Everything Looks Worse in Black and White!

(With apolgies to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome")


As the days run on and I start getting and feeling older, the sharp black and white boundaries of human conduct become fuzzier and grayer – especially on the part of the people you care about. One tends to be more tolerant, more accepting of variances from the straight and narrow – as much an acknowledgement of the depth of a relationship as the relative significance of the infarction and mostly, the inability to deal with it all, anyway.

• As a parent these are golden years because of that more tolerant view to your children’s doings. The children are old enough not to get into really bad trouble and the rules of yesterday seem both anachronistic and unreasonable.
  
• As a spouse, these are golden years too because you know that behavior molded over decades will not change in your lifetime and the asset you have is the asset you hold, dearest to your heart, and a lifeline in the declining years.
  
• As a friend these are golden years, because in keeping with the proverb, you literally, “know all about them and love them still.”
  
  Black and white boundaries of any sort without some level of give and take make for rigid organizations, cults, groups, families, friendships that are at risk every time a line is crossed. We start to police our behaviors and everyone knows that a police state is not a great place to live in. Determining how much flex will not wreck the organization, cult, group, family or friendship is a tightrope juggling act whose sureness and skill can only improve with time and many good and bad judgment calls.
  
  The Taliban, rigid Islamic societies, regimented Hindu institutions and “strict” and "orthodox" Christian and Jewish denominations, and large numbers of families with strict regimented expectations have yet to discover the power of tolerance and flexibility.
  
  Silicon Valley firms that tossed out the suit and tie introduced flexible hours and provided free refreshments in the refrigerator for employees working late at night have unleashed tremendous innovation from their staff. Instead of unquestioning obedience, they get lots of awkward questions but unquestioning loyalty and unswerving diligence.
  
  As enterprise architects, we are usually called up to act as the police for the enterprise. We are usually the designated cats-paw for enterprise governance. In fact, in an earlier thought piece, before my Eureka moment on flexibility, I had written of enterprise architecture as an excellent blueprint for providing a checklist for the Inspector General and the auditors and the omnipresent Government Accountability Office
  
  It is important to keep in mind that governance comes second to creativity, innovation and productivity. Governance does not produce any products or services. Governance does not create wealth. Governance often constrains (sometimes rightfully) the efforts of people who are trying to create new ways, new techniques and methods and new paradigms for improving the status quo. And in that stiving for improvement lies the hope for a society.
  
  We in America have the largest prison population in the civilized world.
  
  My belief is that our society today, as never before, is dominated by “black and white” professions: Lawyers, engineers, scientists, technologists, doctors. And we are all busy enacting, defining, and enforcing black and white boundaries with a single mided black and white zeal. Our obsessions with the "sins" of moral turpitude, abortion, sex, and drugs have become the red light that everyone is watching inside the cockpit. And the plane is going down but no one appears to be watching the altimeter.
  
  My daughter is interested in pursuing a course of studies in the Liberal Arts. And I am firmly behind her efforts and aspirations. The grayness that comes from liberal arts is the leavening that raises the bread of innovation, creativity and provides the air vents through which the hate and intolerance can escape. We need more liberal arts majors strengthening the power of society and weakening the ropes of black and white thinking.
  
  Long term leadership success depends on that grayness of boundary and the skill of exercising behavioral judgment calls! And yes, some of them will be bad judgemental calls - but a flexible society has the internal fortitude to survive those and celebrate and take advantage of the many more good ones.

Lightweight Scheduling

We are easy-going travelers. Not for us, the detailed checklists of places to visit, vineyards to taste wine in, or “happening places” to dine at, or “recommended bars to hop”. Instead, our travels are adorned with the fruits of serendipitous discovery and the surprise and delight that comes from having no expectations. And there have been no shortage of those.

A while ago, we stopped in Singapore briefly with no set plans other than staying at the Imperial Hotel and taking the free standard half day tour around Singapore that Singapore airlines offered. We managed to later see Serangoon Road, eat at one of the Indian establishments, take the sky lift to Sentosa Island from the World Trade Center, spend a little time in the Singapore Zoo, shop for T shirts with the transit system commuters at the Ang Mo Kio terminus, and shop and eat at Orchard Road. We later walked down to the Mariyamma temple at the base of the hill where our hotel was located. All in all, a memorable vacation that stills persists as fond memories more than 15 years later.

Another trip, we stopped at Zurich with three days of vacation, stayed in a Gasthaus by the banks of Lake Zurich (Zurichsee) and drove to St. Gallen, saw the cathedral and walked down the quaint streets looking at the shops and ornate 300 year old balconies of solid hewn wood, went to the monastery and then shopped and ate at a local departmental store cafeteria and watched the solid Swiss citizens shop, eat and walk around. We then drove through Austria and into Germany, along the banks of Lake Constance (Bodensee) and picnicked in the city of Lindau by the castle on the banks of Bodensee. We then drove towards Munich and stopped off for the night at a Gasthaus in a little village along the autobahn. Nobody spoke English, but we managed to communicate with each other, nevertheless.

We went on to see the harrowing sights at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich and the famed BMW auto museum in Munich. We came back by way of Neuschwanstein and Schwangau and saw Mad Ludwig's castle and the turrets poking through the clouds and rain. We even walked up the hill with hastily bought rain ponchos negotiating miles and miles of wet and runny horse scheiss as we trudged up the carriage infested road to the castle entrance only to find a long queue of tourists waiting to get in!

I’d like to think that we are not unplanned travelers in toto, but rather light-weight schedulers. We tend to make spot decisions on the time remaining, resources available and the potential enjoyment factor of visiting places. We also tend to adapt our plans to our state of tiredness, and continuing or lack of continuing enjoyment. As a result we have hugely enjoyed our travels within the US, and around the world.

This brings me to the subject of project planning in the IT world or in general for any type of endeavor. Consider:

• Software development is a response to needs caused by changes in business, environment, technology, market preferences, competitive pressures and needs for continuous improvement.


• These drivers result in the creation of plans.


• Plans result in the creation of budget items


• Approved budget items result in contracts and projects


• Contracts and Projects drive software development


• Software Development must be followed by deployment.


• Deployment is followed by use.


• Use determines the degree of success of the response to the original need.

Each of these steps takes non-zero time. And as the gears start grinding slowly, the original needs may start shifting or new needs may spring up not to replace the old, but to supplement the old. This is somewhat analogous to the situation when you are still in the process of reading this week’s TIME magazine and the next week’s issue comes in. You have now increased your reading load. But given your history with not completing the first issue, you can bet the second issue will also go unread or partially read. As the issues start piling up, reading all of them is impossible. This is exactly similar to the mess we call the IT backlog.

And not for small reason, long projects, slow budget decisions, lethargic or elaborate planning, waterfall development of software, and distributed individual machine deployments have all contributed to the mess.

Is it possible to apply lightweight scheduling to projects and let the projects drive what they can achieve, concentrating on speed and end results? And figuratively discarding unread, all those issues of TIME we never read or will never read…

Over time, we as a family have readily embraced the Internet, and now my smart phone, as tools to improve our lightweight scheduling as demonstrated by our recent three day trip to New York City where we walked across the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge, ate at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria under the bridge, took the Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island, visited the NY Transit Museum in Brooklyn, walked around Times Square around midnight, went around Battery Park, completed a campus visit of Columbia University, ate in Little Italy in Mulberry Street, and took the tram over to Roosevelt Island as well.

The judicious use of available information coupled with a light-weight non-bureaucratic attitude and extreme familiarity with planning, budgeting, requirements gathering, development and deployment may result in “Mini-Projects” that are three months in duration but put a permanent dent in backlogs.. A dream or a possibility? Or simply a great business opportunity for the right entrepreneur?

Agile Furniture Development

I just finished erecting a few non-trivial pieces of furniture in my daughter’s bedroom. She had been asking for new furniture, for a while, and I had been dragging my feet, dreading the inevitable complexity of (i) assembling an order of furniture from catalog piece parts that represented both a complete and aesthetic solution (2) lugging back 8-10 heavy boxes from IKEA (3) staging the boxes in some place other than the small bedroom and (4) assembling the furniture with the risk of broken parts, missing parts, thumb injuries and bleeding fingers from turning knurled nuts onto reluctant screws. But the fact of the matter is that my daughter is leaving for college next September and this is the last year she will enjoy her bedroom as a permanent resident of the Rao home. There was clearly a time WINDOW for her requirements, after which the purpose of the furniture was moot. We were all aware of impending changes to the situation, her needs and the context come August 2010.

It was time for agile furniture development.

With help from my father-in-law and a very close young friend of ours who is also mechanically inclined and adept, we set about the tasks of providing and installing furniture from IKEA in my daughter’s bedroom in a three day time frame. My daughter, busy with schoolwork, could not come to the store to select the furniture. We made phone calls from IKEA to my daughter to get course corrections on our choices of furniture and determine what attributes were not negotiable – the bookcase HAD to have glass doors, for instance. We brought the boxes back, laid them down in our foyer, and set to work with the assembly – a process that lasted two evenings, well, late into the night.

At the end of the effort, when my daughter finally came into her room, she could not control her joy. The room looked airy and spacious and there was light and style everywhere. In business terms, we had succeeded in “delighting the customer”. We had developed a solution within a requirements time window, incorporated needs that were explicitly discussed and exhibited competence and professional pride in executing the tasks that were undertaken.

The fact that more than 70% of IT projects come in dead on arrival, speaks to some deep flaw that is inherent within ourselves – we IT people. When contrasted with road projects that get built, and usually built well, bridges that are routinely constructed, train tracks that are routinely laid, and skyscrapers that shoot into the sky overnight, this IT project failure rate is incomprehensible to me.

I have a lot of suspicions and guesses for why this may be so. Other large undertakings like bridges, skyscrapers, railroad tracks have an already established base of knowledge that makes the planning simpler based on looking at past experience. Once they are commissioned, they move to completion with few dramatic changes but a lot of minor corrections along the way. Funding justification, once obtained, has to survive for the length of the project, for it to complete. The science and engineering is well understood. Meeting the expectations of the sponsor are fairly easy to test once the project is completed. And a number of these projects are either remodels or replacements for existing items.

There are two types of projects in the IT arena. Opportunistic software product development is based on an innovative idea taken to completion in the form of a software or hardware/software product that can be sold in a marketplace. This is the form of software development in the traditional Silicon Valley style startup. The other form is requirements driven software engineering – where the developer is coding to requirements provided by someone else – usually the business sponsor of the effort. The bulk of IT shops that support business and industry, fall into the second category and these are the ones that have demonstrated a 70% project failure rate.


In the IT arena, what we construct is based on requirements. And requirements come from the business. Business changes, often frequently, so requirements must necessarily change. When requirements change, work previously completed may have to be scrapped and new budget allocations are required to staff the changes. When this budget allocation does not appear, we have the classic IT backlog – a number of planned changes on a back burner.

Given that business change is inevitable, the expectation that IT requirements never change is both unrealistic and simplistic. IT development has therefore shifted from building “monument” style IT solutions to quick and dirty “beach-house” releases that address the requirements of the day, knowing that these will change and parts of the solution must be thrown away.

The move to agile development is partially based on delivering IT solutions within a narrow time window when the requirements are still relevant. The use of centralized deployment using web based solutions is to further decrease the latency between the availability of a solution and its deployment to end users.


I was reading an interesting article in CIO magazine http://www.cio.com/article/502263/Project_Management_How_IT_and_Business_Relationships_Shape_Success?source=CIONLE_nlt_projmgmt_2009-09-24 where a project team was able to accomplish much by close coordination between the business and IT staff. The thesis was “Bad relationships, are a leading cause of project failure”.

I quote and partially paraphrase from that article ….

The impact good and bad relationships have on projects is clear: "Negative relationships make people want to avoid each other or work against each other," says Bill Hagerup, a senior consultant with Ouellette & Associates, a IT leadership and project management consultancy.

On the other hand, when mutual trust exists between IT project managers and stakeholders, IT project managers are more likely to discuss problems that could threaten the project as they arise, says Imholz. If bad blood exists between the two groups, project managers may not be inclined to point out those issues, or they may try to cover them up.

If you look at projects that fail, invariably someone on those projects knew things were going bad," says Imholz. "If you don't have relationships and trust, those things don't surface. And when you don't do something about problems in a timely manner, those problems invariably get bigger. In many cases, minor problems become more serious because they're not addressed in a timely manner. A culture of openness is absolutely essential to good project performance."

Decisions affecting the project also get made more promptly when everyone involved gets along. "Fast and good decisions are crucial to keeping projects on track," says Imholz. "The failure of senior people to make decisions means decisions are made at lower levels of the organization. If you have a software developer who's waiting [for a decision] on a business requirement, there are three things that can happen:

1. He can guess what to do and guess right.
2. He can wait for a decision and while he's waiting he's not as productive.
3. Third, he can guess and guess wrong.

If those are three equal possibilities, two-thirds of the time it will be detrimental to the project. And if you stack enough of those decisions on top of each other, it will negatively impact the project."

The article goes on to speculate whether the background of IT personnel prevents them from recognizing the value of relationships and focus instead on the value of tools and processes.

"As IT professionals, we're raised on technology," says Ouellette & Associates' Hagerup. "Almost all the training we get throughout the years is about tools and processes."

Consequently, he adds, IT professionals think process and technology is the answer to everything, including effective project management. While project management frameworks and tools certainly help, projects are fundamentally people-driven, he says.

Agile development coupled with strong relationships can result in customer delight!

ATP Rankings and Bad Marriages

As the years lend clarity to events gone by, I begin to wonder… Are we reducing what are legitimately long term processes into events that are short-lived and wonder why the longer term processes whose outcomes we so desire are seldom successful.

Case in point: Marriage. (Apart from the exceedingly wealthy) the inordinate attention we pay to the event of the wedding is often detrimental to the later success of the marriage. The tremendous amounts of money spent on something that happens briefly instead of husbanding the money for the couple’s future challenges is the reason for a lot of stress downstream and must definitely contribute to the ultimate 50% divorce rate we have in this country.

I just came back from visiting the US Tennis Association’s US Open held in Flushing, New York. Over the years, we have found that the grounds passes bought a week into the tournament work for us – we get to see one or more sets of different matches, walk around the grounds and see the major players at very close quarters instead of sitting in nose-bleed seats at the Arthur Ashe Stadium with the price of the tickets we can afford and watching the players like ants moving around the court.

As I watched the top 20 players of the world play in various matches, it was clear that talent, practice and enthusiasm for the game was evident in all of them. Any one of these could have won the US Open on a good day. Yes, a good day or a bad day determines whether someone takes home a million dollars or not. We have reduced the years of practice, skill building, and sheer expertise into a one event horse race, however long and grueling that event is. Of course, measures like the ATP rankings have come into existence to winnow out the one trick ponies.

As a senior in high school, my daughter is seeking admission to college next year. As I step back and see the obsession of the students and the colleges with the SAT or ACT scores – a measurement taken on one day in their lives, their four years of high school achievements mean nothing if they do not make the high SAT minimum score cut because consideration of the high school performance comes second to the SAT.

And then we come to enterprise architecture. Almost always, the act of building architectures to understand complexity, deal with ever-changing internal and external environments, make sense of the business, systems and technology context – always a hard and time consuming exercise – is reduced to the exercise of passing a budget decision point event. We are transforming architecting and engineering exercises into a budget justification exercise.

For us to make lasting progress we must take the eye off the event and put it in perspective – a long term process is a succession of many successful events. As the successful general knows, “winning a battle” is not “winning the war”. In architecture terms, we must shift our focus from preparing for events to preparing and executing successful processes.

For enterprise architects, ATP like rankings are probably what the industry needs to regulate the skill and proficiency level of the practitioners!!

Can Enterprise Architects Be Young?

The other day, I was following a discussion on one of the enterprise architecture social networks I enjoy following, and the question came up:

Can Enterprise Architects Be Young?

Being a 55 + graying enterprise architect myself, and having seen the size and complexity of the beast at close quarters, I had to scratch my head to come up with a balanced answer and not resort to the usual, "Age is good when the going gets tough" argument.

You see, enterprise architecture is a little different from building that blockbuster product that sold a million copies or taking a company public in two years and then the company goes on to become the next Google. Those are very laudable achievements and have made their achievers both rich and famous.

To mix metaphors, if you pull out all the really big home runs out of the "success" equation, (because those very founders will tell you that a number of unknown and unpredictable circumstances conspired to provide the "win"), predictable success and predictable survival usually falls on the shoulder of the graybeards - be they valiantly paddling behind the poster boy CEO, or standing up in front like John Chambers, or Meg Whitfield. They are the ones with mortgages to pay, children to send to college and imbued with a strong sense of loyalty and duty to their organizations and people.

My response was, therefore:

It's not age that is an asset but the ability to have accumulated and learnt from a variety of broad AND deep experiences - which unfortunately doesn't happen overnight. It's also from having practiced incessantly as the recent book, "Outliers" so ably asserts.

Patients who are looking to pick surgeons tend to pick those with the maximum number of successful surgeries behind them. Perfect practice is a safeguard against risk. With all the exactness of surgery and modern equipment, the surgeon is still a key part of the success formula.

On the other hand, the ability to take astounding risks and succeed is a attribute of the young! As is the ability to dismiss conventional thinking and come up with innovative solutions. The ability to take exceeding risk is usually coupled with the inability to see or comprehend dire consequences. That's why young people have no problem taking risks!

Risks pan out -- sometimes. Any habitual risktaking, for it to succeed, requires pondering on probabilities of success, downside mess etc. and playing the odds and steering middle courses. Enterprise architecture, in my opinion falls into the surgery category and the habitual risk managing category. This is where a single home run will not work in a series that goes on forever.

A one trick pony cannot cover the breadth of knowledge, skills and experiences needed to understand, assimilate, aggregate, arrange, assemble, disseminate, communicate, propagate and evangelize - these are experiences that are accumulated over many jobs, many corporations, many setbacks, many varieties of tasks by a person who is driven by passion, curiosity, puzzles and quickness of mind - a true enterprise architect.

Ultimately when the messes from too many risks gone bad happen, as they usually do, it's always the adults cleaning up after the children have left.

College Visits and IT Death Marches

I just returned from an information visit to colleges in New England that I toured with my daughter who is a senior this year in high school. We went to some of the nation’s best colleges in Princeton, New Haven, Amherst, New York and Williamstown. We showed up for the information sessions promptly on time, usually at 9:00 am and then went on to visit the campus, see the classrooms, admire the libraries, and gawk at all the wonderful facilities out there.

These colleges, apparently flush with endowment money, all made the amazing declaration: “Our admissions are need blind and we will ensure that any student who is admitted will be able to afford to attend our college – with no loans after they graduate!”

It appears that these respected and hallowed colleges were using their endowments to make college more affordable for their students instead of building more stone monuments and edifices for a small student body who already had too many buildings to occupy. They were schools focused on undergraduate education with 99% of the classes taught by the professors and not the teaching assistants.

The guides who took us around were bright young girls and boys, full of cheer, enthusiasm and pride in their college, their classmates and the campus they lived and worked in. Clearly the brightest brains in the country, their self confidence as well as their supportive attitudes were a treat to behold.

It appears that these colleges encourage collaboration and hand-holding in the belief that learning is a process where many shoulders help climb the tree. Fostering a sense of community in the residential colleges, these colleges demonstrated that collaboration provides a bigger benefit overall to creating a body of learned but very human graduates than mindless competition because the best competition for one must be with your own inner self – that is how you drive towards excellence and perfection.

The cafeterias were very inviting and the food offerings were as close to home as one could get. I did not see a single sign showing Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, McDonalds or some other fast food franchise operating the cafeterias (though I did see Barnes and Noble operating the Yale Bookstore). There were several small, independent bookshops selling great books – healthy food for the mind.

And what was the relevance to enterprise architecture…

My view of those venerable colleges reminded me of the kindler and gentler days when enterprises operated their own IT shops and maintained their own systems, had full time staff who were company employees, provided refreshments and bedding for IT personnel on the graveyard shift and believed that the IT infrastructure and its problems and successes was theirs to own. We all rallied around each other and the primary goal was to achieve 100% uptime. The budget was leveraged across all the projects we had and decisions were all made internally and very often for the corporation’s overall benefit.

Permanent staff meant that you could not break any bridges. Permanent staff also meant that camaraderie and friendship had to ultimately win over hostility and strife. Young minds and energetic bodies meant unlimited possibilities.

My visit inspired hope for the future of this country. Those bright brains, enthusiastic and energetic bodies and infectious camaraderie are destined to keep America number 1 if we in the corporations, we as independent contractors, we in the white shoe consulting businesses, we in the federal government offices and bureaucracy don’t screw it up by infecting them when they enter the workforce.

Maybe its time to go back to in-sourcing of IT with permanent employees and fixed IT budgets that can be applied to considered needs. Maybe its time to throw away the corset-like program management plans, the earned value management reporting miracles, and the death march program milestones for something more flexible that changes as the enterprise needs to change. Maybe Obama is on to something.

The Third Eye

I was at the airport waiting for my flight. I looked around me and saw players and roles: passengers boarding aircraft, gate agents checking tickets, aircrew with their flight bags marching resolutely through the boarding gate, flight stewardesses with their well-coiffed hair, smart clothing and luggage and their high heels, catering contractors with their equipment jammed into the side of the plane transferring the four hundred meals for the flight to Frankfurt.

I saw and heard systems everywhere – the alarm system as someone was still busy typing in their pass code into the security-controlled door, the public address system as announcement after announcement droned on, the perimeter security system with heavily armed and armored vehicles driving around the tarmac, the boarding pass system with the gate agents swiping bar coded boarding passes into a scanner, the integrated TV system that at the same time, displayed CNN sports, switched to ABC News and then to flight announcements and then produced a list of standby passengers who would now be able to board because of no-shows.

I saw facilities everywhere – the cubicle with the boarding pass printer that spat out boarding passes, the seating area for smokers, and the one for non-smokers, the people movers that disgorged passengers at designated places in the terminal, the vending kiosks that provided quick drink or bite to eat, the concession stands, the security screening stations with their skeleton doors for detecting metal.

I saw activities everywhere – gate agents issuing boarding passes, checking boarding passes, passengers boarding an aircraft, pilots poring over their checklists – as I watched the cockpit through the huge airport plate glass.

The mind of an architect never rests. Just as the businessman and entrepreneur sees the world through the prism of the dollar, the enterprise architect sees the world through the prism of activities, passengers, and task flows, information flows, systems, and technology.

Just as the jumble of buildings at ground level becomes a town plan, seen 10,000 feet from the air, stepping back to view ground reality provides a lens that discovers prior design and meaning. And everything magically snaps into order as structural and behavioral patterns emerge from the chaos that is life.

Base-lining is a process of representation. Architecting is the process of assigning order and behavior to that representation. Architects jealously cultivate that detachment that allows them to view the chaos without making value judgments. That same detachment allows them to infer and discover hidden meaning behinds structures and behaviors.

Personally for me, since becoming an enterprise architect and developing that third eye for structure and behavior, airports, hospitals, shopping malls, large office building complexes, small town main streets, and railway stations have provoked a new level of curiosity. Any system where there is apparent chaos has an inner design and activity tempo that must be unlocked – the third eye is invaluable!

Lost Eyeglasses and Enterprise Transformation

Today I spent more than 30 minutes searching for my eyeglasses. I am a reasonably well organized person (at least I like to think so and my family does too). My eyeglasses, at my age, are a hindrance to reading and most of the time, for close work, they come off. And they either remain close at hand, deposited at familiar locations or the side frame is clenched between my teeth as I quickly read whatever I need to read and put them back on again.

I have learnt to place them at familiar locations because I don’t like to hunt for stuff. Hunting for stuff comes in the way of enjoying the better things in life that are on hold because I am in hot pursuit of my eyeglasses or keys or wallet or … And so when I retire at night, I usually take my side of the bed and plunk down my eyeglasses on the nightstand. Every night, over the last twenty five years, since I have slept on the right side of the bed. And last night too, I thought.

To my dismay, my eyeglasses were nowhere to be found. I went through all the familiar places and rolled my brain over past history. Was I reading in the bathroom? Did I leave it last night near the dining table after dinner? Was I playing the keyboard last night? Was I working on the computer last night? Was I in the utility room looking for tools? Was I in the family room trying to read the labels of CDs and DVDs?

No, no and NO! As the clock was ticking and precious breakfast and newspaper reading time was burning down, I went back one last time and checked something I never ever check – the LEFT side of the bed. And lo and behold – there were my glasses! Like a father reunited with his long lost child, I grabbed the glasses and rushed out to the garage to drive to work.

And that got me thinking… I missed my eyeglasses which were literally less than 6 feet away from where I was searching. I could have turned around and I would have easily seen them lying there, mocking me. And the reason I was blind, was that my paradigm could not ever comprehend placing my eyeglasses on the left side nightstand. Right nightstand, Yes. Left nightstand, No. After all that was my wife’s side. But yes, last night while she was tired and went to sleep, I was watching a movie, from her side of the bed which was closer to the TV. And yes, I left my glasses on her nightstand.

Enterprises are very often stuck in their own paradigms: All innovation must come only from the R&D department; All employee incentives must come from Human Resources; All layoffs must include minimal contact with the laid off employee; All purchases must go through a purchase czar who no more understands opportunistic purchase from the man on the moon. All for good reason. At some point in time. Usually a few decades back. Based on a few horror stories.

Reinventing or transforming an enterprise, any enterprise, including the one called my family, sometimes requires examination of the paradigms that inevitably cause selective blindness that cripples the enterprise. Like my missing eyeglasses.

Kurukshetra or Fairfax?

Driving, in my humble opinion is where people’s behavior is displayed in full abundance in the raw. Cocooned in a 4-6 ton machine with the safety of Detroit (or Japanese or German or …) steel all around you, you are lulled into some false sense of superiority where society’s civil behavioral norms no longer become a constraint! And particularly if you are in a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) – a synonym for mindless behemoth with a ridership of one - this feeling of invincibility and power gets magnified several times over.

Watching people’s driving habits is an interesting exercise and helps calm the frustration and desperation that takes over when traffic slows down or comes to a halt. I find constant sources of inspiration for my thoughts and endless curiosity in my observations on my daily drive to work through the roads of Fairfax County in Virginia.

Unlike in India, where there is no recognition of lanes, and the progress of cars down the road is akin to the path of the chariots of fighting warriors in the Mahabharata on the plains of Kurukshetra, driving in America, for the most part is an orderly exercise with occasional bouts of brinkmanship and displays of human anger, frustration or timidity.

One observation that has piqued my curiosity, at least in the battlefields of Fairfax County, is how close people can get to the white line that marks the boundary of a lane before a traffic light. This line is the hard limit drawn by the traffic police to prevent encroachment of a car into the intersection area with another road that crosses the lane (“the Box”). I have been observing who tends to stop just before, well before, exactly at the line, or way in front of the line (jutting into the intersection). But the analysis of age of driver, ethnicity, type of vehicle, is fodder for another day’s blog.

Today my observation was that when the first person approaching the line stops ahead of the line, cars in other lanes also cross the line and stop abreast of the first car. The reverse also seems to work. If the first car approaching the red light stops just short of the line, so do all the others. And in this lies a lesson. Most human beings tend to be followers of both “right things” and “wrong things”. And the first person to do something (anything) generally sets the pattern for the rest. And the general breakdown of order is triggered by that “first person” doing the “wrong thing”.

The first person to ignore the stalled traffic in a traffic jam and mount his vehicle on to the shoulder of the road to pass the people patiently waiting in lane, is the trigger for others who were waiting for that first one to break through. Soon there is an army of vehicles straddling the shoulder trying to gain competitive advantage - in hot pursuit of that lead car. The difference between New York City and Fairfax County appears to be that in New York that first person (natural leader?) is quicker to emerge.

The same holds true for cell-phone use. For some inexplicable reason, the State of Virginia allows use of cell-phones while driving (its neighbors Washington DC and Maryland don’t). So when you see a driver chatting away on his cell phone, waving with the other hand and cocking his head at an angle to catch all the nuances of the conversation du jour, your first urge is to pick up your own cell phone and make that very urgent call that was not so urgent twenty seconds ago. Soon you have a cluster of vehicles on the road with all the drivers on their cell-phones making calls they had no intentions of making a minute earlier.

I have noticed the “follow the lead” phenomenon in my own home. When we are all tidied up, my family members tend to keep dishes away, clean the table and countertop, throw garbage where it belongs, make their beds, keep away the magazines and books and toss their discarded clothes into the laundry hamper. But if the house is already untidy, they tend to care less about what they do with their own things, generally contributing to added untidiness.

So the lesson of the day for enterprise architects is – keep your architecture tidy, well managed and well-arranged, and all new contributions will fit neatly into a bigger picture that is at once easy to understand and brief, easy to extend and at all times looks tidy and well constructed. Let go of order and entropy increases very quickly. Watch for that first person who starts the explosion of entropy increase and deal with him/her firmly to prevent a lemming like migration to the dark side.

The emergence of a few natural leaders is actually a good thing for the enterprise, but when everyone in the crowd wants to become a natural leader, anarchy is the result.

Line of Sight or Loss of Sight?

I have been reading a few articles about serendipity and serendipitous discoveries of treasure that intrigue me.

The chemical Minoxidil was originally used as a vaso-dilator to treat high blood pressure. But more than its desired effect on blood pressure, it had the interesting side effect of reversing or slowing down the process of baldness. And lo and behold: the drug was marketed by the Upjohn Corporation as a treatment for baldness and hair loss and went on to gain fame as the brand name ROGAINE. And until its patent expired in 1996, it went on making money for its parent corporation.

3M is a corporation whose business formula is to layer one material or coating over another. With this simple business model 3M has been producing and selling everything from cellophane tape to magnetic recording media.

In 1968, two scientists at 3M accidentally developed a "low-tack", reusable pressure sensitive adhesive that apparently did not do what adhesives are supposed to do – stick two items together permanently. On the contrary, the adhesive paper was reusable and did not leave any sticky residue when pulled off. And lo and behold: Post-It notes were born. And it later became so commercially successful that even the United States Postal Service uses it for redirecting mails using sticky reusable labels that come off when pulled out.

In enterprise architecture circles, there is an obsession towards achieving “Line of Sight” (LOS) - another precise engineering term that met its management abuse Waterloo. What is this LOS? The ability to trace a business problem to an IT Investment and then to an IT capability and then to an IT Requirement and then down to a piece of code that implements the IT requirement as a software service. LOS has become a mantra in the Federal Government and all of our faculty members teaching EA declare high and low that the crowning glory of enterprise architecture is Line of Sight!

This obsession with measurement precludes any kind of serendipitous epiphany that precedes a long lived brand name and unlooked-for revenue streams. Phew! That was a long sentence.

Basically all I am saying is that maybe entrepreneurial organizations should not be as worried about measurements as they are about finding new benefits stemming from their efforts that create new wealth, new health or new strategies. Each of these brings competitive advantage. Pursuing line of sight does not.

The LOS thinking was carried to the extreme in the Army’s Future Combat Systems initiative – New weapons systems will be firing BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight). While the enemy is sharpening its skills to shoot straight at stuff they can see, we are busy building weapons that bring down targets we cannot even see! This wizardry will be accomplished by satellite imagery, remote sensing and unmanned aerial vehicles and a host of automated surrogates who will be passing back images and information for our artillery to consume. Is this a great country or what!

My own personal belief is that we are building larger and larger systems with ever increasing complexity where measurements mean less and less because there are so many assumptions built into the numbers. Our numbers are becoming less meaningful as we struggle harder to measure them. The smaller systems of yesterday, measured by compact and meaningful numbers by people who understood very nuance of those systems are gone. And LOS is one such concept.

Micro-financing, Micro-enterprises, Micro-markets, Micro somethings – this is where the future is headed – if not headed towards humongous corporate profit, then towards tremendous personal satisfaction, involvement and sense of accomplishment. And these micro-somethings will not be looking for line of sight – they already know what it is - because their enterprise is so bounded!

Employee Loyalty and Long Marriages

• My father and mother have been married over 58 years.
  
  
  My father-in-law and his bride have been together for 50 years – they just celebrated their golden anniversary.
  
  My paternal grandfather and his bride had already finished 26 years when he died of cancer.
  
  My maternal grandfather and his bride had already completed more than 30 years of married life when he died.
  
  My paternal great grandfather and his wife had been married for more than 70 years. My paternal great-grandmother, a small built woman, had been a child bride exhausted after 13 child-births.
  
  And almost all of them had been in the same job, some even dying on the job.
  
  It got me thinking. Is there a correlation between loyalty to employers and loyalty to spouses? Even in this very tiny sample size, arguably a number of factors cloud the issue.

• During the times of the people mentioned above, few people switched jobs. There was a clear career path and my ancestors did pretty well for themselves. There was no need to look elsewhere. And they didn’t.

• There were fewer opportunities for change and these opportunities were nowhere as attractive as sticking around on the same job.

• To a man they were all honored and respected employees of the Government, bringing a added dimension of patriotism and sense of duty.

• Mobility and the thought of moving out of town was not very popular – though to a man they all had moved often and to remote places where they had to leave the children behind in some larger town to continue their schooling.

• There are a number of marriages that end in an untimely manner because one of the members wants to break it off, even though the other is inclined to hang in there for the long haul. I would like to add the spouse who would have been the stayer into the list of potential loyal employees.

• And of course the statistical unknowns – marriages that were never meant to be but came into being despite the better judgments of the parties concerned and inevitably broke over the passage of time. These do not yield or detract from the support of the thesis.

• There are other marriages where one of the members died early and we will never know if the marriage would have lasted long or not. But in the Indian context of the 1950s, 1960s we will assume they would.
  
  Though I am personally opposed to any kind of organized profiling and discrimination (I am more than fifty years old and have encountered age discrimination!), this is an interesting thought to pursue – Do long married people make for potential long-term employees? Even more pertinently, on the con side, – does an enterprise thrive on long-term employees or is a constant infusion of new blood even more beneficial and offsets the effects of turnover? And do people who join Government jobs stay there for life?
  
  Turning the coin over to the other side, for people seeking spouses, does longevity on the job predict longevity of marriage?
  
  Food for thought…
  
  My wife and I have been married for 25 years and I am in my fifteenth year with the same employer. My wife has spent over 17 years with the same employer. But we are the outliers in our families because we have both seen more than three jobs apiece! And we may well be the exception that proves the rule!

The Russian Method

In my first days in the computer business in India, I worked amongst a small group of research engineers clustered around (then) a spanking new PDP-11/40 mini-computer system with its sparkling lights, putty colored body, elegant contemporary console panel and the quiet hum of the RP-05 disk drives. All set in an air-conditioned temple where people moved around with hushed voices. We ran RSX-11M – a multi-user operating system that supported, I believe, eight simultaneous users. But ignore the technical jargon – this is simply background material for what follows.

Our friend V, who was in charge of the “system” was a man of tremendous wit and few words. He was also a man of tremendous patience who would try all means possible to keep the computer running and the users productive. But more than once, the computer had a habit of seizing up, lost in some internal thoughts it kept looping in, the console lights flashing in the same endless sequence. When all else failed, V would use what he called the “Russian Method” to fix the problem. He would turn off power, turn it on again and reboot the system and presto – all was well again.

The word “Russian Method” has gone down in my vocabulary as undue use of excessive force to solve an otherwise difficult problem. We use the Russian Method to open recalcitrant jam jars; we use the Russian method to bang in nails that are bent; We use the Russian method to force open nuts with pliers when the wrench does not seem to work; We use the Russian Method to slam doors that would not shut otherwise.

Unfortunately in enterprise architecture also, people tend to use the Russian Method for difficult problems. And if the difficult problem had a chance for a solution, the Russian Method often guarantees that the difficult becomes the impossible.

The best of the Russian Methods is with-holding budget approval. Promise to cut off the budget and even the toughest individual comes groveling at your feet. Another is the totem-pole method used for determining order of layoff. Follow up with needs for various certifications and accreditations before a system can be cutover and the hardiest program manager is ready to hand over his first born.

The Russian Method is simply use of escalating force. Often, a slight effort in analyzing root causes and symptoms and tailoring a solution approach accordingly can provide more benefits. But boy, does the use of the Russian Method make you feel good!

Choosing Dependency Over Autonomy

My father is a very independent man. If you have been reading my earlier blogs, he is definitely a very low maintenance person. Before Parkinson’s robbed him of his independence (I sometimes wonder whether it was a higher power’s way of punishing his independence with a sentence of lifelong dependence henceforth) He celebrated the fact that one must not be a burden to the society around us and we should always carry our own water.

He ironed his own clothes, polished his own shoes, packed his own bags, and drove himself wherever he wanted to go. As an adventurer and explorer in the newly independent India, he was off to telecommunications projects, overseeing the building of telephone trunk networks across the country extending thousands of miles. He slept and ate at some of the camps where the workers toiled day and night to finish projects on time. He ordered food from roadside makeshift greasy spoons because of the remoteness of the villages and towns through which the telephone network ran. His life of low maintenance was characterized by a compact footprint that relied on few people for sustenance and a tremendous self-confidence and sense of competence. There was no mechanical appliance he did not open, service manual in hand or not. There was nothing around him that he did not dissect to see how it worked.

My mother provided the rest of his support system. And he doted on her and submitted himself willingly to her care and attention. He always showed tremendous respect to her and demanded that the world around her including his children do the same.

But my father was a lonely man. Not because of lack of enough people who cared for him and would jump to do whatever he asked them to do. But because he never did. He was not out drinking with his friends, only to come home in the wee hours of the morning. He was not asking for favors from friends. His jokes were not ribald and bawdy. His habits were temperate. He did not demand personal services from friends and relatives – though he did believe that cameras were meant for sharing and did not hesitate to borrow friends’ cameras or the office Leica on his trips in India and abroad. His autonomy not only insulated him from the dependence that ties a person to a network of other people but prevented him from enjoying a visceral closeness that comes with such dependence. He remains a person of regard and respect but not someone you go drinking with.

As enterprise architects we need to remember that asking for favors, depending on services, trading favors, however much they create a feeling of dependence are essential ingredients to relationship building. And in my opinion, relationship building does tend to have its ugly moments but in the long run, produces more holistic results.

Towards the last decade of a fruitful life, my father who is in his mid eighties is totally dependent on my mother, his wife of 58 years and his daughter of 54 and a small army of professional caregivers hired for the purpose. And the love that shines on his face and in his eyes as he looks at them clearly proves my point!

The Maintenance Factor

Summer in Washington DC is an exciting time. From the time that the cherry blossoms open in late March/April to the time that fog shrouds views of the Potomac in August/September, there are plenty of things to do, places to visit, parties to attend and people to meet. We have been especially fortunate to be living in a city that is both a tourist destination and a great place to live. Without the cramped apartments of New York City or the long distances of the Chicago or Detroit suburbs, we are also only a short Metro ride away from the city center.

To our great pleasure and enjoyment friends and relatives continue to visit us from different cities of the US and different countries of the world. And with the accommodations we have and the resources at our disposal, this is not generally a big burden. But with the pleasure and enjoyment also comes the effort of playing host, providing for food and lodging and ensuring safety and convenience and providing directions and itineraries for the guests.

We have been raising the children for over fifteen years. They are good kids with a firm knowledge of right and wrong, for the most part diligent, and always sincere. We are delighted to have them and would never think of exchanging them. Ever. However, we find ourselves cleaning up after them, and picking up the loose ends. They mean well, but raising kids is a constant burden on parents, always more than mitigated by the joy of loving them and having them around the house.

So what does this have to do with enterprise architecture? My observation is that individuals fall into two categories: High Maintenance and Low Maintenance. Family members and friends who are low maintenance are easy to host and nurture. Family members and friends who are high maintenance become irritants if the stay is long enough. There is a higher risk that the ointment of love will run out with High Maintenance people leaving the prickly itch of irritation.

So what makes a person High Maintenance? To answer the question rather obtusely, we need to define the “Span” of a task. I define the span of a task as a sum total of all preceding steps, task specific steps and closeout steps.

The concept of a span is more than just concentration on detail detail in describing the steps (although diligent performers tend to detail out each step more than sloppy ones do). High Maintenance people tend to concentrate mostly on the actual task specific steps and ignore both the preparation steps that precede the actual and the closeout steps that succeed the task.

It is not sufficient to take a shower, it is also required that the clothes be put away either for laundry or stored in a guest room, and wipe the shower stall, and take the hair off the soap and .. and ..

It is not sufficient to eat a meal, but it is also required to put away/rinse the plate, the water/drink glass, the cutlery, wipe off the spot at the table, collect debris from food serving accidents and ...

It is not sufficient to wash the car, but it is also required to put away the cleaners, polishes, cloths and spray wands. And vaccum the interior, and clean the glass surfaces, damp wipe the interior, dress the tires and ..

It is not sufficient to just mow the lawn, but it is also required to clean out the debris around the mower, clean out any mud on the wheels to prevent tracking and stow the mower away - Not forgetting preparatory steps such as filling in the gas, checking the oil level, and cleaning out the blade.

High maintenance people tend to omit preparatory tasks, leave dangling closeout tasks and simplify the main task, stripping it of any distinctive excellence. High Maintenance people tend to avoid the tedious organization, prior planning and preparation that ease the preparatory steps to performing the actual task itself. The highest maintenance people are those who are oblivious to even the need for preparatory tasks and closeout tasks and define the main task in terms of its skeleton element.

Have you met the software programmer who does not want to document his/her code? Or the application programmer who insists on designing a haphazard quick and dirty database structure without the organizational and structural skills of a Database Administrator? Or the sales specialist who has collected his/her commission and tosses the problem customer over to the Help Desk? Or the application developer who does not want to communicate to the technical writers trying to write user documentation for the application?

If the answer is yes, you have just met some high maintenance people! High maintenance employees can kill morale and camaraderie as they need an army of helpers to clean up after them. They tend to be insensitive to the burdens they are placing on the population around them. High maintenance people are responsible for sloppy delivery of results, products and services in an enterprise.

A majority army of Low Maintenance people is the hallmark of a durable and innovative enterprise that works! Even when the boss is gone.

Waiting for the Messiah

As old men or "olding" people of Indian origin tend to do, my father-in-law and I were discussing the many problems that India faces that seem to be insurmountable, once you peel off the gloss of the urban elite and the expatriates, and the IT and call center moguls, the bankers and the multi-national corporations, and the well-heeled.

Everyone seems to be looking for a messiah – a magical person who rides in from the blue, takes things in hand, organizes people into orderly rebellions that will ultimately change the status quo and everyone is happy as he/she rides off into the dust, mission accomplished. But reality always intrudes into this dream – people have jobs, mouths to feed, rents to pay, and who has time to organize people to create quiet revolutions that change the status quo? As my father-in-law puts it, everyone knows what the solution is but no one wants to step forward to lead the charge.

I look back to the India of 1979 when I left that country, only to return as a tourist and visitor year after year. The roads were not congested, nor were the vegetable and fruit markets crowded. The city sprawl was well contained and most distances were covered on bicycle. There was also a sense of optimism and civic sense and decorum among public officials and citizens’ alike and egregious behavior was the exception rather than the norm.

It seems that when you take a country with a population of 500 million and blow it up to 1.2 billion, all the problems that were solvable have become insurmountable. The very crushing weight of all those people, their aspirations, their scrabble for the spoils of life seems to almost tilt the very earth. The room to maneuver is gone (all margins) and continued urbanization in the absence of any town planning seems to stretch resources beyond any manageable level of fairness or equity.

In engineering and physics we studied the concept of entropy – as a measure of the amount of disorder. In India, as populations and urbanization increase, entropy seems to have increased beyond any sustainable levels where human beings can survive without the cushion of disproportionate wages and dollar incomes.

Enterprises face increasing entropy from the time they are formed. Since I personally have been involved in the genesis of three small enterprises and was part of the evolution of a fourth, this statement comes from experience. I will say it again: Enterprises face increasing entropy from the time they are formed. This increase in entropy manifests itself each time a new person comes on board, each time a new process is put in place, each time a new customer is signed on, each time a new piece of equipment comes into the enterprise, each time the enterprise moves locations, each time the enterprise merges into another, or spins off a piece of itself, or …

As we have seen with the Indian situation, increase in enterprise entropy means increased difficulty of implementing solutions – even to the point of impossibility. And when solutions appear impossible, the average employee accepts the fait accompli. No one dare take on the 800 pound gorilla, least of all the burgeoning middle class. Everyone is waiting for that messiah!

Reduction of entropy automatically occurs with reduction of size and complexity. As someone who forsook the perks of corporate life more than twenty years ago to travel the road with smaller lanes, I can attest to the attraction of small business and its smaller entropy footprint. American corporations are hardwired to growth and committed to increasing entropy by the urge of investors and Wall Street. Reduction of entropy occurs when you have no investors and all growth is determined by your own needs and appetite.

And how do messiahs come about? That’s a blog for another day.

Trademark Smile

My father is an advanced Parkinson’s patient. His disease has slowly robbed him, first of his movement, then his speech, now partially his sight and even more critically, his ability to swallow or bring up the phlegm when he coughs. The last 15 years has been a parade of declining abilities – throughout which, his patented trademark smile and his extreme tolerance for pain have carried him through. Now in his mid eighties, he has good days, bad days and very bad days but that smile keeps shining through.

My father’s friends and younger associates from his days at the Indian Posts and Telegraphs have all gone to the big telephone exchange in the sky. He sometimes wonders why he is alive when they are all gone. A man of much reading and knowledge, his partially sightless eyes and his strength-less arms make reading impossible. Not to speak of the inability to perform all the repairs he used to make to the appliances in the house and the car in the garage.

We recently heard that an Indian entrepreneur who lives locally died in his early forties. My brother-in-law died in his sleep at 56. Everywhere, it seems, people seem to be calling it quits, checking out and ending their days on the planet due to some form of body failure. My recent eye diagnosis has squarely put me on the slow inexorable journey into old age.

So what does all this have to do with architecture? I think of human health as a maintenance problem. I test my blood on occasion for sugar levels, and its like pulling out the dipstick on my car to see if the oil is dirty.

And the architecture lesson of the day is: Is catastrophic collapse better than prolonged and increasing degradation of the senses? Or is there such a thing as graceful degradation that robs slowly but systematically?

Condition based maintenance (CBM) is a technique that has lately come into popularity. “The goal of CBM is to perform maintenance only upon evidence of need.” [Defense Acquisition University] The idea is that pulling vehicles into the depot for scheduled maintenance (especially when not required, to play safe) is not always a good one, when there is pressure to perform their mission and their presence is needed elsewhere. Instead, sensors on board are constantly screaming the health of the vehicle and predictive algorithms are used to determine impending failure.

Boy, I would like to order ten of those! Every enterprise needs predictive maintenance because both preventive and breakdown maintenance are so expensive. Predictive maintenance can only come with enterprise dashboards and smart algorithms as well as a lot of heuristics needed to tune the “predictions”.

In the meantime I am hoping that predictive maintenance for human beings is just around the corner and that one finger stick and dipstick reading of the blood is enough to warn me of all sorts of bad things coming at me, not just my sugar levels.

Nothing to worry about, but get used to it!

Today I learned from the ophthalmologist, I have acquired a new lifelong friend. Somebody who will stay with me till the end of my life. Someone I have to learn to ignore when he starts to interfere with my daily life.

I have a floating piece of debris from the vitreous humor in my eye that is permanently pasted in front of my field of vision. I learned that he is part of the process of aging. Nothing to worry about, just get used to it. He will be around because the body will not absorb him and he will move around. Sometimes he will be in the way, and sometimes, most times I pray, he will be in some corner, unnoticed.

And that, in a nutshell is a description of the aging process – nothing to worry about, just get used to it. The problem will stick around, sometimes in your face, sometimes out of sight.

How many enterprises have we seen where we feel the same – that’s the way we’ve always done it. Can’t change it, just get used to it. What does an enterprise architect with dreams of transformation and reinvigoration do when faced with a fait accompli? Just get used to it… As enterprises age these floating pieces of debris will eventually increase. But the resignation to change as well as the obvious futility of eliminating them will remain and life will go on.

GWM Meets SWPF

In my last post I had talked about “Community of Interest” and the vocabularies they create and share that seems cryptic to the people outside.

Today, I was poring through the many sheets of print that make up the Washington Post of the day and saw the personals section. I was struck by the cryptic acronyms that studded each plea for communion by some lonely soul with another. One of my hobbies is to look at vanity license plates on the cars around me and try to decode what they are saying or trying to say. The obvious and boring ones “MY BMW” or “MY BENZ”, I dismiss as uninteresting. Others are more challenging. It’s a game that is both entertaining when you get it and frustrating when you don’t.

I set to work trying to find the patterns amongst the coded acronyms in the personals.

BAF – Black Asian (or is it African?) Female
SWF – Single? Straight? White Female
SAF – Single? Straight? Asian? African? Female
SOH – I lost it on this one
S/DM – Single/Divorced Male
SWCM – Straight White Christian Male
DJF – Divorced Jewish Female
SWPF – Straight? Single? White Professional Female
W/WF – This was tricky, Widowed White Female
LTR – Another tricky one – Long Term Relationship
ISO – In Search Of
BCM – Now this became easy – Black Christian Male
PF – Professional Female
N/S – For a change of pace, Non-Smoker
GWM – Gay White Male

Clearly this was a community of interest made of people who spoke the jargon and knew exactly what acronyms to zero in on. And what to use to save some green. But to the rest of the world, this was mumbo jumbo.

I teach the DoDAF class at the FEAC Institute and am faced with the same challenges. From the Marines, I get cryptic acronyms like MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Forces) and from the Air Force MAJCOM (Major Command) and ABCCC (Air-Borne Command and Control Center). But within each of these communities, members seem to know the secret handshake and the meaning of all those cryptic acronyms. Being accepted as a member means not asking what the acronym means!

A lesson for the enterprise architect: Much as we try to force people to expand all the acronyms and make things clear to the world at large, including ourselves - being able to influence people and events and becoming an “insider” means having to learn the lingo. If you are a Muslim Asian Male and responding to someone who is looking for a SWCM, Cupid is not likely to direct his arrows your way!

Men In Labor

We were young professionals fresh out of college, having made that momentous decision to stay on in the United States after our graduate educations in the various universities of this great country. As Indian graduate students of those days tended to do, the focus of our get-togethers was primarily on two items: food and conversation.

We had all graduated from the early cooking days of “yellow rice” and kidney beans/garbanzos into more sophisticated fare. Our tastes were also slowly turning from cheap beer (from the old BYOB days) to tequila shots and mixed cocktails and dare I say, Scotch. But the primary topic of conversation was the inexorable but slow progress of our immigration process.

The conversation would have been mystifying for anyone not initiated in the context: Pradeep finished labor, Sarabjit is going into labor, Shashidhar is stuck in labor. Taken out of context these comments would seem extremely in-appropriate for a group of manly twenty-something males who despite all their many qualities as documented in their labor certification applications were incapable of bringing children into this world.

We did not realize it then, but we had formed a de facto “community of interest”. Recent trends in architecture have given up on huge standardization efforts across the board, and are focusing on smaller groups or enterprises – we call them community of interest. And just as our little gang had our own vernacular, COIs tend to develop their own vocabularies. These vocabularies require “deep” context because the members appear to speak in “code”.

Later in life I was involved in other communities of interest with other groups – one example was the Kannada Koota formed among members with a common language “Kannada”. But as an inclusive community, we also broadened the definition of membership to “anyone with an interest in the language Kannada or the Indian state of Karnataka”. We had members who were Hindi speaking but had lived in Bangalore, Bengalis from Mysore, white Americans married to Kannadigas and a variety of other diverse people that added richness and color to the community.

People have many sides and motivations. As a result, they are members of many “Communities of Interest”. Each of these communities may or may not have overlap. Each of these communities may have developed a specialized language and vocabulary that is distinctively theirs. Each of these communities may be broadly defined or narrowly defined – they may be inclusionary or exclusionary.

With the recent interest in the architecture community on social networks and their potential for forming, growing and exploiting communities of interest, the question is, “Does a community of interest form naturally? Or is it something that can be “planted”, watered and grown?”

My own hunch is that it is a little bit of both. The seeds of communities of interest must be planted by motivated individuals who see that common interest and make it obvious to the membership. But the growth and sustained development of that community is more organic and less controllable as events, people and passions rise and fall. Inclusive communities tend to be richer and more diverse and bring more tolerance and sensitivity. Exclusionary communities tend to foster elitism, arrogance and insularity.

In my earlier blog I had mentioned “tribes” as a fact of life. Sophisticated and evolved tribes become these “Communities of Interest” ultimately. Under the veneer of civilization, still lurk those tribal tendencies. Enterprise Architects need to understand the various communities of interest in their domain and factor their dynamics into any attempt at enterprise transformation.

Oops Tempo?

I was reading the other day about metabolic rates, rapid consumption of food, high pulse rates, and extremely energetic and agitated behaviors, and I quietly laughed to myself as understanding of our crazy, frenetic, speed possessed world came home to me.

I live in the Washington DC area – an area noted for the slow movement of automobiles on choked I-66 making it the nation’s second worst congested highway system after the great metropolis of Los Angeles.

I look around me as I drive on the Interstate coming into town, and I see interesting human behaviors. (In fact, when I used to take the bus to the Metro Station along the freeway, the view of human behavior from that high perch was even more revealing!)

In the stalled traffic, a woman is applying makeup. She purses her lips, applies the lipstick, and rapidly moves her lips together. Then she fishes out a pair of tweezers from her purse, and starts doing her eyebrows. After she is done, she puts on her foundation and in the meantime, the traffic moves forward.

A young twenty something has brought his cordless electric shaver with him and is busy moving it around his day old beard. He grimaces into the mirror attached to the sun visor of his car and starts pulling the skin to get a better shave. As he is done with the left half of his face, the traffic begins to move.

A middle aged man has spread the day’s Washington Post on his steering wheel and is busy reading the headlines. His eyes dart back and forth as he tries to absorb yesterday’s happenings in the two minutes before the traffic starts to move.

All around me, people are busy talking to unseen people on cell phones, the glow of the screens illuminating their faces. Everyone has someone that they should, must, talk to. There are people with cell phones coyly held to their ears, while others, with their elbows resting in the car window are busy barking authoritative messages in what we used to call “drive-by taskings” to seeming underlings waiting for word from their fearless leader.

We are all “busy”. We are engaged in motion. We are all performing activities that fill up our days. We are busy “hooking up”, “linking”, “networking”, and “connecting”. Our belief is that out of this frenetic activity comes personal success and that somehow, the need for speed is inevitable, necessary and good.

In the eighties, when FedExing stuff was the norm, corporate people blindly sent packages by Air Express regardless of whether the recipient was in town to receive and attend to them. In the nineties it was the Fax machine and electronic mail and FedEx. Today, it is all of the above and more – all conspiring to yank the recumbent employee from the task of pondering and into ill-thought, heedless action.

The Defense Department and the military have a word – “Ops Tempo” that describes organizational metabolic rate nicely. Ops Tempo is the rate at which operations can be conducted within the constraints of a military force structure’s ability to act, attack, defend, supply, and in general, conduct the activities of war. Ops tempo determines the metabolic rate at which a sustainable war can be fought.

Enterprises have sustainable ops tempos too – given the size of the resources, ability to deploy them, motivate them, and achieve successful activities with sustained positive results requires understanding the right ops tempo. Few enterprises or enterprise architects appear to recognize the importance of the ops tempo as a fundamental measure of the metabolic rate of an enterprise. As enterprises get larger and larger, unfortunately, the ops tempo has to scale up to counter the latency introduced by the need to traverse a long chain of command. And there is a limit to how much this can scale up because increasing metabolic rates, as we know from nature, increases the resources we consume and the stress we accumulate.

Nature has already dictated this. Small animals and birds have high metabolic rates, high pulse rates and frequent heartbeats. As animals get larger in size, their metabolic rates drop off – but their size gives them several natural advantages.

Large scale enterprises trying to be nimble like startups are like large animals trying to crank up the metabolic rate to match that of small animals – with an incipient risk of a heart failure and ultimate demise as they burn through their resources and increased stress that hardens their arteries. Right size the metabolic rate of your enterprise and you may have just found the secret sauce of sustained and harmonious survival.

Counting Enterprise-Years

I have been fascinated by abstract patterns. Repeating, in your face, obvious, geometric patterns do not interest me. I am interested in patterns that are multi-dimensional and integrate many aspects of something that has a repetition due to some deep inherent nature or some unknown universal truth, rather than because of conscious human thought or design.

I remember reading Gail Sheehy’s “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life” in the early 1980s. In this book, she explores the passage of time through one’s life and inherent behavioral patterns that we all tend to fall into. She codifies these patterns during the various phases of our lives like the twenties, the thirties, and so on.

• In the Piggyback Principle, for example, she says, “The assumption is: we can piggyback our development by attaching ourselves to a Stronger One.”
  
• In the Urge to Merge introduction that deals with how girls and boys differ in their approach to early romances, she states: “Until recently, seeking has been done primarily by boys and merging by girls.”
  
• In Seeking an Idea to Believe In, she states: “We seek an idea to believe in; heroes and heroines to copy, and we begin to rule out what we don’t want to do with our lives.”
  
• In “The Complete-Me Child”, (where young women rush to have babies) Gail suggests: When it becomes imperative in the late teens to prove that one can do something, make something work on one’s own, the easiest place for a young woman to turn is to her uterus.”
  
  Gail Sheehy talks about behavioral patterns. Her discovery was that much as we think we are unique and different, our exhibited behavior can be codified into rough patterns that have a predictable evolution over the passage of time.
  
  I go back to the patterns of our own middle-class South Indian Brahmin upbringing and the passages that fit the SIBA upbringing:
  


• You went to a good school and studied, well, most of the time. You were there to study, not to have fun!
  
• You got into a good college and took up some professional field: medicine or engineering, and hopefully graduated near the top quarter of your class. Again, you were there to study and graduate, and not have fun!
  
• You graduated and got a good job. You were there to work and advance, and not to have fun with the money you were making or the vehicle you just bought!
  
• You married by advertizing your family connections, your employment potential and your portfolio made up of lack of “bad” behaviors: smoking, drinking, and womanizing. You were there to be responsible and not to have fun with the partying and the freedom of twenty-something singlehood!
  
• Two years later you had your first child. You were there to start planning for college, and bear the responsibilities of fatherhood and not to have fun with mindless but exciting funscapades!
  
• Four years later you had your second. More responsibilities and less fun!
  And then you concentrated on your job for the next thirty years while reliving the patterns in your children – they were supposed to study and not have fun too- just like Dad!
  
• And then you retired/died and it was too late to have fun!
  
  I definitely believe that many tired and creaking enterprises have degenerated into my SIBA pattern – a lot of work, no fun! Companies like Apple and Google seem to have broken the pattern – they have balanced hard work with hard-driving fun – it shows in their products and in the smiles on their faces when they review their quarterly financials. But others seem to be destined to sink into oblivion, laden by responsibility, debts and hopelessness.
  
  I wonder whether there are “Passages” to an enterprise and consequent predictable crises. Whether there are the one, ten, twenty –year anniversaries that mark the milestones that herald change in behaviors, change in strategies, change in mentalities, change in leadership, and reinventions?
  
  If I look at Silicon Valley startups in their first 1-5 years, they are like the teens in Gail’s book when they start up– full of rebellion and anti-status quo and disruption and irreverence and rebellion.
  
  When they turn into the tens and teens, have they started to change their world-view and defined norms, specialties and a sense of security that is not based on reaction and rebellion?
  
  When they start graying at the temples in their twenties, will they still act as if they are in their early years? What about mergers and acquisitions? Are these similar to marriages during the teenage years, or marriages in the twenties or the thirties or even the rebound marriages of the forties and fifties?
  
  Enterprise years vs. Human years, there is an interesting thought. I have heard of dog years and horse years in comparison to the human lifespan, but Enterprise Years?
  
  I believe that people do not start companies with a longevity anatomy in mind. Most Silicon Valley startups are looking at a 2-4 year life before they go public. Very few of these companies have achieved the longevity or venerability of an IBM or a General Electric, or a Procter and Gamble, or a McDonalds, or .. Going public is only one of the “predictable crisis” in a company’s passage. Staying profitable, satisfying customers, creating durable brands that people have faith and trust in, these are the hallmarks of a long lived player. And enterprise architecture needs to pay attention to this facet of the enterprise!

Two Cooking Philosophies

My wife is a great cook! Over these last twenty five years I have been enjoying her baked goods, fried foods, steamed stuff and curries nestled in delicious sauces. An orderly soul, she is a firm believer in both the effectiveness of internet recipes and the need to get all the ingredients together before cooking. She has tried a variety of internet sites and cooking book authors and settled on the few that have produced tried and trusted favorites. Her dishes are to die for. They are cooked well, presented well and accompanied by a smile on the proud face of the cook.

Her modus operandi is to make a shopping list and head for the grocery store. Once there, she buys what she can get and goes on to more stores until she has everything on her list. She then triumphantly begins to start the job of assembly and fine tuning. Sometimes, actually most times, the shopping is done well in advance as my wife is a very organized person.

I, on the other hand, am a crisis cook. When the call goes out, “I don’t know what to cook and its getting late and we have nothing to eat, and can you fix something!” I swing into action. A quick reconnaissance trip to the pantry and the two refrigerators upstairs and downstairs and I build a battle plan based on what’s out there. Plans are made and discarded rapidly as I spy or don’t spy necessary ingredients. Ultimately (most of the time) I have a final order of battle figured out. With two or three burners blazing, a lot of cursing as I burn a finger or elbow, and a lot of tasting in between, my three dishes are ready for consumption. Quickly clearing the vessels that were no longer needed, I present the dinner with a flourish. Licking my painful fingers, I wave away the compliments, “Oh! It was nothing.”

Therein lies a universal truth- there are some of us who cook to recipe and order and others of us who make lemonade when life hands us lemons. And in the enterprise, it is important to know when you have the luxury of planning and when you don’t.

Too often, our enterprises are in crisis, looking for triage and do not have the luxury of waiting for the meal to be cooked. These crisis interventions look like the need for drastic application system surgery, failure of underlying hardware and software platforms, systems dead in the water, and consequent needs for instant switchovers, denial of service attacks from the other side of the world and failure of the network, to name a few. Our sponsors usually hand us the pink slip when we tell them we need to go shopping or need to stop to make a list or we need time to think.

Too bad, that my wife’s approach works better and produces much more tasty dishes than my crisis oriented battle-plans, but in my defense, we haven’t gone hungry for a while.

The Char (Four) Steps

My father-in-law has a theory on child-rearing. For the well-rounded development of a child at least four minimum sustained skills are necessary: Reading, a sport, a cultural skill such as music or dance and a hobby.

Reading is the ability to voraciously consume any form of printed or typed material – from the labels of medicine in the bathroom medicine cabinet to the newspaper that arrives at the breakfast table every morning. Readers talk to other readers, easily. Readers are raconteurs of tales well spun. Readers are dreamers and dare to dream big dreams. Readers are humble as they read about other people’s exploits and daring. Reading is the natural antidote to boredom. Reading is a habit that stays when you are bedridden, stricken with terminal disease or simply tired. Reading brings out the curiosity in a person.

A sport, well developed is a level of skill at playing, competing, practicing and demonstrating a level of play that attracts other sportsmen to engage. Sportsmen learn to deal with winning and losing. Sportsmen automatically drift towards other sportsmen. Sportsmen are able to watch other sportsmen play and enjoy the demonstration of their skills. Sportsmen are constantly striving to improve their game. Sports bring out competitiveness and aggression in a person in a format that is more like staged warfare with clear rules of engagement. In a lifetime solo sport like swimming or golf, the warfare is more against your internal self rather than some tangible opponent.

A cultural skill is essential for the appreciation of the arts. And appreciation of the arts brings a softening of the harshness of life. Music and dance enter the soul and are bubbling out hourly, daily and in every movement of a person. Musicians and dancers drift towards each other. Music and dance bring the performer face to face with both the excellence and the limitations of their skill.

A hobby is your friend when your working life has ended and the daily trips to the office are over. If you have spent your life without hobbies, retirement is more a sentence than a reprieve. A hobby is the reason for meeting fellow enthusiasts and hobbyists – for sharing a rare collection, or for learning tips and techniques. Hobbies are the raisins in the pudding of daily life.

My father-in-law believes, that with these four skills in hand, a person is well-equipped for life’s journey. He/she will have no difficulty in striking up conversations, spending time, enjoying and absorbing new experiences and establishing long lived relationships.

So what does this have to do with enterprise architecture or enterprises? For a healthy enterprise there are some essential skills that together form a complement like the four skills above. In my opinion and experience from three start-ups, at a minimum, these are sales and marketing, financial discipline, quality product and service development and excellent teamwork and human relations. Put a team together with these skills and you have a recipe for a very successful enterprise.

What is the magic “covering set” of skills that successful enterprise architecture work needs? Not an easy answer.

Traditionally we have defined these as skills in understanding information and data management, applications and systems functions management, technology platforms and infrastructure management. These are end states of application development and deployment. There are skills that relate to the actual development process itself such as methodology, modeling, lifecycle process support, documentation, usability and ergonomics.

But boiling down the skills needed for enterprise architecture into four tight comprehensive ones still eludes me.

Oh, and in passing, my father-in-law’s two children reflect his upbringing philosophy and the four steps.

Four By Forty

A friend of mine was telling me a story long ago – before the debacle and financial mess of Wall Street. His son had just graduated from one of the Ivy League schools and was interviewing for jobs with the best of the Wall Street financial firms. He wanted money to buy a suit.

My friend, a frugal engineer from the old school, used to donning his old off-the-rack J.C. Penney suit and having lived a life devoted to polyester, gave him $150 for the suit. He was taken aback when his son wanted $600! The usual father-son argument on extravagance, need for thrift and senseless purchases ensued but the outcome was unusual. My friend handed his son the money he wanted with a pat on his back and a wish for good luck.

Intrigued I asked him how his son won the argument. He replied, “My son told me that if I wanted him to apply to a used car dealer ship as a floor salesman, he would be more than happy to buy an off the rack polyester suit at J.C.Penneys.” But… seeing that he was applying to a Goldman Sachs and a Lehman Brothers, his need was not so much, buying a suit, as making a strategic investment that would land him a job that guaranteed a six-figure income. And a 600 dollar suit may just tip the balance…

I am an engineer with an engineer’s sense of frugality and utility. Having spent life in three different start-ups I know that the money we make is hard-won and not easily wasted on life’s “fripperies”. My first Honda Accord was a DX model – a base model that has “4X40” air conditioning – 4 windows down and 40 miles an hour! But over the years I slowly added on item after item until it became obvious that had I bought the higher end EX in the first place, I would have saved real money. I had the money then and could have easily bought the higher end model in the very beginning, but my sense of frugality and deep sense of virtue in saving a penny and denying myself “useless” luxuries came in the way of making a hard headed investment decision.

In a world of entrepreneurship and frugal enterprises, we must be careful and mind what my father always tried to teach us, “Knowing how to spend is as important as knowing how to save.”

Knowing the difference between heedless cost and sensible investment is not easy. When the CFO is harping on cost management it is difficult to take those financial risks that may pay off handsomely. But a gamble is a gamble and good gamblers win more than they lose. Enterprise architecture forces us to think of cost control as much as putting a face on that risky gamble.