20 March 2009 by blog.

Brain Therapy Exercises 1 and 2 introduce the concept of a Business Architecture paradigm in an attempt to explain some aspects of my life as a semi-retired consultant and to address the question, “What can we do to make the make the world a better place?” These exercises show by example that Business Architecture is about describing how things operate. Exercise 1 is a draft Operational Business Architecture artifact, the Architecture of Fear, that was reverse engineered from reality to explain how the world operates and why we see the outcomes we do today. Exercise 2 also provides an Operational Business Architecture product, the Architecture of Abundance, to show how the world might operate in a future-state with people working together to achieve outcomes that would make the world a better place.

Our next exercise for the brain is the development of a definition of “Business Architecture.” This will allow me to tackle some structured thinking that will, with hope, require intense concentration, thereby inducing the physiological phenomenon of the creation of neuropathic synapses that increase the brain plasticity that is integral to the miraculous abilities of the human being. This should greatly advance my recovery and improve my odds in the long run. So let us dive right in.

Business Architecture may be formal, as defined by various methodologies and techniques, but given the current state of my brain (e.g., recovering) and presumption of fiat from nearly two decades working in strategy, operations, and technology, we shall structure our initial definition informally:

Business Architecture is anything that helps people from different parts of the business (especially the non-technical and technical people) to develop a common understanding of exactly what needs to be done.

The development of Business Architecture as a management tool stems from the thorny issues businesses face trying to figure out technology. In the business world, there always seems to be some issue of getting technology to do the things that people want it to do. Owners, managers, workers, customers, nearly anyone who has ever done or dealt with business can probably relate to the challenges people face integrating and using technology. In larger organizations, this is often characterized as getting the “business people” to understand the “technical people” and vice versa.

Business Architecture is a tool of management communication intended to convey, in non-technical terms, concepts of operations that get people on the same page, regardless of which part of the business they primarily deal with. It is about helping people articulate and understand strategy, define the appropriate organization and resources, and work together towards desired outcomes.

In practice, Business Architecture becomes the basis for Technical Architecture that further decomposes the business into increasingly detailed specifications for technological systems. The general, widely used term for a comprehensive and formalized approach to Business and Technical Architecture is Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA is a practice of developing business and technical architecture tools that support an organization’s strategy by aligning non-technical, functional operations with the technical infrastructure. This is done to crystallize the strategy and increase the efficiency, returns, and capabilities from investments in organizational systems and technology. Organizations and people – businesses – that understand how to do this typically significantly increase their competitiveness through innovation and productivity improvements.

The usage of Business Architecture, however, is necessarily not limited to solely addressing issues of aligning business and technical resources. While technology is critical to every business, at the end of the day a business is only as good as its people. Business architecture, therefore, must address all business processes, people, and resources, specifically as they are organized and deployed. Business Architecture is an idea that by codifying and clearly articulating strategy, using common terminology and the visual presentation of information, people from all domains in the business will understand what needs to be done. This is called alignment of business resources and is critical in efficient, innovative, and successful organizations.

Business Architecture draws on three disciplines in the development of its methodologies and practices:

1)      Management Science, which provides ideas of process analysis, analytics, strategy, management, and communication. The “business” in Business Architecture is about getting things done. Business Architecture concerns itself primarily with Strategy and Planning (i.e., defining the mission, vision, goals, objectives, and tasks) and Organizational Systems (i.e., defining and managing the structures, resources, and operating models for the organization).

2)      Civil Architecture, which provides ideas on design, the visual presentation of information, and communicating across technical and non-technical domains. Business Architecture is less concerned than civil architecture on a formalized methodology of design. Rather, from civil architecture, the idea that a single “blueprint” can be used to communicate across domains is the central adaptation. Business Architecture produces unified blueprints that everyone follows in building and operating the business.

3)      Computer Science, which provides ideas of structured systems analysis, abstraction, and computer architecture and engineering. Business Architecture codifies system design and uses abstraction to communicate and produce increasingly detailed specifications as appropriate to the needs of the business stakeholders. The concepts are valid whether applied across an organization (i.e., Enterprise Architecture) or down to individuals and processes (e.g., work plans and packages).

The practice of Business Architecture, even as it draws on ideas from science, is really an art. The art is the production of unified communications that articulate what the business is about and move people to action.  There are numerous ways to do this, several common frameworks and methodologies that specify useful artifacts, and increasing use of the concepts. Business Architecture, however, is less concerned with how the architecture is produced, for example, compared to Civil Architecture, than it is concerned with producing visionary artifacts, using whatever process and tools are relevant and most appropriate to the business. The objective is to present a conceptual model that enables people to think about the challenges, understand the critical questions, and take actions towards desired outcomes.

There is a great body of work in Enterprise Architecture. Various methodologies and techniques have been developed and the formalization of EA continues. My take is that while a formalized approach may be useful, the most important idea is the concept – that by clearly articulating the strategy and helping people develop a common understanding of the mission, vision, goals, and objectives of an organization many of the problems that often seem intractable can be solved.

My journey through a couple of decades in strategy, operations, technology, has led me to discover many tools and techniques, out of the academic and commercial realms, for accomplishing non-technical and technical tasks in organizations. The love in Business Architecture stems from its positioning at the nexus of strategy, operations, and technology – you have to do it all to understand and get it right. Done right, Business Architecture is a powerful, invaluable tool that can help organizations – and people – realize new capabilities and increase competitiveness.

Business architecture cuts across organizational boundaries to take an enterprise view so that people understand not only their roles and functions but also what individual actions are required to accomplish strategic objectives. The Brain Exercises will continue to explore using this technique to ask people, “What can we do to make the world a better place?” By cutting across human organizational boundaries (i.e., we address people in every family), Business Architecture allows us to take a global view (i.e., with the Earth as our enterprise) so that we may not only understand our roles in creating the outcomes we see in the world today, but also what individual and organizational actions are required to overcome fear so that we may accomplish the strategic objective of creating a world of abundance.

We shall pause here and seek discussion on our emerging definition of Business Architecture. I look forward to your input. In the meantime, the physiological developments occurring simultaneously to this writing are signaling that the author’s brain is ready for another element of healing – sleep.

Cheers,

blog

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27 February 2009 by blog.

The data in my super-secret database that catalogs the beliefs of every person I ever asked if they agreed that a) The Earth is abundant; b) The world is what people make of it; and c) The world should be a better place is at odds with the reality of what we see in the world today. Therefore, in Brain Therapy, Exercise 1, we reverse engineered the current state of the world to posit a few drivers that cause the world’s operating systems to work as they do. The acceptance of hatred, greed, and moral corruption in our day-to-day lives are shown to ultimately underlie the Architecture of Fear. A concrete example of how this works is presented in Brain Therapy, Exercise 1: Extension.

Moving right along, Brain Therapy, Exercise 2 is presented. This positive exercise builds on its predecessors towards a solution in answering the question of “What can we do to make the world a better place.” Once again we use a business architecture view to show at an abstract level key elements required in universal value and operating systems if we are to move from a world of fear and scarcity to one of peace and abundance. 

Ordinarily, in a professional situation with paying clients, we would work collaboratively with the people of the world to address the issues of the Architecture of Fear and earn our premium. Given the scope of the problem – fear is experienced daily, down to the family and individual levels in many communities – the scope of the effort to make the world a better place is necessarily unprecedented. It would be a major feat to involve nearly every person in the world in a sincere and robust discussion of what we can all do, together, to make the world a better place. Interestingly, we have demonstrated with our recent technological achievements that, for the first time in current history, the possibility of humanity achieving such a feat, of having the global family discussion, is technically doable and realistic in consideration.

In this exercise, we assume a starting point for a discussion on changes that all people can make to help the world move from an Architecture of Fear to an Architecture of Abundance.

The Architecture of Abundance frames the discussion and raises serious questions for the people of the world, including the following:

·         Is this something we, every individual, can do in our own lives, starting with a look in the mirror? Within our immediate families? Extended families? Clans? Tribes? States? Nations? Regional cooperatives and blocs? World?

·         Can we, the people of the world, unite around positive, universal core values; disavow the old, negative systems; and implement innovative solutions that improve the lives of people everywhere?

·         Can we live in harmony with nature, allow nature to flourish, and all share in the riches of the Earth?

By example and since we must break this discussion down from the top of the world while simultaneously building it up family by family, I will call my closest people, my people and family in North America, to pause and remember our own history. There was a time in our land, for example, in what is now the United States of America before anyone ever conceived of our present situation, where there were 200 million people, millions of buffalo and deer, rivers and oceans teeming with fish, and great fields of maize everywhere. Plenty of land, plenty of food, plenty of water, and freedom. These shores are surely described in the annals of history, particularly those of Eurocentric history, as the land of plenty.

Contrary to popular historical accountings, the evidence is clear that native American systems were far more effective in providing for all than anything seen at the time in Europe – including advanced sanitation, agriculture, governance, and spirituality. For example, the concept of individual property was foreign to America as the natives had a much more advanced way of thinking about wealth, starting with a core belief that there was plenty for everybody. Understanding this fact and taking a spiritual view of the gifts from the land led them to live in harmony with nature. They believed that God, the Divine Spirit, put everything on Earth for all of us.

Likewise, the concepts of individual freedom and women’s rights are direct adoptions from the flourishing cultures that invading strangers encountered when they arrived to this land of plenty. The people coming on boats, for heaven’s sake and throughout our ages, were indentured servants, political and economic refugees, slaves, explorers, from male dominated societies, fleeing famine, etc., and most of them had no idea what real freedom was until they witnessed it here. The ancestors of these lands, in counterpoint, had no concept of poverty because they lived a life of freedom in a land of abundance.

When foreigners, cum immigrants, first arrived on these shores, they were met with a model of abundance that contrasted greatly with their own experience. These foreigners came from a land ruled by fear in a model of scarcity commanded by kings and popes who took the booty and shamefully claimed their material conquests in the name of God. It was not, but both sides, we should understand, at some point really believed that it was. We are at peace with all of our ancestors for many of them were like so many of us today – trying to get by, exploring and seeking, in search of the Divine, but not really understanding that our separation from the Spirit leaves us operating, driven by, and thus manipulated at our own hands over an Architecture of Fear.

Coming from warring lands of scarcity, chained to commercial interests, some of my ancestors landed in a world of abundance. They did not have cash registers, but it feels like they must have heard the sounds of them (and the historical record certainly agrees). My other ancestors had a land of plenty and in fact offered to share the wealth. We weep for the price of lessons learned during our integration was far too often paid with ancestral blood. From this initial clash, nonetheless, our sensibility has arisen and the truths of our principles prevail. America’s greatest gifts to world, ultimately, may be not only our corn, but also the knowledge and example that diversity, freedom, and a unified spirit are key ingredients to incredible innovation and wealth – and that we are loving, spiritual, and philanthropic people who are willing to share our experience, knowledge, and abundance with the world.

We have learned from the past about our roots of abundance and we understand our history and the roots of the fear, greed, and moral corruption that we overcome. The principles of America, one nation, surely rise as the dust of the red earth that we have sometimes scorched. Both compel us, as do the forces of the Universe reflected through this rich land, to be as we were, and as we are, one people, with freedom and liberty afforded by the richest life for all in this splendidly diverse and abundant corner of the Earth.

My question for my fellow citizens is, “Do you think these lands are any less sacred, rich, and capable of providing for everyone than they were when they were created?”

History is what it is. In a land of abundance there is no need to dwell on the past, but the sensibility to learn from our mistakes is crucial. In a world of abundance, the most important fact is that we have arrived where we are today, remembering and reaffirming what everyone believes – that the Earth is abundant, is what we make of it, and will be a better place. 

One framework for consideration in approaching the questions posed above is The Architecture of Abundance.

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26 February 2009 by blog.

In Brain Therapy Exercise 1, the acceptance of fear, greed, and corruption in our day-to-day lives are shown to underlie the Architecture of Fear upon which it is posited that the world operates. The Brain Therapy exercises are structured tasks that are a part of my “home therapy” program. If we had the luxury of taking a bottoms up approach, we would take the findings from Exercise 1 to the people of the world for vetting, seeking to refine the view until a consensus is agreed on and people understood what is really going on.

For the purposes of this case, we shall clarify the post Brain Therapy, Exercise 1 with a discussion using concrete examples to show that the real problem in the world is the tacit acceptance or inability to control values of fear, greed, and moral corruption in societies and people. Fear leads to an adversarial mindset that traps people in a competition for resources – we have to protect ours from them and if they have what we want and we cannot trade, then we will defeat them in battle and take what we want. The battle for resources, including intangible resources such as the support (or, far too prevalent in reality, the forced support) of populations to adopt ideologies (for example, “Capitalism” vs. “Communism”) has lead to significant investments in a global military-industrial complex to fight the battles and control the distribution of resources.

The world thus operates in a mode of survival of the fittest, where the winners take most of the spoils and there are shortages for everyone else. Since most people in the world do not have (or exercise) any real say in how their governments operate, this leads to an opening for a small number of people to take essentially autocratic control of militaries and governments, thus gaining autocratic control of public resources.

For example, the United States would position itself as the leading democracy in the world. Recent history, however, shows how a small group of people can muscle power from the masses to implement their own agenda, effectively ignoring a majority of people. Specifically, in the Presidential election of 2000, Democratic Party candidate Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote. The election however, was decided by the arcane system of the Electoral College. By coordinating forces of evil to disenfranchise voters in minority districts in Florida, effectively throwing out thousands of votes that would have changed the outcome of the results in Florida, and thus the Electoral College, George Bush was able to steal the election.

In a society that valued the integrity of the democratic process, given the controversies and closeness of the election in Florida, we would expect a creative solution such as re-voting. It was too close to call and the obvious solution was to do it over – with no nonsense and towards a view that everyone gets to vote. However, there were no leaders who stepped up to call for this bold and right action. Instead we relied on the politically appointed and Republican dominated Supreme Court, which handed the election to George Bush using a highly controversial and widely disagreed logic. The same thing happened in the 2004 elections, this time with intentional minority voter disenfranchisement in Ohio.

George Bush never should have been President of the United States. Once he ascended, autocratic control was exerted, the government underwent a massive expansion with substantially all of the growth in military spending, and the largest transfer of wealth from the masses to the richest class in history was witnessed.

The results of the ascendancy of George Bush and the so called neo-cons to power can be described using the Architecture of Fear. Republicans had developed by 2000 a brilliant political strategy based on fear that exploited a)  right-wing conservatives and b) racists constituents. Fearful people are the most easily exploited because their fear of “others,” even in their own society, leads to irrational behavior such as consistently voting against their economic interests, which is by far the biggest determinant of how most people in the mainstream vote. Republicans mounted a campaign of fear that worked brilliantly to capture the marginal votes of conservatives and racists needed to put them into a position to steal the election.

The Republican and the Democratic parties have been historically dominated by a moneyed class.  It costs millions to win a national office so rich fund raisers are crucial constituents. It can be argued, however, that the Republican party is the party that unashamedly caters to the rich – it is known as the party of business, not labor; as the party of Wall Street, not Main Street. By crafting a misleading message on tax cuts – namely by claiming that tax cuts would benefit everyone while implementing policies that resulted in the largest transfer of wealth to the richest Americans in the history of the nation – the Republicans brilliantly exploited people’s greed. The Republican policy of deregulation or lax regulation of the financial system, furthermore, lead to the non-productive creation of capital as the moneyed Wall Street denizens invented “products” such as derivatives and complex mortgage-backed securities in an environment of weak oversight.

We use the term “non-productive” because these vehicles of capital creation were not based on tangible or physical factors of production. Rather they were based on the idea that money-begets-money and were implemented as a vehicle that greatly enriched a small number of people at the upper echelon of the Nation’s moneyed elite. The results of this non-productive creation of capital are seen today as markets crash and money seems to dry up. The public has agreed that greed got us into this mess.

Finally, the exploitation of fear and greed, and wide, tacit acceptance of these values throughout society, opens the door for and sustains moral corruption, particularly in the elite classes and among the fearful ignorant. For example, Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, was previously the CEO of defense contractor Haliburton. Haliburton has profited substantially following Cheney’s ascendancy to office and ability to push his agenda for war on the American people. This example of bald-faced moral corruption is emblematic of trouble with the current control and operation of the Military-Industrial complex.

Corrupt control leads to imbalanced investment and development. In the US, while public education is faltering, particularly in large Urban districts, even as the knowledge base offers solutions to these ills, trillions of dollars are spent on militaries and wars while schools crumble and a substantial percentage of the next generation is left uneducated and ignorant. These ignorant people are susceptible to future exploitation through asymmetric knowledge dissemination – even if they gain access to the canon of knowledge they would be hard pressed to read it, yet alone think it through and act upon it.

The tacit acceptance and subsequent exploitation of fear, greed, and moral corruption as operating principles introduce peculiarities into the world’s operating systems that lead to the outcomes we see around the globe today. The competition for resources shapes the development of business and trade around the world through the lens of a Military-Industrial complex. Militaries and multi-national corporations exercise limited control over public resources. The result is that we have a world of Developed (1^st World), semi-industrialized (2^nd World), and underdeveloped (3^rd World) nations.

We live in a world of conflict where some people win but most people lose. Resources are diverted to militarization instead of development and to the winners instead of the losers. There are wars. Terrorism arises out of the frustration of the world’s impoverished, hopeless, and disenfranchised peoples and in States that use the tools of terror to advance their ideologies or tolerate hate. People everywhere are fighting, some building nuclear weapons, while a substantial majority of the world’s population lives in poverty. We have a global high-tech pharmaceutical industry that produces life saving medicines, but because of the competition for resources, poor people do not have access to these medicines and suffer disease and death. We have the technology in the US alone to feed the world two times over, but hunger is even a problem here as nearly 35 million children in the US live in poverty.

Negative values and divisive control systems work in concert with the Military-Industrial complex to produce systems that lead to conflict, wealth imbalance, and wasted human potential around the world. Most people do not view themselves as part of an integrated whole of humanity. Rather, our worldviews are shaped at the most local level, being members of cultural and ethnic groups first, states second, nations after that. While there has been some progress with regional trade and political pacts opening the door for some semblance of unity and cooperation, at the end of the day the world is nation against nation, peoples against peoples.

Moral bankruptcy leads to collusion, exploitation, pollution, and inhumane treatment of individuals everywhere. As a result, it appears that most people are ignorant of how the world really works (or perhaps, apathetic about it), leaving the majority of the world’s population struggling to get-by if not living in destitution. This is particularly disturbing considering the relative wealth of nations and the advanced capabilities of human technology in the 21^st century. Alas, the world is what we make it and this is explained by the Architecture of Fear.

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25 February 2009 by admin.

The old joke that describes my semi-former profession goes, “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach. Those that can’t teach, consult.” I am, furthermore and of late, a semi-retired consultant, on what I like to think of as a medical sabbatical (or disability leave of absence) whilst recovering from spinal cord and brain injuries that temporarily knocked me out of my mainstream game.  

Brain Therapy includes exercises done as a part of my daily routine to integrate speech and language pathology into my “home therapy” program. Recently, I added a fun exercise to my therapy routine that starts with the task to answer the question “What can we do to make the make the world a better place?” Now that is a task, but I hope to have a really strong brain one day. Why aim low?

To answer this question, I will do some “Brain Therapy Exercises” utilizing tools and tricks from my consultant’s tool-kit. Exercise 1 takes from the tool-kit concepts of architecture, systems analysis, and organizational design to create a Business Architecture Paradigm that reverse engineers the current state of the world to distill an abstract blueprint that shows how the world works and why we see present day, or current state, outcomes.

We may be able to rescue the financial system, bail out industries, and otherwise prop up the systems that have resulted in what we see in the world today. Let us all have hope for the shorter-term. When it comes to the long term, however, I would say to the people of the world, the same thing I tell my clients: “Strategy and planning has a basic theorem – if what you are doing is not working, then do something else. If you keep doing the same thing, you should expect same results.” Experience also shows that change is good.

The preliminary analysis shows the de facto operational business architecture for the world – an Architecture of Fear. Does that sound right (note: this might be a trick question)? Please see the draft below; I would appreciate your feedback. Likewise, anybody think that we, the people of the world, ought to do something different?

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