Today’s Enterprise Architecture Tip – Focus on a consistent level of detail

Enterprise Architecture (EA) teams are usually partially populated with staff that have originally come from a technical IT background, and we all know what they are like don’t we? Because I am one…we love to meddle in the techy details – everything from what static code analysis tool the dev team are using and how, to version control, detailed design artifacts etc. But the key question to remind yourself of is – where should my EA team be adding the value?

It’s back to the good old ‘big rocks’ story (thanks to Mr Fernau for telling me this one several years ago).

So what is the most important thing your EA team can achieve today? For example, is it:

a) Cost avoidance – preventing a programme of work from building the wrong thing and so damaging future agility and increasing long term operational and change costs – by finding a superior alternative approach, i.e. not just saying “no”, but “that’s a really great idea, but what about this”…

b) Resolving the really frustratingly poor use of code header blocks in your offshore team’s work

A classic EA team behaviour anti-pattern is to try and work at both levels of detail – which is very frustrating for all parties involved as neither are the key EA decisions all adequately addressed (in fact they probably never can be – as that’s a “pick the right battles” issue, but that’s one for another blog post) and nor are the more detailed issues, as the EA team doesn’t have the time, control or buy-in to meddle at that level anyway.

You decide…in fact, once you’ve got all the type (a) issues under control, feel free to use the rest of your spare time of issues of type (b)

 

Notes on John Zachman’s Enterprise Architecture presentation at BCS EA specialist group meeting

As advertised in my notes from the last BCS EA specialist group event, myself and my Smart421 colleague (David Taylor, head of our internal WebSphere practice) attended this evening’s John Zachman presentation at Sun’s offices in London. I felt it was too good a chance to miss as I’ve not seen John present before – regardless of whether you agree with him or not, every self-respecting EA needs to have seen him at least once I think, and usually you have to shell out some hard-won training/conference budget to do so. I must admit I was expecting quite a hard sales pitch from him, having seen collateral for all the Zachman Framework materials and courses etc, and because he’s American …but this was not the case, and so I humbly apologise for my stereotypical assumptions.

He is a bit of a handful though – Mike Buck did his best to ‘manage’ John at the end – whilst the sandwiches outside started to curl up at the edges. As I expected he is a very engaging speaker, with some great anecdotes from his career and he spoke passionately about enterprise architecture. He kept speaking at a quite frightening rate and intensity for about 100 minutes, going 100mph and hammering home his messages using those good old speaking techniques of repetition, comedy and metaphor. I was glad I wasn’t at the front of the audience as I suspect that was a bit full-on – it’s a bit like when you go an see a stand-up comic – always best to sit a few rows back…

So what about the content? Well, he basically covered the need to enterprise architecture as a discipline and then spent the majority of the time explaining the Zachman Framework and the justification for it. So for most people in the room, I suspect they didn’t really hear anything new. It was really quite odd to hear him refer to that thing that we’ve all grown up with, the Zachman Framework, as “my framework”. There was no content about how to execute an enterprise architecture process and his viewpoint seems quite academic in nature. In his motivating way, for a moment you are led to feel that you could “model the world” – until your real world experiences kick in and you realise that this is nonsense in almost all current business environments. I must admit I feel bad criticising John Zachman in any way – it feels like complaining about your (very sharp, clever, transatlantic) grandad. To be fair to him, he didn’t try and cover the ‘delivery’ topic at all and could not of done so in the time he had. He’d be a great guy to wheel out in front of your CEO to ’sell’ the idea of enterprise architecture to them, but you also get the impression that you don’t want to be the guy following up on the expectations he might have created. He neatly side-stepped a few audience questions, but you got the impression he had the answers if not the time to give them, e.g. the classic cross-cutting concerns challenge such as ‘how is security architecture represented in the framework?’. I was quite impressed that he openly volunteered that the framework was an ontology but not a method – whilst this is obvious, I thought he might spin this towards a method of his choosing but he didn’t try that at all.

In some ways the asides, anecdotes and little historical lessons were the most riveting part of the presentation – he talked about the process by which he originally “discovered” the framework, the reasons he changed some things in version 2 of it such as renaming some of the terms to make them more business-relevant and less IT-centric, and the history of System R, DB2, IMS, business process modelling and so on. Overall I am very glad I went…I’m richer for the experience although my ears do feel like they’ve been assaulted. Another excellent and very well attended BCS EA SG event – well done committee.

 

Enterprise Architecture case studies – Notes from BCS EA specialist group meeting

As threatened, I attended the BCS Enterprise Architecture specialist group meeting in London near Covent Garden yesterday. There were two interesting presentations regarding EA case studies, both of which caused lots of debate and questions from the gathered audience.

Amit Apte from SITA presented an anonymised case study from the airline industry. As is always a good idea, he started off with a provocation – that “enterprise architecture is boring” – and I think he was a little disappointed with the lack of reaction he got to that statement. I tend to agree to the extent that if it’s all done well, then it should be largely mechanical in nature and so rather dull. However in general this is not the case – in fact it is far too exciting! But the key thing that attracts me to EA is the ability to influence with a more significant level of impact, e.g. stopping the wrong change projects and starting the right ones, rather than operating at a solution architecture level and only influencing with a smaller scope. Maybe it’s a power thing, anyway…

He got a fair amount of stick from the audience about whether this was really an overview of an EA initiative or a one-off enterprise-wide solution architecture that had used a modified version of TOGAF v8 as a method, and the discussion centred around whether a sustainable EA function had been created or not.

Andrew Jolly from Deloitte presented an anonymised case study from the TMT (technology, media, and telecom) sector – concerning the creation of an EA governance capability in an organisation of circa 29k staff/partner staff. Some interesting things came out…

• Both presentations mentioned something like “the business don’t need to know about EA”, i.e. a rather depressing but not unusual admission that selling the concept of EA to the business community is in the too hard pile. Andrew added to this with the sage comment that brand awareness for your EA initiative with the wider stakeholder community is key though, even if it is a meaningful acronym. Call it A.A.R.D.V.A.R.K. (I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader to come up with) or whatever, but call it something so they can hang a label on what you are doing for them.
• The usual general advice applied – start small to demonstrate value, winning over hearts and minds by demonstration of real value rather than selling potential future value. The good old “virtuous circle” that Smart421 (and especially Richard Latham) have been banging the drum about. I was going to ask about metrics etc but someone else got in before me – and got the answer I expected which was they set up some KPIs at the start, but eventually the qualitative measures took over, i.e. did the projects the EA function had cherry-picked to engage with ‘feel’ that they were adding sufficient value.
• One of your selection criteria for where to start is on a project where you have influence (probably by chance, e.g. you know the project manager personally etc).
• As a mechanism of starting to embed the idea of architects contributing to projects/programmes, Andrew’s suggestion was that you could provide a ‘free’ architect as projects will never turn away free resource. You need to ensure they are a good resource and then some benefit will naturally emerge and the project will see it, and so be more likely to ask for (and then pay for) architecture input next time round. Obviously this requires some seed funding which is non-trivial to find.
• Even in what may appear to be an organisation that appears architecturally doomed initially, there are generally people inside the organisation who are performing a psuedo-architecture role some of their time even if they haven’t got the title and wondrous benefits package that goes with it. Otherwise how has the enterprise made it this far? Get these guys involved in some kind of virtual team as they hold the keys to your initial EA artefacts.
• Publish EA materials early – don’t wait for perfection as you’ll never get there. Even if they’re wrong an early viewing so that they get ripped to bits (hopefully not too badly) and then improved is a good thing. Obviously they’ve got to be of a certain quality though. This point really reminded me of the practice recommended I read in a book from Guy Kawasaki about releasing new products to market early, which is completely common practice in the software industry. His quote – “Revolutionary products don’t fail because they are shipped too early; they fail because they are not revised fast enough”. Hence never buy a vs.0…
• What was the biggest risk to the EA function that had now been established? Andrew’s view was that it was “taking our eye off the ball” and losing sight of the fact that the roadmap for the EA function itself must be maintained and pursued – just like the other roadmaps that the EA function might generate for business architecture etc.

Andrew’s parting message was an interesting one – that putting in place an EA capability is a business change project in itself and so should be treated as such, i.e. get the organisation’s “change” people involved to execute the business change.

It was good to put some faces to the names of some more of the the movers and shakers in the UK EA world – I can now point Amit, Andrew, Tom Graves and Sally Bean out of a line-up if required…

Specialist group chairman Mike Buck mentioned that the next event is a presentation by the grand-daddy of EA, a certain Mr John Zachman on October the 6th, so I expect that event to be very well attended…

 

BCS Enterprise Architecture meeting tomorrow

I’ll be attending the BCS EA specialist group meeting tomorrow (10th Sept 2009) at 18:00, 5 Southampton Street, London – at this meeting there will be a presentation of case studies from specialist group members focusing on the following areas:

• Business value delivered by EA
• Professional development for enterprise architects
• Governance of enterprise architecture

I’m looking forward to meeting my EA peers, and I’m keen to hear different perspectives on questions such as these…

• If the EA effort has been going for a while, are they entering the “trough of disillusionment” and how have they addressed this?
• What was the trigger event that meant they got funding/energy for an EA initiative? New CEO? A big disaster that they were rebounding from?
• Are they well engaged with project/programme teams?
• Architecture and/or project governance in place? Working well?
• Centralised or decentralised model?
• What lessons have they learned?
• Views on TOGAF and other frameworks?
• Any relationship to business process improvement teams, six sigma initiatives etc?
• Budget, team size etc
• EA cycle times
• Communication approach?
• Metrics in place?

 

Modeling the Business using Archimate

I am continuing to build business models using Archimate, but I am getting bogged down in functions, processes, services and interfaces,

To my mind Archimate seems to move the modeling of the Business (ie that which is not IT see Tom Graves ) only a little way on from the practice of Business Process Modeling.

Archimate still seems to have a “start with IT and from an IT perspective” feel to it. Or put another way “how can we answer the what & why IT is needed”.

This may be the result of my mind set, however it may also be a result of trying to make Archimate compatible with UML, so that for instance an existing class model can be referenced in an Archimate model.

What I am trying to imagine, is how to represent say a centralized hierarchical organization as opposed to a decentralized flat structured organization. Can a decision be represented as a function, process or an interaction?

 

Using Archimate

I have been looking a little more deeply at Archimate 0.1 to see if it will give a useable off the shelf meta model.

The 1st reaction that I have had from a real customer, is that we EA’s may understand it – but not his business managers and executives.

How much time and effort do we expect customer’s staff to put into understanding our EA models?

I guess that it depends, but for the at a most 20 minutes attention span of busy a CxO the answer is that there is not much time and energy available for learning to understand different graphical representations. Indeed it is not just the symbols, but the juxtaposition of them and of the relative diagrams. By which I am thinking in particular of the representation of layers within Archimate.

Coming from a Zachman filled culture the layers are troublesome, and mentally I tip the diagrams on their side! I cannot get my head round the implied hierarchy within the Archimate meta model, after all if a task or activity can be performed by hand, by IT system or by machine where is the hierarchy?

I have been searching for some real life examples of Archimate, and I have not found any. My efforts so far tend to look a little between a process model and a tiered application architecture.

Does any one have any reviews / articles that will shed more light on the use of Archimate?

I think that we could start a thread or discussion on this, if there is sufficient interest. For instance what do we make of the “layering” of Business, Application and Physical dimensions?

May be this has all been discussed at length in the Archimate forum?

Is there a place for peer review of models on the web?

 

Views from 22nd TOGAF Conference

I have just come from the 22nd Open Group EA Conference in London http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/ and survived my 1st presentation to the Open Goup. I was on edge all conference hoping that no one would be presenting similar material to mine. They did not and the Sustainable Enterprise Architecture http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/latham.htm remained my baby.

It has been good to have affirmation that Smart421’s EA http://www.smart421.com/solutions/consultancy/enterprise-architecture.asp proposition matches up to other’s best practices.

This conference was the launch of TOGAF 9, thankfully for my British reserve, not launched with great pomp and ceremony, nor with any Razzmatazz. A little Raz may well have re-enforced the significance of the achievement.

Judging from the mood of the delegates there is confidence in TOGAF 9 and agreement that it is solid as far as it goes.

TOGAF 9 has put on a lot of weight since it was 8, much of it valuable and not at all a middle aged spread into verbosity. Although covering TOGAF 9 at breakneck speed in a couple of presentations on the first full day was not necessarily the best use of conference time. It did show that at least 3 people know TOGAF 9 inside out – I am sure that all of the Open Group members who worked on it are as equally as knowledgeable.

Watch out for Archimate http://www.opengroup.org/archimate/downloads.htm – A meta model to describe Enterprise Architecture, you download the symbols for use in Visio, but to use it properly it needs to be installed in your modelling package. Archimate 2 is due out by the end of the year. I think that it will be a unstoppable force for architecture modelling in years to come.

There were a couple of recurring themes at the conference:-

The hole that is Business Architecture – As Tom Graves http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/graves.htm pointed out IT is less than 10% of expenditure and so by inference we are missing out on 90% of the market for architecture. The hole is being addressed by the Business Architecture working group, but progress is slow and there is much to be done. I want to encourage all knowledgeable practicing Business Architects to dive in a get it sorted.

Enterprise Architects need more soft skills. We are too geeky! This may also explain the lack of progress on the Business Architecture front as the non IT people can not bear to talk to us or as Paul Homan http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/homan.htm put it – they do not understand what we say and anyway we take too long to say it!

Some people were trying to extend the scope of TOGAF, Jason Uppal http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/uppal.htm talking about the 10 year lifecycle of architecture artefacts. Amit Bhagwat explored the relationship between leadership, time span of control and Enterprise Architecture.

On balance there was a lot of talk about theory and not much on the practical application of TOGAF. There is great need to publish practical EA experiences and best practices.
We have contributed to the EA community, thrown in our hat with a model for Sustainable EA. It was interesting that some other presentations were near to our offering of Sustainable Enterprise Architecture – Danny Greefhorst http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/greefhorst.htm talked about Just in Time architecture as part of his Pragmatic Architecture, Paul Homan talked about architecture becoming out of date quickly, if it if not used (Use it or Loose it I suppose) – Martin van den Berg http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/van_den_berg_martin talked of the “Project Start Architecture” the EA Killer Application – But I think that the EA Killer app is the Project Start-up in the our Sustainable EA.

 

“Sustainable Architecture” presentation at Open Group London conference next week

As previously announced here , my colleague Richard Latham is presenting at the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference on April 30th at 11am. The conference itself runs from 28-30th April and is located at the Central Hall Westminster, Storey’s Gate in London.

Richard will be presenting on the subject of “Sustainable Enterprise Architecture” – based upon real world experience from our recent Enterprise Architecture engagements, how to create and make EA work without undue strain on resources of money, political capital and change to an organisation’s status quo.

Here’s a summary image from his presentation to give some context…

Richard and other Smarties will be there throughout the whole event, so if you’re there grab them and say hello!

 

Six Sigma and EA viewpoints

As it’s an interest area of mine (honest!), I had a 30 minute chat with a Six Sigma black-belt colleague of mine yesterday about how EA and process improvement methods like Six Sigma fit together. His viewpoint was interesting:

• EA/BPM people tend to see things as a technology problem/a problem to be solved using technology first – and maybe jump to creating a “change programme” very early, i.e. tend to solutionize too quickly. Often when working with clients I see projects that have already been dreamt up in the business/change community, and so the “master plan” behind them all is never clear – and some projects are almost contradictory in their objectives/vision.
• On the other hand, six sigma people see things as a process problem to be measured first (set up the right metrics etc), understand where that process can be improved, and then instigate change initiatives. So once the metrics are in place, it may take 6 months before you are confident with your data that you know what to do. His example was to take the business goal “increase sales conversions from x% to y%” and then set up/capture the right metrics to understand why people don’t buy, and then (and only then) drive changes to improve it. I thought this gave the magic linkage/traceability between business vision->objectives->goal->change programmes that I rarely see in the EA world (although it is often talked about).
• His view was that the bulk of business processes in an organisation are performed by people with limited technology support. What I mean by this is that a person might deal with some post (ok – scanned and held in a CMS), decide what to do, make a phone call, check a report, escalate to their manager if necessary etc, then key the result into a system – most of the real action happens outside an IT solution. Therefore the bulk of process change and improvement options lie in the marshalling of human resources first. The “IT is just an enabler” theme was really true to him, and it occurred to me that although we say this a lot in the EA world, we don’t really mean it in the same way and with the same conviction that he does.

Even in the organisations which are reasonably mature in EA terms, it is interesting that I’ve not seen a ‘Change Process Improvement’ team having much contact with the EA team. It’s really confirmed to me that there are two camps who both believe that they should have CEO mindshare – but where neither necessarily has the full picture or skills though.

 

Smartie presenting at forthcoming Open Group London conference

I’m delighted to announce that one of my colleagues, Richard Latham, will be presenting at the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference on April 30th at 11am. The conference itself runs from 28-30th April and is located at the Central Hall Westminster, Storey’s Gate in London.

Richard will be presenting on the subject of “Sustainable Enterprise Architecture” – based upon real world experience from our recent Enterprise Architecture engagements, how to create and make EA work without undue strain on resources of money, political capital and change to an organisation’s status quo.

We’ve been members of the Open Group for a while now so it’s good to put something back into the EA community.