Organizational Blues and Enterprise Architecture

Organizations are like people, they have ups and downs. They have a beginning and an end (even as they transition or morph into something else). And somewhere in the middle or in numerous little points along the way, the organization/person experiences questioning, doubts, reevaluation or mere generally speaking, “the blues.”

The Wall Street Journal, 2-3 February 2008, has an editorial that describes “a massive American-British study of some two million souls throughout 80 counties confirming, empirically, that middle age immiserates us all without regard to income, culture, gender, marital status, or previous experience.”

The study demonstrates the “mood swing of life” with a “U-curve, in which mental stability and happiness bottoms out in our 40s and into our 50s. We then get more cheerful as we round the curve into the final stretch.”

What happens in mid-life crisis?

“Mid-life is a time when the mirage of life’s perfectibility and symmetry, as envisioned in one’s youth, come back to trouble you like a conscience…one might call it a last chance at happiness, or of “getting it right…the last opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it; a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived.”

Not only people, but organizations go through mid-life crisis:

The stock market swoon of company’s stocks (representing their market values) is one gauge of their oft meteoric rise and death-defying falls. Just some recent examples of companies in the news today: Technology titans, Microsoft with an intraday low of $0.80 in 1986 and a high of $53.97 in 1999, and Yahoo $0.65 in 1996 and $125.031 in 2000, and both are slightly above or below $30 today. Another example, Starbucks has been off nearly 50% in the past year.

The rise and fall of enterprises is a reflection of their even changing environment. Life is not status quo. We are all tested, all the time. It is how we respond to those tests that determine where we go next.

How do we respond?

Some people respond to mid-life crisis by changing themselves, their jobs, careers, and even partners (some opt for the flashy red convertible sport car deluxe!). People are trying to remake themselves—for better or worse. Organizations do the same thing; they seek transformation, reengineering, and strategic change, and hence they undertake initiatives like Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, The Baldridge Award, Kaizen, and other varied change management endeavors (even enterprise architecture to an extent). We as people and organizations look in the mirror and realize that we cannot continue as we are if we are to survive and thrive to fight another day.

Organizational Blues and Enterprise Architecture

Web 3.0 and Enterprise Architecture

While the Web 1.0 is viewed as an information source, and Web 2.0 as participatory, Web 3.0 is envisioned as Semantic (or the Semantic Web).

MIT Technology Review, March 2007 reports in an article entitled “A Smarter Web” by John Borland that Web 3.0 will “give computers the ability—the seeming intelligence—to understand content on the World Wide Web.” The goals is to “take the web and make it …a system that can answer questions, not just get a pile of documents that might hold an answer.”

In The New York Times, November 2007, John Markoff defined Web 3.0 “as a set of technologies that offer efficient new ways to help computers organize and draw conclusions from online data.”

Not only individuals would benefit from the Semantic Web, but companies too that “are awash in inaccessible data on intranets, in unconnected databases, even on employees’ hard drives.” The idea is to bring the data together and make it useful.

Many of you have heard of the Dewey Decimal System for organizing information. Melvin “Dewey was no technologist, but the libraries of his time were as poorly organized as today’s Web. Books were often placed in simple alphabetical order, or even lined up by size…Dewey found this system appalling: order, he believed, made for smoother access to information.” (MIT Technology Review) Melvin Dewey developed in 1876 what became The Dewey Decimal System, a library classification attempts to organize all knowledge.” (Wikipedia) In the Dewey system, books on a similar subject matter are co-located aiding discovery and access to information.

MIT Technology Review contends that like Melvin Dewey, web browser and search engine companies, like Microsoft and Google, want to help consumers locate information more efficiently.

“By the mid-1990’s, the computing community as a whole was falling in love with the idea of metadata, a way of providing Web pages with computer-readable instruction or labels…metadata promised to add the missing signage. XML—the code underlying today’s complicated websites, which describes how to find and display content, emerged as one powerful variety.” The problem with this was that it was not a systematic way of labeling data, since each developer used “their own custom ‘tags’—as if different cities posted signs in related but mutually incomprehensible dialects.”

In 1999, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) came up with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for locating and describing information. Since then the vision has been for “a web that computers could browse and understand much as humans do…analogous to creating detailed road signs that cars themselves could understand and upon which they could act,” independent of human action. However, the obstacles remain for how to create ontologies that everyday busy people would use to relate data across the web—data that is currently described in myriad number of ways today—so that computers could then read and understand the data.

A second area of doubt on the realism of a Semantic Web is whether computers can truly understand the intricacies (or connotations) of human language. For example, can a computer realistically make sense of a word like marriage that can have subtle distinctions of “monogamy, polygamy, same-sex relationships, and civil unions?”

Despite the perceived obstacles, many remain not only fixated, but enamored with the notion of a Semantic Web that can not only provide amazing amounts of information, but also, like a human being, is able to analyze the data holistically, and provide actionable artificial intelligence (AI).

To enterprise architects, the Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) would be an incredible leap forward enabling organizations and individuals to get more intelligence from the web, be more productive, and ultimately provide for more efficient and effective business processes, supported by a higher order of computing enablement. Additionally, for enterprise architects themselves that deal with inordinate amounts of business and technical data—structured and unstructured—Web 3.0 technologies and methods for better mining and analyzing the data would be a welcome capability for advancing the discipline.

Web 3.0 and Enterprise Architecture

SOA, Data Management and Enterprise Architecture

Often I hear business and IT people say that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the way ahead to achieve greater interoperability of systems, process integration, and business efficiency in the enterprise. Usually, this is quickly followed by discussion about rolling out the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). However, very infrequently do I hear discussion about the necessary data architecture to achieve the vision of SOA.

Stephen Lahanas has an interesting article, “Enable SOA Transformation and Cross-Domain Data Fusion” in DM Review Magazine, January 2008 that addresses the importance of Data Management to SOA. (http://www.dmreview.com/issues/2007_43/10000444-1.html)

“While SOA has long considered universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI) as its primary discoverability mechanism, the reality is that nearly all integration with an SOA environment is based upon data exchange and will ultimately be demonstrated through data exploitation interfaces (agile BI). Once SOA architects fully realize the implications of this revelation, then agile data architecture will become the facilitating mechanism for cross-domain data fusion and enterprise integration.

Mr. Lahanas provides four fundamental elements for building an agile data architecture, as follows:

1. Actionable enterprise architecture—“a tangible way to connect architecture layers (EA, segment and implementation) and perspectives (application, process, data). One of the main reasons that large integration projects fail is due to the inability to successfully map the various architectures within a meaningful combined picture. Every agile data architecture begins here.”
2. Federated data orchestration—“allow data owners to collaboratively manage resources across domains based upon a shared set of rules rather than a shared single data model. This is an excellent example of a user-centric approach. One of the major shortcomings of massive data warehouse projects has been the lost connections between users and developers and resulting data integrity issues.
3. Enterprise Master Data Management—“Metadata is not just a technical consideration; it can define productivity in our knowledge economy.”
4. Agile Business Intelligence—“A new generation of BI capabilities is bringing user control to more sophisticated report generation tools with much more accurate results… Based upon user queries and activities, we gather metadata, optimize caches and determine cross-domain mapping strategies.”

Two ideas that I particularly like in Stephen’s article are:

1. Linkage of SOA to Data Architecture—“Agile data architecture is a parallel and complementary design philosophy and methodology to SOA and agile application development. Both can be mapped together within the larger actionable enterprise architecture.”
2. Focus on User-centricity—“User-centricity is the primary motivating force behind the development of all agile solutions. The user provides:

• Immediacy – the desire for near-term real-world capability.
• Relevance and context.
• Performance expectations.
• Direction, domain knowledge and the logic behind every solution.”

In developing SOA, we cannot forget the necessity of building a meaningful data architecture that facilitates the discovery and exchange of data via SOA and ESB. Further, all our architecture and IT solutions must be user-centric if they are to be relevant and effective to the enterprise’s end-users.

SOA, Data Management and Enterprise Architecture

Simplification and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture seeks to simplify organizational complexity through both business processes reengineering and technology enablement. Technology itself is simplified through standardization, consolidation, interoperability, integration, modernization, and component reuse.

Harvard Business Review, December 2007, reports on simplifying the enterprise.

“Large organizations are by nature complex, but over the years circumstances have conspired to add layer upon layer of complexity to how businesses are structured and managed. Well-intentioned responses to new business challenges—globalization, emerging technologies, and regulations…--have left us with companies that are increasingly ungovernable, unwieldy, and underperforming. In many more energy is devoted to navigating the labyrinth than to achieving results.”

Having worked for a few large organizations myself, I can “feel the pain.” Getting up to 8 levels of signature approval on routine management matters is just one such pain point.

What causes complexity?

“Complexity is the cumulative byproduct or organizational changes, big and small that over the years weave complications (often invisibly) into the ways that work is done.”

What is sort of comical here is that the many change management and quality processes that are put in place or attempted may actually do more harm than good, by making changes at the fringes—rather than true simplification and process reengineering at the core of the enterprise.

Here is a checklist for cutting complexity out of your organization:

• “Make simplification a goal, not a virtue—include simplicity…[in] the organization’s strategy; set targets for reducing complexity; create performance incentives that reward simplicity.
• Simplify organizational structure—reduce levels and layers…consolidate similar functions.
• Prune and simplify products and services—employ product portfolio strategy; eliminate, phase out, or sell low-value products; counter feature creep.
• Discipline business and governance processes—create well-defined decision structures (councils and committees); streamline operating processes (planning, budgeting, and so on).
• Simplify personal patterns—counter communication overload; manage meeting time; facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries.”

Leading enterprise architecture and IT governance for a number of enterprises has shown me that these initiatives must be focused on the end-user and on simplifying process and improving results, rather than creating more unnecessary complexity. The chief architect needs to carefully balance the need for meaningful planning, helpful reviews, and solid documentation and an information repository with simplifying, streamlining, consolidating, reengineering, and facilitating an agile, nimble, and innovative culture.

Simplification and Enterprise Architecture

IT Consolidation adds Up To Cost Savings and Enterprise Architecture

For CIOs, one of the secrets of the trade for building cost efficiency is consolidation of IT assets, such as data centers and help desks. Of course, to accomplish this you need to executive commitment and user buy-in.

The Wall Street Journal, 29 January 2008, reports that “H-P Hits Snag in Quest for Savings through System Consolidation.”

“Since July 2005 [the Compaq merger]…the firm [HP] has been in a project to cut the number of computer program is uses by more than half [from 6000 to 1600], and reduce the number of its data centers…to six from 85.”

Have the benefits of consolidation been documented?

In a survey of 1500 CIOs by Gartner last year, “reducing costs through IT consolidation and other means is one of their top ten priorities.”

Further, according to Forrester Research, “the benefits can be significant” In a survey, last fall, of eight companies that consolidated IT, “nearly all ‘lowered …overall operational costs by at least 20%.’”

What are some of the critical success factors?

1. User buy-in—“vice president often aren’t used to taking order from the chief information officer on what computer programs they can use. ‘It’s about politics.’” The way to get around this and develop buy-in is to set the targets with the CEO and CFO, but let the users decide which systems to keep and which to fold into the consolidation.
2. Executive commitment— “The solution is to get management support from the top. ‘Getting the CEO lined up is hard, and that’s the key person.’” At HP the CEO “threatened some with termination” that didn’t follow along with his commitment to consolidate.

From a User-centric EA perspective, IT standardization, consolidation, and cost efficiency are important goals. Of course, this needs to be done in the context of developing a sound, secure, reliable, state-of-the-art IT infrastructure. Achieving cost effectiveness must involve building enterprise solutions, merging disparate data centers and help desks, consolidated purchasing, and otherwise standardizing products and streamlining operations. Of course, user buy-is a prerequisite when using a User-centric EA approach.

IT Consolidation adds Up To Cost Savings and Enterprise Architecture

Governance and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is critical to effective IT governance. EA establishes the baseline and target architectures and the transition plan and enforces these through the EA Board, who conducts technical reviews of proposed new IT projects, products, and standards. EA guides the organization to performance results, business-technology alignment, information sharing and accessibility, systems interoperability and component reuse, technology standardization and simplification, and security, including confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy. In short, EA ensures information transparency of business and technology to enhance organizational decision-making.

But what happens when organizational governance, whether EA governance or corporate boards, that is supposed to ensure transparency, does not?

The Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2008, reports “Why CEOs Need to Be Honest with Their Boards.”

“People who have spent time in corporate boardrooms say honest communication is often lacking between CEOs and their fellow directors. ‘Communication and transparency being a problem is more the rule rather than the exception.’”

Sometimes this makes headlines, such as when CEOs conduct activities without informing or getting permission from their directors, such as:

1. Backdating stock options
2. Holding merger and acquisition talks
3. Trying to solve problems independently that need to be vetted

“‘Many times it’s the thing not said, or overly optimistic positioning that gets CEOs in trouble’…as leaders, they want to take charge and inspire confidence, even when things are turning sour. But that instinct can lead them to be less than forthcoming about problems—which can snowball into severe tensions with directors.”

CEOs who do not keep their board up-to-date do so at their own peril—“In 2006, 31.9% of CEOs who stepped down world-wide did so due to conflicts with the board…the forced departures were ‘nearly always because of transparency issues...[this leads to a] slow deterioration of trust, so the termination is generally packaged as a ‘loss of confidence.’”

Things have definitely changed in the relationship between boards and CEOs─ “‘There used to be a bright, clear line: We, the management made the decision and they, the board, reviewed and approved those decisions”…that bright, clear line has gotten really fuzzy now.”

Why does the CEO resist this transparency with the board?

“It’s the CEO’s job to ‘put a good face on things to mobilize and drive the changes that any company needs going forward…this requires inspiring people and giving them confidence that if you only make this last push you will get there.” CEO’s don’t want to admit that things are not progressing as expected. They don’t want to concede that they don’t have all the answers.

What’s the lesson here for User-centric EA?

We can’t think that we have all the answers. Collaboration, vetting, and information transparency is critical to enabling better decision-making. Whether information transparency is coming from EA to business and technical information stakeholders or from the CEO to his board of directors, information transparency inspires trust and “breeds self-correcting behavior” (as the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant often reminds us). Hiding problems, being overly optimistic or self-reliant, or working in stealth are not the cornerstones for good enterprise governance. Rather, openness and frankness about program, projects, products, and plans (EA or otherwise) enables good governance. Hearing opposing points of views leads to better decision-making. Even if it is sometimes painful to hear or slows down the process some; a little enterprise introspection goes a long way to improving the end result.

Governance and Enterprise Architecture

Peer-to-Peer and Enterprise Architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P)—“computer network uses diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application. Peer-to-peer networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing content files (see file sharing) containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and realtime data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology. A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download/uploads and the servers react to and satisfy these requests… Peer-to-peer architecture embodies one of the key technical concepts of the Internet” (Wikipedia)

CNET news, 24 January 2008, reports that P2P technology is important for reducing network traffic and speeding up downloads from the web.

How does P2P help users?

P2P as a “distributed model is much more efficient and cost effective for distributing large files on the internet, than the traditional client-server model.”

P2P for media distribution helps companies so that they “don’t have to spend millions of dollars building out their own server farms and high-speed infrastructure.”

How does P2P work?

“P2P leverages “peers” in the network to host pieces of content…P2P allows the file to be downloaded once and shared many times. In fact, distribution gets more efficient the more people who want the file.”

What is the next target architecture for P2P?

“The P2P solution adds network intelligence to the peering process, so that P2P applications can make smarter decisions about where they get the content…if a P2P service can understand how the network is configured to request the file at the closest peers rather than arbitrarily getting it from a peer across the country or around the globe, it could save a log of network resources…what’s more, using peers that are closer also helps files download faster.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, the ability to use bandwidth more efficiently and to download files faster is a positive development for satisfying user needs for transport of ever greater amounts of data, voice, and video over the internet. Moreover, as the technologies for carrying these converge, we will continue to see even greater requirements to move these communications more efficiently and effectively. P2P is a viable technology for accomplishing this.

Peer-to-Peer and Enterprise Architecture

Intrusion-Prevention Systems and Enterprise Architecture

Firewalls have traditionally been used to “wall off” the enterprise from computer attack, but now intrusion-prevention systems are augmenting the organization’s defenses.

The Wall Street Journal, 28 January 2008 reports that “intrusion prevention systems promise an even smarter defense” than firewalls.

Firewalls are intended to keep intruders out. However, because certain traffic, such as email, needs to get through, holes or open ports allow in traffic that can carry viruses or malware into the network.

Intrusion-prevention systems work differently—they don’t wall off the enterprise networks like firewalls, but rather like a metal detector, they filter or scan every piece of traffic entering the organization for suspicious activity, and reject any item that is identified as a threat.

According to Wikipedia, Intrusion prevention systems (IPS)... [are] a considerable improvement upon firewall technologies, IPS make access control decisions based on application content, rather than IP address or ports as traditional firewalls had done.

Intrusion-prevention systems can be hardware that is physically attached to the network or software that is loaded onto individual computers.

Are intrusion-prevention systems really necessary?

Yes. “According to the Computer Security Institute 2007 Computer Crime and Security Survey, the average annual loss suffered by U.S. companies from computer crime more than doubled last year to $350,424 from $168,000 in 2006. And these reported losses tend to underestimate the number of attacks.”

Gartner analyst recommends antivirus on PCs and an intrusion –prevention system on the network.

Are there any problems with intrusion-prevention systems?

One of the biggest issues is false positives, which if not adjusted for will block desired incoming traffic. One way to handle this is to use the intrusion-prevention system to “detect threats and flag them,” rather than simply block them altogether. Additionally, the organization can adjust the filters that they may not need. This is the tuning required to ensure performance in terms of network speed and an appropriate level of filtering.

If your organization is not using an intrusion-prevention system, this is something your enterprise architecture needs to plan for and implement ASAP.

Intrusion-Prevention Systems and Enterprise Architecture

HSPD-12 and Enterprise Architecture

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, 27 August 2004, is a “Policy for a Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors.”

HSPD-12 establishes a mandatory, Government-wide standard for secure and reliable forms of identification issued by the Federal Government to its employees and contractors (including contractor employees).

The policy mandates promulgation and implementation of secure, reliable identification that covers Federally controlled facilities, Federally controlled information systems, and other Federal applications that are important for security. "Secure and reliable forms of identification" for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically; and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process. The Standard will include graduated criteria, from least secure to most secure, to ensure flexibility in selecting the appropriate level of security for each application.”

In Government Computer News, 27 October 2007, Jack Jones, the CIO of the National Institute of Health (and Warren Suss, contractor) discuss how NIH leveraged the mandates of HSPD-12 to not only implement the common identification standard for more than 18,000 federal employees [and another 18,000 part time employees, contractors, fellows, and grant reviewers] on its main campus in Bethesda, Md., and at satellite sites nationwide,” but also modified and improved it's business processes to ensure a holistic and successful architectural implementation.

What business modifications were involved?

“HSPD-12 was a catalyst for change at the institutes. The NIH Enterprise Directory (NED), which automated the process for registering and distributing badges to new NIH employees, needed to be revised to comply with HSPD-12...the conversation led to a re-examination of the broader set of processes involved in bringing a new employee onboard. In addition to registering new employees and issuing badges, NIH, like other federal agencies, must assign e-mail addresses, add new employees to multiple agency mailing lists, order new phones, assign new phone numbers and update the phone directory.”

How did NIH address this using enterprise architecture?

“NIH changed its enterprise architecture through a formal, facilitated business modeling process that involved all NIH stakeholder groups. The results included clarifications in the policies and procedures for processing new employees along with the transformation of NED into a significantly improved tool to support better communication and collaboration in the broad NIH community.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, this is a great example of EA supporting successful organizational change. NIH, like other federal agencies, was faced with the mandates of HSPD-12, and rather than just go out and procure a new system to meet the requirement, NIH used EA as a tool to look at its entire process for provisioning for new employees including policy. NIT EA modeled it business processes and made necessary modifications, and ensured a successful implementation of the identification system that is supported by sound business process and policy. Additionally, the CIO and the EA did not do this in some ivory tower, but rather in a collaborative “workshops with NIH stakeholder groups”. This collaboration with stakeholders hits on the essence of what User-centric EA is all about and how powerful it can be.

HSPD-12 and Enterprise Architecture

Breakthrough Thinking and Enterprise Architecture

Breakthrough thinking is at the heart of great enterprise architecture. Incremental improvements in the organization are one thing, but dramatic breakthroughs that take an organization to a whole new level is what EA dreams are made of.

Harvard Business Review (HBR), December 2007, reports on how to achieve this breakthrough in thinking.

Firstly, HBR contends that brainstorming does not work for a few reasons:

1. No structure—“most people are not very good at unstructured, abstract brainstorming.” Outside the box thinking is too vague for people to really get their arms around the problem and provide concrete solutions.
2. Data analysis is constrained—“slicing the data in new ways—almost always produces only small to middling insights…the contents of every database are structured to correspond to insights that are already recognized, not the ones that aren’t.”
3. Customer requirements can’t tell the whole story—customers “can rarely tell you whether they need or want a product that they have never seen or imagined."

So what do you do to get breakthrough thinking?

The approach “takes a middle path between the two extremes of boundless speculation and quantitative data analysis.

For example, “one question that can generate insights in any business is, “what is the biggest hassle about using or buying our product or service that people unnecessarily tolerate without knowing it?”

When you ask questions that create new boxes to think inside, you can prevent people from getting lost in the cosmos and give them a basis for making and comparing choices and for knowing whether they’re making progress.”

Here are some questions that drive breakthrough thinking:

• “What is the biggest hassle about using or buying our product or service that people unnecessarily tolerate without knowing it?”
• “How would our product change if it were tailored for every customer?”
• “Which customers use or purchase our product in the most unusual way?”
• “Who uses our product in ways we never expected or intended?”
• “Who else is dealing with the same generic problem as we are but for an entirely different reason? How have they addressed it?”
• “Which technologies embedded in our product have changed the most since the product was last redesigned?”

“The most fertile questions focus the mind on a subset of possibilities that differ markedly from those explored before, guiding people to valuable overlooked corners of the universe of possible improvements.”

From a participant’s standpoint, do the following to encourage breakthrough thinking.

1. Selection—“select participants who can product original insights.”
2. Engagement—“ensure that everyone is fully engaged;” provide incentives as appropriate. People are competitive by nature and a little competition can go a long way to idea generation.
3. Group size—break the participants into groups of around four, since that group size encourages everyone to participate and not hide-out.
4. Focus—set boundaries using preselected questions; “don’t worry about stifling creativity. It is precisely such boundaries…that will channel their creativity.”
5. Results—At the end of the brainstorming, “narrow the list of ideas to the ones you will seriously investigate…nothing is more deflating to the participants of a brainstorming session than leaving at the end with no confidence that anything will happen as a result of their efforts.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, what better way to serve the users than by thinking how to serve them better with improved products and services? The chief enterprise architect should facilitate breakthrough thinking to create the target architecture and transition plan for the enterprise.

Breakthrough Thinking and Enterprise Architecture

Doomsday and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is about planning and transitioning from the baseline to the target state.

However, as architects, there are times when we need to plan for the worst and hope for the best, as the saying goes.

As the price of oil has reached and exceeded $100 a barrel and significant new findings of oil are becoming a rarity, some people are starting to get nervous and are planning for a day when oil will be scarce, pricey, and society as we have come to know will cease to exist. Yikes, doomsday!

Are these people simply uninformed, pessimists, or non-believers that technological progress will outpace the demands we are placing on this planet’s resources?

The Wall Street Journal, 26 January 2008, reports about everyday people, like the Aaron Wissner in Middleville, Michigan, a school computer teacher with a wife and infant son, who became “peak-oil aware.” This term refers to his “embracing the theory that world’s oil production is about to peak.

These people fear the worst; “Oil supplies are dwindling just as world demand soars. The result: oil prices ‘will skyrocket, oil dependent economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.’” Mr. Wissner’s forebodings include, “banks faltering” and “food running out.”

And they believe that we cannot stop this from happening. “no techno-fix was going to save us. Electric cars, biodiesel, nuclear power, wind and solar—none of it will cushion the blow.”

So Mr. Wissner and his family are preparing and transitioning themselves for the worst, they “tripled the size of his garden…stacked bags of rice in his new pantry, stashed gold…and doubled the size of his propane tank.”

According to the article there are thousands of people that adhere to the peak-oil theory.

Of course, there are many doomsday scenarios out there that end in war, famine, disease, and so on. During the cold war, people built bomb shelters in their back yards, and school children had drills hiding under their desks. These days, many fear that globalization will drive this country to economic ruin. Al Gore and other environmentalists espouse the global warming theory. And since 9/11, fears are heightened about terrorists hitting us with nuclear, biological, chemical, or radiological agents. Even Hollywood has entered the fray with movies such as Armageddon about meteors hitting the Earth or The Day After Tomorrow with the greenhouse effect sending us back to the ice-age.

Whether you adhere with any of these various doomsday scenarios or visions of the future (their believed target architecture, not necessarily their desired one) and how they are preparing (transitioning) to it or you think they are just a bunch of nut-balls, it seems important as an enterprise architect to recognize that targets are not always rosy pictures of growth and prosperity for an organization, and the transition plans are not always a welcome and forward movement. Sometimes as architects, we must plan for the worst--hoping, of course that it never comes--but never-the-less preparing, the best we can. As architects, we don’t have to put all the enterprise’s eggs in one basket. We can weigh the odds and invest accordingly in different scenarios. Our organization’s resources are limited, so we must allocate resources carefully and with forethought. Of course, no architecture can save us from every catastrophe.

Doomsday and Enterprise Architecture

Big Brother is Watching and Enterprise Architecture

The enterprise architecture for law enforcement and security in the next decade will be focused on using technology to identify the bad guys and stop them in their tracks.

ComputerWorld, 14 January 2008, reports that “Homeland Security is bankrolling futuristic technology to nab terrorists before they strike.”

Here’s the target architecture:

“The year is 2012 [probably a bit optimistic on the date]. As soon as you walk into the airport, the machines are watching. Are you a tourist—or a terrorist posing as one? As you answer a few questions at the security checkpoint, the systems begin sizing you up. An array of sensors—video, audio, laser, infrared—feeds a stream of real-time data about you to a computer that uses specially developed algorithms to spot suspicious people. The system interprets your gestures and facial expressions, analyzes your voice and virtually probes your body to determine your temperature, heart rate, respiration rate, and other physiological characteristics—all in an effort to determine whether you are trying to deceive. Fail the test, and you’ll be pulled aside for a more aggressive interrogation and searches.”

Last July, The Department of Homeland Security, “human factors division asked researchers to develop technologies to support Project Hostile Intent, an initiative to build systems that automatically identify and analyze behaviors and physiological cues associated with deception.”

The intent is to use these screening technologies at airports, border crossings, as well as possibly in the private sector for building access control and candidate screening.

Sharla Rausch, director of DHS’s human factors division says that “in controlled lab setting, accuracy rates are in the range of 78% to 81%.”

Where is the current research focused?

1. Recognition of gestures and microfacial expressions
2. Analysis of variations in speech (i.e. pitch, loudness)
3. Measurement of physiological characteristics

The hope is that by combining all three modalities, “the overall predictive accuracy rate” will improve.

What are some of the challenges with these technologies?

1. Currently, too many false positives
2. Existing technologies, like the polygraph have “long been questioned by scientists…and remain inadmissible in court.”
3. Ability of algorithms to “correctly interrupt” suspicious behavior or cues
4. Profiling is continuously objected too based on discriminatory grounds
5. Privacy concerns about the personal data collected
6. Testing is limited by security concerns in the field
7. Deployment will be limited due to cost, leaving soft targets potentially at risk

Will this Big Brother screening technology come to fruition?

Absolutely. The challenges with the technologies will be resolved, and putting aside the profiling and privacy issues, these screening technologies will become essential to our protecting ourselves.

Big Brother is Watching and Enterprise Architecture

Creative Capitalism and Enterprise Architecture

CNET News, 24 January 2008 reports that Bill Gates calls for creative capitalism “in a speech Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates is calling on companies to think more broadly about how their products can benefit society.”

What is creative about creative capitalism?

For the last 500 hundred years or so, capitalism was considered the creative economic system based on private ownership of capital, a free enterprise, and a market economy. Capitalism was the economic “light unto the nations,” while socialism, an economic system, based on state ownership of capital and a managed economy, was deemed as inefficient and almost totalitarian in nature.

Capitalism generally refers to an economic and social system in which the means of production are predominantly privately owned and operated, and in which investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are determined through the operation of a market economy. It is usually considered to involve the right of individuals and groups of individuals acting as "legal persons" or corporations to trade capital goods, labor, land and money. Capitalist economic practices became institutionalized in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries, although some features of capitalist organization existed in the ancient world, and early forms of merchant capitalism flourished during the Middle Ages. Capitalism has been dominant in the Western world since the end of feudalism, It gradually spread from Europe, particularly from Britain, across political and cultural frontiers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism provided the main, but not exclusive, means of industrialization throughout much of the world.” (Wikipedia)

Well, as of today, Bill Gates has declared that capitalism is no longer creative, and we need a new capitalism called “creative capitalism”.

Is creative capitalism really a form of socialist capitalism, where the state and companies redistribute private capital based on economic and social factors? Hasn’t the country’s progressive tax system and various social programs (Medicaid, Food Stamps, Student Financial Aid…) been doing this all along, so that as a society we can take care of the needs of the less fortunate? This is an important aspect of social justice and an expression of humanity in our otherwise free enterprise system, where everyone must fend for themselves. In a purely capitalist society, you can be successful and rich beyond your wildest dreams, like Bill Gates or end up destitute and desperate. Socialist capitalism is a way to maintain an overall capitalist economy, but conceptually still take care of all people.

Is Bill Gates sincere?

“Forbes magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked Gates as the richest person in the world from 1995 to 2007, with recent estimates putting his net worth over $56 billion.” (Wikipedia)

At the same time, Bill and Melinda Gates have become some of the world’s largest philanthropists (after Warren Buffet). “Much of Gates' work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has centered on two particular shortcomings of capitalism--solving health problems that affect only the poor and improving educational systems.” Of course, these are noble goals and the Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation’s contributions have been magnanimous. Moreover, “in July, Gates will step down from full-time work at Microsoft and shift his focus to the foundation.”

Then again, it’s sort of easy to call for creative capitalism, when you’re the richest man in the world.

From a User-centric Enterprise Architecture perspective, the need to take care of those less fortunate in society, rings true and just as a principled architecture goal. Our nation and our enterprises must remain human and charitable, even while we compete in the global marketplace. We cannot architect our nation and organizations to succeed merely based on economic factors, but rather must instill human dignity and altruism in the fiber of our nation, organizations, and as individuals. And while of course companies can help by being altruistic and developing products that are cost-effective for those less fortunate (some examples are the One Laptop Per Child Initiative or the $2500 automobile by Tata Motors of India), at the end of the day government must really play the primary role in ensuring that the fundamental needs of all people in society are met.

Creative Capitalism and Enterprise Architecture

Globalization, Localization, and Enterprise Architecture

The world economy is globalizing, but sales and marketing is still a local activity.

How should organizations architect the way forward to address the duality of globalization and localization?

The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2008, reports that “Disney Localizes Mickey to Boost Hong Kong Theme Park.”

Disney has gone global and extended their famed theme parks to Asia. However, the first couple of years have not been a success. “Since it opened in 2005, Disney’s Hong Kong park, the media and entertainment company’s flagship for the booming Chinese kid’s market has struggled to connect with consumers. The park a joint venture with the Hong Kong government, missed public targets of 5.6 million visitors for its first year of operation, and attendance dropped nearly 30% in the second year to about four million.”

Where did Disney go wrong in going global?

Disney did not localize their brand or product to their foreign consumers. Instead, they expected the global consumer to behave the same as their U.S. counterpart with no differentiation for culture, nationality, beliefs, values, and so on. “In the past, it was the Chinese consumer who was expected to understand Disney, or so it seemed. Chinese tourists unfamiliar with Disney’s traditional stories were sometimes left bewildered by the Hong Kong park’s attractions.”

Disney also did not tailor their marketing to the local Chinese consumer, in a big snafu. “Disney’s marketing efforts also have misfired. A Hong Kong Disneyland ad in the summer of 2006 featured a family of consisting of two kids and two parents. China’s government, however, limits most couples to just one child.” Ouch!

So how is Disney changing their Mickey Mouse tune?

“Now, Disney is going on the offensive by going local. Its first big opportunity on the front is a stroke of astrological fortune. In the traditional Chinese calendar, it will soon be the year of the rat. As the Feb. 7 New Year holiday approaches, Disney is suiting up its own house rodents, Mickey and Minnie, in special red Chinese New Year outfits for its self-proclaimed Year of the Mouse.” This sounds good, though I’m just not sure Mickey and Minnie mouse appreciate being equated to rats, as in year of the rat.

Disney is also changing their park exhibitions to address local tastes. “Inside the parks, vendors hawk fried dumplings and turnip cakes. The parade down Main Street, U.S.A., is being joined by “Rhythm of Life Procession,” featuring a dragon dance and puppets of birds, flowers, and fish set to traditional Chinese music…” This also seems good and local, except shouldn’t this be Main Street, Hong Kong or China and not U.S.A.?

Anyway, according to Disney, they are going local all the way to their brand. “We are working as the ‘Chinese’ Walt Disney Company—ensuring that all the people who work in Disney understand the Chinese consumer to forge a deeper emotional connection with the brand.”

From the perspective of User-centric enterprise architecture, we need to focuses on the end-user and stakeholders. Going global and ignoring localized culture, nationality, beliefs, and values may be a cost conscious approach, but a poor architecture one. EA must respect individual, national, and cultural differences, and promote trust, respect, and integrity in doing so. A unified, consistent brand is good, but outreach to consumers based on their localized needs and requirements is absolute. Whether we are dealing with product, process, marketing, brand, or technology, EA must on one hand develop standards and seek out enterprise solutions where possible, but on the other hand, must tailor the enterprise’s offering to local tastes and requirements. It’s not always a one size fits all.

Globalization, Localization, and Enterprise Architecture

Mind Mapping, Social Graphing, and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA uses visualization techniques like mind mapping to brainstorm and develop information products that are useful and useable to the end user.

Mind map—“a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within…The elements are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts and they are organized into groupings, branches, or areas. The uniform graphic formulation of the semantic structure of information on the method of gathering knowledge, may aid recall of existing memories.” (Wikiepdia)

Mind maps are all about linking information and portraying it in a simple, clear, and easy-to-read way for people to understand and use.

Similar to a Mind Map that visualizes linked items to a central idea, the Social Graph is “an image of a person's connections to friends, family, and colleagues,” where the person is in the center and his connections (or links) span outward.

MIT Technology Review, on 28 December 2007 reports in “Mapping Professional Networks” that “IBM's Atlas tool aims to help businesses visualize connections between colleagues…[it] works in conjunction with its Connections software, [and] aims to help professionals network more efficiently within large companies. Its My Net component helps people visualize how closely they’re staying in touch with professional contacts. The closer a contact is to the center of the circle, the more frequently the user communicates with her.

The Atlas tool “collects information about professional relationships based not only on job descriptions and information readily available through the corporate directory, but also through blog tags, bookmarks, and group membership. Atlas can be configured to look at e-mail and instant-message patterns, and to weigh different types of information more or less heavily.”

“Atlas's four features are Find, Reach, Net, and My Net. Find and Reach are both focused on finding experts in particular fields. Through Find, a user enters search terms and receives a list of experts, ranked based on information gleaned from social data, the level of the expert's activity in the community, and any connections he may have to trusted associates of the user. Reach then helps the user plot the shortest path to make the connection, suggesting people the user already knows who could put him in touch with an expert. Net and My Net are primarily meant to help people analyze their existing networks. Net shows patterns of relationships within particular topic areas at a company-wide level. For example, it might analyze data on people interested in social computing and produce a map of how those people connect with each other through blog readership and community involvement. My Net allows individuals to analyze their own networks, showing them who they are connected to and how frequently they stay in touch with those people.”

The Atlas tool is a cool visualization technique that organizations can use, for example, after a merger or acquisition to see how well two organizations are integrating or that an individual in the organization can use to locate and stay connected with the subject matter experts they need to do their jobs.

Mind maps and social graphs are two interesting examples of how information visualization can be used to enable better organizational information understanding, analysis, and decision-making. User-centric EA maximizes the use of information visualization to communicate effectively. This is especially true when it comes to senior executives in the organization, who with their busy schedules, frequently look for a quick snapshot of actionable information, which summarizes lots of information for them, and helps them hone in on problems areas or opportunities, and options and recommendations for addressing these. In User-centric EA, Profiles (like mind maps or social graphs) are the high level products that portray a satellite view of information. Profiles capture a broad, strategic view of information and visualize it for executive consumption and decision-making. Further, user-centric EA links profile-level products to more detailed information products in the architecture, like models and inventories, so users can easily navigate up or down the hierarchy of information to get to what they need. Similarly, a mind map or social graph could also be a navigation mechanism to get to more detailed information on the objects or people linked to those products.

Mind Mapping, Social Graphing, and Enterprise Architecture

Portfolio Management and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture and portfolio management are closely linked activities. EA drives IT investment management (including the IT portfolio select, control, and evaluate phases) by conducting technical reviews of proposed new IT projects, products, and standards, and IT investment management provides important information updates to the EA (baseline, target, and transition plan).

In Architecture and Governance Magazine, Issue 3 Volume 2, Nuttall and Houghton provide an overall framework that goes “Beyond Portfolio Management to Comprehensive Application Governance.”

The framework includes three main areas and one supporting process area, as follows:

1. Application and License Management (tactical)—“It manages the demand side and user requests, the contract and compliance aspects of determining the number of licenses that are contractually allowed, along with the projects that bring new products into the portfolio while retiring older products that have been removed. In many ITIL organizations, a help desk/service desk would handle the demand for applications, while the license management aspects are often assigned to the procurement and/or configuration management functions.”
2. Application Portfolio Management (strategic)—“determines the appropriate mix of applications in the portfolio. It s highly dependent on the strategic business drivers for the corporation and includes: portfolio strategy development, optimization, and planning.” Portfolio strategy development determines the drivers and priority of those. Portfolio optimization determines the right mix of applications to support those goals. And portfolio planning determines the risks and constraints in implementing the portfolio, such as architecture, infrastructure, and resource constraints.
3. Financial Management—“budget and forecasting, account management, and allocations management;” these enable the planning of what money is available for the portfolio and what money is spent for applications.
4. Supporting Processes—other process areas that impact portfolio management include: “knowledge management, communications management, management reporting, architecture strategy, risk management, operational delivery, and support management.”

“One thing is certain, though, as technology continues to drive productivity, comprehension of application governance will become an even more essential step for companies wishing to manage their risks and costs while continuing to gain strategic value from their portfolios.”

I think this model is very helpful in decomposing the traditional definition of governance from the strategic functions of portfolio selection, control, and evaluation to the additional tactical, strategic, and financial aspects involved in managing it. Particularly, I believe it is useful to separate out the business demand (licenses, new systems and technologies) from the portfolio development and optimization (“the right mix” to satisfy user needs). Additionally, the breakout of financial management from the portfolio development is important in making the distinction between the roles of the Investment Review Board/Enterprise Architecture Board and the financial or resources group that actually budget and accounts for the funding aspect of IT spend.

Nuttall and Houghton do not go into any depth with the supporting processes, so these are presented as high level touch points or supporting processes without any particular explanation of how they support portfolio management and governance.

One critical item, the authors did not include, but should have included is the Systems Development Life Cycle, which take the IT portfolio and governs it from planning through analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, operations and maintenance, and ultimately to disposition. The success of moving systems projects through the SDLC will impact the make-up of future portfolio decisions.

Portfolio Management 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

The Power of Marketing and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is all about planning and governance to enable organizational success. But despite all the astute architectural planning and sound governance, why is it that the better product so frequently loses out to better marketing?

We’ve seen this happen with the more innovative and better functional Apple products losing out to Microsoft. We seen VCRs beat out Betamax, even though at the time Betamax was seen as the superior format. And again, we’ve seen CDMA become the dominant cellular network standard in the USA, despite GSM initially being the superior technology and had 73% worldwide market penetration.

Now once again, the superior product has lost in the market and is no longer being made, the Hydrox chocolate sandwich cookie made by Kellogg Company has lost out to the inferior Oreo cookies made by Kraft Foods Inc.

The Wall Street Journal, 19-20 2008 reports that ”The Hydrox Cookie is Dead, and Fans Won’t Get Over It.”

Hydrox enthusiasts “preferred Hydrox’s tangy, less-sweet filling. Many fans seem to remember that the cookies held together better than Oreos when dipped in a glass if cold milk. Some argue Hydrox cookies were more healthful than Oreos, since Oreos used to contain lard.” In fact, in a 1998 taste test by Advertising Age, 29 tasters voted for Hydrox and only 16 for Oreo. Yet despite these preferences, Hydrox lost out to “the dominant Oreos, one of the country’s best-selling snack foods.”

“For many years, the contest between Oreo and Hydrox was akin to that of Coke versus Pepsi, the Beatles again the Rolling Stones, dog people and cat people.”

In the end, Hydrox lost to Oreo; “Oreo had all the advertising, but those in the know ate Hydrox.” Over the years, Nabisco (now owned by Kraft Foods) had the far larger marketing budget, and Hydrox was discontinued in 2003.

Fans still hope that “Kellog changes its mind, especially since this year is the cookie’s 100^th anniversary.”

So is marketing stronger than product, like the pen is mightier than the sword?

This lesson seems pertinent in a presidential election year, where fund raising by candidates and advertising by them is seeing reaching astronomical levels. “After nine months of fundraising, the candidates for president in 2008 have already raised about $420 million. This presidential money chase seems to be on track to collect an unprecedented $1 billion total. By some predictions, the eventual nominees will need to raise $500 million apiece to compete--a record sum.” (http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.asp)

So will the best candidate win to be the next president of the United States or simply the candidate with the deepest pockets and best marketers?

From a User-centric EA perspective, I find this contest of product versus marketing to be akin to content versus design in developing EA information products. For example, an EA program can have wonderful and valuable EA information content, but if it does not employ User-centric EA principles of design and communication (such as using profiles, models, and inventories or information visualization and so on), then the EA program will not reach its potential. Every consumer product has both content and design or product and marketing. The high-end luxury companies have learned this lesson well and often capitalize on this by offering products with superior design, flair, packaging, and marketing and are thus able to develop formidable brands and command superior prices. So a word to the wise, do not ignore the power of marketing, communications, and design as part of your EA or other product development endeavors.

The Power of Marketing and Enterprise Architecture