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

The Virtuous Cycle and Enterprise Architecture

To move the enterprise into the future, organizations need leaders who have the skills and abilities to generate genuine improved results for the organization. These leaders are not afraid of change, embrace new ways of doing things, and are generally speaking, growth oriented.

The Wall Street Journal, 7 July 2008, identifies the effective leadership traits of those who “demonstrate a virtuous cycle of beliefs and behaviors.” Here is my cut at them:

1. Outlook on change—it starts with their outlook on life; effective leaders see “life as a journey of learning, [and] therefore embrace uncertainty, seek new experiences, [and] broaden [their] repertoire. This is in contrast to managers who follow the “vicious cycle” with an outlook that “life is a test,… [they] fear uncertainty, avoid new experiences, [and] narrow [their] repertoire. Leaders rich in experience often either come up the ranks, having been trained and worked in various diverse jobs internally or having worked in a multitude of external organizations in similar or different industries, but in either case, these leaders have been tested time again and have a developed a history of success in the face of constant or frequent change.
2. Customer view—effective leaders “understand customers as people” (versus seeing them only as data points), and they are thus, better able to detect new growth opportunities. This reminds me of the user-centric approach in enterprise architecture that I espouse. If we focus on the end-user/customer, and take an thoughtful approach to genuinely satisfying their needs, rather than just trying to make a sale, then we will always be working to do things better, faster, and cheaper. This is a long-term growth approach, rather than a short-term market share or stock price watcher view.
3. Action-orientation—virtuous leaders manage risk through action instead of through analysis paralysis, and they place “small bets quickly” rather than big bets slowly. One manager at a confectionary company put it this way, “get the products into the marketplace, and then start to understand what works and doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work, either take another shot at it or cut your losses.” That’s the price of learning. While this approach seems a little too loosey goosey; I do see the value of cutting off the analysis phase at a reasonable point, making a decision, and then following through with corrective action as needed.
4. Agility—great leaders are agile and believe that “abilities are malleable” and with change can come growth, as opposed to believing that “abilities are immutable” and leaders being fixed in their way of doing things. There is a need for entrepreneurial leaders who while not risk seekers, are able to take calculated risks. They change as often as necessary to remain agile, growing their own and their organization’s capabilities in meeting customers’ needs, but they do not change for changes sake alone.

What interesting is that each and every trait identified here for effective leadership centers around change—embracing it, acting on it, managing it, and remaining nimble in the face of ever changing circumstance. This is highly consistent with the enterprise architecture view of identifying the baseline, target, and transition plan and moving the enterprise ever forward in the face of constant change.

The Virtuous Cycle and Enterprise Architecture

Biometrics and Enterprise Architecture

Biometrics is “the study of methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.” (Wikipedia)

Biometrics is crucial for identifying and taking out of play enemy combatants, terrorists, and criminals or for providing access to trusted employees or partners in public or private sector organizations, like the intelligence community, defense, security, and various sensitive industries like financial, telecommunications, transportation, energy, and so forth.

National Defense Magazine, November 2007 has an article on the significant advances being made in biometric technologies and their applications to our organizations.

According to “’The National Biometrics Challenge,’ a report produced by the Office of the President’s National Science and Technology Council…’a tipping point in the maturation of the technology has been reached.’”

Both the FBI’s Information Services Division and The Department of Defense Biometric Fusion Center are leading the way in this field.

Currently, identity is established based on the trinity: “something you know (such as a password), something you have (like an identity card), or something you are, which is where biometrics comes in.”

Biometrics includes technologies for recognizing fingerprints, facial features, irises, veins, voices, and ears, and even gait.

But these are technologies identification means are not fool-proof: remembering multiple complex passwords can be dizzying and identity cards can be lost, stolen, or forged. So biometrics becomes the cornerstone for identity management.

However, even biometrics can be spoofed. For example, fake rubber fingers have been used in lieu of a real fingerprint (although now there are ways with living flesh sensors to protect against this). So therefore, biometrics is evolving toward “multi-modial” collection and authentication. This could involve using 10 fingerprints versus one or combing fingerprint, iris scans, and digital mugshots (called the “13 biometrics template” and used to gain access in U.S. managed detention centers in Iraq) or some other combination thereof.

Biometrics has advanced so much so that an Iris scan system from Sarnoff Corp. of Princeton NJ “can scan and process 20 people per minute from distances of about 10 feet away, even those who are wearing glasses.”

The keys to further enterprise application of these technologies in our enterprises are the following:

1. Lowering the cost (especially to make it available to local law enforcement agencies)
2. Making it rugged enough for extreme environments for the military
3. Making it portable so that it can be used for a variety of law enforcement and defense operations
4. Reengineering business processes so that measurements are captured, stored, accessible, and readily available for making a match and generating a decision on someone’s identity in real-time
5. Developing policies that “effectively govern the proper use of the data” and ensure adequate protection for civil liberties and privacy.

Overall, biometrics has moved from emerging technology to applied technology and needs to be planned into your identity management architectures.

Biometrics and Enterprise Architecture

The Three I’s and Enterprise Architecture

One question that is frequently asked in enterprise architecture is whether new technologies should be adopted early (more cutting edge) or later (more as quick followers). Of course, the third course of action is to close ones eyes or resist change and simply “stay the course.”

The advantages to bleeding edge technology adoption is having the early advantage over competitors in the marketplace (this head start provides the ability to incorporate innovation into products early and capture a hefty market share and quite possibly dominance), while the advantage to quick followers being learning from mistakes of others, building from their initial investments and a more mature technology base (for example, with software, one where the bugs have been worked out) thereby potentially enabling a leapfrog effect over competitors. The advantage to staying the course is organizational stability in the face of market turmoil; however, this is usually short lived, as change overwhelms those resistant, as the flood waters overflow a levee.

The Wall Street Journal 5-6 July 2008 has an interview with Theodore J. Frostmann, a billionaire private-equity businessman, who tells of Warren Buffet’s “rule of the three ‘I’s,” which is applicable to the question of timing on technology adoption.

“Buffet once told me there are three ‘I’s in every cycle. The ‘innovator,’ that's the first ‘I’. After the innovator comes the ‘imitator.’ And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot. So when…we’re at the end of an era it’s another way of saying…that the idiots have made their entrance.”

I relate the innovator and the early adopter in their quest for performance improvement and their sharing the early competitive advantage of innovation.

Similarly, I associate the imitator with the quick followers in their desire to learn from others and benefits from their investments. They recognize the need to compete in the marketplace with scarce economic resources and adapt mindfully to changes.

Finally, I relate the idiots that Warren Buffet refers to with those that ignore or resist change. Often these organizations mistake their early market success for dominance and in their arrogance, refuse to cede to the need to adjust to changing circumstance. Alternatively, these enterprises are truly ignorant of the requisite to adapt, grow, mature, and transform over time, and they mistakenly believe that simply sitting behind the cash register and waiting for customers is the way to run a business (versus a Costco whose warehouse, wholesale model has turned the nature of the business on its head).

In architecting the enterprise, innovation and imitation, while not without cost and risk, will generally speaking be highly rewarded by superior products and services, greater market share and more loyal customers, and a culture of success in the face of constant change. You don't need to look far for examples: Apple, 3M, P&G, Intel, Toyota, Amazon, and more.

The Three I’s and Enterprise Architecture

Earned Value Management and Enterprise Architecture

“Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project management technique used for measuring project progress in an objective manner. EVM combines measurements of technical performance (i.e., accomplishment of planned work), schedule performance (i.e., behind/ahead of schedule), and cost performance (i.e., under/over budget) within a single integrated methodology. When properly applied, EVM provides an early warning of performance problems.” (Wikipedia)

There is a terrific article on EVM called “If the Pharaoh Had Only Used An Earned Value System in Building the Pyramids,” by Lt. Col. William Neimann USAF (Ret.) Lt. Col. Neimann demonstrates very effectively how to use EVM (a scary topic to many) in a humorous scenario of ancient Egypt and the building of the pyramids.

The article starts as follows:

"The developer of the great pyramid of Egypt might be looked upon as the father of program management. He had one of the first programs in recorded history that required a great deal of integration and coordination (i.e. program management). He did not, however, have the relatively new concept of "earned value" to assist in the management of this ambitious program. An "earned value" concept is the heart of all defense contractor management information systems, which comply with DoD Instruction 5000.2 concerning the earned value management control system (EVMCS). But let's go back nearly 5,000 years to the construction of the pyramids to see if "earned value" would have been of any utility in managing that program.”

So what are the key measures in EVM for identifying cost and schedule variances?

(Positive is favorable, Negative is unfavorable)

• Cost Variance (CV) = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP) - Actual Cost for Work Performed (ACWP)

So, if the Pharaoh’s project manager budgeted 14 million shekels for the pyramid construction, but actual cost came in at 13 million shekel, then the project has a positive or favorable cost variance of 1 million shekels. The pyramids are under budget.

• Schedule Variance (SV) = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP) – Budgeted Cost for Work Scheduled (BCWS)

So, if Pharaoh’s project manager calculates that work performed was budgeted at $10 million shekels, but was scheduled to be 14 million shekels complete, then the project has a negative or unfavorable schedule variance of 4 million shekels. In other words, the pyramid builders have performed 4 million less work than planned. The pyramids are that behind schedule.

To calculate the overall project status at any given time:

• % Schedule = (Budgeted Cost for Work Scheduled (BCWS)/Budget At Completion (BAC)) * 100
• % Complete = (Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP)/Budget At Completion (BAC)) * 100
• % Spent = (Actual Cost for Work Performed (ACWP)/Budget At Completion (BAC)) * 100

How efficient is the project?

Greater than 1 is favorable, less than 1 us unfavorable:

• Cost efficiency = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP)/Actual Cost for Work Performed (ACWP)
• Schedule efficiency = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP)/Budgeted Cost for Work Scheduled (BCWS)

(Adapted from Earned Value Management Gold Card, Defense Acquisition University)

There are a number of other measures, but you get the idea.

EVM is important to Enterprise Architecture, why?

Enterprise architecture planning and IT governance is all about making order out of chaos in managing IT. By setting strategic direction with the architecture and enforcing it with sound governance, we set the stage for more successful IT project delivery. EVM is a way to measure IT projects success in terms of cost, schedule, and performance. Through EVM, we can measure our IT projects to ensure that we are meeting our EA plan and making course corrections as necessary through the governance process.

EA, IT governance, and EVM are ways to ensure that we no longer manage IT by the “seat of our pants” approach (gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim). We now have tools to plan, govern, and measure transformation.

Earned Value Management and Enterprise Architecture

Always Forward and Enterprise Architecture

ComputerWorld Magazine, 26 June 2008, has a terrific interview with Loraine Rodgers, formerly Xerox CIO, Citibank senior VP, city of Phoenix CIO, and American Express director.

Her early years…

Ms Rodgers found out at 16 that she was adopted and was “so angry at being lied to I threw away my merit scholarship and refused to go to college. But I took a programmer aptitude test and I aced it, so I started in IT as a programmer. I started in the weeds.”

Over the years, “I always volunteered for seemingly thankless jobs—challenging assignments that nobody wanted.”

Here’s the best part of what she said and I believe very inspirational…

“I am self-propelled, driven, excited about life, love to learn. I got my undergraduate degree at age 40, and my MBA at 42—all working full time. I move forward always—not necessarily in a straight line, but always forward. I have been fired once, laid off twice and promoted over 27 times. I repackage myself regularly and keep moving forward. I perceive the possibilities. I am not hindered by obstacles. There are no obstacles. Some things just take longer.”

WOW!

Ms. Rodgers is inspirational on an individual and organizational/enterprise architecture level.

Ms. Rodgers story is one of overcoming life’s challenges to succeed beyond probably her wildest dreams and most of ours. To succeed individually or as an organization, there are always challenges. Life is not a straight line upward, but is marked by up and downs, hopefully like Ms. Rodgers professional life, it has generally more ups then downs, and going always in an upward pattern.

Ms. Rodgers idea of always repackaging herself and constantly moving forward is terrific and in EA can be associated with an organization continually looking to reengineer and improve their processes and introduce new technologies to enable the mission and results of operation. The key is to always being grateful for what we have been granted, yet to always strive to improve things one step further: never to be satisfied with status quo or mediocrity.

Similarly, architecting the organization is not a one-time event; rather, it is an ongoing cycle of planning, governing, and transforming. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Whether on an individual or organizational level, we must learn to “move forward always—not necessarily in a straight line, but always forward!"

Always Forward and Enterprise Architecture

Online Medical Data and Enterprise Architecture

We all need access to information. In our personal lives, what’s more important than easy access to our financial and medical records?

In the case of financial records, these are generally all maintained online now. From your banking to your brokerage, from the online deposit of your paycheck to online bill pay. However, what about our medical records?

Generally speaking medical records are not available online and not easy to access. But why are medical records lagging behind financial ones in terms of their technology enablement? Is it that there is not bona fide need? Or is it that the technology is immature?

MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008, reports that “Google and Microsoft are offering rival programs that let people manage their own health information.”

Google Health (released in May) and Microsoft HealthVault (launched in October) “allow consumers to store and manage their personal medical data online. Users will be able to gather information from doctors, hospitals, and testing laboratories and share it with new medical providers, making it easier to coordinate care for complicated conditions and spot potential drug interactions or other problems.”

However, based on a 2007 poll “just 2 percent of all respondents said they had created and maintained medical records on their own computers, and just 1 percent reported using a ‘personal health record that is stored on the Internet.”

So the issues are?

1. New software—Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are relatively new and haven’t caught on yet.
2. Paper records—“many doctors still do not use electronic records and others are unwilling or unable to transfer data to patients in electronic form.”
3. Privacy—online medical data services are “not covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), under which hospitals, doctors, and third-party payers typically cannot release information without a patient’s consent.”
4. Sensitivity—“medical information—histories of mental illness, paternity tests, genetic information—can be far more sensitive than browsing histories or even financial records.”

From an enterprise architecture standpoint, these issues really do not make a whole lot of sense to me as being showstoppers to moving medical records online.

Firstly, there is a genuine need for medical records to be digitized and made more accessible and easy to use by patients and medical providers. Just think about being wheeled into an emergency room (possibly unconscious); wouldn’t it be nice if the emergency room physician could access your medical records before they start treating you from a pretty much blank state?

Also, have you ever wondered about the archaic paper filing system your doctor uses—you know the oodles of forms you have to fill out every time you go to a new doctor, the indecipherable notes your doctors jots down on freebee paper from the pharmaceutical companies (with their logos on it), the file folders with the colored stickers that office administers attach to them for tracking purposes, and the double and triple deep, wall to ceiling file shelves on rollers that they manipulate to store and access the records. Talking about crazy!

Further, the technology solutions are available. If we can manage the bits and bytes of our financial records discretely and securely, surely the same can be said of medical records.

I’ve got to conclude that there is a cultural issue here that is impeding the transformation to online medical records, and I don’t believe that the reluctance is coming from the patients’ side, because we are living and breathing digital information transformation daily and for the most part, we are addicted to it and love it. People are still screaming for more.

We’ve got to get the medical community to get off the dime; so that they recognize the importance to the consumer of their medical information and that they treat that information as belonging to the patient as opposed to being owned by them. Whether the medical community is holding back because they want to maintain the aura of medical mystery to what they do (have you ever tried to tell your doctor that you looked up something medical on the internet and see their reaction?) or that they want to hold onto their patients by controlling their medical records—either way we are not providing the patient/consumers the service they want and deserve, particularly when health and life are at stake.

Medical records are a prime area for transformation and they need a desperate dose of enterprise architecture to transform the sad state of affairs.

Online Medical Data and Enterprise Architecture

Bill Gates and Enterprise Architecture

On July 1, Bill Gates is stepping down from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft, but will continue to serve as Chairman. Bill Gates grew Microsoft into the worldwide software development leader with revenue of $51 billion for fiscal year ending June 2007 and 78,000 employees in 105 countries and regions.

As the prior CEO and chief software (and technical) architect it is definitely worthwhile to look at the legacy that Bill is leaving behind at Microsoft.

Fortune Magazine, 7 July 2008, provides four lasting imprints that Bill Gates is leaving on Microsoft and here are my thoughts on these as relates to enterprise architecture:

1. Software can do anything—Gates has a “utopian view of software. He believes it can do anything.” Like Bill Gates, we need to believe in the mission of our organization. Such belief is critical in inspiring passion for and dedication to what we do. However, blind belief that any one thing can do anything is folly. For example, software without hardware is a no-go as is hardware without software. Both are non-starters without the people to innovatively apply them to our greatest challenges.
2. Engineers rule—“Microsoft employees about 30,000 programmers among its 90,000 employees. In operating groups, engineers are involved in every major decision…Microsoft $8 billion computer science R&D lab is the world’s largest” Engineers are critical to solving our challenges, but you should not ignore marketing and sales either. Marketing and sales reach out and touch the people. You cannot ignore the human aspect to solving problems. Maybe it partially Microsoft’s obsessive engineering approach that has left it vulnerable on the people side, for example: “Apple’s biting ad campaign has successful painted Windows as uncool.”
3. “Institutionalize paranoia”—“’It’s very Microsoft to prepare for the worst,’ says Gates…Bill and Steve (Ballmer) created what I guess I’d characterize as a culture of crisis,’ says chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. There’s always someone who’s going to take the company down.” Paranoia is a disorder, but fighting for competitive advantage is reality. Your competitors are not laying down to die; they are fighting for their professional lives, and you need to meet the challenge every day if you want to be the best out there.
4. “Invest for the long term”—“Whatever the cycle is, we will keep investing through the cycle, because we know on the other side of whatever cycle happens, there is opportunity,” says entertainment division president Robbie Bach. The approach for long term planning is very enterprise architecture focused. However, the architecture planning without the good governance to administer structured, consistent, collaborative decision making is not very workable. Planning without effective decision making and enforcement falls short on the execution side. Again, perhaps here too, Microsoft could benefit from a less top heavy culture and a more open decision process, where all project and product stakeholders have a serious voice at the table. Then turning over the reins from Bill will not be as traumatic requiring approximately four years of preparation and turnover.

In the end, Microsoft is truly terrific company and Bill Gates is leaving a company that is nothing short of spectacular. Of course, even the best can get better with continuous learning and innovation and that is the next chapter for Microsoft in the world of the likes of Google and Apple.

Bill Gates and Enterprise Architecture

Architecting a Balance

As a child, we learn from our parents, teachers, and mentors, that too much of even a good thing is bad for you: be it sweets or hard work—in fact, just about anything taken to an extreme is deadly.

The lesson of finding a balance in life has been captured in religious and philosophical teaching about practicing a middle of the road or golden path approach in life. In architecture as well, developing a strong viable architecture is also premised on balancing conflicting demands and finding that delicate balance.

In simple terms, architecting a balance shows up in having to manage scarce IT resources. So that while on one hand, we may like to have the latest and greatest technologies to give us every edge, we have to balance to promise of those technologies with the cost involved. We do not have endlessly deep pockets.

Similarly, while on one hand, we it would be wonderfully customer-centric to provide each and every one of our customers the customized business processes and technology solution that they want, prefer, or are simply most familiar or comfortable using; on the other hand, we must balance the innovativeness and agility that our customers demand with the need to standard around enterprise and common solutions, which provide a more structured, deliberate, and lower cost base on which to service the enterprise.

As we know from childhood, it is not easy to find the “right” balance. That next bite of cotton candy tastes great going down and we won’t feel the stomachache till later that evening.

National Defense Magazine, November 2007, has an article about architecting a balance in the Coast Guard mission of maritime security, titled “License to Boat?”

The threats from small boating vessels are threefold:

1. Smuggling—“the use of a boat to smuggle people or weapons of mass destruction into the United States.”
2. Waterborne improvised explosive device (IED)—“that a boat will be used as a weapon itself by a suicide bomber” (such as the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole). “Imagine…the consequences of waterborne IEDs against passenger ships, against tankers, against port facilities themselves.”
3. Weapons’ platform—“boat used as a platform to launch a weapon, such as a short-range ballistic missle,” says Dana Goward, Director of MDA, at the U.S. Coast Guard

Despite these serious security threats, the article discusses the challenges of architecting a balance between increased security/maritime domain awareness (such as through requiring of boating licenses and/or automated identification systems for the more than 17 million small vessels that operate in U.S. waterways) and the desire to “ensure that future regulations don’t compromise boaters’ way of life or disrupt the flow of commerce.”

Of course, there is more than one way to skin a cat, so if security options don’t include boating licenses, Goward states, “the answer could be something as simple as a combination of rules, extra patrols, and increased monitoring on the waterways.”

When it comes to balancing competing interests, nothing is really simple. National Defense Magazine reports that in terms of maritime security, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on “Maritime Security: Potential Terrorist Attacks and Protection Priorities,” states that “terrorists are more likely to use small boats for waterborne attacks because they ‘satisfy the overwhelming terrorist requirements for simplicity,” Now, we need to continue architecting solutions that meet these security threats head-on, but at the same time preserve freedoms, our way of life, and support international commerce.

Creating balance between alternate views/needs is one of the biggest challenges, but also has the potential for some of the greatest benefits, because by striking a balance, we have the potential to satisfy the greatest number of stakeholders and optimize our ability to meet conflicting requirements. It’s easy to (as the Nike slogan says) “just do it,” but it’s hard to do it and not mess up something else in the process. For example, it’s relatively easy to do security, if you aren’t concerned with the affect on quality of life, commerce, and so on. However, this is not realistic.

Like all things in life, finding the right balance is an art and a science, and requires ongoing course corrections.

Architecting a Balance

Information Warriors and Enterprise Architecture

In the digital age, information is critical to decision making. This is the case in the board room as well as on the battle field.

Information superiority is critical to our warfighters ability to intelligently and efficiently defeat our enemies. Many of the Department of Defense‘s modernization initiatives are aimed at getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Unfortunately, there are still some information gaps.

National Defense Magazine, December 2007, reports “troops in digital age, disconnected.”

Apparently, not everyone in the military is getting all the information they need (at least, not yet).

“The problem often is described as a ‘digital divide’ between the technology haves—the upper echelons of command—and the have-nots---the platoons and squads that are deployed in remote areas. These small units for the most part are disconnected from the Army’s main tactical networks and only are able to communicate with short-range voice radios…[however,] at the top echelons, commanders can tap into loads of data—maps, satellite images, video feeds, and reams of intelligence reports.”

Often though it is the small units on the front lines that need to send and receive critical information on combatants or other situational updates that can have life and death implications. This is why the net-centric strategy for virtually connecting all units is so important to achieving the vision of true information dominance.

Here are just a few important ways that information can help our warfighting capabilities:

• Providing information to soldiers to locate enemy combatants (such as from “live video from unmanned aircraft)
• Enabling location tracking of soldiers to save lives when they are endangered (such as from GPS locators)
• Sending information updates back to command for coordination and enhancing decision capabilities (such as from streaming voice and video, instant messaging, etc.)

The good news is that there are a lot of new information technologies coming online to aid our military, including the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JTRS).

To ensure the success of these technologies, we need to manage the solutions using enterprise architecture to validate requirements, reengineer the processes, and effectively plan and govern the change.

1. Requirements management—“how to identify essential needs for information as opposed to providing information indiscriminately”
2. Business process reengineering—according to Marine Corps. CAPT Christopher Tsirlis “it’s not just about the latest and greatest technology but also changing the organization to use new technology.”
3. Planning/governance—we need link resources to results;“the technology exists, the question is how we resource it, and what is the right amount for each level.”

With a solid enterprise architecture and innovative technologies, we can and will enable the best information warriors in the world.

Information Warriors and Enterprise Architecture

The Water Crisis and Enterprise Architecture

According to Wikipedia: “The Earth has a finite supply of fresh water, stored in aquifers, surface waters and the atmosphere. Sometimes oceans are mistaken for available water, but the amount of energy needed to convert saline water to potable water is prohibitive today, explaining why only a very small fraction of the world's water supply derives from desalination.

There are several principal manifestations of the water crisis.

• Inadequate access to safe drinking water for about 1.1 billion people
• Groundwater overdrafting leading to diminished agricultural yields
• Overuse and pollution of water resources harming biodiversity
• Regional conflicts over scarce water resources sometimes resulting in warfare

Waterborne diseases and the absence of sanitary domestic water are one of the leading causes of death worldwide. For children under age five, waterborne diseases are the leading cause of death. At any given time, half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from waterborne diseases. According to the World Bank, 88 percent of all diseases are caused by unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.”

How critical is water to life?

While a person can live 4-6 weeks without food, survival without water is limited to between 3-7 days. (http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/how-long-can-you-live-without-food/)

The Wall Street Journal, 23 June 2008, reports that that a new invention, “The LifeStraw is a personal, portable water purifier,” “that “has the potential to save many lives.”

The LifeStraw was created in 2005, is 10 inches long, and weighs 4.3 ounces. “One straw is capable of purifying at least 700 liters (182 gallons) of water, removing an estimated 99.9% of bacteria and 99% of waterborne viruses.”

This is a game-changing invention:

“The product, which costs as little as $3, has won a number of awards including the 2008 Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas.”

So simple, yet so effective:

“When someone sucks through the straw, the water flows through textile and iodine filter, which kill off viruses and bacteria.”

Already hundreds of thousands have been purchased and are being distributed in countries with non-potable water.

As an enterprise architect, nothing is more satisfying than seeing an innovation that saves lives and improves the way of life for millions of people around the world.

While we are all introduced to inventions such as those “As Seen On TV” with new doodads for kitchen appliances, household/personal/car-care, tools, and novelty items, the introduction of something truly extraordinary like the LifeStraw just makes one do a double-take.

As an enterprise architect, I believe we need to hold up transformative innovations, such as the LifeStraw, as examples of best-in-class architectures that combine business process improvement with technology innovation that positively impacts millions of otherwise suffering people around the world.

As I go about my day-to-day responsibilities I’d like to keep this one in mind as an inspiring example of what can be achieved when technology is applied to global problems. Perhaps you’d like to do the same!

The Water Crisis and Enterprise Architecture

What Not to Tell Your Boss and Enterprise Architecture

ComputerWorld Magazine, 20 June 2008, tells us five things you don’t want to tell the CIO and which I believe tracks closely with the enterprise architecture function and goals, as follows:

1. “All about the technology -- and nothing about the business”—just like enterprise architecture is about business driving technology, rather than doing technology for technology’s sake, so too the CIO is interested in aligning business and technology. So don’t just go to the CIO talking technology solutions unless you have a clear understanding and can articulate the business requirements.
2. “There's only one solution”—in enterprise architecture and IT governance, we validate requirements against the architecture—the baseline, the target, and the transition plan. It is especially important to check if there are existing systems, products, and standard that can be used to meet user requirements, rather than building or acquiring something from scratch. There is rarely only a single technology solution for a business problem. Therefore, we need to evaluate the proposed new IT investment in terms of the return on investment, risk management, strategic business alignment, and technical compliance. Additionally, we need to review the analysis of alternatives to make sure we are effectively managing our scarce IT resources.
3. “Bad opinions about your colleagues”—EA planning and governance makes information transparent and enables better decision making. With EA information, vetting of IT investment and collaborative decision making, there is no need to point fingers at each other over failed IT projects. Instead, through sharing information and bringing IT project stakeholders together, we all have input into the decision process and share the project risk.
4. “There's no way”—With enterprise architecture, rather than say there’s no way to achieve enterprise goals or overcome technical challenges, we develop a target and plan for how we will do it. No, the goals are not achieved overnight, but rather by following a meticulous and vetted plan, usually over a period of three to five years, we can transform the enterprise.
5. “A surprise”—Bosses don’t like surprises. In a professional setting, we usually like rational thinking, process, structure, and planning, so that we can effectively deal with the chaotic world out there. EA planning and structured governance helps the organization stay on course and not get surprised or thrown. The planning process itself involves looking at our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and makes us more self-aware and proactive as an organization, so there are less surprises waiting to ambush us.

EA helps us to NOT have to tell our boss, the CIO, things he doesn’t want to hear, because we are proactive in our approach to planning and governance.

What Not to Tell Your Boss and Enterprise Architecture

Fusion Centers and Enterprise Architecture

An important way to share law enforcement and intelligence information in a physical setting is through fusion centers.

Government Technology’s Emergency Management Magazine, Spring 2008, states “the ultimate goals of any fusion center is to prevent terrorist attacks and to respond to natural and man-made threats quickly and efficiently.”

“Data fusion involves the exchange of information from different sources—including law enforcement, public safety, and private sector—and with analysis, can result in meaningful and actionable intelligence and information…The fusion process allows relentless re-evaluation of existing data in context with new data in order to provide constant updates.”

Fusion centers bring together federal, state, local, tribal, and private sector subject matter experts to share information, provide risk and threat assessments, and provide a coordinated response.

“Nearly every state now has a fusion center to address gaps in data sharing.” In the fusion center, there is real time video monitoring that can be panned and zoomed, GIS mapping capabilities and the ability to amalgamate information. The advantage of the fusion center is that all participant organizations have the potential of seeing and hearing the same thing at the same time—although local authorities “cited difficulties accessing federal information systems.”

Not all fusion centers are permanent; some only are formed to deal with special security events like the Olympics and so forth. But those that do function 24x7 hone the skills of the participants by having them work together in a steady ongoing fashion.

While you would think that technology would do away with the need for fusion centers, since the information can be shared virtually, and therefore participants would not need to be co-located, there are benefits to having people deal with people from other organizations face-to-face.

As a User-centric enterprise architect and one who believes strongly that the human capital perspective is under-appreciated or neglected altogether, I appreciate the need for fusion centers, joint operations centers, interagency coordination centers, and the like to share not only information and technology resources, but to actually work together, cooperate, coordinate, and build stronger ties across functional and organizational silos. This is really what “enterprise” architecture is all about—breaking down the silos and building a unified, more effective and efficient organization.

The fusion center solution acknowledges that the challenge of law enforcement, intelligence, and counter-terrorism efforts needs to go beyond pure information technology initiatives. We can’t afford to just have siloed agencies and organizations working out of their own “corners.” There is a need for people to come together and collaborate in a face-to-face environment.

As architects, there is an erroneous tendency to focus on technology solutions. This is suboptimal. We need to look at business process improvement and reengineering, the introduction of new technology, and continuing to build an ever more skilled, innovative, and cohesive work force. This User-centric EA approach ties to a three-pronged approach of people, process, and technology.

Fusion Centers and Enterprise Architecture

Information Addicts and Enterprise Architecture

As an enterprise architect, my job is to develop plans and governance for IT to meet mission/user requirements, which is typically for more and more information. But is more information the answer?

The Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2008, reports on a new book called Distracted by Maggie Johnson, that talks about instant communication robbing “the workday of any sustained interval of unbroken attention to a particular task…from email to instant messaging to Twitter—an-update service devoted to what-are-you-doing-at-this-moment inanity--the interval between interruptions appears to approaching zero.”

“In the workplace, a distracted knowledge worker is a fallow asset.” Ms. Jackson reports that:

• “Workers ‘typically change tasks every three minutes’ and ‘take about twenty-five minutes to return to an interrupted task…usually plugging into two other work projects in the interim.’
• By one estimate, ‘interruptions take up to 2.1 hours of an average worker’s day and cost the economy $588 billion a year.’”

“Many distractions turn out to be self-initiated: It appears that we just can’t wait to read the next email or blog entry or check to see what might be happening in an online discussion.”

We are addicted to information. On one hand, we want more and more information and complain bitterly whenever we are out of our carrier’s coverage or otherwise not able to use our cell phones, email, or internet connections. And on the other hand, we are so overloaded with information and so distracted all the time, we are walking around with our heads spinning, not knowing what to focus on next. We are true information junkies!

The information overload and incessant disruptions and distractions are not limited to the workplace. No, indeed.

I don’t know about you, but time for me is an endless deluge of everything information, driven by technology (especially email, blogging, professional networking, internet news and search, and so on).

Yet, while we absorb and spit out more and more information, our quality of life seems in many ways worse and worse. The things that are really important like spirituality, family, friends, charitable giving, and health/fitness is eroded by our incessant need for the next information fix.

We run away to getaway resorts, bed-and-breakfasts, and day trips, only to take our Blackberries or worse yet our laptops. We check our email compulsively. We check our networking sites to see where our friends are and what they are doing. We check for the latest information on this, that, and the other thing. We are checking ourselves into a dizzying numbness, where we are losing touch with real people in the real world in lieu of information ubiquity and life in a virtual world. We are losing important pieces of ourselves in our addiction to information.

So what’s an enterprise architect to do?

• Baseline—awareness is step #1. We need to recognize that we are creating an information addicted society for ourselves and our children. Information ubiquity, if not our current state, is certainly where we are well on the way to. In fact, I’ve seen many organization’s IT strategic plans that specifically state their vision as information 24x7x365 or anytime, anywhere.
• Target—planning for a better tomorrow. We need to take control and set a target state that balances the “highs” that we get from more and more information, with the need to be better people—better to ourselves and to others, more inclined towards our spiritual needs, physical health, and more in touch with the real world versus the virtual.
• Transition Plan—getting from here to there. We need to wean ourselves off the constant information fix. It’s easy to get addicted. I had many a caffeine headache until I got myself some decaf beverages. Similarly, smokers often must substitute a nicotine patch for a cigarette. We need to plan time for spirituality, family, friends, and other activities that wean us off the information addiction we have.

Information Addicts and Enterprise Architecture

Employee Onboarding and Enterprise Architecture

The human capital perspective of the enterprise architecture is often overlooked, and is not yet included in the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), but I’m still hopeful.

A recent article in Federal Times, 9 June 2007, called “First Day on the job, first step to retention” demonstrates that human capital architecture is alive and well although not consistently used.

A report by the Partnership for Public Service found that “the government has no consistent approach to bringing new employees on board; new employees often aren’t taught about and initiated into their new agency’s culture; and technology that could ease the process and improve collaboration is underused.”

However, some agencies are coming up with new ways to welcome new employees, make them feel “at home” on the job, get them situated, acclimated and trained, so they quickly become productive employees with longevity at the agency.

For example in setting up the logistics for a new employee, “GAO and NASA have each developed case management systems to track new hires from the moment they accept the offer. The system alerts information technology offices to set up a computer network access and email account for a new employee; facilities staff will prepare an office and desk; and security staffs work in advance to arrange needed clearances.”

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) goes above and beyond when it comes to onboarding. OCC send new hires “a welcome basket with an agency-branded T-shirt, umbrella, luggage tags, and chocolates.” Not a bad introduction for someone starting new in a place.

GAO, NASA, OCC are all good examples of what human capital enterprise architecture is all about. I would suggest growing this list and building it into a FEA human capital perspective.

We cannot take our employees for granted. Their enthusiasm, determination, innovation, empowerment, and leadership is what will drive the organization ultimately to succeed or not.

The enterprise architecture human capital perspective can look at the lifecycle of the employee from recruiting, hiring, and onboarding all the way through their 30+ year careers and into retirement. The enterprise architecture can assess how we manage the human capital lifecycle in the enterprise today, establish a future target state, and develop the transition plan to move the organization towards best practices for managing our most critical asset, our people.

Employee Onboarding and Enterprise Architecture

Emergency Incident Management and Enterprise Architecture

When a disaster or emergency strikes, who is in charge—federal, state, local, or tribal authorities? Police, fire, rescue, medical services, public works, environmental response professionals? Who has jurisdiction? How is incident response coordinated?

“The National Response Framework (NRF) presents the guiding principles that enable all response partners to prepare for and provide a unified national response to disasters and emergencies. It establishes a comprehensive, national, all-hazards approach to domestic incident re

• describes how communities, tribes, states, the federal government, private-sectors, and nongovernmental partners work together to coordinate national response;
• describes specific authorities and best practices for managing incidents; and
• builds upon the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which provides a consistent template for managing incidents.” (http://www.dhs.gov/)

“National Incident Management System:

• While most emergency situations are handled locally, when there's a major incident help may be needed from other jurisdictions, the state and the federal government. NIMS was developed so responders from different jurisdictions and disciplines can work together better to respond to natural disasters and emergencies, including acts of terrorism. NIMS benefits include a unified approach to incident management; standard command and management structures; and emphasis on preparedness, mutual aid and resource management.” (http://www.fema.gov/)

Government Technology’s Emergency Management Magazine, Spring 2008, reports that “only willing partners coming to the table, treated as equals, will prove effective in establishing a national standard for incident response.”

Why are there so many issues in coordinating incident response?

1. Miscommunication—“the ideal scenario is that everyone uses the same system and terminology when responding, which allows disparate agencies to come together quickly and avoid miscommunication when confusion ultimately rules—during disasters.”
2. Jurisdictional egos—“Jurisdictional egos can become involved, along with personal history and interagency ‘baggage.’…it can be messy at best, especially as leaders emerge, each wanting to highlight their agency’s accomplishments and not be superseded by another.”
3. Lack of interagency and cross-jurisdictional training—“We need joint training, planning and exercises with all potential partners if we’re ever going to fix the issue of unified command…[additionally, there is a] lack of practice in how, in larger, cross-jurisdictional responses, the elected officials aren’t used to working in tandem with other jurisdictions during emergencies.
4. Subordination is not in the law—“It is not in our nature and governance for one jurisdiction to subordinate itself to another, especially in crisis. As such, the solution will need to be the establishment of mechanisms that allow for joint action via a coordinated response.”

As a citizen, I frankly do not care about responders’ terminology, egos, training, or distaste for subordination—when there is a true crisis, I (like I believe any sane person) wants help to come, come quick, and come effectively. I want lives saved and property safeguarded.

From an enterprise architecture perspective, I acknowledge the challenge that we face in coordinating incident response among a broad spectrum of stakeholders and emergency response experts. However, at the same time, I cannot help but marvel at the current federated system of emergency response. I believe that emergency response needs to mature to one where there is absolute crystal clear chain of command and a solid, unified approach to dealing with disaster. All necessary and appropriate resources need to be brought to bear to help people in disaster and a coordinated response is a must.

Certainly, while there are technical issues in establishing common data standards, mechanisms for information exchange, interoperable systems, and securing these, it seems that the biggest issue is cultural. People and agencies are continuing to function in a siloed mentality despite the clear need for a unified approach to dealing with disasters as well as with the large, complex, and global problems that we face. I believe that this only underscores the need for “enterprise architecture” and that it is becoming more and more obvious that each of us doing our own thing is not going to enable us to solve the great issues of this century.

Emergency Incident Management and Enterprise Architecture

Preventing Another 9/11 and Enterprise Architecture

From the tragic events of 9/11 came the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act, the findings of the 9/11 Commission in 2004, and the Presidential memoranda in 2005 and 2007 to better share information.

ComputerWorld Magazine, 26 May 2008, reports that “nearly seven years after 9/11, information-sharing problems that hobble law enforcement are just beginning to be solved.”

What is the information sharing problem in law enforcement?

There are “20 federal agencies and 20,000 state, county, local, and tribal enforcement organizations nationwide.” The problem is how do you get this multitude of varied law enforcement organizations to share information to identify the bad guys?

While 75% of police agencies use automated systems to manage incident report data, only 25% of those systems are capable of sharing that information.

What’s being done to fix the problem?

First (not mentioned by ComputerWorld), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is establishing common terrorism information sharing standards (CTISS) to drive and enable information sharing among Law Enforcement, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Military, and Diplomatic information domains.

Additionally, the Department of Justice is developing a data dictionary/schema to establish a “common vocabulary and structure for the exchange of data.” First, this took the form of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) in 2003, and later took form in the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) in 2005 that extended the effort from “law enforcement to other areas of justice, public safety, intelligence, homeland security, and emergency and disaster management.” (Note: Defense and the Intelligence Community have a comparable data standard initiative called U-CORE.)

This past March, DOJ and the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS) division “began rolling out the National Data Exchange Initiative (N-DEx), a NIEM complaint database and data sharing network.” N-DEx provides “federated search capability across incident reports residing in state and local record management systems nationwide while allowing those records to be updated and maintained by their local owners.”

The goal is to have “the majority of the country participating” by 2009. The biggest obstacle is that many agencies’ systems have been so customized that integration is now challenging and expensive.

According to the FBI’s website, NDEx will be accessible via the internet and “includes several basic but vital capabilities, including searching and correlating incident/case report information and arrest data to help resolve entities (determining a person’s true identity despite different aliases, addresses, etc.). N-DEx will also create link analysis charts to assist in criminal investigations and identify potential terrorist activity.”

According to the NDEx brochure (available online at the FBI website), law enforcement agencies who participate in NDEX will:

• “Sign an operational Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
• Identify and map incident/case data to the N-DEx Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD)
• Obtain network connectivity through an existing CJIS Wide-Area Network (WAN) or connect over the Law Enforcement Online (LEO). “

The architecture concept here is summed up nicely by Linda Rosenberg, Director of the Pennsylvania Office of Criminal Justice: “Now you don’t have to go back and build these data warehouses and totally redo your entire infrastructure.”

Instead, you plug in to the NDEx and share information that’s been mapped to the common data standards. NDEx provides the target infrastructure, while NIEM provides the data exchange standards. Together, we can share information for better achieving our law enforcement mission—protecting the American people.

Preventing Another 9/11 and Enterprise Architecture

What Goes Around Comes Around and Enterprise Architecture

As an enterprise architect, I have always wondered about the trend of outsourcing our manufacturing jobs out of country-- where as a nation we erode our manufacturing base and ship this capability to China, India, Mexico, and other countries where labor is plentiful and cheap.

Yes, in the short term we are taking advantage of the lower costs of manufacturing in other countries, but long term, I always questioned the viability of this strategy thinking that surely every nation needs to maintain a core of critical manufacturing and service capabilities and infrastructure to guarantee self-sufficiency, protect itself from eventual global disruptions, and ensure the continuity of its existence.

I believe that some day (and maybe relatively soon), we will regret the near-sightedness of our decisions to move production abroad for the sake of the dollar today.

Interestingly enough, I read in the Wall Street Journal today, 13 June 2008, that “stung by soaring transport coasts, factories bring jobs home again.”

“The rising costs of shipping everything from industrial-pump parts to lawn mower batteries to living-room sofas is forcing some manufacturers to bring production back to North America and freeze plans to send even more work oversees.”

I thought to myself—Hallelujah!

No, I am not happy that oil prices are soaring and that inflation is looming everywhere, but I am cautiously relieved that perhaps, we as a nation will wake up in time to secure our economic interests at home and not send our entire manufacturing base and capabilities out of country.

Ironically (da!), the further we move our factories away, the more it costs now to ship the goods back home.

“The movement of factories to low-cost countries further and further away has been a bitter-sweet three-decade long story for the U.S. economy, knocking workers out of good-paying manufacturing jobs even as it drove down the price of goods for consumers. But after exploding over the past 10 years that march has been slowing. The cost of shipping a standard 40-foot container from Asia to the East Coast has already tripled since 2000 and will double again as oil prices head toward $200 a barrel…In the world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money.”

The other thought that always kept coming to mind was that as we continue to move manufacturing abroad, the increasing demand for labor would drive the cost of labor up, and eat away at the cost differential making the overseas move a moot point.

Again, I read today in the Journal the story I always felt was bound to be told and to continue to unfold: “The cost of doing business in China in particular has grown steadily as workers there demand higher wages and the government enforces tougher environmental and other controls. China’s currency has also appreciated against the dollar…increasing the cost of products in the U.S.”

One problem with trying to bring the jobs back home…

“Much of the basic infrastructure needed to support many industries—such as suppliers who specialize in producing parts or repairing machines—has dwindled or disappeared.”

What goes around, comes around. The jobs (some) are coming home (although net-net, we’re still losing manufacturing jobs). As a country, we‘ve benefited in the short-term from outsourcing, but in the long-term, I believe we’ll have done ourselves a good deal of harm.

Does this sound unfamiliar?

Think national deficit—big time. Think gargantuan problems with social security, Medicare, health care, and so on.

All too often, we behave with short-sightedness and like infants, the desire for immediate gratification. But as enterprise architects, I believe we need to think long term and often defer gratification for long-term competitiveness, self-sufficiency, and survival.

What Goes Around Comes Around and Enterprise Architecture

Cognitive Styles and Enterprise Architecture

We are all familiar with personalizing websites like Yahoo.com to make them more appealing, functional, and easy to navigate.

Now, according to MIT Technology Review, 9 June 2008, websites are being personalized not by the person, but rather by systems “that detect a user’s cognitive style” and changes the website accordingly

What is cognitive style?

Cognitive style is how a person thinks. Some people are more simplistic, others more detail-oriented, some like charts and graphs, and some like to be able to see and get to peer advice.

Why is cognitive style important?

Well, if we can figure out a person’s way of thinking and what appeals to them, then we can tailor websites to them and make them more useful, useable, and more effective at selling to them.

“Initial studies show that morphing a website to suit different types of visitors could increase the site’s sales by about 20 percent.”

So what’s new about this, haven’t sites like Amazon been tailoring their offering to users for quite some time?

Amazon and other sites “offer personalized features…drawing from user profiles, stored cookies, or long questionnaires.” The new method is based instead on system adaptation “within the first few clicks on the website by analyzing each user’s patterns of clicks.”

With cognitive style adaptation, “suddenly, you’re finding the website is easy to navigate, more comfortable, and it gives you the information you need.” Yet, the user may not even realize the website has been personalized to him.

“In addition to guessing each user’s cognitive style by analyzing that person’s pattern of clicks, the system would track data over time to see which versions of the website work most effectively for which cognitive style.” So there is learning going on by the system and the system gets better at matching sites to user types over time!

If we overlay the psychological dimension such as personality types and cognitive styles to web design and web adaptation, then we can individuate and improve websites for the end-user and for the site owner who is trying to get information or services out there.

Using cognitive styles to enhance website effectiveness is right in line with User-centric Enterprise Architecture that seeks to provide useful and usable EA products and services. Moreover, EA must learn to appreciate and recognize different cognitive styles of its users, and adapt its information presentation accordingly. This is done, for example, in providing three levels of EA detail for different types of end-users, such as profiles for executives, models for mid-level managers, and inventories for analysts. This concept could be further developed to actually modify EA products for the specific end-user cognitive styles. While this could be considerable work and must be balanced against the expected return, it really comes down to tailoring your product to your audience and that is nothing new.

Cognitive Styles and Enterprise Architecture

TEOTWAWKI and Enterprise Architecture

TEOTWAWKI stands for the end of the world as we know it. It is a term used in the survivalist movement and is sometimes used as a reference to the apocalypse. (The apocalypse though has religious connotations in that the end of the world has greater meaning in terms of revealing G-d’s ultimate purpose for mankind.)

The end of the world—is there such a thing?

As mortal human beings, we know that all living things have a beginning and an end of life. Even inanimate objects are recognized as having a lifecycle, and this is often talked about from a management perspective in terms of administering “things” from their initiation through their ultimate disposition. Some common lifecycles frequently referred to are: organizations, products, projects, assets, investments, and so on.

So how about the world itself?

Well, the answer is of course, yes—even the world will one day come to end. Astronomers have long witnessed even the implosion of stars at their end of life—these are called supernovas. And our world is a lot smaller than a star; in fact, you could fit about a million Earths inside our sun (which is a star).

When times get tough, TEOTWAWKI is something that perhaps we ponder about more and wonder whether this is it!

For example, during the Cold War and the buildup of the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States, there were enough nukes to destroy the world ten times over. And people wondered when the button would actually be pushed.

Nowadays, we wonder less about nuclear holocaust and more about overpopulation (currently at 6.3 billion and expected to reach 9 billion by 2042) and depletion of world energy resources like oil (currently at $140 a barrel and up 44% in cost YTD), demand outstripping supply for silver, copper, aluminum, and many other commodities, and shortages of food (as the UK Times reported in February that “the world is only ten weeks away from running out of wheat supplies after stocks fell to their lowest levels for 50 years.”)

Further, while the population continues to explode and resources continue to be depleted, we continue to overflow the world’s dumps with garbage so much so that there has even been talk of sending garbage into space, just to get it the heck out of here!

And let’s not forget global warming and pollutants that stink up our cities, cause acid rain, asthma, and so many other unfortunate effects on the ecosystem and human health.

The good news is TEOWAWKI talk is often just fear and occasional panic and it is not imminent. The bad news is there are some very real problems in the world today.

The problems are so big that leaders and governments are having a difficult time trying to tackle them. All too often, the problems get passed to the next generation, with the mantra, “Let it be someone else’s problem.”

As an enterprise architect, my frame of reference is to look at the way things are (the baseline) and try to come up with a better state for future (the target) and work up a transition plan, and basically get moving.

We all know that it is extremely difficult to see our way through these extremely complex problems of global magnitude. But if enterprise architecture has taught me anything, it is that we must create a roadmap for transformation; we must forever work to change things for the better. We must do whatever we can to prevent TEOTWAWKI.

Perhaps the field of enterprise architecture can be expanded from one that is IT-focused and now becoming business and IT-focused to ultimately becoming a discipline that can drive holistic change for major world problems and not just enterprise problems. Does this mean that enterprise architecture at some point becomes world architecture?

TEOTWAWKI and Enterprise Architecture

Information Sharing Standards and Enterprise Architecture

In response to the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 called for an Information Sharing Environment (ISE), “an approach that facilitates the sharing of terrorism information” and that requires the President to designate a Program Manager for the ISE and to establish an Information Sharing Council to advise the President and the Program Manager.

The Common Terrorism Information Sharing Standards (CTISS) Program Manual is a construct for ISE. It defines both functional standards and technical standards.

• Functional standards—According to the CTISS Program Manual, these are “detailed mission descriptions, data and metadata on focused areas that use ISE business processes and information flows to share information.” From an enterprise architecture perspective, I believe this would correspond to the business and information perspectives of the architecture as well as be extended probably to the performance perspective. In other words, functional standards correlate to the three business perspectives of the Federal Enterprise Architecture. These are the standards that define our requirements, in other words, how we measure performance (for example, Balanced Scorecard), how we engineer business processes (for example, Lean Six Sigma), and how we describe information sharing requirements (for example, NIEM or U-CORE, and Information Exchange Package Descriptions).
• Technical Standards—“methods and techniques to implement information sharing capability…[for] acquiring, accessing, producing, retaining, protecting, and sharing.” From an enterprise architecture perspective, I believe this would correspond to the services, technology, and security perspectives of the architecture. These correlate to the three technical perspectives of the architecture. The technical standards include how systems will interoperate or share information (for example, J2EE, .NET), what technology standards will be employed (for example, XML, SOAP, UDDI) and how security will be assured (for example, various from NIST/FIPS, ISO, IEEE, and so on).

What I like about the CTISS is that it attempts to define a comprehensive framework for the ISE from the highest-level being the domains of information (such as intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security, foreign affairs, and defense) and drills down to the security domains (SBU, Secret, and US-SCI), reference models, (FEA, DoDAF, IC EA…), standard types (metadata, data, exchange, and service), standards bodies (NIEM, W3C, OASIS…), and then the standards themselves.

As an initial impression, I think next steps are to articulate how I share information with you or you share with me. Currently, we are still defining techniques for future sharing of data, like developing metadata, creating a data dictionary and schema, defining exchange standards, and service standards to discover data through registries. It like responding to someone who asks, how do I get to your house, by saying, we need to pave roads, design and manufacture cars or buses, install traffic signs and lights, and so on. That’s all infrastructure that needs to be built. That still doesn’t tell me how I get to your house. While we are making huge progress with information sharing, we’re still at the early stages of figuring out what the infrastructure elements are to share. But it seems to be a running start!

Information Sharing Standards and Enterprise Architecture