Ops Tempo? What's That?

Hummingbird

The Importance of Recognizing Operations Tempo


In the field of Biology, we see an interesting phenomenon - small animals tend to have a high rate of heartbeat and pulse and live shorter lives, carry their young for shorter intervals inside their bodies and tend to also have a high rate of activity. The hummingbird is a classic example of such a small animal as is a nocturnal creature - the bat.

In the battlefield, we use the word operations tempo to describe the rate at which a battle is fought. Increase the ops tempo and you tend to burn more ammunition, fuel and lose more people. Decrease the operations tempo and you tend to have protracted warfare that allows the enemy to reform, regroup and fight more resolutely. The commander's challenge is to operate at the highest operations tempo possible that a supply chain can sustain (of course ensuring that he has technological superiority and can deliver a convincing blow with the increased operations tempo).

Enterprises have their own operations tempo, partly driven by the nature of their business and partly by the need to compete and match or better a competitor's rate of operations. For the enterprise architect, it is very important to understand the operations tempo of the enterprise she is analyzing.

For the simplistic analyst, who believes that government should operate as a private corporation, is to deny the mismatch between the operations tempo in the government and that in a private corporation. For the government person to believe that their experience in Government qualifies them to lead a fast paced private corporation is also equally simplistic.

Governments have for the most part, been in business for decades if not centuries. They have evolved gradually, increasing their operations tempo with infusions of technology, turnover in personnel and adoption of new laws, policies, rules and regulations. Governments are constrained by legislatures to pay modest wages with little incentives to improve performance.

Private corporations on the other hand are nimble and fleet footed and is able to sustain a very high operations tempo based on providing windfall rewards and rapid rises in positions for their employees. They are able to form their own specific organization structures, supply chains, policies, procedures, processes that are geared towards this high operations tempo. Even within private corporations, there is a diversity of operations tempos. Older, established long lived corporations tend to behave like the Government, while startups that are pre-public offering work at a frenetic operations tempo that is seldom sustainable after they go public.

The classic mismatch is when a person leaves a slow ops tempo enterprise to lead a fast one or when a person leaves a fast paced private enterprise to lead a slow government enterprise. Experience has shown that the transition from one enterprise with a dramatically different operations tempo than another is challenging and few people successfully make it successfully.

Another form of classic mismatch is when two organizations need to collaborate or form different parts of the same value chain. A lot of frustration results when the operations tempos of the two organizations are dramatically different.

Away from enterprise architecture land, in the people world, we tend to categorize people as Type A or Type B personalities. Unconsciously or consciously we are also assigning a value of operations tempo - Type As tends to work at a high rate of operations tempo while Type B's are slower in their operations tempo. Dating, marriages between mixed types or similar types are examples of operations tempo mismatch or match with interesting consequences. Entire families may have a distinct operations tempo and interactions of family members with other family members may be fraught with frustration.
Ignore understanding and factoring in ops tempo as an enterprise architect at your own peril!

Emergence

In an earlier post I was complaining about the Washington Area traffic. The nation's capital is also the site of capital traffic jams. Highways are shut down due to construction or all but one lane is blocked off and a long line of cars are burning gas and waiting patiently to get through. Very quickly like water pressure finds the weak point in a submarine's hull, the traffic finds an exit to some side road that runs through a quiet residential neighborhood. Soon all the cars are pouring through roads that are single lane wide and riddled with stop signs and a 25 mile an hour limit.


The careful well planned highway capable of carrying six lanes of traffic at 60 miles or more an hour lies idle as the side roads are choked with traffic far beyond their carrying capacity. What is happening here? The drivers are exhibiting emergent behavior. If one were to magically wave a wand and expand the by lanes to turn them into highways, they would soon become the "new normal" until the old highway comes back into service. Maybe the old highway may never be used again.

I am a fan of the late author Michael Crichton. Only now as I am slowly beginning to understand emergent phenomena, I am beginning to realize that emergent behaviors are a thread that run through most of his books - be it a virus mutation in the Andromeda Strain, the adaptive learning of the human brain in The Terminal Man or the emergent behavior of prehistoric animals brought back to life in Jurassic Park.

I look at nature and I see emergence everywhere. The termite hill in the distance is a product of emergent building as are ant hills, bee hives, and bird's nests. Did they have a static plan when the insects and animals who built them started? Or did the hill or hive or nest get built as they went along? Did the icicle always grow at the same place (crystalline structures are fractal, but the overall shape of the crystal may be a result of lopsided growth).

Emergent behavior, speaking loosely is an unplanned evolution of behavior that results from many factors, often unanticipated. Emergent behavior defeats the static planning and the estimation of dynamic calculations that form the bedrock of architecture work. We as architects are trying to plan the various parameters of a system based on assumptions of growth and evolution and capacity limits and topological structures that reflect the world as we understand it today and our assumptions for the next say, three, five or even ten years. Emergent behaviors tend to wreak havoc on this planned and organized way of being. Emergent behaviors are opportunistic. Emergent behaviors are driven by unforeseen constraints, an urge to get ahead, impatience with the static status quo and a host of other motivating factors.

Emergent behaviors seem to exacerbate when there is an explicit disconnect between the "swarm" and the resources. I had observed behavioral differences between customers at fast food restaurants in Germany where you have to ask and pay for ketchup and jam versus customers in the United States, where these condiments are set out in piles of packets for customers to help themselves.

I am looking forward to doing more research on "emergent architectures" and the phenomenon of emergence as it relates to systems engineering to develop ways to manage the evolution of architecture topologies to match emergent behaviors rather than stay static with the assumptions of yesterday ill suited to the behaviors of today. The area of cloud computing is a domain that is akin to the fast food example I have mentioned earlier.

Sure-Fire Crystal Ball Gazing

It is always interesting how I stumble upon some great thinking and writing by serendipity but rarely have the wherewithal at hand (pencil, paper, laptop, iPad, whiteboard) to ponder and tease and work those thoughts into coherence and direction for my professional and personal life. This was one time when I was by my computer while I was reading an extremely pertinent article for all of us who are in enterprise architecture, technology strategy and the crystal ball business.


I was reading the April 2012 issue of Smithsonian magazine and came upon an article on FUTURISM by the celebrated science fiction writer and author of Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling. Aside from the extremely witty and apt quotations, his observations on forecasting the future were very interesting. His thesis is that you don't need to be clairvoyant to predict the future.

If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real genuine things that already are happening NOW. For them, that is the future.

As a person interested in thought patterns, process patterns and information patterns, I lapped up the classification scheme used by futurists to predict the future

1. Statistical: analyze the volumes of hard data collected by businesses and government and sift out underlying trends. It's demographic research, not clairvoyance, that predicts that a new Starbucks coffee shop will appear in a heavily foot trafficked urban locale.
2. Reportorial: The future is often a dark mystery to people because they haven't invested the effort in finding out what's likely to happen. Some simple shoe leather spadework (interviews, search engines, social networks) coupled with basic questions of who, what, when, where and why can be of great use here. (This method is the basis for what has become known as "Open Source Intelligence")
3. Historical Analogy: Sterling believes is radically inaccurate, yet also dangerously seductive, because people are profoundly attached to the seeming stability of the past. In practice, though our ideas of what has already happened are scarcely more solid that our predictions of tomorrow. If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary.
4. Scenario Forecasting: What Sterling calls a set of strange rituals which assists bewildered clients who can't frankly admit to themselves what they already know. The job is to encourage mental change through various forms of playacting and rehearsal.
5. The fifth and final method, Sterling believes is the most effective of all. If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real, genuine things that already are happening now - for them, that is the future.

Put another way, Sterling argues, the future is already upon us, but that is happening in niches. The inhabitants of that niche may be saint-like pioneers with practical plans for applying technology to eliminate hunger or preserve the environment. Far more commonly they are weird people with weird ideas and practices and are objects of ridicule.

Sterling cites the example of the French cartoonist Albert Robida who he claims is probably the greatest futurist of the 19th century who predicted all the advances of the twentieth. His cartoons depicted the use of electricity, flying machines, the emancipation of women, and other then far out prospects. Sterling also wryly observes that "Even the cleverest, most deeply insightful forecast becomes paper thin when time passes it by. Visions of the future are destined to fade with the dawn of tomorrow."

There are a few well phrased quotations buried in Sterling's extremely readable prose:

"Tomorrow obeys a futurist the way lightning obeys a weatherman."

"If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary."

"Visions of the future are destined to fade with the dawn of tomorrow."

Robida's cartoons are excerpted at Smithsonian.com/robida.

Estimate That!

The other day, I was at the store and the guy at the counter rang up the sale. An awkward $10.18 Meaning, I was going to haul back a few dollar bills and 82 cents in jingling, heavy change. Determined to forestall an increase in the metal payload in my pockets, I fished around my pockets and to my delight, I found two dimes. With a triumphant smirk, I put the two dimes on the sales counter along with a $20 bill. And waited and waited, as the poor guy first looked at his left hand holding the twenty dollar bill and then the right holding two dimes and finally at the cash register display that showed $10.18. Finally at peace, wearing a smile, he gave me back the two dimes, rang the sale for a $20 payment and gave me nine dollar bills and shot the small change of 82 cents through the coin chute.


Other than suffering the inconvenience I had hoped to avoid with my twenty cent gambit, the deeper regret that surfaces is that we are not teaching our children to estimate and carry and manipulate numbers in their heads. We are not teaching our children how to approximate and come up with ballpark numbers that are often close but not exact. Modern technology has reduced the problem of calculation to the silicon chip and a few deft finger strokes and the illusion of perfect knowledge and computation - in much the same way that the Internet has dumbed down the amount of knowledge we need to carry in our heads because the facts are simply an iPad or smart phone away - or the way in which managers blindly believe in the numbers on a spreadsheet without an inkling or approximation of what the numbers should be - or how we remember friends' telephone number by their auto-dialing prefix on our smart phones.

Nowhere is this blind faith more evident than the executive dashboard - a panoply of software display "gauges" that tells the executive that all her projects are in good health - as the green colors clearly showed. Or the "analytics" that are now freely available to the executive who wants to serve himself with the conclusions and does not want to bother himself with the supporting data.

The conventional management wisdom "to measure is to manage" and its logical extension "to measure accurately is to manage effectively" must give way, in a constantly changing world where measurements are both impossible to make and where accuracy in a single dimension has no meaning in the context of many dimensions, to the maxim "To estimate well is to assess, and to assess is to understand where to lead". Ballpark knowledge is often just enough for effective leadership.

Estimation is like an exoskeleton for the mind - just as an exoskeleton allows a human being to carry superhuman loads, or walk superhuman distances, estimation and approximation stretches the ability of the mind to fathom the vast deep of the unknown. Estimation and approximation allows the thinker to draw the sketches of hypothesis as patterns that come from thought and observation.

Capitalism has its root in the power of Capital - money! Capital is the engine behind the Industrial Revolution because, to be able to mass produce goods, companies have to buy expensive machinery whose cost has to be recovered over many years. Capital is a necessary consequence of acquisition and ownership of expensive stuff.

The growth of the power of Wall Street is directly related to the needs for raising capital. Financial Institutions raise money in the capital markets, and command tremendous influence amongst the seekers of funds for their companies.

The power of capital has been the story of the West since the Industrial Revolution to date. Questioning the power of capital, Wall Street and the influence of infusions of money in the fortune of companies has always been considered heretical. But this is the right time to consider whether a new model must emerge from the ashes of capitalism that reflects the real needs of today.

Consider

Interest rates are lower than they have ever been and remained low for several years in a row. From a sheer demand and supply situation, the indication of low premium for borrowing money is that the demand for capital has been low and very few companies need to go to the capital markets for raising funds.  They have either tailored their growth rate (or been forced by markets to do so) to consume capital at a rate that is sustainable in line with their revenues, or are able to meet all of their cash needs from the money they generate from their businesses.

Service Sector

It is possible to start a business using services provided by external sources without incurring the capital costs of owning the assets needed to provide that service and incurring the running costs of that infrastructure.  For example, providing payroll requires information systems, personnel, computing facilities, human resource specialists, tax law specialists and people knowledgeable about government regulations - OR - the company can purchase payroll services from a service provider such as ADP for less than 75 dollars per employee per month. Today, it is possible for businesses to be service based instead of being capital based and convert requirements for capital to more modest demands for monthly cash.

Manufacturing Sector

Businesses are getting their fabrication and manufacturing done offshore using providers who also service other companies as well. With the economies of scale, providers are able to provide multiple customers with manufactured goods. The cost of entry to but manufacturing services is much less than the cost of capital needed to build captive manufacturing infrastructures. Once again, a need for capital has been converted into a more modest need for cash to pay for batches of manufacturing, one batch at a time.

These are fundamental tectonic shifts in the need for capital and the power of capitalism.

Enterprise Architecture can help!

Enterprise Architecture is a discipline that allows businesses to represent services in a manner where these costs can be represented and aggregated. Enterprise architecture for the new model of a company allows the owners and operators of the company to constantly operate the enterprise using working capital instead of large capital investments.

S**ttyBank

Last night, I finished a frustrating session with an "industry best" website of one of the largest US banks in the world. The account being a "Non-Resident Indian Account" and with me, a very infrequent visitor, (I access the account probably once a year, usually to deposit money) I had long since lost my cryptic password assigned by the bank and the even more cryptic PIN number made up of meaningless letters and numbers.

After more than an hour of running from pillar to post, I gave up. I do not know if this website represents the best of Indian user interface design or if the development team was having a bad day. In any case, working for a multinational Mega-Bank, I suspect, would attract the best programming talent in India unless the bank took the approach of the US Federal Government : Lowest Bidder.

Some of the user interface design practices that confounded me:

1. Profuse use of acronyms that may mean something to the bank staff but might as well be Greek or Latin to the rest of us. The difference between IPIN, TPIN and WPIN, who's to know? And what about IVRS? The acronym jungle out there would make Indian Railways proud from my fond memories of SBC as Bangalore City and BNC as Bangalore Cantonment.

2. Circular logic and use of the broken record technique requesting a PIN for every transaction including "Read my lips, I have lost my PIN"; I felt like a rat going through a maze and passing the same point again and again.

3. And worst of all - the need for a login to register a complaint when the complaint itself is "I cannot log on because I have not the foggiest idea where I have kept my materials other than the debit and ATM cards I have in my pocket."

4. With this major bank I have several thousands of dollars in three accounts. The login that had the selection for a Banking relationship refused to recognize my existence. As far as the bank is concerned the relationship is with a customer and not an account, but rather through an account.

5. When I tried to fill out a complaint form, the detail section would not let me type in anything at all. There was a cryptic message exhorting me not to use "special characters" and an "Enter" key. In this day and age... Interestingly, my devious mind managed to paste my complaint into the text field but I could not submit my complaint. It reminded me of earlier days in a Bangalore Transport Bus which had a complaint box without a bottom.
Based on the user interface, my first inclination was to withdraw all my money and go someplace else, but where?

It got me thinking - turning the gun on our profession. Are we as software developers and architects of the user experience passing on this frustrating experience to end users as we stand on the podium and receive "Best Practice" awards? Are Indian customers more tolerant of pain than the American banking client? Should we be demanding more from our banks? Should the executives who sponsor these websites be more accountable to customers, especially in multinational banks? In India, where US banks are trying to establish a presence, it's probably time to institute a clearing house for complaints just to set the baseline for services before a bank is allowed to do business. And lastly, when posed problems with websites, do we blame the victim instead of putting the burden on the programmer, recognizing that the primary purpose of the website is to get the customer in and out, with work complete and a satisfied smile..