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.

Dragovision and Subway Station

A very good friend of mine went to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne to study Electrical Engineering. At a physics class there, the Asian professor kept talking about “Dragovision” and “Subway Station” to the absolute mystification of my friend. Finally the epiphany broke: “Dragovision” was really “Drag Coefficient” and “Subway Station” was really “Surface Tension”. All became clear.

In the specialized worlds we live in, we are peppered by “Dragovisions” and “Subway Stations”. Only they come dressed up as “Market Spaces”, “Best Practice”, “Thought Leadership” and such. Someone needs to provide the Rosetta Stone to convert these into the ordinary language and common sense that lies at the heart of business success.

My father-in-law, once the senior-most officer for acquisition and procurement for Indian Railways, likes to tell the story of the self-made businessman who addressed the several thousands of workers at his multi-million dollar rail wagon factory. “What do we make?” he asked his workers. “Wagons!” came back the reply. He shook his head and then called out the real answer, “We make MONEY!” In his simple mind, he was very clear about his objective and could articulate it with a single sentence. His leadership and his strategies were all centered around that single focus.

Our world is made up of intelligent, highly educated and complex thinkers managing other people’s money and businesses. Too often, the “other people” tend to be stockholders who do not have the wherewithal or the capacity to correct our focus. We become an end unto ourselves, in love with the complex schemes we create.

We gather like minded complex thinkers and speakers around us and soon we are all talking in “tongues”. We as Business School majors with our freshly minted MBAs and our portfolio of “sock-it-to-them” terminology are very comfortable trading cryptic messages with others of our ilk. We as Enterprise Architects are happy talking data architecture, applications architecture, business architecture, Zachman Framework, Technical Reference Model, Framework, and other such terms of secret handshake with fellow architects. In the web programming world, it is the same with widgets, Java, dynamic HTML and the bubble du jour.

Ultimately we crowd out the simple minded or the simple talkers, like weeds overtaking the lawn, and convince the world that what business needs is a special breed of people who have the jargon down and the networks of other like minded people in place – in short MBAs from the B-schools, or perpetually recycled captains of industry. We command princely wages for the commanding speeches we make and the seminars we lead and the keynote addresses we provide and the grand plans we announce with fanfare.

We take simple mission statements and start adding parenthetical clauses to complicate them. We add ifs, buts and wherefores until we are not very clear what the mission is and are unable to tell whether we have accomplished it or not or who it benefits.

Obviously, I have exaggerated the effects of jargon for effect, but one simply has to log into the internet and surf the web in any professional domain, and see the truth of the proposition. Of course, if you are a practitioner of the jargon, the hypothesis that the jargon is incomprehensible to ordinary people is ludicrous!

I think I’d like to see blue collar simplicity gain ascendancy over the Blackberry toting intelligentsia. We need a Harry Truman not a Barack Obama. We need a Sam Walton and not a Henry Paulson. We need a pickup truck and not a BMW. We need overalls, not Brooks Brothers. We need sleep after a good day’s toil, not an all-night crawl through the bars. We need to go back to being the America of plain-speak and action.

Apparently, therein lies the simple appeal of country music and the mesmerism of the messages of Rush Limbaugh! In simplicity, and common sense, lies the strength of our enterprises! And common sense is a gift of the common man or woman.

Arranged marriages and Service Oriented Architectures

This week we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary – twenty five years from that smoke filled day when my fiancé became my bride and the mother of my children a few years later.

I am a happy product of the arranged marriage system. I love my wife, and (privately) am in awe and devotion of her many qualities and am constantly surprised by her love for the undeserving me. Don’t get me wrong. Our parents did not meet in secret over our cradles and arrange a wedding that was foisted upon us. Rather we met with our parents’ blessing and decided we liked each other enough to tie our lots together. And have never looked back since. She still lights up my life and there is a spring to my step and a song on my lips because she is part of my life.

But the arranged marriage is like a market. Specify someone at least six feet tall, and you have eliminated 75% of the eligible bridegrooms – the Indians of my generation though long on intellect were short of height. Specify a college degree and you have clobbered another good 30% of the remaining. Specify a degree only from a prestigious institution and you are now able to count the successful candidates on your fingers. The trick is to be open-minded enough to specify the minimum needed to make you happy without drastically slicing the size of the pool of available candidates. Be overly broad and you will wind up with someone you would not have looked at twice when you were in college.

Very quickly you learned to shape your needs – being specific enough to only make compromises you are willing to live with but being broad enough that there is anticipation of enough supply.

How true this is, in the area of defining systems requirements for a broad set of users such as we are trying to do with the e-Government initiatives from the Office of Management and Budget. How true this rings, when we are trying to define service oriented architecture and specifying services that are general enough to fit a large market but specific enough to meet their needs.

Growing up in the India of tradeoffs and personal inconveniences of the 1950s and 1960s and even the 1970s, we learnt quickly how to ride the tightrope balance between tightly defined requirements and breadth of choices.

As my last thirty years in the US have taught me, America is the land of indulgence. You can have your cake and eat it too. Our grocery stores are filled with a wall of choices. Our electronics stores offer wonderful variety from all over the world. Our ice creams come in 56 flavors (sorry Baskin Robbins). Our multiplexes offer a choice of ten movies at the same time. The Apple iTunes store offers more than a million tunes. We have more than ten car dealerships on Dealership Alley.

And so when we specify the extensive requirements for our new homes, the extreme set of accessories for our cars, boats and motorcycles, and the formal shirts, casual shirts, dress pants, casual pants, jeans, shorts, ties, tee shirts, chinos, jackets, golf shirts, suits and overcoats for the wardrobe we MUST have, we carry that to the requirements of the systems we build, and the services we specify by tightening our specifications and needs to the nth degree. Cost and tradeoffs are not usually a criteria during the formulation stage of requirements. We wait for the managers and the financial management people to wield the hatchet and then complain about the cuts that left systems dysfunctional.

Manufacturing to a mass market is cheaper and more stable for suppliers to produce to than supporting large markets of size one. Buying, and using a mass manufactured product involves accepting necessary trade-offs and living with a less than perfect fit. Buying and using a mass manufactured product means that the Jones have one too, as do the Smiths and the Richardsons.
Someday we’ll get it. Designing a SOA has a lot to do with understanding arranged marriages. Or we’ll quickly find ways to cheaply build solutions for markets of one. After all, aren’t we an entrepreneurial lot?

Chronic Diseases and Enterprise Architecture

The celebration of another birthday on the wrong side of fifty is cause for introspection and re-engineering of one’s world view.

I have been a diabetic for more than twenty years and have found that treatment of a chronic illness must take a different course from the management of short illnesses. There is usually no light at the end of the tunnel, and as the saying goes, if there is – it is the light of an oncoming train! Pleasure is taken a day at a time and payment is due sooner or later. One learns to live with the illness and all the constraints it imposes on food habits and the delay of instant gratification. Managing chronic disease is a process of first undergoing the classical stages – neglect, denial, anger, hope and then finally, blessed acceptance and the peace that it brings.

At a unlimited food buffet, one learns to pace oneself while eating. As a good friend remarked, the difference between a buffet and a dinner is the difference between a marathon and a sprint. The initial laps are slow, almost languorous, and the finish is tiring but exhilarating. Eating at buffets is an art cultivated over the years. I like to think that the Brahmins I have descended from are adept at gastronomic marathons over the centuries of feasts and ceremonial dinners.

We have hosted many close friends, relatives and acquaintances over the years. For me, growing up in a large family, it was the most natural thing to invite people over for a stay and enjoy their company and share our shelter and food with them. We have had good guests and great guests and even a few not so good ones. The lesson we learned is calibrating our expectations and setting guests expectations based on the length of their stay. The frenetic visits to Washington DC, the eating out at fancy restaurants in Alexandria and Georgetown, the long drives to Mount Vernon and Monticello become untenable when repeated day after day for months with the same set of people. On the other hand, each new guest seeing the sights and doing the town for the first time brings back the same “first-time experience” we had when we came to this beautiful city and rekindles the sense of enthusiasm and excitement that keeps us living in this area 12 years later.

Looking after a friend’s child for a week is a wholly different matter from raising your children for the length of their childhood. Respect, discipline, setting up of structures and behavioral patterns, reinforcement of positive behaviors, trust, delegation patterns, and daily motivation are simply some of the things that are different when dealing with lifelong relationships.

As the US is embroiled in the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are finding out that winning a war and staging successful occupation and transfer of regime while fending off insurrections is a different matter than raining bombs and bullets in a show of “shock and awe”.

All of this has a bearing on enterprise issues. The first question one must ask is whether an enterprise issue is a chronic issue or whether it has the possibility of an immediate solution, chronic issues must be dealt with differently. The expectation of instant solutions for chronic problems is different, knowing it is a chronic problem. Chronic problems are seldom solved in Toto. Refactoring or local improvements are used to effect long term improvement but there is seldom a time when the world returns back to perfect whole. Recognition that a problem is chronic must come to all stakeholders at the same time. If there is disagreement then there are different sets of expectations about the solution strategy that must be pursued.

In much the same way I think of one weekend guests, one week guests, one month guests and longer term co-residents, enterprise issues are probably categorizable into immediate, one week, one month, one quarter, one year or chronic issues. The difference is that neglected short term issues ultimately become chronic issues. And just as personal wellbeing in the midst of problems is based on the pursuit of effective habits, morale, discipline, order, tidiness and structure, enterprise well-being is also based on the pursuit of effective habits, morale, discipline, order, tidiness and structure.

Chronic issues in enterprises must be dealt with through re-factoring. For example, cleaning a large 15,000 square foot home is different from cleaning an 800 square foot apartment. Re-factoring is incremental improvement of the local without regard to a wholesale improvement of the whole. Re-factoring does not guarantee a perfect whole enterprise – it only ensures that parts of the enterprise are always improving.

Chronic issues involve moving two steps forward and one step back, sometimes. Chronic issues go through the entire lifecycle: denial, anger, sorrow, acceptance and finally reconstruction to the new reality.

When an enterprise has a portfolio of chronic issues that threaten its survival, it is time to “start a forest fire” and renew the enterprise from a new fresh start.

When the obvious is not obvious

As a young and green manager in a large corporation many years ago, I watched dumbstruck as a senior manager spent most of his budget early in the year and came after mine - after I had carefully husbanded my resources to spend uniformly throughout the year for my team. And to my greater surprise and outrage he was given a healthy chunk of my budget – and chunks from other careful managers! We had been schooled in different schools of thought – mine to save and spend according to my means – his to grab the action wherever it lies with whatever you have. Bucking conventional wisdom he gambled his budget early in the year on long shots. He scored a few home runs and used his budget as investment capital for informed gambling – and managed his cash flow using his peer managers’ budgets.

We were driving back from a vacation trip, the other day, in the middle lane of a three lane highway. The rightmost lane was clearly marked as ending in 500 feet. While we all waited patiently for the traffic to move, several aggressive souls came barreling down in the rightmost lane and plowed their way in at the end of the merge area. The question was, does one wait patiently leaving an entire lane empty while the traffic stretched back several miles or do we use all three lanes to capacity with the consequent mayhem at the merge area but with shorter lines overall?

Architecturally, this got me thinking about conventional wisdom and the holy cows of systems engineering discipline vs. the cowboy mentality of the open road developer. And the layering and the virtualization and the platform independent designs that we all tried to produce in the days of the big three: Sybase, Oracle and DB2. As architects are we obsessed with long term elegance to the detriment of immediate benefits and are quick to dismiss short cuts as hacking? Or were we fighting all over again, the war we lost?

Today’s chaos is both a testimonial to successful, quickly developed working software that is keeping companies afloat and a tombstone for good architecture, design and documentation intentions that died on the way to a deadline. We are unable to re-engineer our way out of the mess. But how much architecture is enough architecture? How much tidiness is enough tidiness for a house to function effectively? When does architecture tidiness turn into architecture elegance and then into plain architecture obsession?

And given the mountain of legacy systems and issues, will any organization ever have enough time, money, management attention and the resources to do it over right or do we have to understand that architecture techniques have to incorporate very stringent time, resource and money tradeoffs as part of the strategy? And remodeling, refactoring, incremental evolution, and point solutions have to enter our vocabulary and our priorities.

In the building industry, architects are coming to the same realization. In manufacturing, as we burn through the earth's resources and generate ever more millions of cubic feet of carbon dioxide, we are coming to the same realization.

As the sage of Omaha reportedly remarked "Only when the tide goes out do you see all the people who are swimming naked!"

Commonsense for Dummies

IT Tribes

The other day, being the plain-spoken person I like to think I am, I was reading a book, “SOA Adoption for Dummies” with the intention of unlocking the mysteries of Service Oriented implementation in words that even a dummy like me could understand.

Apart from the lucidity of the prose, I was taken by the analogy of Information Technology teams to primitive tribes with their jealous tribal unity pitted against the other warring tribes.

The authors Miko Matsumura, Bjoern Brauel and Jignesh Shah state: “The result of all these fragmented groups within enterprise IT is the formation of IT tribes. Each tribe could represent a vendor solution, geography, a business unit, a consulting company, or any of the distinctions that divide IT into competing groups.”

“The desire for each tribe to succeed by dominating the other tribes is a natural and yet unfortunate reality of large scale enterprise IT. Without understanding and overcoming the organizational impulses that create and maintain silos, slabs and spaghetti, any technological approach will be doomed to failure.”

How true!

All of us gray haired ones (with the little hair we have), with more than 30 years under the belt in the IT war fighting theater have experienced the tribal effect and more than once, have been guilty of practicing it ourselves. “We have met the enemy and he is us." And unless we decide to federate our tribes in the pursuit of the greater good and the bigger big, we are doomed.

IT Sprawl

The authors, likened the spread of IT systems in an un-architected and uncontrolled manner to urban sprawl: “City planners refer to haphazard and disorderly urban development as sprawl.”

Once, again, how aptly described!

I have travelled to the city of my youth – Bangalore India – many times since my original departure in 1979 after living in the United States these many years. Every year I see the sprawl get worse. The roads that were built in the early 1900s are still the roads that carry the main traffic. Any short term attempts of converting roads into one-way streets to try to distribute and dilute the traffic have been overtaken by traffic volumes where even those solutions do not work anymore. It appears that the architecture of the city laid out before the mid-1900s to serve a population of 450,000 souls is now serving a population of more than 10 Million.

The sewers, the electricity supply, the water supply also followed the same story as urban Bangalore outgrew the four boundaries that the original founder – Kempe Gowda had deemed as the limits of growth.

Today we have India’s Silicon City with a worldwide reputation for technology excellence mired in the urban sprawl and lack of infrastructure that is crippling its growth and quality of life.

How long do we have to wait until our IT sprawl reduces us to the same state? Is there a way for us to innovate new systems “under the radar” that is architected as the sprawl continues?

The other day my in-laws and wife presented me with an iPhone. What a marvelous device! As an avid but measured promoter of technology and advanced thinking at work, I am a reluctant embracer of technology and its consequent expense at home. The iPhone came in like a tornado into the Rao household and swept me into 2009 overnight. As I launched application after application, as I seamlessly dived from a calendar event to the players, then the contact information in my address book to the GPS coordinates of their homes and automatic driving instructions to get there, I was wonderstruck by the seamlessness, the absolute accuracy, the leveraging the work of several hundreds of thousands of people and the aesthetic beauty of the interface and access methods built into that small 5 inch device.

I wonder whether “small is beautiful” and the iPhone represents the pinnacle of that philosophy – that as we build larger and larger systems we tend to run out of understanding or are overwhelmed by the complexity of the job or are beset by sloppy work ethics, laziness and a profound ignorance and limited awareness of the context in which we build these hyper large systems..

I wonder whether we have built large dinosaur systems with bailing wire and jute thread and whether we should start from the ground up and layer on incremental function from wherever it comes, all playing a part in an orchestrated “whole” – sort of like the iPod.