Jaywalk

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.

Today, the 1st International Symposium on Service-Oriented Locally adapted Enterprise Architecture, SOLEA 2009, took place in Dipoli conference center in Espoo, Finland. Having been planning and organizing the event for the last three months, it was great to see more than 60 people from 7 countries to attend the event.

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This week, I attended the Seminar on Enterprise Information Systems at Helsinki University of Technology, whose topic this year was Service-Oriented Architecture and Software Engineering. The lectures were given by Kari Hiekkanen, Director of Technology at Logica CMG, Finland, whom I also happened to know from my earlier employment at WM-Data.

Having focused on the area of Service-Oriented Architecture for several years, I had a fairly good view on the topics of this course, already. Nevertheless, I wanted to take this opportunity of hearing a coherent story of the overall field of SOA and reflect my own conceptions thereagainst, while including the course in my academic curriculum. There are always new things to learn and new viewpoints to consider.

Hiekkanen is working on a dissertation on service-oriented software development and has already been teaching this course last year. Even so, it surprised me how comprehensive yet concise introduction to all relevant facets of SOA he had managed to compile.

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The Fifth International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2007, was held in Brisbane, Australia, on 24-29 September. I attended the main conference on 25-27 and the co-located event on BPM Governance, WoGo 2007, in which I gave a presentation of my paper “On the Lookout for Organizational Effectiveness — Requisite Control Structure in BPM Governance”.

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Professor Heikki Hyötyniemi gave an interesting, interdisciplinary lecture on Neocybernetics at the annual meeting of The Finnish Society for Natural Philosophy tonight.

First he rehearsed the basics of Hebbian learning and argued for “semantics through substance”: symbolic grounding is hermeneutic and emphasizes relevance over truth. He then used the Hebbian model as a starting point to holistic considerations generalizing to other domains such as ecology, economy and cognition. “Evolution is equally cruel in all environments,” as he puts it. The basic tenets were that:

• The details are abstracted away — a holistic view.
• There exist local actions only, no structures of centralized control.
• Underlying interactions and feedbacks are consistent.
• One can assume stationarity and dynamic balance in the system in varying environmental conditions.
• Linearity is pursued as long as it is reasonable.

One of the important points was that as cybernetic systems perform “pattern matching”, the process can be substituted with the final pattern. Adaptation processes are very different but the end states are unique and generally characterizable.

Unfortunately, Hyötyniemi skipped the mental system in his presentation due to time constraints, but the exemplary ecological simulations were also of interest. He provided some mathematical evidence of the robustness and biodiversity of ecological systems. Control in these systems is neither centralized or distributed (in traditional sense), but the coordination occurs through environment.

The natural philosophy was addressed in the true spirit of Heraclitus. I somewhat missed Hyötyniemi’s account on the relationship of information and material flows in a cybernetic system, but understood that information and matter are tightly intertwined and that “the natural system is a model” as much as “the model is a natural system”. He also brought in that the nature is more like work of a “hardworking idiot” than an “intelligent designer”.