Jaywalk

I am proud to announce that my company Requisite Remedy now has a new logo and website design. Kudos to Evoke design agency for their excellent work!

I usually have my gaze firmly in the future, but on this last day of the year, I found myself gratefully reflecting on all that has happened during the last 12 months. It has been a busy year, very hectic at times, but fortunately also had some breathing room for contemplation and innovation.

This has now been my second year as an independent consultant. Whereas the first year was characterized by envisioning the future while securing the necessities of business, this year has been about starting to translate these ideas into concrete structures and features.

This year, I have also been employed as a researcher on a part-time basis, which has catalyzed my conceptual-analytical thinking to a great extent and provided a sounding board for my ideas.

At the most superficial level, my year can be summarized as follows:

January: For the whole month, I had my nose on the grindstone in a customer engagement that had begun in October. The first phase of the project ended at the end of the month.

February: I decided to extend my contract, but took the first two weeks off from the project to have a mini-holiday and to attend to some errands and appointments that had been pending. As a perfect opportunity showed itself mid month, I made a major strategic move and decided to rent an office in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My article “Agility Calls for Maturity” was published on BPTrends.

March: For the last three months, I had been quite occupied with planning and organizing SOLEA 2009 symposium. The event took place on March 19 and went really well. On the following week, I attended Holacracy training in the Netherlands. On the same trip, I also finalized the rental agreement for the new office.

April: The project was in full swing. Mid month, SOA SIG organized a seminar on Web-Oriented Architecture, and on the following week, I was speaking at IIR’s SOA seminar on SOA governance.

May: This was a hectic month with both the project work and academic work coming to a head.

June: Attended a networking event in Belgium and EAC 2009 in London. The project kept me busy until midsummer, then there was a summer break of five weeks. I was mostly chilling out, but also found time to co-author an academic paper.

July: Spent a well-deserved holiday week in French Riviera. Back to the project at the end of the month.

August: A relaxed yet productive month after the holidays.

September: Really busy in the project. There was no time for research work, but I gave a lecture on Master Data Management and Data Governance.

October: This was the last month of my contract that with several extensions had lasted for twelve months. On the first day of the month, SOA SIG co-organized a seminar on Model-Driven Architecture and Domain-Specific Modeling, featuring some renowned speakers. In October, I was also asked to start writing a new blog.

November: In early November, I was presenting an academic paper in ECMLG 2009 Conference in Athens, Greece. Also took a few days off for holiday there, before making a business trip to London.  Started to write a book.

December: On December 4, I held again my one-day training seminar on EA, BPM and SOA. After that, I have been writing the book and planning a leadership workshop.

I look forward to 2010 and hope the new year will be as productive and expansive as this one has been!

Last night, I attended the inaugural meeting of Integral Finland, a cozy event that featured two presentations.

First, Jani Mattsson gave an introduction to Integral Finland and Ken Wilber’s Integral Model. The model was hardly new to anyone in the audience, but his personal, conversational style induced some interesting discussion.

What I specifically came to the event for, however, was Anssi Balk’s lecture on adult psychological development from integral perspective. Here are the slides of his presentation (in Finnish) — only a glimpse of the wealth of information Anssi has on the topic, but wraps up the essence quite nicely.

I look forward to what the pioneering spirit of these guys will create next!

The 5th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance (ECMLG 2009) took place in Athens, Greece, yesterday and today, on November 5-6. It was a small but great conference featuring some really inspiring and thought-provoking sessions, particularly on Leadership side. Reflecting our time of change, many of the presentations recognized the need for more authentic, more collaborative and more ethical leadership.

I had the great honor and pleasure to present a paper entitled “EA and IT Governance — a Systemic Approach”, in which my colleagues and I put forth a governance construct called Agile Governance Model (AGM). It specifies an abstract meta-level governance structure that can be instantiated for any type of governance, e.g. IT governance, data governance, security governance. In this paper, we called for a distinct definition of EA governance that addresses the strategic, forward-looking aspects of enterprise architecture, currently downplayed by IT governance, and used AGM to position the notions of IT Governance and EA Governance with respect to the IT-related decision-making in the organization.

I am starting to write a new blog at ebizQ. It’s called Anatomy of Agile Enterprise and will be about strategic IT in support of organizational change and responsiveness. I aim at posting quite often, even on a weekly basis.

Consequently, this blog will likely be less about IT in the future, but I will keep summarizing interesting events and other learning experiences, refer to interesting articles and other resources, and record my thoughts here, insofar they go outside of the scope of the other blog.

I will generally not cross-post to both blogs, so if you are a subscriber to this feed, you may want to follow the other one as well.

Today, KAOS, a newly formed Finnish community of practice on Enterprise Architecture organized a world café about setting up an EA function. The event took place at OKO Bank in Helsinki. I was asked to host a café on EA governance, which I found a rewarding experience. The small group discussions were intense and it was interesting to hear about  experiences in a large variety of companies.

I opened the discussion with the following set of questions:

• Which roles and responsibilities pertain to EA governance?
• What kind of linkages exist between these roles?
• At which organizational levels are various architectural artefacts governed?
• Which governance processes pertain to EA governance?
• Is EA governance centralized or distributed? Are there any underlying structural or other contingencies?
• How is EAG related to other types of governance, e.g. IT governance?

Half of the questions would have been enough, however, as there would have been no end to the discussion that ensued.

It was concluded that EA governance specifies expectations between people in terms of roles and accountabilities, defines decision-making entities and clarifies communication. It should have a strong link with business development and guide the development of new IT. EA governance should have influence on the project portfolio and be aligned with the project model. It helps enterprise architecture down from the ivory tower and infiltrate the organization.

The governance roles seemed to vary from organization to organization, and we generally deemed that the question about contingencies is, indeed, relevant: there is no universal governance model. However, we were not able to delve into the question in any depth at this time.

Today, SOA SIG, MallinnusOSY and SOLEA jointly organized an event on Model-Driven Design. The principles, advantages and challenges of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) approaches were discussed in four great presentations as well as in the panel discussion that followed.

After I had opened the day, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, CEO of MetaCase and co-author of “Domain-Specific Modeling” gave an introductory presentation to the day’s topics, with a special emphasis of Domain-Specific Modeling. He argued that, due to the modeling language specifically tailored to the domain, DSM raises the abstraction of software development to a new level, gives full control of development to the company and increases productivity by hundreds of percents. Not a bad proposition.

Next, we had a great honor and privilege of having a keynote presentation by David S. Frankel from the US, a pioneer in MDA and the author of “Model Driven Architecture: Applying MDA to Enterprise Computing (OMG)”. Mr. Frankel spoke specifically about semantic interoperability in enterprise integration, as “most growth in model-based systems is in model-driven integration”. Whereas the state-of-the-art tools support syntactic mapping, they do not address what should map to what. Integration costs are high to start with, consuming 30-40% of IT budgets, and an estimated 80 % of the integration effort is consumed by semantic interoperability requirements, which is very labor intensive. Even modest improvements in semantic interoperability wil thereby have large economic repercussions. Frankel explained the nature and structure of machine-readable semantic metadata, based on principles of language and called for a link between semantic ontologies and message structures in the next generation integration tools.

After the lunch break, Jan Wirix of Integral ICT, Belgium, recounted his experiences in a large-scale business process automation undertaking, in which model-driven principles had been applied in the form of MERODE methodology. Based on his experience, a clear distinction should be made between IT demand and IT supply, the conceptual and logical specifications independent on the physical implementation. Wirix concluded that MDA is an important factor to preserve simplicity and control projects and a significant step in moving software engineering “from stone age to iron age”. However, MDA can take place if and only if an architect exists.

Finally, professor Matti Rossi of Helsinki School of Economics presented his findings in an academic study that investigated whether domain-specific models are easier to maintain than UML models. The results were statistically significant and suggested that DSM models are, in fact, easier to comprehend and maintain than UML models.

The day was concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Harri Kreus of Auroranet and participated by David Frankel, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Matti Rossi and Juha Mykkänen (University of Kuopio). First, Kreus asked the panelists to take sides in the juxtaposition between MDA and DSM. Not surprisingly, no-one vehemently defended either approach, but everyone acknowledged the applicability of both, confessing oneself as being “Pro Modeling” rather than “Pro MDA” or “Pro DSM”.

At the end of the day, the question comes down to how to efficiently generate good quality code that addresses the business needs. The panelists agreed that although the level of abstraction of languages has risen, there is still a long road to go, before business can be readily executed in software. In the world of PowerPoint as the starting point, how should a language look like that would appeal to the domain experts? Professor Rossi drew an analogy from urban planning saying that high-level models should not describe the world in too detail, but merely as tentative; otherwise, they will be taken as something already decided-upon. Independent of the technology used, Frankel called for human competence in precise expression of business requirements, something a business process specialist or business analyst should be good at.

As a general conclusion, it was deemed that MDA has merits where interoperability is called for, but DSM becomes more applicable the more specific the domain is.

Today, I was lecturing at the Special Course in Information Systems Integration at Helsinki University of Technology for the fourth season already. This year, the theme of the course is Master Data Management (MDM) and I gave a lecture on MDM and Data Governance.

IRM UK’s Enterprise Architecture Conference took place in London earlier this week. I only had time to attend the second day of the seminar on June 10, but one day alone provided plenty of stimulation, new ideas and good contacts.
(more…)

Otto Scharmer’s book Theory U: Learning from the Future as It Emerges describes “the social technology of presencing”, the theory and practice of the U process that calls for “presence” and “sensing”. Scharmer maintains that through this “presencing” — being in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate — individuals, teams, organizations and global systems alike are able to raise to a higher level of operation, at which they are able to seize the highest future possibilities that “want to emerge”.

Theory U is about profound transformation: personal, social and global. The U process leads through seven field structures of attention in an U-shape: downloading, seeing, sensing, presencing, crystallizing, prototyping and performing. This is the deepest level of change that not only reflects on what has happened in the past, but draws from a more generative and more authentic presence in the moment linked with the individual’s/organization’s highest future potential.

Scharmer describes to great extent how to bring about such a change individually, in organizations and in society, but does not give a proper account of what the change means in structural terms. He discusses the evolution of institutional field structures (from centralized to decentralized to networked to ecosystem), but does not relate these structural archetypes to the field structures of attention within the U process.

Figure 1 depicts my idea of how Scharmer’s four levels of responding to change would be manifested structurally in a system, e.g. an organization. In the following, the terms structure and organization refer to systemic structure and systemic organization as defined by Maturana and Varela.

Figure 1. Structural manifestation of Theory U.

Reacting is based on existing habits and routines within a single structure. It takes place within the structure but does not change that structure. This level of response is requisite at the real-time level, when the changes in environment do not call for adjustments in the systemic structure. If a reactive response falls short of addressing the change, the anomaly is reported one level up (cf. zero-learning).

Redesigning considers divergent views and adapts the elements of decentralized structure with each other. The change is incremental and takes place within the systemic structure. Underlying theories, reasoning or assumptions are not questioned, but requisite change is incorporated into existing structure (cf. simple-loop learning). This level of response takes place at the operational level. It may be triggered from the real-time level (reactive), from the tactical level (proactive) or from within the operational level (active).

Reframing is called for when the same old structure does not work anymore, but the rules of business and underlying assumptions need to be questioned. It requires changes in insights and reframing the patterns of thinking (cf. double-loop learning). Thereby, it calls for changes in the systemic organization, i.e. the relationship meshwork between structural elements, too. This level of response requires tactical level intervention. It may also be reactive, proactive or active in nature — emerge from the operational level, be introduced from strategic level or be enacted at the tactical level, respectively.

Regenerating (presencing) brings about a shift in the very identity of the organization (cf. triple-loop learning). It requires transformational changes in the systemic organization as well as adaptation with external systems. This level of response is strategic in nature and is all about finding the best fit between the systemic organization and the wider ecosystem beyond organizational boundaries. A strategic response should be predominantly proactive and realize opportunities inherent in the environment but also be in fine tune with what emerges from within.

These four responses require an increasing subset of cognitive spaces, or field structures of attention. A strategic response calls for a major transformation that undergoes all the field structures of the U process. These field structures can also be aligned with Kurt Lewin’s stages of change:

• Unfreezing: downloading, seeing, sensing
• Changing: presencing
• Refreezing: crystallizing, prototyping, performing