Overvaluing the Outsider

Harvard Business Review (HBR), April 2010, has an article entitled “Envy At Work” by Menon and Thompson that describes research that shows that “people want to learn more about ideas that come from other companies than about ideas that originate in their own organizations.”

The reason that we value outside opinions over inside ones is that we fear elevating the person whose opinion we espouse. In other words, if we endorse an idea of a person in the organization, then we risk being seen as not only supporting the idea, but the person, and then having our power potentially being subsumed by that person.

The HBR article states: “When we copy an idea from an outsider, we’re seen as enterprising; when we borrow an idea from a colleague, we mark that person as an intellectual leader.”

This kind of thinking harms the organization. For rather than seeing our colleagues as teammates, we see them as competitors. We work against each other, rather than with each other. We spend our time and energy fighting each other for power, influence, resources, and rewards, instead of teaming to build a bigger pie where everyone benefits.

According to Menon and Thompson, “The dislike of learning from inside rivals has a high organizational price. Employees instead pursue external ideas that cost more both in time (which is often spent reinventing the wheel) and in money (if they hire consultants).”

I’m reminded of the saying, “You can’t be a prophet in your land,” which essentially translates to the idea that no matter how smart you are, people inside your own organization will generally not value your advice. Rather they will prefer to go outside and pay others to tell them the same thing that it cannot bear to hear from its own people.

Funny enough, I remember some consultants telling me a few years ago, “That’s what we get paid for, to tell you what you already know.”

Remember the famous line by Woody Allen, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member”? The flip side of this is that as soon as the organization brings you into their club, they have contempt for you because you are now one of them.

How do we understand the capability of some people to overcome their natural tendency toward envy and be open to learning from others inside the organization? More specifically, how do we as leaders create a culture where such learning is facilitated and becomes a normal part of life in the workplace?

One way to start is by benchmarking against other organizations that have been successful at this—“Most Admired Companies” like Goldman Sachs, Apple, Nike, and UPS. When one starts to do this, one sees that it comes down to a combination of self-confidence, lack of ego, putting the employees first, and deep commitment to a set of core values. It may not feel natural to do this at first – in a “dog-eat-dog” world, it is natural to fear losing one’s slice of the pie – but leaders who commit to this model can delegate, recognize, and reward their people without concern that they personally will lose something in the process.

The leader sets the tone, and when the tenor is “all for one and one for all,”— the organization and its people benefit and grow. This is something to be not only admired, but emulated.

Overvaluing the Outsider

A New Decade, A New Time For Technology

As we enter the new decade starting with 2010, we should reflect on the last decade, learn from it, and redirect for a better future.

While the last decade surely brought much good to many, for our nation as a whole, it was a decade punctuated again and again by terror—wrought externally, but also from within.

These events range from the horrific events of 9/11/2001 to the failed attack on Flight 253 by the Underwear Bomber on Christmas day and the Taliban attack that took 7 unsung heroes of our CIA on December 30, 2009.

The fear of terrorism has swept through our society this past decade, so much so that we insist people remove their shoes at the airport for screening and are quick to mistake a photo shoot of Air Force One over the Statue of Liberty (just this past April) as another 9/11. The possibility of a terror attack, and especially with weapons of mass destruction, looms always in the back of our minds.

We have also experienced homegrown terrorism, such as the assassination of an abortion doctor in Wichita, Kansas and an attack at the U.S. National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. to name just a few.

As if all of this is not enough already, Americans have been deeply affected by other fearful events and issues:

· The Economy—From the 2001 bursting of the dot-com bubble and recession to the 2007 mortgage mess bringing us the worst financial recession since the Great Depression, we have seen foreclosure rates soar and unemployment rise to 10.2%. Too many of us now know the intense fear and also the reality of losing our homes and jobs.

· Health—Aside from traditional health concerns about cancer, heart disease, stroke and other diseases, this last decade we experienced concerns ranging from lingering concerns of Bird Flu to the newer variant of Swine Flu. We were constantly reminded of the potential of another deadly influenza pandemic such as the 1918 flu that killed 50 to 100 million people globally. People this last year lined up around the block for the H1NI vaccine, and delays in production and delivery of the vaccine caused even greater consternation among the populace.

· Energy—Oil prices peaked at $147.30 a barrel in 2008 before drastically receding. Overreliance of Mideast oil supplies, geopolitical disruptions, and natural disasters as well as peak oil fears all contribute to energy supply shortage fears and the move to alternate energy resources and energy independence.

· Global Competition—With the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and the outsourcing of our job base, the recognition of the U.S. being surpassed as the economic superpower is on everyone’s mind, as the Wall Street Journal reported on January 2, 2010, “China is both making and eating our lunch.” We fear not only for our country’s future prosperity, but also for our ability and our children ability to earn a decent living anymore.

· The Deficit—With the trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of the Recovery Act and the new Health Care legislation, as well as ongoing critical entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and so on, the national deficit has soared to over $12 trillion dollars and is about to hit the ceiling again. The viability of this deficit spending is sending shock waves through the American public who realize that at some point the bill must be paid.

· Environmental Issues—From addressing global warming to a green economy and the need for conservation, recycling and sustainable environmental practices, we have awoken to the fear of creating an environment that is no longer hospitable to human life, if we do not act to be better stewards of the planet.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather is meant to demonstrate the breadth and depth of issues to which we been exposed to fear, dread, and terror about our personal and national futures.

Further, the fear for the future that we experience is not meant to shut us down or demoralize us, but rather to direct our attention and redirect our energies to solving these critical dilemmas facing us all.

One of the biggest areas of hope that I believe we have is through technology. In fact, technology has been a major offset to the decade of terror that we have experienced. Through technology and the requisite cultural change, we have moved towards a society that is more connected, enabled, and informed. We have achieved greater information sharing, collaboration, transparency, and overall productivity. Advanced telecommunications, e-Commerce, online information resources, and entertainment have transformed our lives primarily for the better. Technology has helped solve some of the greatest challenges of our time—whether through biotechnology, food genetics, alternative energy, military defensive technologies, and hosts of engineering advances particularly through miniaturization and mobility solutions.

While we cannot rely on technology to solve all of our problems, we can use it to augment our intellectual and communications capabilities to better attack and resolve the challenges confronting us.

We are a strong and resolute people and we can overcome terror with religious faith, strong family and community, individual and national determination, sacrifice and innovation, all variety of technology (infotech, nanotech, biotech…), and the paradigm of continuous learning and improvement.

We have a unique opportunity in time to move from a Decade of Terror to a Decade of Peace—a peace of mind, body, and soul brought by a conquering of the terrorists found within and without. I believe that technology can and will be there to support us in this if we can change along with it.

A New Decade, A New Time For Technology

Supercapitalism and Enterprise Architecture

As a nation are we overworked? Are we just showing up, doing what we're told, and making the same mistakes again and again?

Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary and Professor at University of California at Berkeley, says that we are more than ever a nation of workaholics.

Reich’s book, Supercapitalism, talks about how we have to work harder to make ends meet for the following reasons:

• Globalization—“our real incomes are under assault from technology and low-wage workers in other countries.”
• Greater competition—“all barriers to entry have fallen, competition is more intense than ever, and if we don’t work hard, we may be in danger of losing clients, customers, or investors.”
• Rapid pace of change—“today most people have no ability to predict what they’re going to be doing from year to year, and job descriptions are not worth the paper they’re written on because jobs are changing so fast.”

Reich says to temper our workaholic lifestyles, we need to “understand that the quality of work is much more important than the quantity.” Honestly, that doesn’t seem to answer the question, since quality (not just quantity) takes hard work and a lot of time too.

In terms of supercharged programs, I have seen enterprise architecture programs working "fast and furious," others that were steady, and still some that were just slow and sometimes to the point of "all stop" in terms of any productivity or forward momentum.

Unlike IT operations that have to keep the lights on, the servers humming, and phones working, EA tends to be considered all too often as pure “overhead” that can be cut at the slightest whim of budget hawks. This can be a huge strategic mistake for CIOs and organizational leaders who thus behave in a penny-wise and dollar foolish manner. Sure, operations keep the lights on, but EA ensures that IT investments are planned, strategically aligned, compliant, technically sound, and cost-effective.

A solid EA program takes us out of the day-to-day firefighting mode and operational morass, and puts the CIO and business leaders back in the strategic "driver's seat" for transforming and modernizating the organization.

In fact, enterprise architecture addresses the very concerns that Reich points to in our Supercapitalistic times: To address the big issues of globalization, competition, and the rapid pace of change, we need genuine planning and governance, not just knee jerk reactions and firefighting. Big, important, high impact problems generally don't get solved by themselves, but rather they need high-level attention, innovative thinking, and group problem solving, and general committment and resources to make headway. This means we can't just focus on the daily grind. We need to extricate ourselves and think beyond today. And that's exactly what real enterprise architecture is all about.

Recently, I heard some colleagues at a IT conference say that EA was all bluster and wasn't worth the work and investment. I strongly disagree. Perhaps, a poorly implemented architecture program may not be worth the paper it's plans are printed on. And unfortunately, there are too many of these faux enterprise architecture programs around and these give the rest a bad rap. However, a genuine user-centric enterprise architecture and IT governance program is invaluable in keeping the IT organization from running on a diet of daily chaos: not a good thing for the mission and business that IT supports.

Organizations can and will work smarter, rather than just harder, with strong enterprise architecture, sound IT governance, and sound business and IT processes. It the nature of planning ahead rather than just hoping for the best.

Supercapitalism and Enterprise Architecture

Conflict Management and Enterprise Architecture

What is conflict?

In the book Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan, the author states “Conflict arises whenever interests collide…whatever the reason, and whatever form it takes, its source rests in some perceived or real divergence of interests.”

Why does conflict occur?

Morgan continues: “People must collaborate in pursuit of a common task, yet are often pitted against each other in competition for limited resources, status, and career advancement.”

How does conflict manifest?

“The conflicting dimensions of organization are most clearly symbolized in the hierarchical organization chart, which is both a system of cooperation, in that it reflects a rational subdivision of tasks, and a career ladder up which people are motivated to climb. The fact is there are more jobs at the bottom than at the top means that competition for the top places is likely to be keen, and that in any career race there are likely to be far fewer winners than losers.”

How does User-centric EA help Manage Conflict?

Enterprise architecture is a tool for resolving organizational conflict. EA does this in a couple of major ways:

1. Information Transparency: EA makes business and technical information transparent in the organization. And as they say, “information is power”, so by providing information to everyone, EA becomes a ‘great equalizer’—making information equally available to those throughout the organization. Additionally, by people having information, they can better resolve conflict through informed decision-making.
2. Governance: EA provides for governance. According to Wikipedia, “governance develops and manages consistent, cohesive policies, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility.” As such, governance provides a mechanism to resolve conflicts, in an orderly fashion. For example, an IT Investment Review Board and supporting EA Review Board enables a decision process for authorizing, allocating, and prioritizing new IT investments, an otherwise highly contentious area for many sponsors and stakeholders in the organization.

Conflict is inevitable; however, EA can provide both information and governance to help manage and resolve conflict.

Conflict Management and Enterprise Architecture

Organizational Politics and Enterprise Architecture

Organizations are intrinsically political systems, “in the sense that ways must be found to create order and direction among people with potentially diverse and conflicting interests.”

“All organizational activity is interest-based…an organization is simultaneously a system of competition and a system of collaboration.” “Because of the diversity of interests… [the organization] always has a latent tendency to move in diverse directions, and sometimes to fall apart.”

Organizational politics is founded in Aristotle’s idea “that diversity of interests gives rise to the ‘wheeling and dealing’, negotiation, and other processes of coalition building and mutual influence that shape so much of organizational life.”

“Organizational politics arise when people think differently and want to act differently. This diversity creates a tension that must be resolved through political means…there are many ways in which this can be done: aristocratically (‘We’ll do it this way’); bureaucratically (‘We’re supposed to do it this way”), technocratically (‘It’s best to do it this way’), or democratically (‘How shall we do it?’). In each case the choice between alternative paths of action usually hinges on the power relations between the actors involved.”

“Power is the medium through which conflicts of interest are ultimately resolved. Power influences who gets what, when, and how.” Organizational power is derived from formal authority, control of scarce resources, control of information, use of structure, policies, and rules, and so on.

(Adapted from Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan)

Recognizing the importance of organizational politics—individual, group, and special interests, as well as the resulting conflict, and resolution through the levers of power is critical in User-centric Enterprise Architecture.

EA works within a diverse organization, takes competing interests and organizational conflicts, and turns it into common objectives and goals and the striving towards their achievement.

Enterprise architects work across organizational boundaries to synthesize business and technology to create interoperability, standardization, efficiencies, enterprise and common solutions, and integration.

Through the target architecture and transition plan, EA seeks to transform the organization from its intrinsic conflicts into a force with unity of purpose and mind to achieve ever greater accomplishments.

Organizational Politics and Enterprise Architecture

Is Free Worth the Price?

In the computer world, free is often the architecture and economic model of choice or is it?

We have various operating systems like Linux, Chrome, Android and more now costing nothing. Information is free on the Internet. Online news at no cost to the reader is causing shock waves in the print news world. There are thousands of free downloads available online for applications, games, music, and more.

What type of business model is free—where is the revenue generation and profit margin?

Yes, we know you can use giveaways to cross sell other things which is what Google does so well making a boat load of money (billions) from its free search engine by selling ads. Others are trying to copy this model but less successfully.

Also, sometimes, companies give product away (or undercharge) in order to undermine their competitive challengers, steal market share, and perhaps even put their rivals out of business.

For example, some have accused Google of providing Google Apps suite for free as a competitive challenge to Microsoft dominant and highly profitable Office Suite in order to shake one of Microsoft’s key product lines and get them off-balance to deflect the other market fighting going on in Search between Google and Microsoft’s new Bing “decision engine.”

So companies have reasons for providing something for free and usually it is not pure altruism, per se.

But from the consumers perspective, free is not always really free and is not worth the trouble.

Fast Company has an interesting article (October 2009) called “The High Cost of Free.”

“The strategy of giving everything away often creates as many hassles as it solves.”

Linux is a free operating system, yet “netbooks running Windows outsell their Linux counterparts by a margin of nine to one.”

“Why? Because free costs too much weighted down with hassles that you’ll happily pay a little to do without.”

For example, when you need technical support, what are the chances you’ll get the answers and help you need on a no-cost product?

That why “customers willingly pay for nominally free products, because they understand that only when money changes hands does the seller become reliably responsive to the buyer.”

And honestly, think about how often--even when you do pay--that trying to get good customer service is more an anomaly than the rule. So what can you really reasonably expect for nothing?

“Some companies have been at the vanguard of making a paying business of “free.” IBM, HP and other tech giants generate significant revenue selling consulting services and support for Linux and other free software to business.”

Also, when you decide to go with free products, you may not be getting everything you bargained for either in the base product or in terms of all the “bells and whistles” compared with what a paid-for-product offers. It’s reminiscent of the popular adages that “you get what you pay for” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Sure, occasionally there is a great deal out there—like when we find a treasure at a garage or estate sale or even something that someone else discarded perhaps because they don’t recognize it’s true value—and we need to be on the lookout for those rare finds. But I think we’d all be hard pressed to say that this is the rule rather than the exception. If it were the rule, it would probably throw a huge wrench in the notion of market equilibrium.

And just like everyone savors a bargain, people are of course seriously enticed by the notion of anything that is free. But do you think a healthy dose of skepticism is appropriate at something that is free? Again, another old saying comes to mine, “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”

Remember, whoever is providing the “free” product or service, still needs to pay their mortgage and feed their family too, so you may want to ask yourself, how you or someone else is paying the price of “free,” and see if it is really worth it before proceeding.

From the organization’s perspective, we need to look beyond the immediate price tag (free or otherwise discounted) and determine the medium- to long-term costs that include operations and maintenance, upgrades, service support, interoperability with other products and platforms, and even long-term market competition for the products we buy.

So let’s keep our eyes open for a great deal or paradigm shift, but let’s also make sure we are protecting the vital concerns of our users for functionality, reliability, interoperability, and support.

Is Free Worth the Price?

A Productivity Boost and Enterprise Architecture

For years, the IT industry has been putting out more and more devices to help us communicate, access and analyze information, conduct eCommence, be entertained, and generally increase productivity. To do these things, we have desktops, landlines, laptops, tablets, handhelds, cellphones, pagers, and all the application systems, social media, and internet to run on them. And for the organization, the CIO has been central to evaluating, planning, implementing, and maintaining these technologies.

You would think with all these tools for managing information, our lives would be simpler, more straightforward, and ever more carefree. Isn’t that what “tools” are supposed to do for people?

Well, think about your own life. Is your life less hectic with all the IT tools? Do you have more time to focus on what you’re working on? How’s your work-life balance?

If you are like most people these days, the answer is likely that you are more frantic and are trying to more things at the same time than ever before—almost driving yourself crazy, at times, to keep up.

The Wall Street Journal, 15 December 2008 had a book review by Christopher Chabris on “The Overflowing Brain.”

Here’s an excerpt of the review that I believes tells the story well:

“Take a look at your computer screen and the surface of your desk. A lot is going on. Right now, I count 10 running programs with 13 windows on my iMac, plus seven notes or documents on my computer desk and innumerable paper piles, folders, and books on my ‘main’ desk, which serves primarily as overflow space. My 13 computer windows include four for my internet browsers, itself showing tabs for 15 separate Web pages. The task in progress, in addition to writing this review…include monitoring three email accounts, keeping up with my Facebook friends, figuring out how to wire money into one of my bank accounts, digging into several scientific articles about genes, checking the weather in the city I will be visiting next week and reading various blogs, some which are actually work-related. And this is at home. At the office, my efforts to juggle these tasks would be further burdened by meetings to attend, conference calls to join, classes to teach, and co-workers to see. And there is still the telephone call or two—one of my three phone lines (home, office, mobile).”

Does this ring a bell for anybody? Dare I say that this is the reality for more of us these days.

So has IT (and the CIOs of our time) succeeded in giving us the technologies we need and want?

Well let’s look at what we said earlier were goals of IT—communication, information, commerce, entertainment, and productivity. Yep, we sure have all of these—big time!

Great, let’s just stop here at the outputs of technology and claim victory for our CIOs and the society we’ve created for ourselves.

But wait, what about the simpler, straightforward, and carefree parts—the anticipated outcomes, for many, of IT—shouldn’t we all be breathing a little easier with all the technology tools and new capabilities we have?

Ah, here’s the disconnect: somehow the desired outputs are NOT leading to the outcomes many people had hoped for.

One possible answer is that we really don’t want simple and carefree. Rather, in line with the ‘alpha male theory,’ we are high achievers, competitive, and some would even say greedy. And all the IT in the world just pours oil on our fire for doing and wanting more, more, more.

As many of us take some time off for the holidays and put our feet up for a week or two, we realize how much we look forward to some peace and quiet from all the helpful technology that surrounds us every day. But at the end of a few weeks, most of us are ready to go back to work and go crazy again with all our technology-driven productivity.

On a more serious note, from an enterprise architecture perspective, one has to ask if all this running around is leading to a strategic, desirable result in our personal and professional lives or is it just business for business sake, like technology for technology sake.

A Productivity Boost and Enterprise Architecture

GM and Enterprise Architecture

Where has enterprise architecture gone wrong at General Motors?

THEN: In 1954, GM’s U.S. auto market share reached 54%; in 1979, their number of worldwide employees hit 853,000, and in 1984 earning peak at $5.4 billion.

NOW: In 2007, U.S. market share stands at 23.7% and GM loses $38.7 billion; by 2008 employment is down to 266,000.

(Associated Press, “A Brief History of General Motors Corp., September 14, 2008)

Fortune Magazine, 8 December 2008, reports that “It was a great American Company when I started covering it three decades ago. But by clinging to the attributes that made it an icon, General Motors drove itself to ruin.”

GM clung to its past and “drove itself to ruin”—they weren’t nimble (maybe due to their size, but mostly due to their culture). In the end, GM was not able to architect a way ahead—they were unable to change from what they were (their baseline) to what they needed to be (their target).

“But in working for the largest company in the industry for so long, they became comfortable, insular, self-referential, and too wedded to the status quo—traits that persist even now, when GM is on the precipice.”

The result of their stasis—their inability to plan for change and implement change—“GM has been losing market share in the U.S. since the 1960’s destroying capital for years, and returning no share price appreciation to investors.”

GM’s share price is now the lowest in 58 years.

When the CEO of GM, Rick Wagoner, is asked why GM isn’t more like Toyota (the most successful auto company is the world with a market cap of $103.6 billion to GM’s $1.8 billion), his reply?

“We’re playing our own game—taking advantage of our own unique heritage and strengths.”

Yes, GM is playing their own game and living in their own unique heritage. “Heritage” instead of vision. “Playing their own game” instead of effectively competing in the global market—all the opposite of enterprise architecture!!

GM has been asphyxiated by their stubbornness, arrogance, resistance to change and finally their high costs.

“ GM’s high fixed costs…no cap on cost-of-living adjustments to wages, full retirement after 30 years regardless of age, and increases in already lavish health benefits. Detroiters referred to the company as ‘Generous Motors.’ The cost of these benefits would bedevil GM for the next 35 years.”

GM’s cost structure has been over-the-top and even though they have been in “perpetual turnaround,” they have unable to change their profligate business model.

Too many models, too many look-alike cars, and too high a cost structure—GM “has lost more than $72 billion in the past four years” and the result is? Are heads rolling?

The article says no—“you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their jobs”

“At GM, conformity was everything, and rebellion was frowned on.” Obviously, this is not a successful enterprise architecture strategy.

Frankly, I cannot understand GM’s intransience to create a true vision and lead. Or if they couldn’t innovate, why not at least imitate their Japanese market leader brethren?

It’s reminds me of the story of the Exodus from Egypt in the bible. Moses goes to Pharaoh time and again and implores him to “let my people go” and even after G-d smites the Egyptians with plague after plague, he is still unmovable.

Well we know how that story ended up for the Egyptians and it doesn’t bode well for GM.

The bottom line, if the enterprise isn’t open to genuine growth and change, nothing can save them from themselves.

GM and Enterprise Architecture

Learning from the Private Sector and Enterprise Architecture

There is a terrific article in ComputerWorld, 17 July 2008, called “Pentagon’s IT unit seeks to borrow tech ideas from Google, Amazon, other companies.”

Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) provides IT solutions to the Department of Defense. So what DISA does has to be state-of-the- art and best practice 24x7x365. Their mission depends on it!

To keep ahead of the curve, John Garing, DISA’s CIO and a retired Air Force colonel has been visiting with top tier private sector companies like Google, Amazon, UPS, Sabre, and FedEx to identify their best practices and incorporate them.

What has DISA learned from the private sector?

1. Cloud Computing

According to Garing, cloud computing is “going to be the way—it has to be. We have to get to this standard environment that is provisionable and scalable.”

To this end, “DISA has begin deploying a system [Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE)] that is similar architecturally to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) technology, a web-based computing service that enables users to quickly scale up their processing capabilities.”

Using RACE, a soldier in the field will be able to use a client device (like a PDA) with web support and “dynamically access a wide range of information sources and meld together data,” such as blue force tracking, mapping of combatant locations, identification of aid stations, fuel and ammunition supplies, and so forth.

2. Elastic and flexible

DISA has to be prepared to handle the unexpected and this means they need to be able to flexible to meet a mission need or fight a war or two. Garing has found that companies like Amazon and Sabre have built their IT infrastructures to enable “elasticity and flexibility.”

3. Competing for business

Like the private sector that competes for market share, DISA sees itself and operates “like a business and produce[s] an attractive offering of IT services at a competitive price. They recognize that they “compete for the business it gets from other military agencies, which in some cases have options to use private-sector IT service providers.”

4. Process-driven and Speedy

Like enterprise architecture, which looks at both business processes and technology enablement, Garing is “interested in the processes that companies use to deploy technology, not just their technology itself.” DISA wants to learn how to speed an idea to a service in just a few months as opposed to the years it often takes in DoD.

DISA is learning that cloud computing will enable increased standardization through a “standard suite of operating platforms” as well as increased “deployment speed and agility.”

By being open to learning from the private sector, Garing is leading an enterprise architecture that is making for a better and more capable DoD.

Job well done DISA and a shining example for the rest of the federal space!

Finally, learning is not a one-way street and surely the interchange between the public and private sector can lead to improvements for all.

Learning from the Private Sector and Enterprise Architecture

DARPA and Enterprise Architecture

As a discipline enterprise architecture strives to move the organization into the future—that is what EA planning and IT governance is all about—and that is also what an organization like DARPA is about.

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major impact on the world, including computer networking [the Internet]…DARPA’s original mission, established in 1958, was to prevent technological surprise like the launch of Sputnik, which signaled that the Soviets had beaten the U.S. into space. The mission statement has evolved over time. Today, DARPA’s mission is still to prevent technological surprise to the US, but also to create technological surprise for our enemies. DARPA is independent from other more conventional military R&D and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA has around 240 personnel (about 140 technical) directly managing a $3.2 billion budget.” (Wikipedia)

National Defense Magazine, November 2007, states that DARPA “has a reputation for taking on challenges that sometimes seem to defy the laws of physics—or at least common sense.”

“’DARPA Hard’ refer to problems its researchers attempt to solve...’Please tell us that it’s something that can’t be done. It’s science fiction. That is a challenge we can’t resist,’” says Brett Giroir, director of the defense sciences office.

Here are some interesting target architectures that DARPA has set out to tackle:

• Transparent walls—“DARPA wants to defeat rock, concrete and plaster walls—not by blowing them up—but rather by making them transparent. The agency is creating a suite of sensors to map the inside of buildings, tunnels, caves, and underground facilities.” The Visi-building project ,for example, uses radar to detect the inside of buildings, and then DARPA is exploring how to penetrate and destroy without resorting to nukes.
• Inner Armor—“the objective is to fortify the entire soldier against attack from the enemy of the environment.” This includes environmental hardening to “protect soldiers from extreme heat, cold, and high altitudes,” and kill proofing “to protect soldiers from chemical and radiological threats,” as well as safeguarding them from deadly diseases. It’s a comprehensive protection package. DARPA for example envision “universal immune cells that are capable of making anti-bodies that neutralize…hundreds of threat agents.”
• Chemical mapping—“there are about 80,000 commercially available chemicals, and many of them are toxic, DARPA wants to create a map showing where and if they appear in a given area.” This would show forces where chemical labs or weapons caches are. One idea is to use “replace sensors with nano-technology-based samplers that extract chemicals…[and that have ] a GPS device attached [that] could be placed on helicopters, military vehicles, or secretly placed on delivery trucks making rounds through a city”

These are great! You have got to love the “know no bounds” attitude of DARPA. They are truly innovators, and are a model for the rest of government and industry in defining problems and actually solving them.

In enterprise architecture, it is one thing to set targets that are incremental, non-monumental, and the same as everyone else is doing (like moving to Microsoft Vista). But it is an altogether different thing to set targets that are groundbreaking in terms of business process engineering and technology innovation.

While not all our targets can be revolutionary, perhaps a subset of them should be to keep us really innovating and not just copycatting the competition. We need to bring innovation back to the forefront of what we believe, how we think, what we do, and how we compete.

DARPA and Enterprise Architecture

Competitive Sourcing and Enterprise Architecture

Our economy is heavily based on ensuring a competitive environment to drive innovation, cost-competition, and consumer value.

One of the reasons why mergers and acquisitions are reviewed so carefully is to ensure that they are not anti-competitive, which would result in antitrust action.

Competition law, known in the United States as "antitrust law," has three main elements:

• Prohibiting agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business entities. This includes in particular the repression of cartels.
• Banning abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.…
• Supervising the mergers and acquisitions of large corporations, including some joint ventures. Transactions that are considered to threaten the competitive process can be prohibited altogether, or approved subject to "remedies" such as an obligation to divest part of the merged business or to offer licenses or access to facilities to enable other businesses to continue competing. (Wikipedia)

Competition law has been extended to the federal workforce as follows:

The Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 mandates that “To ensure that the American people receive maximum value for their tax dollars, commercial activities should be subject to the forces of competition.” This includes the following activities:

“a. Identify all activities performed by government personnel as either commercial or inherently governmental.
b. Perform inherently governmental activities with government personnel.
c. Use a streamlined or standard competition to determine if government personnel should perform a commercial activity.”
The concept of A-76 is that without federal workers having to compete for their positions against for example, the private sector, then there is no way to ensure value for the American taxpayer. Where is the incentive for the federal workforce to perform if when they aren’t performing competitively, and they are not threatened with replacement by a better, more effective and efficient provider?
Federal Times, 12 May 2008 reports that “all indications are that as the Bush administration winds down, so too has its most controversial government reform: competitive sourcing.”
“Many in Congress have aggressively challenged the practice as being unfair and demoralizing to federal employees and last year they passed myriad reforms and restrictions that are already being felt.”
While I agree that competitions drive efficiency in the marketplace, I think A-76 has missed the mark in terms of reforming federal human capital.
Why?
Competing federal workforce against private sector contractors on a cost basis does not necessarily ensure best value. From an enterprise architecture perspective, we are missing something crucial in A-76 and that is the human capital perspective.
The human capital perspective on EA is one that was initially proposed by John Zachman, the founder of EA, and I am a strong proponent of it. Essentially, it says that just like the other business and technology perspectives of the EA, human capital is a filter through which you must make organizational decisions.
The human capital perspective of the architecture provides us an opportunity to optimize federal workforce performance in the first place, before getting to an outsourcing decision point. Additionally, if you can’t effectively manage your own workforce, what makes you think you can better manage a contracted-out function? (In the same issue of Federal Times, there was an article about how the federal procurement officials are resigning in droves!)
What can we do to first improve performance results from the federal workforce (and I’m not saying that there is any problem to begin with)? The same as with any organization—provide strong leadership to them. Provide them with a bold vision. Hire the best and the brightest. Accelerate the hiring and clearance processes. Make clear their roles. Inspire them as President Kennedy did when he stated “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Challenge the workforce and empower them. Provide training, career growth, and financial and other incentives. With these, the federal workforce can truly be competitive and best value—if not all the time, then certainly much of the time.
The enterprise architecture way to do this is to first, baseline your current workforce. Then, look at best practices, benchmark, and set the targets for your people. And finally, develop a transition plan to move your workforce from the baseline to the target.
There is much more work to be done in this area, and obviously this is just a cursory overview or sketch of what the human capital perspective of EA would do. On a personal note, this is an area of great interest to me and I look forward to exploring it further.

Competitive Sourcing and Enterprise Architecture

“Sacred Cows” and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture develops the organization’s baseline and target architecture and transition plan. EA is an endeavor of change and transformation from current state to future state. To achieve organizational change successfully, the “sacred cows” must be made change-ready.

In the book, Sacred Cows Make The Best Burgers, by Kriegel and Brandt, the authors explain that the greatest inhibitor to organizational change is people’s resistance—people are the gatekeepers of change and people are the enterprise’s most stubborn of sacred cows!

“Sacred Cow—An outmoded belief, assumption, practice, policy, system, or strategy generally invisible, that inhibits change and prevents responsiveness to new opportunities.”

What’s with this analogy to cows?

“Cows trample creative, innovative thinking. They inhibit quick response to change, and cost money and time. They roam everywhere…yet many organizations continue to worship their sacred cattle. They’re afraid to abandon what once made them successful, and they extract a heavy fine from those cow hunters who would ‘pasteur-ize’ them.”

What’s the imperative for change now?

“It’s hurricane season for American business. Winds of change are barreling in from all directions. Competition is tougher than ever and coming from places you least expected. The customer is more sophisticated and demanding. Technological change is incessant. Government regulations are tougher. And everyone is restructuring, reorganizing, reinventing, downsizing, outsourcing—all at ultrasonic pace.”

What are we doing about it?

“New programs, processes, and strategies have been introduced to help you keep ahead of these changes and eliminate sacred cows. In fact, they’re emerging almost as fast as the changes themselves…reengineering, total quality, virtual teams, ‘horizontal’ corporate structures…”

What are the results of these change efforts?

• “Though it’s predicted that U.S corporations will spend $34 billion on reengineering, most efforts will flop.”
• “Some statistics say seven out of ten reengineering initiatives fail.”
• A McKinsey study found that “a majority of companies researched achieved less than a 5 percent change due to reengineering.”
• “Two-thirds of American managers think TQM has failed in their companies.”
• “The number of applicants vying for the Malcolm Baldridge Award…has fallen since its peak year in 1991.”

In short, “The ’Q’ [quality] word has become cheap currency.”

Why do these change efforts fail?

• “People’s resistance to change is ‘the most perplexing, annoying, distressing, and confusing part’ of reengineering.”
• People resist change because “change is uncomfortable, unpredictable, and often seems unsafe. It’s fraught with uncertainty and always looks harder than it is….change brings us face-to-face with the unknown, and that evokes our worst imagined fears: We’ll be fired, humiliated, criticized. So we dig in our heels.”
• “We’ve seen workers fight change for months and years because they didn’t understand it, were afraid of it, or didn’t see it being in their self interest. It’s naïve to assume that the bulk of the workforce will come around. Even when resistance seems to disappear, most often it’s just gone underground, and will resurface when you least expect it.”
• “Management consultants who deal with companies in transition know that the ‘people’ part of change is critical. And that it is most often overlooked and undervalued.

“The reason that three fourths of reengineering efforts fail…is that the focus of change is on work processes, new technology…and decentralized services rather than on the people who must implement change.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, this last point is critical. Enterprise architecture efforts, by definition, are focused on business, technology, and the alignment of the two. EA looks at business process improvement and reengineering and the introduction of new technologies to enable mission success. Traditionally, EA did not look at the human element—the people factor. The necessity of measuring people’s change readiness and assisting people in transitioning to new ways of doing things is one of the most important elements of any change initiative. As I’ve written previously, Human Capital is the missing performance reference model in the Federal Enterprise Architecture. All this points to the importance of transitioning from traditional EA to User-centric EA, where the end-users and stakeholders (i.e. people) are the most important element of the enterprise architecture. How would my kids phrase this, “in the end it’s not the business process or the technology, but the people, stupid!”

What happens if we don’t recognize the centrality of people to the change process?

Plain and simple, change efforts will continue to fail. Money and time will be wasted. Our competition will continue to gain on us and overtake us. Our organizations will be made obsolete by our own inattention to our most important asset—our people!

“Sacred Cows” and Enterprise Architecture

One Laptop Per Child and Enterprise Architecture

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative announced at the World Economic Forum in 2005 set out to put $100 laptops in the hands of 100s of millions of disadvantaged schoolchildren within 4 years and help eliminate world poverty in the process.

The Wall Street Journal (24-25 November 2007) reports that this ambitious non-profit program has hit some snags.

The problems faced by this benevolent program provides lessons in EA for practitioners into what can go wrong if User-centric EA principles are not followed:

1. Functionality versus price--as the OLPC computer added functionality, the $100 laptop became $188 plus shipping and many potential buyers balked at the pricetag. On the other hand, countires like Libya complained about the inferior functionality and quality and said, "I don't want my country to be a junkyard for these machines." From a User-centric EA perspective, we need to understand the requirements of our users and understand the trade-offs between functionality and price. Then we need to make conscious decisions on whether we fulfill needs for greater functionality and quality or whether we seek to hold the line on price for our customers. These are important architectural decisions that will affect the organization's ability to compete in the marketplace.


2. Compete or partner--the OLPC machine went with open source software like Linux and AMD chips; these put the laptops head to head with companies like Microsoft and Intel, which come out fighting, with the gloves off. Intel is aggressively promoting its version of the laptop for developing nations called the Classmate for $230-$300, and Microsoft has announced $3 software packages that include Windows and a student version of Office. From a User-centric EA perspective, the decision of the organization whether to compete with the big players (like Microsoft and Intel) or partner is another major architectural decision. While we shouldn't make decisions based on fear of what the competition will do, we do need to be cognizant that if we go head-to-head with "the big boys", then they will respond, usually in a big way. Now OLPC is reportedly in discussions with Intel to design an Intel-based laptop.


3. Training and support--In User-centric EA, do not underestimate the importance to the end-user of adequate training and support. The OLPC made the mistake of minimizing the importance of training and support and said that the "plan is for the machines to be simple enough that students can train themselves--and solve any glitches that arise." Not very realistic given the state of technology today, and many countries quickly "questioned who would fix them if they break."

By not following certain foundational EA principles, the OLPC program has floundered and "nearly three years later, only about 2000 students in pilot programs have received computers."

This is a shame, since so much good from this initiative can still be done.

One Laptop Per Child and Enterprise Architecture

User Concerns (Finally) Answered and Enterprise Architecture

There are a number of prominent issues or concerns that many users seem to voice or have about EA (and I have seen these as common across most organizations).

Here are the concerns:

1. What’s in it for me (WIIFM)—everyone wants to know the answers to these questions: What do I get out of this? Why collaborate? Why cooperate? Why share information (“information is power” and information is currency”)? Why is EA on my turf?
2. Perceived obstacle—EA provides for IT governance, but why do we need that? Doesn’t it stifle innovation? Isn’t it better to be ‘free’ to implement what you like, when you like? Why all this bureaucracy?
3. The knowledge gambit—EA is not technical, what do you know about IT? EA is not operations, what does EA know about the business of the organization?
4. Unhealthy competition—why is EA competing for management attention, influence, resources, and so on?

It is the job of the chief enterprise architect to address these concerns.

1. EA is about trust and collaboration; we’re not working for ourselves and against each other, we’re working for the good of the organization. By sharing information, you will also get information from others that will enhance your understanding of the enterprise and enable you to do your job better. If everyone shares, then everyone (and the enterprise, as a whole) benefits!
2. Governance, when designed right, is a help for users—and not a hindrance or obstacle to progress or innovation. The governance process is owned by the executive decision makers in the organization, usually the Investment Review Board, made up of senior decision-makers from across the organization (both business and IT). The IRB authorizes, prioritizes, and funds new IT investments. EA facilitates the investment review process by providing valuable input to the decision makers in terms of technical review and architecture assessments of new IT projects, products, and standards. EA helps make projects a success by providing business and technical input, and best practice guidance. By bringing subject matter experts together to review and vet ideas before they actually get implemented, we get a better end-product. Innovation is valued and encouraged by EA and moreover, information sharing through EA helps drive innovation and collaboration in the organization.
3. EA synthesizes business and technology and therefore, is a bridge between the business and technical experts in the organization. While EA is not the ‘subject matter expert’ in either area, EA is an honest broker and functions as a competent facilitator translating business and information requirements to IT and conferring on technology solutions, plans and governance with the business.
4. There is no competition between EA strategy and operations. The organization needs operations and strategy to not only coexist, but also to complement each other. Strategy and operations are co-dependent. One without the other would not only be suboptimal, but would actually not make sense. You need a strategy and you need to execute—period.

User Concerns (Finally) Answered and Enterprise Architecture

Darwin and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA seeks the long term preservation, maturation, and growth of the organization and its ability to deliver mission execution.

Charles Darwin stated that "in the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”

In the book Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan, Darwin’s theory of survival is extended from the individual to the enterprise. “Organizations, like organisms in nature, depend for survival on their ability to acquire an adequate supply of resources necessary to sustain existence. In this effort they have to face competition from other organizations, and since there is usually a scarcity of resources, only the fittest survive.”

Even in cases where resources are abundant and self renewing, organizations are always competing to survive. This competition takes the form of who can supply the end user with the products or services they need better, faster, and cheaper. The competition, in this case, is not for resources, but to be the resource to others. For in being the supplier of choice to its customers or stakeholders, the enterprise thrives and survives in executing its mission.

Indeed, in a competitive economy, there is always the opportunity for a competitor to arise and challenge the organization’s role in the marketplace. It is this competition that is considered not only healthy, but also a cornerstone for continuously improving product and service quality and keeping prices at bay for customers.

Even in government, where some may think there is no competition, agencies not only compete for limited resources (funds, people, and so on), but also for being the provider of choice to the citizens. As one example, in the federal government, there are several agencies that can provide banking regulation, such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Office of Thrift supervision (OTS), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Federal Reserve.

In a competitive environment, EA is a tool for business and technology planning and governance that helps an organization deliver on its mission and be the provider of choice to its customers.

Darwin and Enterprise Architecture