Inspired!

Open Group Conference Cannes - April

 

I will be speaking on the topic "Real Business Architecture Transforms Business" on the first day of the Open Group Enterprise Transformation Conference in Cannes April 23-27th.

Here is the blurb for the talk:

This presentation introduces a comprehensive integrated view of business architecture which goes well beyond current methods and incorporates design thinking, innovation and aspects not typically included in EA, such as competitors, market segments, channels, communication, value architecture, culture, brand, customer experience. Provides a unifying meta model which incorporates but goes beyond TOGAF® and ArchiMate®.

 

Those attending this session will learn about:

 

• The integration of real business thinking, design and strategy with EA.
• Integrated meta model and viewpoints to ensure all stakeholders are speaking the same language and on the same page.
• The value architecture concept

Hope to see many of you there!

This includes the rich picture level models for the integrated business architecture meta model, overlapping into the IT Engagement space. Feedback welcome. 

View or download from Slideshare: 

Real business architecture transforms business

View more presentations from grahammcleod

Graham

Semantics Gets Personal and Mobile

The timing is ironic given my last blog entry on Steve Jobs passing.

About a year ago we discussed with colleagues, clients and students a promising technology called Siri which came initially out of research done in Europe, but was beginning to be commercialised in the USA. It was subsequently bought by Apple and has just reached the market publicly with the launch this week of the iPhone 4s and IOS 5.

Siri is an advanced application that combines:

• Voice recognition (in multiple languages)
• Semantic analysis of text to understand what the user is saying and requesting
• Back end search and semantic matching to retrieve relevant information
• Back end integration with Internet based transactional and synchronisation services to carry out user requests, like making a theatre booking, sending e-mail, updating calendars and more
• On-device integration with other applications to achieve things like timing, reminders, find addresses, read e-mails and SMS messages etc.

This is a great example of the power of semantics together with the genius of Apple in making complex technology accessible and delightful to the consumer market.

Take a look at the demo and find more information here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

Cheers

Graham

Farewell Steve

This morning I received the sad news that Steve Jobs has died at the age of 56 after his long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Steve made legendary contributions in conception of products (Mac, Next, iPod, iPhone, iPad.. ), the production of digital movies (Pixar, Disney) the structure of business (Product led company culture of Apple; iStores), the distribution of content (iTunes, iBooks). He brought the eye of an artist and great designer to visionary technology and wrapped it in inspiring marketing and retail experience. He revolutionised application distribution with the AppStore, something which is still a wave of change reshaping the industry. He truly, as he would say "put a dent in the universe".

You will be missed. Your example will continue to inspire us for decades to come.

News on Steve's passing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15193922

For an insight into his life, I recommend reading: The Steve Jobs Way. iLeadership for a New Generation, by Jay Elliot. Vanguard Press.

Farewell and thanks.

 

Graham

 

Marrying Documents and Semantics

Many many years ago, in the dawn of the PC era, I had a wonderful device known as an Amiga computer which ran a wonderful piece of software called Pagestream. Sadly the Amiga was dragged out of existence by bad management at Commodore and Pagestream was wrecked by bad ports and updates trying to go mainstream on Windows and Mac.

What was wonderful about that environment was that, as an author, I could create content in text, documents (letters, brochures, books, academic papers), presentations etc. including both bitmap and structured graphics. I could do it all in one consistent environment then reuse it across all formats. It was trivial to reuse the same graphic in a colour slide presentation and in a book which had to be output in postscript for professional printing. If the latter required black and white and the graphic had colours of similar density, I could automatically translate colour fills to patterns without any manual editing. The scaling would also be handled seamlessly with the embedded fonts scaling proportionately within the graphic. This left the author free to concentrate on meaning and the best way to communicate with the reader, rather than formatting, layout and internal storage formats (e.g. vector versus bitmapped etc. )

When that environment disappeared, I managed to create something approaching the same functionality with the Lotus Smartsuite on Windows using OLE to achieve embedding of objects. Not as smooth, not all in one piece of software and not glitch free, but workable. This also met a sticky end as Microsoft progressively broke OLE and it became unreliable to the point of being unusable. Then IBM stopped evolving Smartsuite. Sigh. The Ms Office environment doesn't come close in terms of usability, so, although I have it and use it when required for client work, it never became my environment of choice.

I tried going the professional route and invested in the pricey Adobe Suite. This includes very sophisticated tools for vector illustration, handling bitmaps and photos, page layout and authoring long documents. Sadly, they were not very intuitive or well integrated either. I don't want to have to manually adjust a vector drawing if I have created it in Illustrator and use it at a different scale in InDesign. Print artists put up with these issues as they are creating something unique once. I want to reuse and repurpose content routinely.

I now use a Mac with the Apple iWork products, Pages, Keynote and Numbers, supplemented by Omingraffle Professional vector drawing. There was a linking and embedding technology on the Mac, but sadly, this seems to be poorly supported. The individual programs are powerful and intuitive, but there is still the frustration of a lot of manual work to repurpose anything. It is also a mission to keep, say, a conceptual diagram consistent between multiple presentations, various brochures, some white papers and a book.

With the recent focus (especially around here) on semantics and semantic modeling, I think the time is right to propose an ideal environment which would store all content semantically, then allow definitions of configurations to collate / compile it into documents or other representations with as little manual intervention as possible. It should leverage the latest semantic standards to provide maximum possibility of importing, integrating and sharing information. It should support cross platform and widely used standards for text and formatting (rtf, xhtml, css..) for bitmap graphics (.png, .jpeg, .tif...) and for vector graphics (svg, vrml etc. ) as well as for packaging and sharing (.pdf etc. ). There seems to be a case for a semantic layer that manages identity, relationships, versions, composition and configuration; a layer that deals with representation, scaling, layering etc. and a layer that deals with storing and managing content in the various formats.

Interestingly, I see glimmerings of such products emerging in the IOS (iPhone and iPad) world. Back to the future? Meanwhile, I would be very pleased to hear from anyone who knows of or is creating such an environment!

Of course chief luminary Alan Kay and his team at Viewpoints research have not been immune to this problem and have for some years been working on STEPS - a programme to "redefine the fundamentals of computing and create a user understandable personal computing environment" and do it in less than 20 000 lines of code. They are 4.n years into a five year programme and are making exciting progress. Take a look here: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf for their end 2010 progress report.

 

ORGIs

Software architects and programmers talk about APIs - Application Programming Interfaces. The importance of APIs is that they provide a published, stable and reliable way for an outsider to interact with a piece of software and do something useful. For example, we can use a Google Maps API to take advantage of the capabilities of Google Maps in our application or website; We can use an API to use Amazon's Cloud Storage, or e-Bays API to automate bids and purchases. APIs have a definition which includes: What functions you can invoke; what results you can expect/achieve; how to do it - viz. what messages to send according to what protocol (e.g. first logon before trying to transact..), what parameters to pass, what data items and types to use and expect. Service providers are free to change their implementation (how the service works internally) but will take care to keep the API stable (or at least backwards compatible) so that users will be able to use the service reliably. Good APIs promote use of the services on offer and often provide a competitive advantage.

Organizations (or Enterprises, if you prefer) survive and thrive or fail by how well they interact with their environment. Just like a living creature, an organization needs to be healthy inside and to be well adapted to its environment/context to thrive. This is the central idea behind popular organizational analysis techniques like value chains (or the more modern version, value networks) originally described by Michael Porter.

Organizations used to compete (and still do) on quality (of product and/or service) and on price (which implies efficiency). These days there are two new considerations that are really important:

• Friction - the amount of overhead/effort/cost that is involved in interacting with someone, or an organization. This should be as low as possible. For example: the friction doing online banking at my computer at home is much lower than that of going to a physical ATM, which is lower than physically queuing up to transact through a real bank teller. There are two kinds of friction, as well:
  • Initial friction - how easy is it to perform the first interaction (e.g. to set up the account, to get registered, to understand how to do the transaction etc. ) and
  • Transaction friction - how easy/cheap are subsequent interactions
• Agility - how quickly can an organization adapt to new requirements, new opportunities or changing contextual issues, such as the medium through which a transaction is achieved. This has become vital to survival. Think about Barnes and Noble as a bookseller suddenly confronted by Amazon; or the music publishing houses facing iTunes as a competitor; or magazines in a tablet adopting world

 

For some years now I have been preaching the reality that organization boundaries are now more permeable and movable. Let me explain:

• We used to have very defined interaction points with clients. For a retailer, the store; for a bank, the branch; for a publisher the retail chain and so on. Nowadays we have multiple interaction points at different levels and of different styles: the retailer may sell through stores, catalogues and online; the publisher may sell directly online and in digital form too
• Value chains extend beyond the enterprise itself: 
  • We may arrange delivery to our client direct from our supplier
  • We may purchase through a collaborative purchasing portal, where we consolidate orders from our competitors with our own to get better volume pricing from our suppliers
  • We may outsource parts of our business process to business partners or other service providers. E.g. if I am a travel agent, my business process could include using the foreign exchange services of Amex or xe.com
• Our customers and others we interact with will want to interact with us (or at least our information) directly e.g. a retailer wants to query stock availability within the wholesaler; a member of the public wants to get an online insurance quotation tailored to their items needing cover; a parent wants to access a pupil's school results and timetable online and so on

We need to think carefully about these interaction points to create what I call Organizational Interfaces or ORGIs. There are several issues and levels to consider:

• Who will we interact with (what kinds of entities performing what roles?)
• What is the purpose of the interaction - what services do they need? What must an interaction be able to achieve in net terms?
• What information is necessary - both inbound and outbound
• What media will the information be exchanged through?
• Where will access to the services be required?
• What transactions must be able to take place? What authentication is required? What security is necessary? What privacy or other considerations are there?
• What will the protocol (sequence of message exchanges) be for achieving a given result?
• Can we leverage any standards? This is vital to ensure:
  • Information is exchanged accurately and with minimum friction
  • Interfaces can be set up as quickly as possible (thereby increasing agility)
  • We can leverage technologies and tools to the fullest, thereby saving costs, reducing support requirements and allowing maximum opportunities for business process flexibility or outsourcing parts of the value chain
• Standards should apply to:
  • Information formats for the domain we are working in (e.g. retail, banking, medical..)
  • Message formats and protocols (e.g. web services)
  • Technologies employed - e.g. If we develop our quotes system using a web based interface and standards compliant browsers, then it is fairly easy to devolve this service to business partners or even the end customer. If it was developed in a proprietary technology on our in house network using unique protocols, the effort to share it increases exponentially

Many of our existing architecture elements can be leveraged to think about ORGIs. We can use domain models to understand the information requirements and ownership; stakeholder models to identify the parties we will interact with; business communications concepts to think about the message exchanges, formats and media; Value chains, networks and business process architectures to devise effective and efficient ways of delivering service; Risk modeling to consider aspects of risk, security, reliability etc.  When we have thought about it at the logical level, we can then link these elements with the supporting applications, technologies and information resources in our the other architecture domains.

Organizations with good ORGIs should thrive.

Value Architecture

For my recent talk on the vital role that innovation plays in creating value for customers, and the creator of products and services, I drew a new picture to illustrate how we can create value in the hands of the end customer. It looks like this:

 

Let me explain. Say we want to create a new consumer device. Lets take a smartphone as an example. The device itself is the hardware. This should be light, have a powerful processor, enough memory, a good screen, decent ergonomics and offer the expected functions (decent phone reception, good battery life, capability to run included utilities, support for media types, ability to run applications, etc. ).  Quite a few companies can do this: Nokia, Samsung, HP, HTC, Apple, Blackberry etc. The basic hardware specifications and capabilities will be a deciding factor up to a point. We may have a minimum battery life that we absolutely require, for example. Like salary in a human resources context, these hardware capabilities are expected and are a hygiene factor. They do not necessarily motivate a purchase - they are an expected minimum capability for consideration. Having more of a particular thing doesn't necessarily satisfy better either - if the battery life is weeks, but it compromises weight, that is not a good thing. Having a massively powerful processor and a short battery life is also not good. We expect a balance of features that make the device capable and fit for purpose. A great ergonomic or aesthetic design will start to connect with a buyer on an emotional level. (The tip of the heart overlay in the diagram).

Once the device is in hand, the user will often find that things are easy and intuitive or difficult to frustrating to impossible given the design and performance of the software. An iPhone is a very different experience to one running Symbian or the Blackberry OS or Windows Mobile. Different OSes will delight or frustrate users depending upon their orientation, conceptual models and intuitive interfaces as well as performance.

It doesn't stop there, though. The game contiues these days into the services realm. The Blackberry devices, for example made their mark with the support of server backed push e-mail. Apple created a new industry with downloadable content (iTunes) and applications (appStore). Not too many companies are playing really successfully in this space. Think too about things like server backed storage to provide automatic backups for your purchased media; synchronisation with your desktop; access to social media sites such as facebook and twitter...

The ease with which it all works (including the reviewing, purchasing, setup, integration, synchronisation, application and content purchase) is heavily influenced by the processes that the supplier puts in place to support the device and the ecosystem. This constitutes the process block on top of the services. The content to its right represents the range, cost and convenience of accessing content including books, music, movies, web, news and magazines. Apple is a major player in this space with iTunes and iBooks. Nokia has responded with free downloadable music.

Finally, there is the ultimate synthesis of all the elements into the user experience. How well the pieces all fit together is determined in large measure by how well the design has been accomplished at all levels. Very few companies can deliver on this. The master is probably Apple which has the advantage of controlling just about every element from the hardware, OS, content and application stores, retail stores through to the way that third party developers develop and deliver their applications. Their success is represented in the way they have taken over the high end phone market and have swept away competition in the tablet space with the iPad. Other players are competing hard for parts of the picture, but battling to pull it off for the whole user experience. It is extremely difficult - consider the alliance between Nokia and Microsoft for example. How will they deliver an integrated platform, OS, content and applications purchase experience when there are so many parties involved? The only hope to do this in a multi-player, open world is via standards. But getting agreement from all parties for a consistent, cohesive direction is a very hard thing. Google is probably making the most headway with Android.

The purpose here is not really to examine the smart phone market, though. As architects and business innovators, I think we can apply the model to broader thinking:

• What are the unique customer profiles that we aim to satisfy?
• What are their needs and what will delight them?
• How can we create a great customer experience and an emotional connection where they will really care about our products and our success as a company and where they will have loyalty and pay a premium?
• What is the complete value architecture through all the layers?
• What parts do we have and what do we need to architect, design and create?
• What will we do in house and where will we collaborate with partners?
• How do we manage the overall architecture and the boundaries between pieces and parties so the whole is still coherent?
• What are the tradeoffs that we will have to make?
• How do we deliver it quickly enough?

Remember: VALUE IS THE AREA UNDER THE ELEMENTS IN THE DIAGRAM

Till next time...  As always, feedback welcome!

 

From Chief Information Officer to Chief Innovation Officer

The world is changing more rapidly than ever before. Business models from just five or ten years ago are often obsolete. Change is inevitable. Change is scary. Rapid decisions backed by sound models and data are vital to exploit new opportunities while controlling risk. Too many architects are focussed internally. Too many are reactive. Too many cling to the geek speak comfort zone. We need to lead, but we need to understand the context of business today and the critical factors to get right. We need to connect the broad themes running through today’s world with the structure of our businesses and the processes, applications, information and technology supporting them. We need to create agile and responsive organizations that adapt and that matter. Its a survival thing. This talk offers some insights and recommendations for how to proceed ...

Download as .pdf  - Note: There are some embedded videos. Look for links to launch these next to relevant pictures. 

The talk was presented at the Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Johannesburg on the 16th March 2011. It was very well received. 

Upcoming Events

I will be presenting at two upcoming events. The first is the Open Group EA Practitioners Conference in Johannesburg starting tomorrow. Inspired is an event sponsor and I am doing a keynote on the second morning. The title is: From Chief Information Officer to Chief Innovation Officer.  Download FromCIOtoCIO. An abstract is below:  

The world is changing more rapidly than ever before. Business models from just five or ten years ago are often obsolete. Change is inevitable. Change is scary. Rapid decisions backed by sound models and data are vital to exploit new opportunities while controlling risk. Too many architects are focussed internally. Too many are reactive. Too many cling to the geek speak comfort zone. We need to lead, but we need to understand the context of business today and the critical factors to get right. We need to connect the broad themes running through today’s world with the structure of our businesses and the processes, applications, information and technology supporting them. We need to create agile and responsive organizations that adapt and that matter. Its a survival thing. This talk offers some insights and recommendations for how to proceed ...

The second is a tutorial at the Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE) '11 in London in June. I will be presenting on the topic of Techniques for Business Architecture. The intended coverage is below:

Title

Techniques for Comprehensive Business Architecture

Rationale

The field of Business Architecture is maturing as a merger of various disciplines including business process modeling and optimisation, organization design, enterprise architecture (growing upwards from the IT space) and strategic planning techniques. The mainstream EA methods are increasingly addressing topics in this space (witness the evolution from TOGAF 8 to TOGAF 9). The author and colleagues in industry and academia have been practicing in this space since 1989 and have evolved/adopted/adapted many advanced techniques for performing integrated analysis and design of both the business and its context, backed by a comprehensive integrated unifying meta model. These techniques have recently been aligned with mainstream approaches including TOGAF and Archimate. We believe that the broader community can greatly benefit from the work done and come to an appreciation of what is possible in this space. Examples from practice and research will be shown. 

Duration

Full day (6hr)

Goal and Objectives

To impart to the participants a thorough understanding of the scope of a comprehensive business architecture, including the context of the organization. To demonstrate examples of techniques for performing modeling, analysis and integration across the various facets involved. To show the importance of an underlying unified meta model and the power of using relevant techniques and representations to work with different stakeholder groups. 

Scope

The tutorial will cover a range of techniques relevant to performing competent business architecture modeling, analysis and engineering. This will include various dimensions of business and the context of the organization, including:

• Customers and Markets
• Competition
• Risks
• Opportunities
• Stakeholders (including partners)
• Economy
• Legal Climate
• Social Context
• Principles
• Goals and Objectives
• Skills and Resources availability
• Technologies relevant to the industry
• Brands
• Marketing
• Channels
• Products and Services
• Value Chains and Value Networks
• Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
• Costs, Financial Returns, Justifying Investment
• Organizational Radars
• Organizational “APIs”
• Business Events
• Business Communications
• Business Processes
• Functional View
• Service Oriented View
• Organization Structure
• Business Rules
• Ergonomics/Ecology and Sustainability
• Contracts and Agreements
• Significant Time Cycles and Horizons

 

NOTE: There could be a concern that the list of elements above is too broad and could not be covered in the available time. The intent is to show how these concepts are related using a few powerful frameworks and models and then to delve into related model types and techniques which explore different facets, each of which will typically combine a number of the concepts. Care will be taken to have a good “map” of the forest, then explore some “trees” in detail. 

The intended audience is enterprise architects, business strategists, senior business analysts and methodologists involved with business modeling and business engineering. Suitable for intermediate or advanced participants with some background in modeling, analysis or architecture. 

No specific prerequisites are required, though those with relevant background are likely to benefit more from the session. 

Teaching Method

We will use a participative lecture / workshop / tutorial approach. Principles are presented and delegates will have the opporunity to do both individual and group exercises using a case study. We will require a high resolution data projector and the ability for the delegates to assemble in small groups. We will bring our own notebook computer. Printed notes/case/exercises will be provided in .pdf form and should be available to the delegates upon registration. 

Structure of Contents

1. Business Pressures and Strategic Response
2. Business Context, Business Boundary, Business Elements
3. The Context
   1. Stakeholders
      1. Customers and Markets
      2. Partners
      3. Others
   2. Risks and Opportunities
   3. Relevant Technology
   4. Competition
   5. Value Networks
   6. Sensitivity to Key Variables
   7. Political, Legal, Social, Environment
4. The Boundary
   1. Channels
   2. Business Events
   3. Resources
      1. Financial
      2. Human
      3. Natural
   4. Contracts and Agreements
5. The Business
   1. Products and Services
   2. Value Chains
   3. Business Functions, Processes, Services
   4. Goals and Objectives
   5. Organization Structure
   6. Business Models
   7. Culture
   8. Rules
   9. Use of Information
   10. Governance
6. Cross Cutting Concerns
   1. Cost
   2. Risk
   3. Quality and Performance Improvement
7. Desired Future and Initiatives
   1. Vision
   2. Future Architecture
      1. Scenarios
   3. Validation and Motivation
      1. Financial Techniques
      2. Non-Financial Techniques
   4. Risk Containment
   5. Prioritization

 

Hope to see some of you there! 

Semantic Technology Gaining Traction

Cisco is the company providing some 80% of the infrastructure running the current Internet. They are also a recent but major player in collaboration software and telepresence. Finally, they are one of the best run and most innovative major corporations in existence. They have grown to a 40 $Bn plus company and, via their innovation methodology, open culture, crowd sourcing of ideas via the I-Prize contest, telepresence facilitated collaboration and management empowerment to participate in strategy, are powering over 30 business initiatives in parallel. Each of these is selected on the basis of viability and potential to become a billion dollar business in its own right. 

DERI is a research institute in Ireland (Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway). They have created innovations in the area of ontologies for the Social Web (including SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)), collaboration and integration of data from heterogeneous sources. 

Cisco is investing 500 000 Euros in two projects/areas with DERI:

• 400k for enhancements to the Cisco Quad product (social networking and collaboration)
• 100k for advancing real-time data integration

This could just be one of those 30 odd billion dollar businesses emerging...

Meanwhile, at the sharp end of application, EBags.com credits a 33% increase in sales to a platform that uses semantic technologies to guide shoppers to the correct product using criteria which they provide. Semantically marking up their product details has also enhanced search engine traffic. See details... 

These stories illustrate the growing acceptance and power of semantic technologies in commercial application. 

 

 

 

Be a Great Blacksmith! (or: The village is back, but now its global)

One of the UK’s premier designers over the last 30 years or so, Richard Seymour, likes to say we are in a new “Middle Ages” - quoth he: “If the blacksmith in the village is crap, then everyone will know he’s crap”. What he is referring to is that people no longer believe mass media. There has been too much hype for too long - too much marketing speak, too much spin, too many broken promises. Conventional advertising doesn’t work any more. According to Socialnomics* Only 18% of TV campaigns now produce a useful ROI. 

Where do people decide what to buy? 70% go straight to the web, search, compare and then consult customer reviews to make their choice. Search is big. Google gets 200,000,000 hits per day looking for products and services..  Only 14 percent of people trust advertisements, while 78% trust peer reviews, especially by those in their network. For retail products, 70% of final purchase decisions are made at the shelf (physical in store or virtual) - this means that design and appeal of the product itself are vastly more important than the ad campaigns. 

There has been a great squeeze in business since the 1990’s eliminating layers of bureaucracy, cost and inefficiency and connecting strategy more tightly to execution through technology. We are now seeing the elimination of middlemen on the horizontal axis too, as PR, marketing and other activities intervening between a creator and the end consumer are eliminated. Often the Internet replaces marketing, channel partners, distribution and billing entirely, while also facilitating product support. 

With social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, individuals are connected to one or more interest groups / communities / social graphs. Think of these as the modern equivalent of villages - the 150 or so people you know fairly well. Only now, they can be anywhere on the planet, and you can broadcast to all of them without cost or waiting to bump into them. Each of them knows another 150 or so, so an interesting message can propagate to tens of thousands in a flash. 

This brings us back to authenticity and real value. If you connect with just one client and deliver an exceptional service or product, they may tell their friends, who tell their friends and so on. Unfortunately, if you do a bad job, that will propagate just as quickly. So, the message is: forget the marketing, forget the hype, forget the old mass media models. Just be a damn good blacksmith. Focus on satisfying the immediate client and building a relationship. Gain trust, respect and liking and you will be admitted to their circle. 

The broader perspective is that we are witnessing the death of the mass media marketing era. We are now in the search era where consumers and customers look for what they want online. Very shortly, this will give way to social media marketing where again products and services can be offered to select communities via “push”, but not in the same intrusive scatter gun approach as the old mass media: now we are looking at permission marketing, relationship marketing and highly focussed disemmination to communities that have selected themselves to have an interest in a particular area and whose trust you must gain - then you can share your offerings with them. So, its:

Goodbye mass media; Search Now; Selected focussed content to subscribers in future. 

*Statistics sourced from: