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!