Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

President Roosevelt was a man of great accomplishment:

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

(adapted from Wikipedia)

Wow, what an amazing President!

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

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

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

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

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

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Enterprise Architecture

Disruptive Technologies and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA plans for the future of the enterprise and is on the lookout for both incremental innovation as well as disruptive technologies.

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

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

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

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

Disruptive Technologies and Enterprise Architecture

The Dialectic and Enterprise Architecture

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

Here is an example of how the dialectic works:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• EA practitioners take two dialectical opposites (business and technology) and bring synthesis to them. EA practitioners integrates the two realities of the organization, business and IT: business drives technology and technology enables business. EA is a communication channel and mechanism for bridging the needs of the business with the capabilities and solutions of technology.
• EA synthesizes the architectures of all the distinct lines of business, users, and developers. EA is not focused on the individual segments (lines of business) or on solutions (users and developers), but on the synthesis of these—the overall enterprise itself.
• EA develops the target and transition plan for the organization; in doing this, it hears positions and requirements from many different leaders, subject matter experts, and stakeholders, and must synthesize these into a viable and effective strategy for the organization.

EA, like the dialectic, synthesizes various extremes to derive deeper meaning from the distinct elements (such as business and technology, segment and solutions architecture, leaders and subject matter experts). By synthesizing various types of information, EA perspectives, stakeholders, and architectural views, EA brings out a richer, deeper meaning of IT planning and governance for the organization.

The Dialectic and Enterprise Architecture

Porter's Five Forces Model and Enterprise Architecture

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

Porter's Five Forces include the following:

Three forces from 'horizontal' competition -

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

and two forces from 'vertical' competition -

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

(Adapted from Wikipedia)

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

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

(Adapted from American Management Association)

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

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

Porter's Five Forces Model and Enterprise Architecture

Architecting Politics With Mind Reading

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

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

How is this monitoring taking place?

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

How widespread is this?

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

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

How long has this been going on?

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

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

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

Architecting Politics With Mind Reading

Wanted Enterprise Architect!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanted Enterprise Architect!

Information Security and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

Information Security and Enterprise Architecture

An Ant Colony and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ant Colony and Enterprise Architecture

Master of Paradox and the Enterprise Architect

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

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

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

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

Can we as enterprise architects ever resolve these paradoxes?

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

So as architects what specifically can we do?

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

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

Master of Paradox and the Enterprise Architect

Relationships and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relationships and Enterprise Architecture

Boeing and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

• INSIGHT—EA is the synthesis of business and technology to improve organizational decision-making. EA develops information products, so that the organization has the information it needs to improve mission execution, and so that business is driving technology. In the case of Boeing, they were so focused on getting the technology of the new jet right, that they overlooked the underlying business problems. “It figured the chief risk lay in perfecting a process to build much of the plane from carbon-fiber plastic instead of aluminum. Boeing focused so hard on getting the science right that it didn’t grasp the significance of another big change; the 787 is the first jet in Boeing’s history designed largely by other companies,” and this has been plagued with problems ranging from language barriers to their contractors subcontracting out key tasks, such as engineering. Boeing’s focus on the technology led them to ignore important aspects of the business of designing and producing the new planes. Boeing did not have sufficient insight into the business side (versus the technology) of managing this tremendous endeavor.

• OVERSIGHT—EA involves IT governance, so that IT investments are made based on sound principles of business alignment, return on investment, risk management, and technical compliance. Generally, the Investment Review Board, the EA Board, and the Program Management Office sees to it that IT projects are reviewed and managed in terms of cost, schedule, and performance parameters. In the case of Boeing, they did not ensure adequate EA oversight for the 787 jet. “Boeing overestimated the ability of suppliers to handle tasks that its own designers and engineers know how to do almost intuitively after decades of building jets. Program managers thought they had adequate oversight of suppliers but learned later that the company was in the dark when it came to many under-the-radar details.” Boeing’s general expertise in project oversight was outsourced along with the engineering and production tasks, and this led to, what an executive of one major supplier has called, chaos.

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

Boeing and Enterprise Architecture

An Online Only World and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the advantage of cloud computing?

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

What are some of the issues with cloud computing?

• Privacy—“user privacy …becomes especially important if Google serves ads that correspond to all personal information, as it does in Gmail.”
• Encryption—“Google’s encryption mechanisms aren’t flawless. There have been tales of people logging into Gmail and pulling up someone else’s account.”
• Copyright—“one of the advantages of storing data in the cloud is that it can easily be shared with other people, but sharing files such as copyrighted music and movies is generally illegal.”
• Connectivity—“a repository to online data isn’t useful if there’s no Internet connection to be had, or if the signal is spotty.”

Still Google’s vision is for “moving applications and data to the internet, Google is helping make the computer disappear.” Human-computer interaction has evolved from using command lines to graphical user interface to a web browser environment. “It’s about letting the computer get out of our way so we can work with other people and share our information.”

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

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

An Online Only World and Enterprise Architecture

Microwave Energy Weapons and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

That’s also the epitome of poor enterprise architecture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microwave Energy Weapons and Enterprise Architecture

Democracy and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy and Enterprise Architecture

Exascale Computing and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exascale Computing and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architect Leader = Warrior, Healer, and Tao

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enterprise Architect Leader = Warrior, Healer, and Tao

IT Investment Reviews and Enterprise Architecture

To manage IT, you’ve got to have investment reviews, but when is it too much or not effective?

There are a number of executives (CXO’s) with a stake in the success of IT projects and a responsibility to review and manage them:

1. Chief Financial Officer (CFO)— is interested in the investment’s alignment to the mission and its return on investment
2. Chief Information Officer (CIO)—looks at IT projects in terms of technical alignment and compliance with the enterprise architecture, systems development life cycle, IT security, and other areas like privacy, accessibility, records management, and so on
3. Chief Procurement Officer (CPO)—reviews projects for contractual issues to protect the organization and ensure that “it gets what it’s paying for”
4. Line of Business (LOB) Program Officials—must review projects in terms of their project management and to control cost, schedule, and performance and ensure that the organization “controls” its investments

Usually, each of these executives has boards to carry out these review functions, and they are redundant, inefficient and drive the end-user crazy answering questions and checklists.

Part of the problem is that the executives and their review boards do not limit themselves to reviewing just their particular domains, but look across the management areas. So for example, EA often not only looks at technical alignment, but also will review business alignment and performance measures.

Moreover, not only are the review boards’ functionality often redundant between CXO’s, but even within the domain of a CXO, there will be duplicative review efforts such as between EA, SDLC, and IT security reviews.

Additionally, when an organizational component of an organization needs to conduct these reviews at their level and then again all the same reviews at a higher overall organization level, then the already inefficient review process is now doubly so.

In the end, with all the requisite reviews, innovation gets stifled, projects hamstrung, and the end-user frustrated and looking to circumvent the whole darn thing.

Obviously, you must review and establish checks and balances on IT investments, especially with the historical trends of people spending extravagantly and wastefully on IT solutions that were non-standard, not secure, not interoperable, did not meet user requirements, were over-budget, and behind schedule.

The key from a User-centric EA perspective is to balance the needs for governance, oversight, and compliance with helping and servicing the end-user, so they can meet mission needs, develop innovative solutions, and manage with limited resources. Asking users the same or similar checklist questions is not only annoying, but a waste of valuable resources, and a great way to spark an end-user revolt!

Remember it’s a fine line between EA and governance showing value to the organization and becoming a nuisance and a hindrance to progress.

IT Investment Reviews and Enterprise Architecture

Robot Warfare and Enterprise Architecture

The day has arrived. It’s the Terminator, but for real—a killer robot made to do some serious battlefield harm.

Fortune Magazine (December 2007) reports that its “1% inspiration and 99% obliteration…when engineering talent meets extreme gunsmithing.”

“It’s two feet tall, travels ten miles an hour, and spins on a dime. Remote-controlled over an encrypted frequency that jams nearby radios and cellphones, it’ll blow a ten-inch hole through a steel door with deadly accuracy from 400 meters.”

When firing in automatic mode, it shoots 300 rounds per minute and “delivers the lead equivalent of 132 M16s.”

Two such deadly bots can be carried into battle on a remote-controlled mini-helicopter, called the AutoCopter.

Robotex has built these deadly robots with investor money rather than government research money and has developed these devastating technology marvels for only $30,000 to $50,000.

These robots while new to the market are a sure bet from an enterprise architecture perspective. They meet user requirements as a superb killing machine. They take our military men and women out of harm’s way and instead intelligently use technology to conduct the “business” of war. The technology employed is low maintenance and is the finest, most reliable, firepower available (“It’s made of aircraft-grade aluminum steel, never needs lubrication or cleaning, and won’t rust. Pour sand in it and it won’t clog. It doesn’t recoil.”). It’s extremely cost-effective. And it gives us the technology edge.

Let’s hope and pray that we’re already planning counter-measures for when the bad guys get up-to-speed on these. That is very necessary EA planning for protecting our country and interests.

Robot Warfare and Enterprise Architecture

Turducken and Enterprise Architecture

When I asked a friend at work, how they enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday, they said great, they spent the day making (and then eating) turducken!

In the conversation, I was to learn what turducken is…

Turducken—“a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The name is a portmanteau of those ingredients: turkey, duck, and chicken. The cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are filled with, at the very least, a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird.” (Wikipedia)

I thought to myself, is it strange that someone made a recipe that combines 3 different birds and named it as if it was a new species with three heads or something?

My friend told me how much work it was to make this recipe and put these three birds together as one; also what a mess it made of the kitchen.

As I continued to hear and think about turducken, I realized it was all about good old innovation. Any plain old turkey, duck, or chicken—that’s old news. We’re in a society, where we are always looking to do and try something new. While “new” is not always better, it is the adventure, the creative process, the forever trying that is part of our creed. Like in Star Trek at the beginning where they say, “to go where no man has gone before.”

This creative spirit is an essential part of User-centric EA. Architects are masters at not only studying and analyzing the business and technology of today, but also aspire to innovate a better technology enabled business in the future. Aside from the “not another data call” EA is about piecing the business-technology puzzle of the organization together and incorporating all the economic, political, and social influences to create a viable vision and execution model for bringing the organization into the future.

So EA will never be satisfied with a plain old turkey, duck, or chicken. User-centric EA will always be looking to create an innovative turducken recipe!

Turducken and Enterprise Architecture

Email and Enterprise Architecture

How many emails a day is enough?

The Wall Street Journal, 27 November 2007 reports that we are all being inundated with email and it is only going to get worse.

On average, the corporate email user received 126 messages a day last year, up 55% from 2003.

Moreover, “by 2009, workers are expecting to spend 41% of their time just managing emails.”

Further, by 2011, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person, per day is expected to hit 228!

According to Microsoft, users fall into two general categories for how they handle all the email:

1. Filers—“strive to have an empty inbox at the end of the day”
2. Pilers—“the super-messy desk people. They’ve got 5,000 emails in their inbox, most of them unread”

One new novel architecture approach to help manage email is based on a product from Seriosity, as follows:

“Attent™ with Serios™ is an enterprise productivity application inspired by multiplayer online games. It tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games. Attent creates a synthetic economy with a currency (Serios) that enables users to attach value to an outgoing email to signal importance. It gives recipients the ability to prioritize messages and a reserve of currency that they can use to signal importance of their messages to others. Attent also provides a variety of tools that enable everyone to track and analyze communication patterns and information exchanges in the enterprise.” (www.seriosity.com)

So for example, users may get 100 serios at the start of the week, and they get more when others send them messages. They allocate these serios to each message they send. “A message asking some if he or she wants to go out for lunch might carry a value of three ‘serios’ of virtual currency; [while] a message about an important customer with an urgent problem might get 30 serios. In this way, we try “to get people to send fewer message, or just more relevant ones.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, having senders designate the importance of messages is a wonderful idea to help receivers gauge relative importance and need to read. This is an improvement over the basic Microsoft Outlook capability that enables users to simply mark something with a “!” as important or not.

The Seriosity product is a good example of how technology can meet emerging business requirements, even when it involves managing hundreds of emails a day.

Email and Enterprise Architecture

The "Right" Way to Introduce New Technology and Enterprise Architecture

I came across some interesting lessons learned on rolling out new technology (from the perspective of franchisers/franchisees) that apply nicely to user-centric enterprise architects (adapted from The Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2007):

1) Partner with the user--"if you can get a franchisee really excited about the new technology, it's a lot simpler to get it rolled out...if I can convince you, and you can see the difference, you will be my best spokesman."

2) Testing it first--"finding a guinea pig...we have a lot of people telling us they have great concepts. We want to see that it works with our customer base, our menu, our procedures first."

3) Show the cost-benefit--"an enhancement may look promising, but if its payback is years away, the investment may not compute." Why fix it, if it ain't broke.

4) Keep it simple--"most franchisees are focused on their business, not technology...so they're not looking for something to complicate their lives." Also, focus the solution on the operators in the field and not on the headquarters staff, who may not be completely in tune with the realities on the front lines with the customers.

The "Right" Way to Introduce New Technology and Enterprise Architecture

Implicit Requirements and Enterprise Architecture

With electonic contact lists in Microsoft Outlook on the computer and on organizer programs on cellphones and other electronic gizmos, why would anyone still keep a physical Rolodex anymore?

The Wall Street Journal, 24-25 November 2007, reports that "some executives are still spinning their rotary card files...more than 20 years after the digital revolution that forecasted the paperless office, the 'rotary card file'--best known by the market-leading brand name Rolodex--continues to turn."

The article continues, "as millions of social-network users display their connectedness on their Facebook pages, a surprisingly robust group of people maintain their networks on small white cards. Most of these devotees also rely on BlackBerrys and other computer-based address books."

This infatuation with physical Rolodex files extends to models like the 6000-card wheel that are no longer even on the market. Other executives keep as many as 8 or 9 Rolodex wheels on their much needed desk space. Why?

The article states that "part of the card system's appeal has always been that it displays the size of one's business network for the world to see." Yet, social-networking sites like LinkedIn also display the number of contacts a person has, so what's the difference from a physical Rolodex file--what need is the technology not fulfilling with users?

From a User-centric EA perspective, it seems that people have a fundamental need with their contacts to not only be able to maintain them in an organized fashion and to demonstrate the size of their network (to show their value to the organization), but also to feel important and accomplished and to be able "to wear" this like a mark or medal of distinction, in this case by laying it out their Rolodex files prominently on their desks for all to behold.

In EA, when we design technology solutions, we need to keep in mind that there are functional requirements like the organizing of personal and professional contacts, but there are also human, psychological requirements that may never actually come out in a JAD session. These are unstated or implicit requirements and architects need to plan technology to meet both the explicit and implicit needs of users.

A little like Sherlock Holmes and a little bit like a psychologist, an architect must explore user needs beyond the surface if they are to successfully align new technologies with end-user and organizational requirements.

Implicit Requirements and Enterprise Architecture

One Laptop Per Child and Enterprise Architecture

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

One Laptop Per Child and Enterprise Architecture