implemented with speed [to] produce good results.”

How does an organization move with alacrity?

1. Structure—developing defined, repeatable, measureable processes with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and standards for performance.
2. Personal Accountability—“taking and expecting personal responsibility for corporate results.” And accepting failure to promote success—“many of today’s top performers have a surprisingly mediocre track record, with far more losses than wins to their credit.”
3. Empathize—“when contemplating a new idea, they seek out potential resistors. Not to change their mind (not yet anyway), but to learn their mind.” Hearing and embracing opposing points of view actually can produce better decisions.
4. Education—“fast, agile companies are Learning Organizations. They are relentless in collecting information, but more important—they organize and re-distribute knowledge more effectively than their slower, less nimble competitors.”
5. Direction—“perhaps one of the most common characteristics among top performers—in every arena—is clarity of purpose.”

These disciplines for moving with speed tie directly to the goal of User-centric Enterprise Architecture, which is to provide useful and usable information products and governance services to the end-users to improve decision-making. EA provides structure through the architecture framework. It demands personal accountability through establishing the role of EA product ownership and the governance boards and setting up performance measures and criteria for selecting, controlling, and evaluating proposed new IT investments. User-centric EA empathizes with people through the human capital perspective of the architecture and through vetting enterprise information. EA provides a robust information asset base for the organization to make information easy to understand and readily available. And finally, EA sets direction for the organization by providing a clear roadmap, including a target architecture and transition plan.

What’s the biggest obstacle to speedy organizational change?

Probably the biggest speed trap for an organization or a person is fear of failure. But “even the simplest task, seemingly performed to perfection, is actually comprised of countless failures and one final correction.”

We cannot be afraid to change or to fail. We must be brave and steadfast in demanding ever-higher levels of excellence of ourselves and our organizations.

“If you want something to be scared of, then be deathly afraid of what will happen if you don’t capture the learning, make the corrections (and the connections), and go forward.”

Speed is the Name of the Game and Enterprise Architecture

Lean Six Sigma and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is one way for an organization to drive business process improvement and technology enablement. Another way is through Lean Six Sigma.

Federal Computer Week, 3 March 2008, reports that “DoD rallies around Lean Six Sigma: The methodology has become the Defense Department’s ‘tool of choice’ for business transformation.”

“Lean Six Sigma is simply a process-improvement method for reducing variability and eliminating waste.” With Six Sigma (developed by Motorola), the idea is to make processes efficient and repeatable, so that there are fewer than 3.4 defects per 1 million. The Lean (developed by Toyota) concept refers to “eliminating any steps that don’t add value.”

In Lean Six Sigma, process improvement is enabled through the following steps:

1. Define—identify problem and measures
2. Measure—capture data points
3. Analyze—discover areas for process improvement
4. Improve—implement process changes
5. Control—verify and validate that improvement is attained and sustained

In 2000, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England made Lean Six Sigma the foundation for DoD’s continuous process improvement program.

Currently, “about two-thirds of DoD organizations by some estimates are committed to Lean Six Sigma.”

DoD is training their people in Lean Six Sigma and intends to have 5% of its employees attain Green Belt (involves typically a week of training) and 1% reach Black Belt (typically involves approximately two years of training in math and statistics and several years experience working on projects as Green Belts).

However, DoD has been criticized by some for focusing more on the training, than on translating that training into practical on the job know-how to transform the Department.

Yet, by some measures DoD has made improvement. The Army claims to have “completed 770 Lean Six Sigma projects, from which it estimated savings of $1.2 billion in 2007.”

To me it seems like enterprise architects would do well to work in partnership with Lean Six Sigma professionals in order to understand the business processes, improve them, and identify requirements to technology enable those. In User-centric Enterprise Architecture, business drives technology rather than doing technology for technology’s sake. Lean Six Sigma can help business led the way for truly useable and usable technology solutions.

Lean Six Sigma and Enterprise Architecture

Spy Phones and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is running into many situations these days with new and exciting technologies that raise the hairs on the back of your neck in terms of privacy and security concerns.

One such technology is phones that provide GPS tracking on YOUR location to others and vice versa.

The Wall Street Journal, 28 March 2008, reports “would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant? Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they’re rolling out services to make it possible.”

One example, “Sprint Nextel Corp. has signed up hundreds of thousands of customers for a feature that shows them where their friends are with colored marks on a map viewable of their cellphone screens.

“Making this people-tracking possible is that cellphones today come embedded with Global Positioning System technology.” GPS was developed by DoD using a network of earth satellites that “determine an object’s [or person’s] location based on how long it takes for a signal to reach the object from satellites.”

GPS enables not only mapping features like driving instructions, but also “tracking of cellphone users’ whereabouts in real time.”

The drawback with this high potential technology is that the location-tracking may be “abused by stalkers, sexual predators, advertisers, or prosecutors.”

Sam Altman, the CEO of Loopt (the location tracking service that Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless will be using) states: “it’s one of those things, the more you think about it, the more ways you can figure out a creep could abuse it.”

A related issue is “under what circumstances carriers or service providers like Loopt will have to turn over realtime location information in criminal proceedings.” Will this require a simple subpoena or a more stringent order based on probable cause?

Sprint is concerned enough about the security and privacy issues that it requires customers sign a disclaimer that states that “Sprint is not responsible for the Loopt service” and customers disclose their location “at your own risk.” Similarly, Loopt has “several pages of disclaimers and privacy notices.”

“The Federal Communications Commission back in 2002 considered issuing regulations for commercial location services, but decided it was too early to delve into the issue. The agency says it hasn’t any plans to restart those proceedings.”

While vendors are building in a number of protections, such as limiting the users who can view your whereabouts or features that allow users to give false locations, there continue to be concerns about potential for misuse and abuse.

The result is that with promising technologies such as location-tracking and the counterbalancing issues of security and privacy, enterprise architects will continue to be challenged on recommending these as part of an organization’s target architecture and transition plan.

Spy Phones and Enterprise Architecture

Identifying a Phony and Enterprise Architecture

Part of what distinguishes a good enterprise architect from a mediocre one, is the ability to discern fact from fiction and the important from the mundane when it comes to the state of the enterprise. Having the skill to do this is critical to being able to establish viable targets and transition plans. A mediocre architect may collect information, but can’t spot the true nature of the enterprise, what is right and wrong with it and how it needs to course correct. The truly talented architect can make those distinctions.

Recently in the news there was an item about a doctored photo of a Tibetan antelope running harmoniously alongside the controversial high-speed train developed by China in the animals’ Himalayan habitat. When first released, this photo was accepted as genuine and only upon analysis was it discovered as a fake.

Just like with the photo of the Tibetan antelope, as enterprise architects, we must a look with circumspection and fine tuned analyses at the information presented, so that we can come to valid conclusions and not just accept everything at face value.

MIT Technology Review, 17 March 2008, reports that “new tools that analyze lighting in images help spot tampering.”

One MIT researcher states: “lighting is hard to fake…even frauds that look good to the naked eye are likely to contain inconsistencies that can be picked up by software.”

Similarly, in enterprise architecture, we need to proverbially shed light on the information we capture in the architecture to discern its meaning to the organization—are there really gaps or in our capabilities or does some executive just want to have the latest technology gadget to showcase? Are the redundancies identified in the enterprise needed for backup purposes or are they truly superfluous? Is a process efficient or is this just the way things have been done for so long, that no one really knows differently or wants to change? Is an opportunity really advantageous to the organization or is it fool’s gold?

These are tough questions and answered incorrectly, could lead the organizations down the wrong path and result in costly mistakes, such as unsatisfied customers, lost market share, wasted time and effort, and demoralized staff.

The MIT Technology Review article states: “many fraudulent images are created by combining parts of two or more photographs into a single image.”

Similarly, in enterprise architecture, facts are often misinterpreted or distorted by combining pieces of information that do not go together or by omitting information from the puzzle. For example, user needs and technology solutions can be combined as touted as the ideal solution for the enterprise, but in fact the solution is mismatched to the requirement. Or an IT investment may be heralded as the be all and end all, but critical information was not examined such as the security of the product, the vendor support and training available, the true cost including operations and maintenance in the out years and so on. So just as with photographs you can have errors of commission and omission.

Cynthia Baron, associate director of digital media programs at Northeastern University and author of a book on digital forensics states: “it’s amazing to me, some of the things that make their way onto the web that people believe are real. Many of the things that software can point out [as fraudulent], you can see with the naked eye, but you don’t notice it.”

This is the same with the information that enterprise architects analyze—so much of it is can be misinterpreted—but with a little more attention and a skilled architect, you can find the true meaning behind the data.

In the end a good enterprise architect can be worth their weight in gold to the organization.

Identifying a Phony and Enterprise Architecture

The Enterprise is Unwieldy and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture develops the architecture for the enterprise, right? You’d think that’s a no-brainer. Except what happens when the enterprise is so large and complex that it defies the efforts to architect it?

Federal Computer Week (FCW), 24 March 2008 reports that Dennis Wisnosky, the chief architect and chief technical officer for DoD’s Business Mission Areas states that “the Department [of Defense (DoD)] is too large an organization to attempt to encompass all of its activities in a single enterprise architecture.”

Similarly, FCW, 26 November 2007, reported that “the size of the Navy Department and the diversity of its missions make it impossible to describe the service in a single integrated architecture.”

Dennis Wisnosky goes on to say that “DoD must achieve business transformation by breaking off manageable components of an enterprise architecture rather than trying to cover everything at once…[this is how we will achieve] the goal of an enterprise architecture [which] is to guide future acquisition and implementation.”

Richard Burk, former chief architect of the Federal EA (FEA) at OMB states: “there is no practical way to create a useful architecture for a large organization. You can get an overall picture of an agency using an [enterprise architecture] of everything the agency does, but when you get down to making it operational, at that point you really need to break it down into segments, into the lines of business.”

The Navy is using the concept of segment architecture, but is calling it “architecture federation.”

Michael Jacob, the Navy’s chief technology officer, “compared the architecture effort to the development of a city plan, in which multiple buildings are built separately, but to the same set of standards and inspection criteria.”

Mr. Jacob continues that “our effort will allow common core architecture elements [technical standards, mission areas, business processes, and data taxonomies] to be identified so that architecture efforts can be aligned to those same standards.”

I believe that every level of an organization, including the highest level, can have a architecture, no matter what the size, and that we should tailor that architecture to the scope of the organization involved. So for an organization the mega-size of DoD, you would have very little detail in at the highest level, EA (like the FEA Practice Guidance demonstrates), but that the detail would build as you decompose to subsequent layers.

For any organization, no matter its size, every level of the architecture is important.

Within the enterprise architecture itself we need multiple views of detail. For example, from an executive view, we want and need to be able to roll up organizational information into summary “profiles” that executives can quickly digest and use to hit core decision points. At the same, time, from a mid-level manager or analyst view, we want and need to be able to drill down on information—to decompose it into models and inventory views--so that we can analyze it and get the details we need to make a rational decision.

Similarly, within the overall architecture, we need the various views of enterprise, segment, and solutions architecture. The enterprise view is looking at strategic outcomes for the overall enterprise; the segment view decomposes this into actionable architectures for the lines of business; and the solutions architecture “brings it all home” and operationalizes the architectures into actual solutions.

Just like with the profiles, models, and inventories of enterprise architecture where we can roll-up or down, the key with these various architectural levels is that there is line-of-sight from the enterprise to the segment and to the solution. The lower levels must align to and comply with the levels above. This is how we achieve integration, interoperability, standardization, and modernization.

The Enterprise is Unwieldy and Enterprise Architecture

Weather Engineering and Enterprise Architecture

In enterprise architecture (EA) we plan business processes improvement and technology enablement to engineer the business, drive results of operation, and manage change and transformation. We do this for both core mission functions as well as mission support and business support function in our organizations. But how far can our organizations go in architecting change and results?

For the Olympics this year, China will literally be engineering the weather!

MIT Technology Review, 25 March 2008, reports that “the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics using supercomputers and artillery.”

Here’s the architecture plan for how this will work—it involves technology and fine-tuned choreographed processes to achieve the target weather desired for the Olympics:

“To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium …the city’s branch of the National Weather Modification Office…will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer…that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second…then using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city’s engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium. Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near (the Olympics stadium)…will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over.”

China’s national weather-engineering program is also the world’s largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and crews, as well as 37,000 part time workers—mostly peasant farmers—who are on call to blast away at the clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.”

How successful is China’s weather modification program?

“The state run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain—an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China’s second largest, four times over.”

“Although they possess the world’s largest weather modification program, the Chinese point to the Russians as being the most advanced. In 1986, Russian scientists deployed cloud-seeding measures to prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Moscow.”

What’s our weather modification program like in the U.S.?

“During the 1960s and ‘70s, the United States invested millions…simultaneously the U.S. military tried to use weather modification as a weapon in Project Popeye, during the Vietnam War…[but] a 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded…‘there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of international weather modification efforts.’”

Other meteorologists disagree and say “the evidence that it works in certain situations is very compelling.”

For thousands of years, mankind has looked to gain dominion over the environment. From mere charlatans to professional engineers and architects, human beings seek to control the world around them and in essence, their very fate. With modern technology and science, supported by planning and governance, we no longer need to rely on witch doctors or rain dancers to effect change. G-d has given us the resources and the tools to try and make the world a better place.

Weather Engineering and Enterprise Architecture

Malthusian Fears and Enterprise Architecture

As enterprise architects, we plan for an unknown future. In most cases, we plan to grow and evolve our organizations to provide products and/or services well into the future. In the best case scenario, we are planning for organizational growth in terms of serving more customers, stakeholders, shareholders. We view growth as a sign that we are succeeding in the marketplace.

What happens though as the world grows more populous--is there a limit to the ability of the world to support this growth? And in such a scenario, where growth potential outstrips our ability to meet demand, how is architecture planning affected?

The Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2008, reports that “across the centuries, powerful voices have warned that human activity would overwhelm the earth’s resources…[yet] each time there were new resources to discover, new technologies to propel growth.”

But is there a limit to these resources and technological boundaries that are cause for concern?

“As the world grows more populous—the United Nations projects eight billion people by 2025, up from 6.6 billion today” and up from 1.65 billion at the turn of the 20^th century. By 2050, the projection is for 9.19 billion people!

The English demographer and political scientist, Thomas Malthus in 1798 forewarned of this problem: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce sustenance for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

Similarly, The Club of Rome think tank in 1972 raised these concerns: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next 100 years.”

The problem with the population explosion is magnified by the population becoming more prosperous. “The average person is consuming more food, water, metal, and power. Growing numbers of China’s 1.3 billion people and India’s 1.1 billion are stepping up to the middle class, adopting the high protein diets, gasoline-fueled transport, and electric gadgets that developed nations enjoy.”

“The result is that demand for resources has soared. If supplies don’t keep pace, prices are likely to climb further…and some fear violent conflict could ensue.”

Many say not to worry, that economic forces and human ingenuity will spur technological innovation, which will overcome the limits of growth and the scarcity of resources.

As enterprise architects, we play a critical role in matching requirements to technological enablers and in driving business process improvement. These are essential to organizations and the world doing more, productivity-wise, with less resources.

“New technology could help ease the resource crunch. Advances in agriculture, desalinization, and the clean production of electricity among other things would help.”

“Indeed, the true lesson of Thomas Malthus…isn’t that the world is doomed, but that preservation of human life requires analysis and then thorough action.”

For enterprise architects, we are at the center of capturing these data points, analyzing them, and making solid recommendations for our organizations to spur them to action to meet the growth head-on. Growth is good, but it is also challenging. As the population continues to grow, we are about to face extraordinary business and technological challenges for providing for the needs of many a billion.

Malthusian Fears and Enterprise Architecture

In Love with Information and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture helps to ensure the decision-makers in the organization have the information they need to make improve business processes and make sound IT investments.

In general, people love information and the more the merrier, up until the point of information overload.

We need information to survive, to gain a semblance of control over our lives, and to satisfy our human curiosity.

The Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2008, reports “why we’re powerless to resist grazing on endless web data.”

Apparently, when the human mind is stimulated with information, there is an “increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

“New and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it…it is something we seem hard-wired to do…when you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we’re junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’”

So in essence, we eat up information. We are addicted to information. (Hence, all the time your teenagers and you spend on the web).

“The reverse is true as well: we want to avoid not getting those hits, for one, we are so averse to boredom.”

In fact, when people’s minds are idle or information deprived, they seem to get into more trouble. They are bored and they seek out experiences to liven things up a little.

Years ago, before the age of planes, trains, automobiles and the Internet, people lived much more shallow lives. Most were constrained to lives that wondered no further than maybe 10-20 miles from their villages. Information was scarce. Forgot about national headlines or international intrigue. More often than not, people were misinformed and often relied on neighborly gossip.

“Today, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.”

“We are programmed for scarcity [of information, like scarcity of food] and can’t dial back when something is abundant.” Hence, we are addicted to the water hose flow of information and sometimes have the feeling that we are drowning in it.

One advantage of User-centric enterprise architecture is that it structures and regulates the flow of information, so that it is useful and usable to organization end-users. It is developed for specific users and users, and is not just more shelfware information.

In Love with Information and Enterprise Architecture

Gross National Happiness and Enterprise Architecture

“Gross domestic product, or GDP, of a country is one of the ways of measuring the size of its economy. GDP is defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country in a given period of time (usually a calendar year).” (Wikipedia)

Generally, enterprise architecture looks to improve business processes and enable them with technology to improve results of operation and productivity measures. Our national productivity is often measured in terms of its gross domestic product (GDP). But is productivity alone really the measure we need to be focused on?

The Wall Street Journal, 22-23 March 2008, reports that in the “tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan,” they have developed a new measure, called Gross National Happiness (GNH).

The idea of GNH is to balance the country’s modernization and democratization with things that will “boost morale.” The leaders of Bhutan “want to prove that they can achieve economic growth while maintaining governance, protecting the environment, and preserving an ancient culture.

“By traditional economic measures, Bhutan is doing well averaging about 7% growth annually over the past decade.” However, “fast growth should also not usher in a consumerist invasion that affects the national mood.” In other words, materialism isn’t and shouldn’t become the be all and end all!

GNH is a commitment “that if we are going to manage this change, we have to be able to measure it.” So “the government has contracted a local think tank to conduct a nation-wide survey to determine what makes people happy and what makes them sad or stressed out.”

“Researchers have fanned out across the country interviewing more than 1,000 households…the sample size is considered large in a country with only 750,000 people and not a single traffic light.”

The survey is quite comprehensive and includes “nearly 300 questions [that] take several hours to complete.”

Interestingly enough, Bhutan’s planning commission was even renamed early this year to the Gross National Happiness Commission—as we know, enterprise architecture is all about planning and governance too; wouldn’t it be cool to call EA, enterprise happiness and have it focus on a balance of organizational performance factors that are not just based on productivity, but also on truly improving human life?

Even the blueprint for Bhutan’s future (or their target architecture) includes happiness as a goal. The plan is called “Bhutan 2020: A Vision for Peace, Prosperity, and Happiness.” How many of us can say that our organizations’ strategic plans or architectures includes happiness as a dimension of our planning?

While, we focus on architecting our organizations for success, we need to remember that success is multi-dimensional. Yes, productivity, innovation, efficiency, and technological prowess are important. But we must not lose sight of the bigger picture, which is respect for the individual, and as the United States Declaration of Independence so eloquently puts it—what really important— “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Gross National Happiness and Enterprise Architecture