December 18, 2007

Power of Persuasion and Enterprise Architecture

In Fortune Magazine, 12 November 2007, Retired General Wesley Clark explains “Leadership is the art of persuading the other fellow to want to do what you want him to do.”

Wesley K. Clark, Former Supreme Commander of NATO, explains that effective execution of power, includes the following:

Key lesson #1:

In business, it is important to motivate through the power of shared goals, shared objectives, and shared standards.”

Clark goes on to explain that there are three ways to persuade others:

  • Education—“Employee education is one of the most cost-effective investments that businesses can make.”
  • Participation—“Employees need to become vested in their work through participation.”
  • Co-option—“Building and maintaining the emotional bonds of teamwork, loyalty, and trust.”

Key lesson #2:

”Essentially leaders have to sell themselves and their programs to their teams, in order to influence.”

Leadership, influence, persuasion, building shared community—these are all necessary skills to developing and maintaining an effective User-centric EA program. Architecture isn’t done in a vacuum or an ivory tower, it’s a grass roots effort that takes leadership skills to motivate others through the development of shared goals and objectives—such as, business-technology alignment, information sharing and accessibility, systems interoperability and component re-use, technology standardization and simplification, and information confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy.

We get to these EA goals, through educating others, engaging with them, and building a shared vision and sense of team, and “not by calling in the air-force.” as Wesley Clark would say.


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December 17, 2007

Information Privacy and Enterprise Architecture

The Privacy Act of 1974 states: “no agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.” However, there are certain exception for statistical, archival, and law enforcement purposes.

What is privacy?

In MIT Technology Review, “The Talk of The Town: You—Rethinking Privacy In an Immodest Age” (November/December 2007), by Mark Williams, the author states Columbia University professor emeritus of public law Alan F. Westin defines privacy as, ‘the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.’”

Do we have privacy?

Already in 1999, Sun Microsystems chairman Scott ­McNealy stated, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

These days, there is no illusion of privacy, as young people routinely put their biographical details and images online at a myriad of social-networking websites. Moreover, “kids casually accept that the record of their lives could be Googled by anyone at any time…some even considered their elders' expectations about privacy to be a weird, old-fogey thing--a narcissistic hang-up.”

Privacy is certainly not an absolute, especially since we need to balance the right to privacy against the first amendment guarantee of free speech. However, when people think their rights to privacy has been abused they have recourse to tort, defamation, and privacy law.

EA’s role in privacy:

User-centric EA supports the Investment Review Board selection, prioritization, and funding of new IT investments with architecture reviews and assessments; these EA reviews include a detailed appraisal of everything in the “information” perspective, including information management, sharing, accessibility, assurance, records, and of course privacy issues.

Furthermore, more detailed privacy impact assessments (PIAs) must be conducted, according to the the E-Government Act of 2002, “when developing or procuring IT systems or projects that collect, maintain or disseminate information in identifiable form from or about members of the public.”

Although Generation Y does not particularly seem to value their privacy as you'd expect, EA, along with the privacy officer and the chief information security officer, plays a critical role in monitoring and ensuring the privacy of information managed by the enterprise.
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Master Data Management and Enterprise Architecture

“Master Data Management (MDM), also known as Reference Data Management, is a sub-discipline of data architecture within Information Technology (IT) that focuses on the management of reference or master data that is shared by several disparate IT systems and groups. MDM is required to enable consistent computing between diverse system architectures and business functions.” (Wikipedia)

Master data are the critical nouns of a business and fall generally into four groupings: people, things, places, and concepts. Further categorizations within those groupings are called subject areas, domain areas, or entity types…Master data can be described by the way that it interacts with other data. For example, in transaction systems, master data is almost always involved with transactional data. A customer buys a product. A vendor sells a part, and a partner delivers a crate of materials to a location… Master data can be described by the way that it is Created, Read, Updated, Deleted, and searched. This life cycle is called the CRUD cycle…Why should I manage master data? Because it is used by multiple applications, an error in master data can cause errors in all the applications that use it. (“The What, Why, and How of Master Data Management” by Wolter and Haselden, Microsoft Corporation, November 2006)

How can MDM software help manage MDM? Wolter and Haselden identify three primary methods:

  • Single-copy of master data—where all changes and additions are made to the master and all applications accessing it use the current master data set
  • Multiple copies of master data—master data is updated in a single master, but the data is sent out to the source systems where data sets are stored locally and changes to non-master data can be made)
  • Continuous merge—where changes are made to the source data sets and are sent to the master to be merged and resent out to the source data sets again.

CIO.com, in “Demystifying Master Data Management”, 30 April 2007 reports that “unfortunately, most companies don't have a precise view about their customers, products, suppliers, inventory or even employees. Whenever companies add new enterprise applications to "manage" data, they unwittingly contribute to an overall confusion about a corporation's overall view of the enterprise. As a result, the concept of master data management (MDM)—creating a single, unified view of an organization—is growing in importance.” However, the article notes that adding MDM technologies will not magically correct an organization’s data quality issues, as noted in “a recent report from The Data Warehousing Institute that found 83 percent of organizations suffer from bad data for reasons that have nothing to do with technology. Among the causes of poor-quality data were inaccurate reporting, internal disagreements over which data is appropriate and incorrect definitions rendering the data unusable.”

So the essence of an MDM initiative is to first improve data quality by developing the process to define, categorize, and identify authoritative sources for data, and only then to apply MDM software to build a single view of the data.

MDM is important to enterprise architecture for a number of reasons:

  • Information sharing—MDM is critical to information sharing, data integration, and reconciliation, as it establishes an authoritative source of data that can be shared between systems or organizational entities.
  • Data governanceMDM helps establish the basis for sound data governance, since data owners, stewards, and users need to be able to distinguish good data from bad data, define data objects, establish data standards, metadata requirements and registries for discoverability, access rights, transfer protocols and methods, and maybe most importantly a governance process that defines who is allowed to change system data and how.
  • Business IntelligenceMDM enables business intelligence by providing for an integration of data for mining, reporting, and decision support.

Creating authoritative master data is an imperative for data and systems integrity, and good decision making based on sound enterprise data.


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December 16, 2007

The Dunbar 150 and Enterprise Architecture

We need a network of people in our life (family, friends, and colleagues) to accomplish most anything meaningful, including building an enterprise architecture to grow and mature an organization.

But is there a limit to how many significant others we can have?

The Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2007 reports that “several commentators and news articles have cautioned that there is a natural limit to a friendship circle. They typically cite the so-called Dunbar number, 150, as the ceiling on our personal contacts.”

However, with social networking sites and other technological means of keeping in contact (cell phones, email, instant messaging, and so on), we are looking at an expansion of our ability to connect with others and the numbers of others we can stay in contact with.

Some have questioned, whether as you increase the number of casual relationships, it comes at the expense of those closest to you—“those you turn to when in severe distress.”

Others have questioned whether technology really enables close relationships. In other words, technology helps communicate and stay in contact with larger numbers of people, but to be close “you really do need to be touchy-feely with people.”

What social networking sites do help with is “less-close friendships and acquaintances,” those “at the outer edges of your friend group…people who you don’t talk to regularly…but your likely to swap tales, or more, should your paths cross...you have a history.”

The Dunbar 150 limit on effective social interactions seems more limited to a time when people were less mobile and were confined to a single village or a lifetime job. “But modern man moves among several groups in a fragmented world.” New ranges for maintaining effective relationships are between 100 to 300.

In the end, while cheap and readily available communication can “enrich your life wih more contacts,” real relationships require more than just communication, such as mutual investments of time, giving (sacrifice), trust, and respect to name a few,

Clearly, a large undertaking like building and maintaining an enterprise architecture (that influences organization-wide decision-making, serves as a true planning mechanism, and is utilized for IT governance, cannot be done by a single architect or by a staff of architects. It is an endeavor that requires outreach and communication up and down and across the organization as well as reaching outside for best-practices and looking at market trends. To build an EA for large organization, I think the Dunbar 150 may be a limit easily exceedable by a good chief enterprise architect.
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Want Versus Should and Enterprise Architecture

In the Harvard Business Review (HBR) whitepaper entitled, “Harnessing Our Inner Angels and Demons” by Milkman, Rogers, and Bazerman, the authors describe the “conflict when deciding whether to behave responsibly or indulge in impulsivity”, what the authors call the want/should conflict.

How do we define want and should?

“Some options are preferred by the should self (e.g. salads, documentary films, trips to the gym, etc.), while others are preferred by the want self (e.g. ice cream cones, action films, skipping the gym, etc.).”

How do we decide between the want and should options?

“The optimal choice between want and should options requires summing the short-run and long-run utility that would be gained from each option and selecting whichever provides more discounted net utility. Although should options have more long-run benefits than want options, in many cases the short-run benefits of a want option may be significant enough to outweigh the long-run benefits of a should option.”

An example:

While salad is a should option, and pizza a want option, we frequently chose the pizza, because the short-term instant gratification of the pizza outweighs the perceived long-terms health benefits of the salad.

How does this should/want conflict impact EA?

User-centric EA is all about making choices and trade-off decisions. The enterprise has limited resources and so must chose between IT investment options. Some of these investment may be want options and others may be should options. For example, user may want to upgrade their desktops with the “latest and greatest” computer model and options every year or two. However, the enterprise should invest in business intelligence or customer relationship management software, for example, that will yield significant long-term utility to the organization. Which option does the Investment Review Board choose? Which option is called for in the EA target architecture and transition plan? The HBR whitepaper shows us to measure the utility and make decisions based on the net utility to the enterprise. In this way, the organization gets the greatest good for its IT investment dollars.
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Wii and Enterprise Architecture

We all think of kids and teens playing with video games like the Wii, but how about senior citizens?

Well, The Washington Post, 15 December 2007, reports in “Granny Got Game” that “Wii’s move-around style appeals to a new demographic,” the senior citizen.

“Bingo is looking a little like last year’s thing, as video games have recently grabbed a spot the hot new activity. More specifically, retirees are enthusiastically taking to games on the Wii.”

One 73 year old retired marine says he “likes that the Wii emulates the motion of real sports.” And research has shown the physical games are helpful in fighting obesity, similar to how mental activity is beneficial in staving off dementia.

Market research company ESA states that “in 2007, 24 percent of Americans over age 50 played video games, an increase from 9 percent in 1999.” The seniors seem to enjoy games, such as Wii “hockey, bowling, shooting, fishing, and billiards.”

For Nintendo the maker of the Wii, demand from the various demographics continues to outpace supply. “Some analysts have said the company could sell twice as many as it is making available today, even as it puts out 1.8 million units a month.”

The Wii is a brilliant stroke of User-centric enterprise architecture. The Wii is a genuinely a technology product with mass market consumer appeal with users in demographics that range from children to seniors. It is the fulfillment of IT planning by Nintendo, which “had always wanted to appeal to a large consumer base with the Wii.”

Nintendo hit a home run by aligning the Wii technology to the requirements of their users. Nintendo did this by developing a technology solution to handle not only people’s desire for gaming and entertainment, but also their need for physical activity and sports. What’s particularly amazing is that video games, which have traditionally been for kids and teens have extended their reach so much so that “among retirement communities…the Wii is ‘the hottest thing out there.’” That is good User-centric EA in action!


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December 15, 2007

Monopoly and Enterprise Architecture

Monopoly─“a board game published by Parker Brothers, an imprint of Hasbro.…since Charles Darrow patented the game in 1935, approximately 750 million people have played the game, making it "the most played [commercial] board game in the world.” (Wikipedia)

Now according to The Washington Post, 15 December 2007, the classic board game is getting a technology makeover.

Monopoly “is one of the most popular games ever…its colored stacks of money─from the white $1 bills to the coveted bright orange $500 bills—have iconic status.”

Yet, even this classic game is being re-architected for the 21st century. In a new edition of Monopoly released this year, electronic bank cards replace colored money and the processes to track your game’s transactions has been reengineered and replaces good old-fashioned counting and scorekeeping.

The changeover in the game of Monopoly is mimicked in the new game of Life, Twists & Turns, and is a reflection of the change in society from being currency-based (with bills and change) to credit and debit cards. As a senior analyst at a consumer behavior research firm states: “I think this is a case of updating the game play/design to reflect the times.”

These days, “our wealth (or lack thereof) becomes just a number, printed on a bland receipt spit out from an ATM.” Moreover, “cash has become such a hassle that it is a nuisance even in our imaginations.” Imagine that: saying the cash is a nuisance (I bet that is a nuisance that a lot of people would like to get their hands on. J)

So Hasbro has reinvented the game to reflect changes in our society. This is a clear case of technology (electronic bank cards) being applied to a business problem (the out-datedness of the paper-based currency in the game). This is enterprise architecture and consumer marketing at work together and in tandem.

If even the Monopoly game that I used to play with as a kid can be refashioned with some good ‘ol doses of EA, imagine what EA can do for other businesses, products, and services. Reengineering business processes and applying technology to improve outcomes is a plus for board games, but an even stronger medicine for organizations and our economy.


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December 14, 2007

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Enterprise Architecture

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was the thirty-second President of the United States. Elected to four terms in office, he served from 1933 to 1945, and is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms. A central figure of the 20th century during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war, he has consistently been ranked as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents in scholarly surveys.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Roosevelt created the New Deal to provide relief for the unemployed, recovery of the economy, and reform of the economic and banking systems. Although recovery of the economy was incomplete until almost 1940, many programs initiated in the Roosevelt administration continue to have instrumental roles in the nation's commerce, such as the FDIC, TVA, and the SEC. One of his most important legacies is the Social Security system.”

“The New Deal had three components: direct relief, economic recovery, and financial reform. These goals were also called the ‘Three Rs.’"

  • Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population most affected by the depression.
  • Recovery was the effort in many programs to restore normal economic health.
  • Reform was based on the idea that the Great Depression was caused by market instability and that government intervention was necessary to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor.”

President Roosevelt was a man of great accomplishment:

  • Domestically—“On the homefront his term saw the vast expansion of industry, the achievement of full employment, restoration of prosperity and new opportunities opened for African-Americans and women.”
  • Internationally, At War—Additionally, during World War II, “Roosevelt…provided decisive leadership against Nazi Germany and made the United States the principal arms supplier and financier of the Allies who later, alongside the United States, defeated Germany, Italy and Japan.”
  • Internationally, At Peace—“Roosevelt played a critical role in shaping the post-war world, particularly through the Yalta Conference and the creation of the United Nations.”
  • Personally—FDR showed amazing courage and was determined to regain use of his legs (that had been laid waste from the disease polio) through swimming.

(adapted from Wikipedia)

Wow, what an amazing President!

FDR was the impedemy of a doer and fighter. When the world was in chaos, whether from the Great Depression, World War II, or on a personal level when he contracted Polio at age 39, he came out with a plan and acted on it—whether the war he was fighting was povery and social ills, fascism and totalitarianism, or personal illness—FDR was a man of action and achievement, and this country was the great beneficiary.

FDR “brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and asserted in his Inaugural Address, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/fr32.html)

FDR is a role model for leadership, but to me, he is also a paradigm for User-centric EA. Why? EA done correctly is not only about having a plan OR about taking action, but rather it is about developing a sound plan AND executing on it the way FDR did over and over again over 4 terms as President. He came up with the plan for the New Deal and successfully executed it, so that 75 years later many elements are still fundamental to our system of social and economic policy and administration. Also, FDR came up with a plan to defeat the Axis in WWII and he with Winston Churchill led us to success. Unfortunately, no amount of planning or execution could successfully fight Polio before the discovery of a vaccine by Jonas Salk.

In summary, EA is not only about planning and governance, but it’s about helping the organization to execute and achieve on its plan. EA does this by developing the transition plan, which logically sequences incremental change for the organization, as well as by working closely with leadership, subject matter experts and stakeholders to actually guide and influence positive change.

All EA practitioners can learn to plan and execute from the master, FDR!

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Disruptive Technologies and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA plans for the future of the enterprise and is on the lookout for both incremental innovation as well as disruptive technologies.
  • A disruptive technology is a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market. Sometimes, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents. (Adapted from Wikipedia).Disruptive technologies are innovations on steroids.
  • Innovations improve product performance of established products. Innovations are often incremental; however, they can also be radical or discontinuous.

How does EA plan for innovation, whether incremental or those that are revolutionary and disruptive?

  • Structure and content—First, EA captures critical baseline and forward looking content from subject matter experts and is responsible for developing a useful and usable structure for the content which enables analysis and recommendation for filling gaps, eliminating redundancies, and creating efficiencies through new technology solutions and process improvement. EA does not actually "own" the content of the architecture. EA develops and maintains the structure. EA works with the subject matter experts (business and technical) to capture the content. In general, facilitates the architecture development, maintenance, and use, so that the content stays current, accurate, and complete, is easy to understand, and is readily accessible to end-users.
  • Synthesis of business and technology—EA synthesizes business and technical information to get a holistic view of the enterprise and where it is going in terms of mission execution performance, functions and process, information requirements, and technology solutions. In this way, EA ensures that new technologies are aligned to mission (i.e. that business is driving technology, rather than technology for technologies sake).
  • Target architecture—EA captures explicit and explicit information in the enterprise and conducts market research and outreach to partners to continuously understand the business and technical landscape and how it may be changing and builds this into the target architecture.
  • Change management (transition plan)—EA believes in a phased approach to change, and helps to manage, guide, and influence these through EA information products and governance services (such as EA Board technical reviews of new EA projects, products, and standards). So even though technology may be radically changing, EA will guide the organization through a phased transition plan, such that the enterprise vets proposed changes, gradually adopts new innovations and is able to integrate it with its existing processes successfully. In other words, EA seeks to ensure that technology is not brought in prematurely, before business process reengineering or improvement occurs. Thus, even though technologies may be disruptive from a market perspective, they are not disruptive to the organization and its mission performance. There is always innovation, and this is a great thing for all of us. It provides us with new opportunities and better, faster, and cheaper ways of doing things.

EA is at the forefront in facilitating innovation—continuously scanning for innovations to bring into the target architecture, conducting regular outreach and market research to synthesize business and technology information, building a useful framework for the EA information, and vetting and phasing in change in consumable chunks by the organization.

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The Dialectic and Enterprise Architecture

Hegel [a German philosopher (1770-1831)] stresses the paradoxical nature of consciousness; he knows that the mind wants to know the whole truth, but that it cannot think without drawing a distinction. Unfortunately, every distinction has two terms, every argument has a counter-argument, and consciousness can only focus on one of these at a time. So it fixes first on the one, then under pressure fixes second on the other, until it finally comes to rest on the distinction itself. Hegel refers to this process of alternation and rest as dialectic. Dialectical motion has three stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.”

Here is an example of how the dialectic works:

  • Thesis: Starting point—the glass is half full
  • Antithesis: Negation of the thesis—the glass is half empty
  • Synthesis: Negation of the opposition between thesis and antithesis—the glass is half full and half empty

The mind generally moves from one side of an opposition to another, finally discovering a deeper unity from which the two sides are derived.”

(http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/courses/hegel/DIALECTX.HTM)

In common man’s terms, I believe this is like the metaphor of the swinging pendulum. The pendulum swings from one side to the opposite (like one’s thinking or behavior), until finally settling somewhere in the middle. The dialectic is little deeper in that it has the added dimension of not just a middle position, but actually a synthesis of the two extremes.

In Judaism, there is a principle similar to the “synthesis” in the dialectic, advocated by the Rambam, called the Shvil Hazahav, the golden path. The golden path is also sometimes referred to as the middle of the road approach. This is the concept of the importance of maintaining a balance in one’s thinking, behavior, and in life, in general. Extremes on either side (to the right or to the left) are viewed as negative and possibly even dangerous. But by following the path in the middle, a person is on “safe ground” and will thrive.

In User-centric EA, the dialectic is central to the EA practitioner and EA is a major synthesizing agent in the organization, in the following ways:

  • EA practitioners take two dialectical opposites (business and technology) and bring synthesis to them. EA practitioners integrates the two realities of the organization, business and IT: business drives technology and technology enables business. EA is a communication channel and mechanism for bridging the needs of the business with the capabilities and solutions of technology.
  • EA synthesizes the architectures of all the distinct lines of business, users, and developers. EA is not focused on the individual segments (lines of business) or on solutions (users and developers), but on the synthesis of these—the overall enterprise itself.
  • EA develops the target and transition plan for the organization; in doing this, it hears positions and requirements from many different leaders, subject matter experts, and stakeholders, and must synthesize these into a viable and effective strategy for the organization.
EA, like the dialectic, synthesizes various extremes to derive deeper meaning from the distinct elements (such as business and technology, segment and solutions architecture, leaders and subject matter experts). By synthesizing various types of information, EA perspectives, stakeholders, and architectural views, EA brings out a richer, deeper meaning of IT planning and governance for the organization.

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Porter's Five Forces Model and Enterprise Architecture

“Porter's 5 forces analysis is a framework for industry analysis and business strategy development developed by Michael E. Porter in 1979 of Harvard Business School….It uses…5 forces to determine the competitive intensity and therefore attractiveness of a market…They consist of those forces close to a company that affect its ability to serve its customers and make a profit. A change in any of the forces normally requires a company to re-assess the marketplace…Strategy consultants use Porter's five forces framework when making a qualitative evaluation of a firm's strategic position..”

Porter's Five Forces include the following:

Three forces from 'horizontal' competition -

  1. threat of substitute products
  2. the threat of established rivals
  3. the threat of new entrants

and two forces from 'vertical' competition -

  1. the bargaining power of suppliers
  2. bargaining power of customers

(Adapted from Wikipedia)

“The definition of your industry and competition is not a ‘mechanical task’, but requires objectivity and imagination. Strategic planning is not only about today’s customer needs and today’s competitors, but also about future needs and future competitors.”

Porter’s Five Forces Model helps identify industry forces and market attractiveness. Combining the Five Forces (“microenvironmental factors”) with other factors like technological change, growth and volatility of the market, and government and regulatory intervention (“macroenvironmental factors”) is a powerful tool for market analysis and strategy development.

(Adapted from American Management Association)

The Five Forces Model is a terrific tool to understand your industry and decide whether you have a competitive advantage (cost, technological…) that will enable you to serve your customers and do it profitably.Analyzing the Five Forces helps EA practitioners to understand their organization’s competition—and decide whether the enterprise can deliver their value proposition more effectively than their competitors and successfully defend against them. EA is not only about technology differentiation, but also about general planning and governing for the organization's success and longevity.

Furthermore, the competitive environment is constantly changing. So the enterprise can never feel “fat and happy” and ignore micro- and macroeconomic factors. The successful strategy in today’s marketplace may be a failing strategy in tomorrow’s. Therefore, EA must constantly monitor the environment and adapt its strategy accordingly.

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Architecting Politics With Mind Reading

Enterprise architecture is good when it help the organization improve mission execution and achieve desired results of operation. However, what happens when it is used to influence politics and elections, such as through the application of brain scanning technology to get votes?

The Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2007 reports that neuroscience and mind reading is being used for “monitoring voters’ brains, pupils and pulses, [and] may be more effective than listening to what they have to say.”

How is this monitoring taking place?

Technology is being applied to support the information requirements of the mission, which in this case is to see what provokes positive images and voting tendencies from candidates to the populace. For example, recently, “volunteers watched the debate while wearing electrode-studded headsets that track electrical activity in the brain.”

How widespread is this?

Neuromarketing firms across the country are pitching their services to presidential campaigns.” One example is “a biofeedback program that tracks brain waves, pupil dilation, perspiration, and facial-muscle movements.”

One Stanford political scientist, who works with the American National Election Studies, that “we need a tricky way to get into people’s minds and find out who they’re going to vote for instead of asking directly.” Another research director stated, “traditional methods of polling voters are sometimes inaccurate — ‘people may say one thing in a focus group and do another thing in the voting booth.’”

How long has this been going on?

“In the 1980s, focus groups became popular, as did ‘dial groups’ where participants register their reactions to candidates with electronic dials. The most cited innovation in 2004 was microtargeting, a strategy borrowed from corporate marketing firms that involves tailoring specific messages to individual households based on their consumer profiles…in recent years, advances in brain scanning technology have allowed researchers to identify areas of the brain involved in political beliefs.”

The neuroethics program director at the University of Pennsylvania stated that “taken to its logical limit, it’s a kind of mind reading." While a democratic strategist stated that “the wide adoption of these techniques is inevitable.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, one has to wonder whether this type of “mind reading” and architecting of politics using the latest in brain scanning technologies is really appropriate. Why are we “tailoring the message" to voters, based on the technical scanning of their brains, instead of being honest and forthright about political means and ends. Perhaps, we are getting to slick with the technology and applying it a little too liberally to an area that should be quite personal and important – people’s politics and voting behaviors.

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December 13, 2007

Wanted Enterprise Architect!

A friend at work sent me an interesting article from Business Intelligence Review (www.bireview.com) 13 December 2007 about someone who recently went to the Gartner EA Summit in Las Vegas and what he learnt about enterprise architects.

He writes that “If you set out to write the most outlandish job description in corporate America, your classified ad might read something like this:

Wanted: Person or persons to chart IT and business transformation in a huge, old established corporation. Candidate(s) will model current and future states of business drivers, regulation and market dynamics along with the functional role structure of all business units and sub-units. Candidate must understand and relate technology projects and project portfolio, integration programs, application and information systems, business processes (and everything else we own) to business optimization for future planned market dominance. Salary TBD.”

Later the author recounts how “one vendor described, the perfect EA might be ‘half cowboy VP with clout, half academic.’ It’s a situational role.”

He goes to say that while “most demonstrations I saw represented the incipient need for EA more than its result. You could say that EA is in part providing some insurance against future risk and some assurance that investments will make more sense going forward …You can’t help but salute these individuals, their visionary companies and the work they are doing.”

From my perspective, I don’t know about the cowboy VP with clout piece, but what I do know is that EA is not a job for the faint of heart.

An enterprise architect must understand and be able to straddle both the business and technical sides of the house. EA’s have responsibility for architecture perspectives that range from performance, business, information, systems, technology, and security. They must understand not only the mission and business functions and processes and desired results of operation, but also how that translates into information requirements and various technology solutions. Further, EA’s need to be able to translate the business requirements to the techies. Simultaneously, EA’s must be knowledgeable in a broad swath of technology areas (such as systems, technologies, standards, IT security, information sharing techniques, IT best practices, IT governance, IT planning, service oriented architecture, modeling, and so on). Enterprise architects must be able to not only know the current technologies, but also have an eye out toward the emerging. EA’s must be able to explain technical jargon in simple, easy-to-understand language to business executives and program offices. EA’s develop the current and planned state of the enterprise and a path for getting from one to the other.

EA’s need to work across the entire organization, as well as up and down the hierarchy—from being expert in enterprise architecture, to also being highly knowledgeable in line of business segment architectures and developers’ solutions architecture. EA have to develop and maintain catalogues of information; business, data, and systems models, and high-level visual profiles that can “paint a picture” for executives in 5 seconds or less. EA must not only develop and maintain these information assets, but they must be able to analyze them and come up with meaningful, actionable findings and recommendations (like gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities) for executive management. EA’s should be experts in organizational culture and change management/tranformation. EA needs to be able to articulate its vision for the organization and to present regularly to staff, management, and executives. EA’s provide not only information products to the enterprise, but also governance services in terms of technical reviews of new IT projects, products, and standards. EA’s deal with internal subject matter experts and stakeholders and also external private and public sector entities that provide best practices, legal requirements, and other mandates.

EA is a challenging, invaluable, and awesome field to work in!


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December 11, 2007

Information Security and Enterprise Architecture

Information security is generally considered a cross-cutting area of enterprise architecture. However, based on its importance to the overall architecture, I treat information security as its own perspective (similar to performance, business, information, services, and technology).

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 11 December 2007, professional hackers are getting smarter and more sophisticated in their attacks and this requires new IT tools to protect the enterprise. Here are some of the suggestions:

  1. Email scams—“hackers have responded to improved filtering software and savvier population by aiming their attacks at specific individuals, using publicly available information to craft a message designed to dupe a particular person of group of people” In response, organizations are installing antivirus and antimalware software from multiple vendors to increase the chance, the an attack that gets by one security software products, will be stopped by one of the others. These products can be obtained from vendors like Sophos, Sybari, Micosoft, Symantec, and McAfee.
  2. Key loggers—“one common form of malware is a key logger, which captures the user names and passwords that an unsuspecting computer user types, and then sends these to a hacker.” However, software from Biopassword Inc. can thwart this by recording employees typing rhythms, so that even a hacker that knows a username and password is denied access if he types too fast or too slow.
  3. Patrolling the network—hackers who get past the firewall often have free rein to roam once inside the network. However, CoSentry Networks Inc. has a product that imposes controls on where a user can go on the network, so even someone with a valid login will be prevented from snooping around the network or accessing information from an unapproved location.
  4. Policing the police—one of the biggest threats to an enterprise is from the insiders, employees who have access to the systems and information. Software from Application Security Inc., however, monitors access, changes, repeated failed logins, and suspicious activity and notifies the designated security officer.

From a user-centric EA standpoint, information security is paramount to protect the enterprise, its mission execution, its employees, and stakeholders. As the WSJ points out, “breaches of corporate computer security have reached epidemic proportions. So far this year more than 270 organizations have lost sensitive information like customer credit-card or employee social security numbers—and those are just the ones that have disclosed such incidents publicly.” EA must help the chief information security officer to identify these enterprise security threats and select appropriate countermeasures to implement.


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December 10, 2007

An Ant Colony and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric enterprise architecture supplies critical business and technical information to the end users in the organization to enhance IT planning, governance, and overall decision-making. When developed and communicated effectively, EA is a tremendous information asset to the organization that aids the enterprise in making sound IT investment decisions, aligning technology to mission, and enhancing results of operation.

In the book The Art of War for Executives by Donald G. Krause, the author shows that Sun Tzu’s model for effective, or what he calls “Natural Organizations,” is based on their existence to serve a specific purpose, their information-centered capability, and their adaptability. All of which are highly supportive of the need for a strong EA!

  1. Defined purpose—enterprises need to have a clear mission and this is supported by an enterprise architecture that captures performance outcomes, mission functions, process, activities, and tasks, and seeks to provide the information required to perform those.
  2. Information-centered—“organizations seek and use data as a basis for action. They avoid unwarranted opinion and conjecture, choosing to deal with uncertainty by estimating reasonable probabilities.” Enterprise with a strong EA, with useful and useable information products, have the requisite information to base meaningful decisions on.
  3. Adaptability—“organizations respond quickly and effectively to changes in their environment.” Setting realistic EA targets and transition plans help an organization first of all assess their environment and then to make requisite plans to address change.

Ant colonies are an example of effective organizations that rely on EA-like capabilities:

“Ant colonies have survived for hundreds of millions of years. They exist solely for the purpose of providing food and shelter to its members…are totally information-centered (seeking information about food and shelter and transmitting that to others in the organization), and adapt by changing location and methods to take advantage of opportunities discovered by members.” (adapted from The Art of War For Executives)

While human organizations are obviously more complex than ant colonies and survive by more than simply the search for food and shelter, the simile is apropos:

  • When applied to Sun Tzu’s army, their philosophy for success hinged, like the ant colony, on their ability to come together for a defined purpose, in their case to handle whatever threat or opportunity arose.
  • Sun Tzu’s superior commanders were information-centered, succeeding “in situations where ordinary people fail because they obtain more timely information and use it more quickly,”—they gather, process, use, and give out information.
  • The adaptability of Sun Tzu’s army, enabled them to “respond quickly and adapt readily to changing circumstances…like water, they flow around obstacles and challenges, always seeking to follow the most effective path.”

Like the tried and true success factors for Sun Tzu’s army or the regimented, age-old ant colonies found around the world, organizations succeed through defined purpose, information-centricity, and flexibility. And EA, as a discipline, assists in all of these: focusing and magnifying an organization’s purpose through a well documented and communicated architecture; ensuring information discovery and exchange—often through technology—to support business processes; helping an organization to readily adapt and change through the establishment of targets and transition plans to remain competitive and successful in the marketplace.

From an information perspective, efficient organizations mimic organizations with strong EA’s:

  • Organizations “much like new computer chips…create a greater number of channels to move information faster. They also reduce system overhead by reducing unnecessary intramural data requirements (e.g. interoffice memos, unused reports). They increase system response by obtaining more and higher quality information; by training organization members to use information properly; by ensuring that organization members have quick access to data and allowing them to make and execute informed decision based on information; and by efficiently transmitting information to organization members and outsiders.

In large measure, information is at the center of an EA program. EA information is used for helping organization end-users make better IT decisions, and technology investments helps provide information better, faster, and cheaper to support the mission. Like an ant colony survives on information, an organization’s very survival can depend on timely and actionable information.


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December 9, 2007

Master of Paradox and the Enterprise Architect

As enterprise architects, we need to have clarity of vision to see what is and to chart a way ahead for the organization. Yet, we live amidst polarities and paradoxes, which are challenges for every enterprise architect to see through.

In the book The Empty Raincoat, by Charles Handy, the author identifies nine paradoxes that we need not only be aware of, but also be focused on, so that we can find a better way forward for ourselves, our enterprises, and society.

Here are the top six paradoxes (of nine) of our time:

  1. Intelligence—“brains are replacing brawn…knowledge and know-how is the new source of wealth, [yet] it is impossible to give people intelligence by decree, to redistribute it. It is not even possible to leave it to your children when you die…It is not possible to take this new form of intelligence away from anyone. Intelligence is sticky…nor is it possible to own someone else’s intelligence…It is hard to prevent the brains walking out the door if they want to…intelligence is a leaky form of property. [Finally,] intelligence tends to go where intelligence is. Well educated people give their families good education.”
  2. Work—“some have work and money, but too little time, while others have all he time, but no work and no money…we also use money as the measure of efficiency. Our organizations, therefore want the most work for the least money while individuals typically want the most money for the least work.”
  3. Productivity—“productivity means ever more and ever better work from ever fewer people…as more and more people get pushed out or leave organizations…[they] do for themselves, what they used to pay others to do for them.” In a sense the newly unemployed stifle market demand and further growth.
  4. Time—“we never seem to have enough time, yet there has never been so much time available to us. We live longer and we use less time to make and do things as we get more efficient…[yet] we have created an insidious cycle of work and spend, as people increasing look to consumption to give satisfaction and even meaning to their lives.”
  5. Riches—“economic growth depends, ultimately, on more and more people wanting more and more and more things…If , however, we look only at the rich societies, we see them producing fewer babies every year and living longer. Fewer babies mean fewer customers, eventually, while living longer lives mean, usually poorer and more choosy customers.”
  6. Organizations—“more than ever, they need to be global and local at the same time, to be small in some ways but big in others, to be centralized some of the time and decentralized most of it. They expect their workers to be more autonomous and more of a team, their managers to be more delegating and more controlling…they have to be planned yet flexible, be differentiated and integrated at the same time, be mass-marketers while catering for many niches, they must introduce new technology, but allow workers to be masters of their own destiny; they must find ways to get variety and quality and fashion, and all at low-cost.”

Can we as enterprise architects ever resolve these paradoxes?

While, we cannot resolve the polarities of society, we can find ways to balance them, move between the extremes “intelligently,” as appropriate for the situation, and search for better way to adapt. We do this not only to survive, but to help our organizations and society thrive in spite of the paradoxes. “Life will never be easy, nor perfectible, nor completely predictable. It will be best understood backwards [20-20 hindsight], but we have to live it forwards. To make it livable, at all levels, we have to learn to use paradoxes, to balance the contradictions and the inconsistencies and to use them as an invitation to find a better way.”

So as architects what specifically can we do?

As architects, we are advisors to the Chief Information Officer (from a technology-business alignment perspective), Chief Financial Officer (from an IT investment perspective), and to the Chief Procurement Officer and Line of Business Program Managers (from an IT execution standpoint) and other organizational decision-makers. In this advisory role, we can help point out the polarities and paradoxes that may be driving the organization one way or the other, or actually in a conflicting, bi-directional manner. As advisors, we can highlight gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities and suggest ways to improve or capitalize on this. But most importantly of all, by having a structured way of thinking about IT planning and governance, we can provide a perspective to the organization that may otherwise be neglected or trashed (in favor of operations), and we can provide clarity to the organization in terms of planning and governance processes, when the organization may otherwise just be blowing around in the wind of universal contention.

"There are kings [executives] and there are prophets [architects]...the kings have the power and the prophets have the principles...but every king needs his prophet, to help him, and increasingly her, keep a clear head amidst all the confusions...prophets in spite of their name, do not foretell the future. No one can do that...What prophets can do is tell the truth as they see it."
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December 8, 2007

Relationships and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric enterprise architecture captures, analyzes, categorizes, and serves up information to enhance decision-making capability in the organization. However, it is not only information alone that helps us make better decisions, but also developing and nurturing important personal relationships.

In the book, It’s Not Business, It’s personal by Ronna Lichtenberg, the author reminds us that relationships are key to personal and professional success and deeply affect our decision-making ability.

  • Lichtenberg asks, “is there room in our new millennium, ‘e.com’ world for relationships? Some folks would tell you there isn’t, that all that matters is performance and speed…the only problem is that all this speed has made us, to use a high-tech word, kludgy…as we whiz by one another, we don’t really connect. Which means that every decision is more complicated, takes longer, and is less intelligent because you can’t get real information about business problems from people you don’t trust.

So in this fast-paced, high-tech world, we overlook others, but can’t we still get good information from disciplines like EA? While EA is a valuable information resource, EA information products or a repository is not a substitute for relationships, nor can you develop and maintain the EA without solid relationships.

  • “We can be deceived into believing that our world is now too efficient [like through the development and use of EA information and other business intelligence methods and tools ] for relationships, that when every bit of information, and virtually any product or service, can be bought with a click of a mouse, the need for relationships has disappeared. But in fact, it has become even more important.”

How many relationships do we need? While quantity of relationships can be important, it is the quality of those relationships that is even more important. It is the “real relationships” in our lives or those of substance that provide the most satisfaction, value, and meaning to us over the long term. These relationships extend first and foremost to family and friends, but also to professional relationships between talented, dynamic people who can work together to build successful programs, products, and services for organizations and society (and this includes strategic programs like EA).

  • “When working with people and investing in relationships, the value comes not in quantity, but in quality. It doesn’t matter how many people you’ve met in your career or how many Rolodex cards you’ve acquired…what matters is who will be there for you when you really need it…‘networking’ is superficial. ‘Relationships’ are deep.
  • “The trick is to make it personal, to bring your heart into it, while respecting the roles and the rules of business. The goal is not to do business with your friends and it’s not to make friends out of your closest business relationships (though that sometimes happens). It’s to be present, and to bring all the nuance and intensity and affection and power of your personality into your close business relationships.”

Some obvious areas where relationships are critical in building an EA program are as follows:

  • Executive commitment—an EA program needs to have commitment from the highest levels to be successful. That means not only your boss, but also the senior executive team that runs the organization. Developing relationships with senior management that helps to explain the program and gain their commitment is fundamental.
  • The EA team—a good chief enterprise architect carefully chooses his or her EA team. Having experienced, knowledgeable, skilled, talented and enthusiastic people can make all the difference between a vibrant EA program and one that falls flat or fizzles out. Additionally, good synergy between team members helps to build a strong, cohesive program.
  • Subject matter experts—the information in the enterprise architecture cannot be gleaned only from documents and databases. EA is built through the interaction of business and technical subject matter experts throughout the organization, as well as from those outside the organization who can provide best practices. Of course, everyone is busy, but it is through building relationships with others that one can more fully engage them with the EA program.
  • Users—the dot-com adage of “build it and they will come” is way too simplistic for leveraging EA use for a wide variety of users in the organization. The chief architect needs to engage with the end users to, first of all, understand their requirements, but also to develop EA information products and governance services that are truly useful and usable to the end user.

Meaningful relationships, passion for what you do, and the commitment to give it your best, those are the elements of a solid EA program.


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December 7, 2007

Boeing and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture is a combination of developing and using organizational insight and managing sound oversight.

Boeing Company’s recently announced six-month delay of its new 787 Dreamliner jet shows defects in both their EA insight and oversight.

The Wall Street Journal, 7 December 2007 reports that “layers of outsourcing slow 787 production…a look inside the project reveals that the mess stems from one its main selling points to investors—global outsourcing.”

How did global outsourcing reveal the breaks in both effective insight and oversight at Boeing?

  • INSIGHT—EA is the synthesis of business and technology to improve organizational decision-making. EA develops information products, so that the organization has the information it needs to improve mission execution, and so that business is driving technology. In the case of Boeing, they were so focused on getting the technology of the new jet right, that they overlooked the underlying business problems. “It figured the chief risk lay in perfecting a process to build much of the plane from carbon-fiber plastic instead of aluminum. Boeing focused so hard on getting the science right that it didn’t grasp the significance of another big change; the 787 is the first jet in Boeing’s history designed largely by other companies,” and this has been plagued with problems ranging from language barriers to their contractors subcontracting out key tasks, such as engineering. Boeing’s focus on the technology led them to ignore important aspects of the business of designing and producing the new planes. Boeing did not have sufficient insight into the business side (versus the technology) of managing this tremendous endeavor.
  • OVERSIGHT—EA involves IT governance, so that IT investments are made based on sound principles of business alignment, return on investment, risk management, and technical compliance. Generally, the Investment Review Board, the EA Board, and the Program Management Office sees to it that IT projects are reviewed and managed in terms of cost, schedule, and performance parameters. In the case of Boeing, they did not ensure adequate EA oversight for the 787 jet. “Boeing overestimated the ability of suppliers to handle tasks that its own designers and engineers know how to do almost intuitively after decades of building jets. Program managers thought they had adequate oversight of suppliers but learned later that the company was in the dark when it came to many under-the-radar details.” Boeing’s general expertise in project oversight was outsourced along with the engineering and production tasks, and this led to, what an executive of one major supplier has called, chaos.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner may well end up being a true “dreamy” jet plane, but from a User-centric EA perspective, the 787 has been a real nightmare and a example of ineffective EA insight and oversight!


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December 6, 2007

An Online Only World and Enterprise Architecture

How long will it be before the internet becomes our primary means of storing personal data and running software applications (web-based)?

MIT Technology Review, 3 December 2007, reports that one core vision for the evolution of technology (that of Google) is that we are moving from a computer-based technical environment to an online-only world, where “digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet”—this is called cloud computing.

Already, users can perform many applications and storage functions online. For example:

  • “Google Calendar organizes events,
  • Picasa stores pictures,
  • YouTube holds videos,
  • Gmail stores email, and
  • Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.”

Moreover, MIT Technology Review reports that it is rumored that Google is working on an umbrella application that will pull these disparate offerings together for a holistic cloud computing solution.

What’s the advantage of cloud computing?

A computer hard drive is no longer important. Accessibility to one’s information is limited only by one’s access to the internet, which is becoming virtually ubiquitous, and information can be shared with others easily. “The digital stuff that’s valuable… [is] equally accessible from his home computer, a public internet café, or a web-enabled phone.”

What are some of the issues with cloud computing?


  • Privacy—“user privacy …becomes especially important if Google serves ads that correspond to all personal information, as it does in Gmail.”
  • Encryption—“Google’s encryption mechanisms aren’t flawless. There have been tales of people logging into Gmail and pulling up someone else’s account.”
  • Copyright—“one of the advantages of storing data in the cloud is that it can easily be shared with other people, but sharing files such as copyrighted music and movies is generally illegal.”
  • Connectivity—“a repository to online data isn’t useful if there’s no Internet connection to be had, or if the signal is spotty.”
Still Google’s vision is for “moving applications and data to the internet, Google is helping make the computer disappear.” Human-computer interaction has evolved from using command lines to graphical user interface to a web browser environment. “It’s about letting the computer get out of our way so we can work with other people and share our information.”

Of course, Google’s vision of an online-only world isn’t without challenge: Microsoft counters that “it’s always going to be a combination of [online and offline], and the solution that wins is going to be the one that does the best job with both.” So Microsoft is building capability for users “to keep some files on hard drives, and maintain that privacy, while still letting them access those files remotely.”

I will not predict a winner-take-all in this architecture battle of online and offline data and applications. However, I will say that we can definitely anticipate that information sharing, accessibility, privacy, and security will be centerpieces of what consumers care about and demand in a digital world. Online or offline these expectations will drive future technology evolution and implementation.
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Microwave Energy Weapons and Enterprise Architecture

There’s a new way to stop by the bad guys—with microwave energy!

The problem is that no sooner do we develop the improved technology, then we are already telling the bad guys how to foil it. That’s incredibly self-defeating and stupid!

That’s also the epitome of poor enterprise architecture:

  • good User-centric EA ensures that business drives technology and technology meets user requirements—in this case, the requirement is to be able to stop the bad guys; however, we already know how the bad guys can circumvent the technology and are telling them how— that’s not meeting user requirements, and that’s poor EA!


In this example, MIT Technology Review, 13 November 2007 is reporting that a company called Eureka Aerospace has developed a new “more efficient and compact” electromagnetic system that can send out “a beam of microwave energy [that] could stop vehicles in their tracks.”

“Pulses of microwave radiation disable the microprocessors that control the engine functions in a car. Such a device could be used by law enforcement to stop fleeing and noncooperative vehicles at security checkpoints, or as a perimeter protection for military bases, communication centers” and other critical infrastructure.

Sound good, and the technology is ready for deployment in 18 months. Here’s the catch—the article tells us (and the world) how the state-of-the-art technology is foiled:


  • Metal shielding—“metal acts as a shield against microwave energy.”
  • Older vehicles—“electronic control modules were not built into most cars until 1972, hence the system will not work on automobiles made before that year.”

Some additional snafu’s from the architects who designed this:

  • Collateral damage— nearby electronics will also be taken out; “so if the officer is pointing the device in the direction of the mall, he or she could end up trapping 12 people in an elevator.” Also, it “could cause a huge accident if a car is disabled and a driver loses steering control.” Here’s some more: “radiation can burn human skin and microwaves have long been suspected of being a cancer-causing agent.

So here’s a neat technology that sounds good on paper, until we see (and tell the bad guys) how to defeat our latest gizmo that’s designed to protect our citizen’s and troops. Plus let’s not forget the collateral damage from this “non-lethal” weapon. Architects back to the drawing board, please.


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December 5, 2007

Democracy and Enterprise Architecture

A society that is open to thoughts, ideas, and expression is free to grow and mature. This is democracy.

The Wall Street Journal, 5 December 2007, reports that the Chinese government’s repression of ideas is being challenged through the widespread use of social and networking technology, including the use of the internet, blogging, messaging, and so on.

Generally speaking, without the ability to think and express freely, Chinese society’s development has been stifled. One Chinese blogger shares this parable to describe the effect of repression on Chinese society: “There was a kind of fish that lived deep in the ocean. It did not use its eyes very often, since it was used to the darkness there. So its eyesight degenerated gradually, until one day it became blind.”

While 162 million Chinese use the internet, the government continues to try to stymie their freedom and movement toward democracy. For example, the “Great Firewall of China”—the Chinese government’s filtering software—is used to censor website access.

In addition, there is the Chinese “mental firewall,” which is a form of self-censorship, based on “China’s Confucian values [that] teach respect for authority and the subordination of the individual to the family and state. In China’s rigid education system, young people rarely are encouraged to express their opinions. And people have learned to keep quiet as political orthodoxies changed with the wind over the decades…finding yourself on the wrong side could lead to punishment, including exile and jail.”

However, the power of technology to open societies—even those as entrenched as China’s—to free thinking and expression is compelling. Many “think that over time, the social-networking capabilities of the Internet will help Chinese people become more assertive about speaking their minds. Young Chinese have already made the Internet an integral part of their lives. It opens opportunities for them to express individuality and emotion in a way that didn’t exist before.”

In one survey, “73% of Chinese Internet users age 16 to 25 felt they could do and say things online that they couldn’t in the real world.” The Internet is opening up real possibilities for freedom and democracy that could only be dreamed off earlier.

From a User-centric enterprise architecture perspective, we as architects apply technology to solve our organization’s greatest business challenges in order to improve mission execution and drive results of operation. However, the use of technology goes way beyond our organizational boundaries and outcomes. Modern technologies based on the Internet are a major disruptive force that brings down the “great firewalls” and “mental walls” of China and other countries with similar restrictive regimes and traditions, and enables the free expression of ideas and the democratization of billions of peoples around the world. Therefore, while EA can be applied at an organizational level to drive enterprise outcomes, it can also be used on a macro-geopolitical level to drive political change, freedom, and human rights. The foundational principle of information-sharing and accessibility in enterprise architecture can be an important lever to drive social change.

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December 4, 2007

Exascale Computing and Enterprise Architecture

Faster computers mean more capability for problem solving some of our most difficult and challenging business, technical, and scientific quandaries.

The Washington Post, 3 December 2007, reports that by next year, the next generation of supercomputers will come online at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The computers will be petascale, capable of processing 1,000 trillion calculations per second! (note: that is almost double the current capability of 596 trillion cps.)

Imagine that we don’t even readily have a term to describe a 1,000 trillion, yet we’ll be able to do it!

That much processing power is the equivalent of 100,000 desktop computers combined.

IBM’s “Roadrunner” is the “leading candidate to become the first petascale machine,” and will enable computer simulations that will “shed new light on subjects such as climate change, geology, new drug development, dark matter, and other secrets of the universe, as well as other fields in which direct experimental observation is time-consuming, costly, dangerous, or impossible.”

Another area that supercomputers help with is in assessing “the reliability, safety, and performance of weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile” without any real-life testing necessary.

One big advantage to these powerful supercomputers is that rather than doing experiments, we can simply simulate them. So, computational science (generated by supercomputer power) supplants to some extent observational or theoretical science.

What’s more amazing yet? Scientists are anticipating the exascale machine, yet another thousand times more powerful, by 2018. Now we’re talking a million trillion calculations per second. And that’s not “baby talk,” either.

From a User-centric enterprise architecture perspective, the importance of petascale and exascale supercomputing is that we need to think beyond the existing models of distributed computing and recognize the vast potential that supercomputers can provide. As architects, we need to envision the potential of future low-cost supercomputing power and what impact this can have on our organization’s ability to better perform its mission and achieve improved results. One day, supercomputing will not only be for scientists, but it will be employed by those savvy organizations that can harness its processing power to deliver better, faster, and cheaper products and services to its users. Some day, when we apply supercomputing power to everyday problems, we’ll be approaching the vision of Ray Kurzweil’s, the singularity, where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But to me that point really isn’t who is smarter, man or machine, but rather can we—in organizations of various sizes, in every industry, and around the globe—harness the power of the supercomputer to make the world a truly better place.


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Enterprise Architect Leader = Warrior, Healer, and Tao

In the book the Tao of Leadership by John Heider, the author describes three roles for a leader:

  • Warrior—“leader acts with power and decision” (the Yang or masculine)
  • Healer—“leader acts as a healer and is in an open, receptive, and nourishing state” (the Yin or feminine)
  • Tao—“leader withdraws from the group and returns to silence, returns to G-d…withdraw in order … to replenish my spirit.”

Helder goes on to state that “the leader who knows when to listen, when to act, and when to withdraw can work effectively with nearly anyone…perhaps the most difficult and sophisticated group members.”

In User-centric Enterprise Architecture, we bring together business and technical leaders and subject matter experts; we work vertically and horizontally in the organization as well as with stakeholders outside the enterprise. To effectively lead, collaborate, and communicate with all these group members, the architect ‘leader’ must know when to act as the “warrior” (push for change, results, and be decisive), when to act as the “healer” (listen, be receptive, and encourage others), and when to return to the “Tao” (withdraw and let others reflect or let the process evolve for a while).

In general, a great leader-architect is skilled in these various roles and is judicious on when to use each. If as a leader, for example, you talk when you should listen, or withdraw when you should engage, and so on, you can fall right on your sword (i.e. you’ll fail as a leader, as a change agent, and as an enterprise architect).

The leader-architect needs to be fluid between roles and to engage-withdraw, speak-listen, focus on work-focus on people, stabilize-seek change, push for progress-let things evolve. It’s all a fine line; many would call it a tightrope. That is why few people are truly excellent leaders. Although practice makes perfect!


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