EA Talk on Managing Complexity

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
Richard Veryard February 2011
Managing Complexity using Enterprise Architecture

Two Contrasting Agendas for EA
Business is simple
Systems are complicated and inflexible
Software applications
Human activity systems
Therefore simplify and unify the systems to align with the business
Business is complex
Therefore differentiate and integrate systems to help manage complexity.
Simplify and Unify
Differentiate and Integrate

Traditional EA doctrines
Information Engineering
Zachman Framework

Simplification and Unification
Duplication
Inconsistency
Poor Interoperability
Fragmentation
Waste
Risk
Economics of scale
Economics of scope
Interoperability
FROM
TO

Achieving Simplification and Unification
Quick and cheap solutions to local problems
Tight project goals
Stakeholders protecting established assets and arrangements
Joined-up thinking
The “Big Picture”
Clustering
Increase Cohesion
Decrease Coupling
Typical Challenges
EA Weaponry

Simple Interaction Matrix
Source MSDN

Clustered Matrix
Source MSDN

Simple Interaction Protocol (SIP)
8
SIP brings a rational process to project optimization
Reproducible
Verifiable
Optimal
SIP has a mathematical foundation
Set theory
Complexity analysis
Equivalence relations
SIP drives simplicity
The architecture with smallest collections of functionality that have the fewest dependencies.
Simplest possible architecture that solves the problem.
Roger Sessions
ObjectWatch

9
Comparing SIP to Traditional EA
SIP
Traditional
- Higher success rates.
- Reduced cost.
- Increased agility.
- Cloud optimized.
Roger Sessions
ObjectWatch

Two Contrasting Agendas for EA
Business is simple
Software applications
Human activity systems
Therefore simplify and unify the systems to align with the business
Business is complex
Therefore differentiate and integrate systems to help manage complexity.
Simplify and Unify

Three Dimensions of EA Maturity

Information
Gathering
Decision
& Policy
WIGO
(what is going on)
Learning& Development
Knowledge& Memory
EA as organizational intelligence
12
Sense-Making
Communication & Collaboration

Responding to customer demand …

Enterprise or Ecosystem  a third agenda
Looking outside the traditional enterprise
Questions of corporate identity
Indirect demand (end customer)
From Affiliation to Alliance
Value for whom?
Scope
Third Agenda

Dynamics of strategy (Kurtz & Snowden)
AGENDA 3
Differentiated Integration
Strong
distributed
AGENDA 2
Weak
distributed
AGENDA 1
Simplify and Unify
Strong central
Weak central
Source: “The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated World”. Kurtz and Snowden. IBM Systems Journal Vol 42, No 3 2003

Aspects of Modernism

Limitations of modernism
Difficulties handling complexity, emergence and self-organization.
Lack of agility, flexibility, evolution.
Constrains organizational learning.
No explicit treatment of holistic architectural properties such as balance and harmony
No room for pluralism and human values

Exploration of new ideas?
“Hybrid thinking drives change via the co-creative exploration of meaningful human-centred experiences when confronting complex, intractable issues.”
Gartner 2010
“Holistic enterprise change”
TOGAF 2009

Structural complexity of business
Asymmetrical demand
Business as a platform
Coupling
enterprise as loosely coupled network of sociotechnical components and services
Edge organization
Enterprise tempo
activities with different characteristic tempi
Ethical dilemmas
conflicts of interest, moral hazard
Multi-sided markets
different stakeholder classes with complementary demands
Organizational intelligence
Viability
command and control
VSM

Value of business architecture
Structural complexities in any business can critically affect business performance.
To manage these structural complexities, we need to think architecturallyabout the business …
… which will help us to overcome the structural inhibitors to business performance.
An explicit business architecture should help coordinate specific forms of congruence and requisite variety across all human activity systems
management information systems (IT)
management reward systems (HR)

As business becomes more complex …
Complicated or fragmented systems
Exposes management weakness
Customers’ economics of alignment outweigh suppliers’ economics of scale and scope
Competitive advantage
Requisite variety
Costs
Benefits

Some alternative lenses for viewing structural complexity
Viable Systems Method (Stafford Beer)
I-Space (Max Boisot)
Pace Layering (Frank Duffy, Stewart Brand)
The Nature of Order (Alexander, Salingaros)
Asymmetric Design (Philip Boxer, Bernie Cohen)
Organizational Intelligence
Asymmetric Leadership
Structural Complexity
Management Capability

On The Nature of Order
Christopher Alexander
The Nature of Order

To be simplified
Exogenously defined linkages
Weak (not convincing)
Strong (convincing)
exploration
Strong (evident to the player)
just-in-time transfer
(exploitation)
Endogenously
defined linkages
incremental improvement
convergence-divergence
asymmetric collapse
Weak (not evident to the player)
imposition
The relationship of the actor/ player to the larger context
‘linkages’ = action-consequence pairing: strategies:
‘strong’ = convinced that they are right
‘weak’ = not convinced
Good-enough ground for mechanism design that is convincing to a rational and intelligent actor…
The right answer only emerges retrospectively
An expert would be expected to know the right answer
Complex:
Cause-and-effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat
Knowable:
Cause-and-effect separated over time and space
NB read-across to Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild
disorder
Known:
Cause-and-effect relations repeatable, perceivable and predictable
Chaotic:
No cause-and-effect relationships perceivable
Everyone knows the right answer
There is no right answer
Source: “The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated World”. Kurtz and Snowden. IBM Systems Journal Vol 42, No 3 2003

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy
1
2
?
Low differentiation
High differentiation

Viable Systems Model (Stafford Beer)Conceptual View

Viable Systems Model (Stafford Beer)Engineering View

Capability Requirement

Governance Cycle

Boisot I-space

Pace Layering

Information
Gathering
Decision
& Policy
WIGO
(what is going on)
Learning& Development
Knowledge& Memory
Organizational intelligence
32
Sense-Making
Communication & Collaboration

Stratification of Models

Example 1: Defence Procurement
“The Ministry of Defence has a substantially overheated equipment programme, with too many types of equipment being ordered for too large a range of tasks at too high a specification. This programme is unaffordable on any likely projection of future budgets.”
[MOD 2009]
Each piece of equipment may have many different uses and affordances, in various use-contexts.
Traditional planning and cost accounting cannot cope with this complexity.
Description
Issues

Example 2: Bank DataWarehousing
Two kinds of problem
looking for market inefficiencies that could create investment opportunities for the bank
managing the ‘value at risk’ associated with existing investments

Generalized schema

Example 3: Mobile Ecosystem
Direct demand - focus on the device
Indirect demand – focus on the customer ecosystem
Nokia
Apple

Example 4: Mashup Ecosystem

Example 5: Healthcare
See presentation by Prof Bernie Cohen

Conclusions
Broad range of complex practical problems
Emerging methods for reasoning about differentiation and integration.
New agenda for enterprise architecture
Not suppressing complexity but managing complexity

… and more
EA Forum (Unicom)
February 24
September ??
EA/OI Briefing (Unicom)
April 13
RVsoapbox.BlogSpot.com
asymmetricdesign.com
Future Events
Other Material and Links

http://rvsoapbox.blogspot.com	46
http://eablogs.gotze.eu	5
http://swik.net	4
http://rvsoapbox.blogspot.com.au	4
http://paper.li	2
http://twitter.com	1
http://feeds.feedburner.com	1

EA Talk on Managing Complexity

by Richard Veryard on Feb 25, 2011

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EA Talk on Managing Complexity — Presentation Transcript