One Bucket of Water

It’s time to prepare for the Indian lifestyle on the eve of my trip to India. In the thirty years of visiting Bangalore, the water supply situation has been constantly changing. In the early years, my parents’ home received city water from a nearby lake. When that promised to dry up, the city tapped into the Cauvery River, piping in water from several hundreds of miles away. When that also dried up, my parents reluctantly commissioned the drilling of a bore well under our driveway to tap into ground water. With the single family home plots turned into multi-storied apartment buildings, the ground water supply is also drying up.

Enter the single bucket of water bathing method. With one bucket of water, and exactly one bucket- you enter the bathroom, and come out clean - torso, arms, legs, hair and scalp - one and all. Living in America with an endless stream of water pouring down from the shower fixture atop, this seems like an impossible task. A week before the trip, I find myself easing into the one bucket routine. This means, passing up the shower in favor of a bucket of water in the bathtub. It means wetting yourself thoroughly before soaping. It means soaping yourself everywhere before wasting precious rinse water… and then making sure that when you do rinse all parts of the body, benefit from the force of gravity by pouring water from the top down. An exercise, at once in resource management, speed of execution and preparedness, it is a tremendously disciplining exercise. And the glow of saving precious fresh water resources and making a dent on the water bill at the same time lasts for a while.

I take a second long look at the world around me in the United States … supersized SUVs with just the single driver. The huge mall where we take our daily walks in winter filled with but less than a hundred people on a weekday evening … the size of a 2 gallon milk jug at Costco that seems to last for three weeks for the two of us. Will the bucket of water mean renewed focus and discipline and a concentration on innovation and frugality for the US also?

The Hippocratic Oath

My dearly loved sister is a pediatrician … has been one for more than 30 years. Her daily routine involves seeing more than 30 patients. Her day is filled with the variety of cases and the range from hope to utter despair that characterizes the diversity of 30 patients a day. A doctor who is firmly rooted in her Hippocratic Oath, she is a physician who will never probably get rich financially (many of her patients cannot pay well), but the queue of patients she treats with combinations of medical and common sense advice, and sometimes provides free physician’s samples and accepts payments in cash and kind, guarantees a slot in Heaven when her time comes.

In my own career as an enterprise architecture consultant more devoted to practice that preaching, but also in the position of a trusted adviser to my customers, the variety of assignments, customers and issues is a constant source of wonderment and interest. In much the same way that my sister’s effectiveness stems from the variety and intensity of the issues she deals with, I am beginning to believe that in the consulting business, the variety of problems that we address, the depth of involvement - from practicing what we preach to looking over other people’s mistakes, we benefit from multiple engagements and multiple customers and multiple types of problems.

Enterprise architecture benefits from consultants who have worked with many enterprises. Enterprise architecture benefits from consultants who are as comfortable with problems of the enterprise as they are with business units (segments) and solution architectures. To pigeon hole themselves into one or the other is often to the detriment of their customers.

If, like my sister’s thirty patients a day, I could handle three enterprise architecture problems a day for six months at a time, I would consider my life well led and my brain well stimulated and the value I bring to my customers multiplies from the lessons learned from many battlefields. Like her, I may never get rich like a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet, but the enjoyment and happiness factor would definitely make the journey to the enterprise in the sky smoother.

The Plateau

Back in the day when my body used to work and I had fewer pounds around the middle I used to play tennis. Being self taught, every inch of progress was hard won - with longing glances at the "naturals" - they with the easy flowing strokes, follow through and the blindingly fast serves. But progress did come game after game and it got to a point where I could hit fairly reliably and hard and somehow managed to get my serve across the net and inside the opponent's court more often than not. After a few years it happened. I hit the plateau.

My game stopped improving and I kept making the same mistakes. Again and again. The clock of learning had lost some gears and broken its springs. Nothing seemed to be working. All the weak wristy forehand returns , the just-short lobs that came crashing back as the opponent hit his stride. Nothing seemed to improve, whatever I did. It almost looked like I had run out of my initial cache of ideas and now was running on empty.

When I decided to do something finally, I signed up for tennis lessons. My pride at being self taught gave way to the grudging admission that professional help was much needed if I were to break out from the plateau. It was hard to undo years of self taught certainty but I tried. I opened my ears and listened and my body tried to obey the commands of the instructor. And then magically, the fog lifted.

My serves got faster, more accurate and repeatable. The one o'clock position, a deeper toss and the bend of the body like a bow to hit the ball at the right time with the entire force of the body - that was what the instructor told me. My lobs got richer and deeper, arcing to the roof almost and dropping vertically in the back making it hard for the opponent to slam down like an errant mosquito. All this in four to six lessons! Clearly those who know know well and those who only strive can never know until they have been shown the light.

I have been enjoying a better game and somehow winning seems to matter less than that perfect contact of the racket with the ball, knees bent down, taking the ball very low and skimming it over the net; the easy follow through as the racket follows the trajectory of the ball; the feel of the courts on a warm sunny day with blue sky and white clouds passing through.

I am beginning to believe that enterprises also go through a plateau phase. They are smug in the ways they have learned, often self-taught. They have their game down to some level of plateau that they have become happy with. To change the game, they need to go through a intervention like I made when I went to that tennis clinic. Enterprise architecture promises to be that secret sauce that gets you across the plateau.

Throwing Batteries at the Enemy

The other day, one of my students in the military posed an interesting dilemma that is increasingly becoming common: as soldiers carry more and more electronics, they need more and more batteries to keep them running. And in the middle of battle, you cannot simply go to a store to reload batteries or plug in a charger into a nearby wall socket. You carry your spare batteries with you and pray that you have enough to last the mission.

But the laws of anatomy and physiology put a limit on what you can carry on your back. Most soldiers carry 60 lbs of equipment in a backpack along with armor and weaponry. At a hundred pounds you are stretching the limits of human endurance. In the spirit of enduring improvement, the US Marine Corps has been stretching the limits with technology, with the Individual Load Bearing Equipment (ILBE) Marine backpack. The ILBE has arguably been responsible for a number of shoulder and other back related injuries http://www.10news.com/news/24360304/detail.html. Even more loads will likely land on the back of the hapless soldier from all the research on exoskeletons.

The fact of the matter, my student said, is that a military mission demands that the soldier's primary payload always be armor and weaponry closely followed by food and sustenance. Batteries are somewhere low down in the list of priorities. And to trade off lethality and self-defense against electronics and batteries, is a tradeoff that can result in loss of life and unsuccessful warfighting missions.

The ludicrous spectacle of soldiers hurling batteries and laptops at the enemy as a gambit of last resort during retreats is rapidly approaching as we "smarten" up the business of fighting war and killing with battery laden gadgets and weaponry.

So how much battery is enough battery? And how much of the tradeoff of the load on the back for ammo and food in favor of gadgets and batteries? This is the eternal battle between the actual task of warfighting in the trenches compared to the need for command and control from the top - and the need for command and control usually wins out.

The "battery problem" pattern is one that has manifested itself in many ways in architecture. Protocol overhead vs message content; Value adding processes vs support processes; Management vs Worker; and even politically - the 99% vs the 1!

In the world of information and data architectures we are facing the same dilemma. Substitute information content for food and ammunition and metadata for batteries and gadgets. As we try to increase the amount of metadata around each piece of "real information", we start stuffing "context data" batteries into the backpack of "content data". Arguably, some of the metadata is essential for establishing context, but often we reach a point where the batteries have taken over the backpack - 90% of our communications bandwidth is spent sending context and not content. 90% of our storage capacity is spent storing context and not content. The Defense Department's assumption that all data must be potentially discoverable places the need to coat content richly with large doses of metadata to provide context for all the people trying to discover that content.

Reminds me of my early childhood in the "Wild West" India of the 1960s when addresses with house and street numbers were not enough to direct the rickshaw driver or postman but had to be supplemented with landmarks, names of nearby famous people and proximity to large bodies of water. The house number, the street name and later the postal code allowed us to focus directly on the destination without the surrounding context data. We seem to be going back to the 1960s again.

A one headlamp Chevy Vega and Competitive Vulnerability

My first car was a real dog, but a very cheap dog. A Chevrolet Vega two door hatchback I bought in 1980, developed during the early 1970s with an oil drinking habit because of a mismatched cylinder liner with a different metal engine block. I mean engine oil. So much so that I was always carrying a six pack of 10W30 in my trunk to replenish the dwindling supply inside the engine.

But that was only the beginning. Someone had hit the car while I was working on a program in the Department and knocked one of the head lamps out. I came back to find a police notice of a hit and run posted under my windshield. Too poor and ignorant to replace the lamp right away, for two months I learnt to drive with one scratchy, dusty headlamp and make hypotheses of the conditions of the road ahead - sometimes correctly, sometimes not so correctly. It was winter and 8 inches of snow are very forgiving to errant cars and the people of Minnesota develop a very tolerant attitude in winter to cars that run astray.

It is famously said that your headlamps may only show the way about 20 feet in front but you can travel coast to coast on just that vision. The critical assumption (one that we all tend to forget) is that the car is moving and that the driver is able to make course corrections based on what he/she sees and that the driver is prepared to risk embarking on a journey that becomes tangible 20 feet at a time. It also helps to have both lamps on.

As I was contemplating the distant memory of that Chevy Vega, I realized, too often in enterprises, our cars are standing still. Our headlamps are illuminating a fixed twenty feet around us. And we are smug in the knowledge that comes from our twenty foot cone of observation. When competitors revolutionize their business processes, their product lines or come to attack, they are often outside that 20 foot cone.

One way to extend the reach of the headlamps is to move the car. Take some risk, start some innovation. Like that Vega in Minnesota, some of these may wind up on a snow bank. But some of them will also take you to the destination. Bring in people who have lived outside the reach of your headlamps. Then listen to them. Believe them. Trust them for they have seen what you cannot validate with your own headlamps.