Architectural Control as a Managerial Paradox

In recent years, IS academia has argued that EA is increasingly becoming a strategic management tool or a high-level business function for long term planning and execution. It has been a healthy evolution for EA to question its IT heritage and adopt a broader perspective of how commercial enterprises navigate and gravitate in their respective marketplaces. This healthy evolution has particularly been articulated by Turner, Gotze, and Bernus (2010) in their paper Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise, which argues the key role of architecture in executive management. Architected organisations are said to achieve better, more consistent results since the strategy is aligned and architected against operations, processes, and the technology portfolio.

As I have previously argued in my writings on strategic management, the assumed reality of strategic long term planning has to a large extent ignored the socio-political side of human and organisational behaviour. Planning is volatile and subject to rapid change in turbulent environments. As Rittel & Webber (1973) argue in their 1973 article on government policy and planning, assuming that any problem can be solved by rational planning will ultimately lead to confusion and failure. In their view, assumed rationality leads to unexpected ambiguity. Here, it is crucial to ask the question: if EA really is such a strategic discipline driven by the need for informed decision making, how can the first and always at-the-top-of-the-framework-pyramid component called strategy rely on such a naïve view of how human planning works in practice? This discussion is by no means new; already in the late 90ies, Mintzberg (2002) argued the need for an organic, emergent view of strategy by elaborating on Simon’s (1997) concept of bounded, contextual rationality. 

Let us for a short moment forget about strategy as an applied, deliberate package of human reason and rather think of strategy as inherently equivocal. Management concepts, as they often arrive straight out of the business scholar’s first year text book on business strategy, are, in fact, paradoxical and ambiguous despite the strive for precision and forecasting. This is explained in the following:

1. The first paradox concerns the relationship between assumption of control vs. human and environmental ambiguity. The more one attempts to control and superimpose predictability onto reality, the more imprecise and irregular reality, in fact, becomes. This classic paradox of the manager as an assumed homo oeconomicus is discussed in depth by Kallinikos (2004).
2. The second paradox is three-sided: the short, very generic nature of corporate vision and mission statements vs. the corporate search for control and manageability vs. the complexity of the business ecology surrounding the enterprise. The first facet is short and simple, where the second facet strives for precision, detail, and consistency, both which in turn neglect the ecological complexity and institutional pressure (the third facet) of the organisation’s environment.
3. The third, most noticeable paradox is the fact that the implicit equivoque of high-level mission/vision statements fosters organisational resilience. The more loosely or ill-defined the strategy, the better will the official policy document fit into the actions and immediate strategies (what Weick (2001) denotes just in time strategies) deployed by employees to fulfil or achieve certain goals and expectations (Astley & Zammuto, 1992). The more ambiguous the official strategy or policy articulation, the more free hands for the individual employee to appropriately navigate the socio-political problems of the business environment. Despite the intended precision of a strategy document, the more possible interpretations of a strategic policy or plan, the more organisational resilience and responsiveness (Weick, 2001).

However, it is too simplistic to assume that corporate ambiguity per se triggers organisational resilience and flexibility. In that case, any old plan would do.The paradoxical nature of precision and ambiguity is better understood as a second order systems theoretical concept (Luhmann, 1995 & Luhmann, 2000), in which any system, be it social or biological/ecological, applies certain reductionisms in order to reduce the outside complexity the environment. In Luhmann’s theory of symbolically generalised media within social systems, phenomena such as scientific truth, politics, sex, and power are applied by different institutional systems in order to reduce the complexity and ambiguity of modern society. Similarly, organisations as social systems deliberately deploy equivocal mission statements and simplistic strategies in order to interpret and cope with a hyper-complex, fast-paced business environment. Despite the claim of predictability, strategic long term plans are thus put in place in order to reduce societal complexity and constraints to static architectural maps and prescriptive policies. The reduced conception of reality is by no means successful or comprehensive enough to account for all important details simultaneously, but it makes reality manageable until the actions taken and plans made are reasonable enough (see  reasonableness as a criterion for strategic success in (Weick, 2001)). 

As Teubner (2000) writes, strategic planning fosters productive misunderstandings: business strategies have to be misunderstood (compared to what was originally intended by e.g. senior management) and reinterpreted in the particular reality and bounded rationality of the individual. The final, synthesised (mis-)understanding of strategy, mission, and vision serves to build and sustain resilience and organisational responsiveness---but only with reference to the organisation itself. As Luhmann’s sociology tells us, the end result would never achieve the same results in the outside reality. This also explains why replicating or adopting existing patterns of strategy will most likely lead to a bad result without adopting, contextualising, and productively misunderstanding the presumed strategic rationality. Good strategies are misunderstood, self-referential and contextual whilst fostering resilience and adaptability.

It is my conception that EA must adopt such view of strategic thinking as a self-referential, ambiguity-producing human practice in order to successfully navigate the needs and requirements of tomorrow’ adaptive and flexible virtual enterprises.

References

Astley, W. G. & Zammuto, R. F. (1992), `Organization Science, Managers, and Language Games', Organization Science 3(4), 443{460.

Kallinikos, J. (2004), `Deconstructing Information Packages: Organizational and Behavioural Implications of ERP Systems', Information Technology & People 17(1), 8-30.

Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Writing Science, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Luhmann, N. (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2002). Strategy safari (2nd ed.). LT Prentice Hall. 

Rittel, H. & Webber, M. (1973), `Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning', Policy Sciences 4.

Simon, H. A. (1997), Models of Bounded Rationality, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA.

Teubner, G. (2000), `Contracting worlds: Invoking discourse rights in private governance regimes', Social and Legal Studies 9, 399-417.,

Turner, P., Gøtze, J., Bernus, P. (2010) Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise. In Bernus et al (2010) Enterprise Architecture, Integration and Interoperability: IFIP TC 5 International Conference, EAI2N 2010, Held as Part of WCC 2010, Brisbane, Australia, September 20-23, 2010, Proceedings. 

Weick, K. E. (2001), Making Sense of the Organization, Blackwell Publishing.

Bank Branches need Process Improvement

I am generally a happy client with my personal bank here in Australia. Their online services are good, they have excellent phone service, always reply to my enquiries with a smile, and service fees are kept at a minimum. However, two weeks ago I had an experience I thought belonged to the pre-Gorbachev era. My wife and I went to the bank in order to integrate consolidate our bank accounts and personal finances. Also, we wanted to migrate a single credit card into both our names as shared card holders. With many couples consolidating their banking business every day, this really shouldn't be a complex process, even though it turned out to be a dull three hour experience. Forget about going to the bank in your lunch break to finally get those accounts sorted out: you will need at least an afternoon to get things right.

Let's investigate the processes involved in this relatively client request: 

1. Verify client identity
2. Open x new client bank accounts
3. Transfer funds from existing bank accounts to new bank accounts
4. Close y old client bank accounts
5. Update client and card holder details for MasterCard credit card
6. Verify details and finalise client request

For a bank (and the branch officer), these processes should be relatively trivial and simple. Following Porter and Harmon (Harmon, 2007), these are core bank service processes. I had expected 30-45 minutes including a couple of signatures, a few mouse clicks, and maybe an internal phone call to a service desk. How could that result in three hours? These were the main process flaws:

1. The poor customer service officer spent more time looking for the correct paper forms and subsequently printing these out for further processing. The bank has a comprehensive Intranet site providing access to all client request forms with an enormous tree folder structure, and she even tipped over the screen so I could have a look for the right place to find the form. All relevant forms for a account closure and account opening were located in completely different folders, completely detached from the actual client task. Furthermore, all forms were given long, cryptic names, which made the whole operation even more painful (who would have guessed that HD30 is the code for an account transfer request?).
2. Lack of task and process orientation: the user interface on the service officer's screen was data-driven and not process-focused. For each step in the processes, she had to navigate through a hierarchy of different Intranet pages to find the right forms and data entry screens. Some of these screens (or web based wizards) were task oriented, but only at the most local level. One client request thus consisted of invoking six different wizards dispersed over three different application systems each with its own user interface, constraints, and terminology. I would recommend looking in to consolidating end-to-end business processes inside the same process engine operating on the same account data.
3. Basic process tasks were delayed and not properly formalised. It is crucial for a bank to verify the identity of its clients to prevent fraud, also for people walking in from the street. Verifying the client's identity should this be a basic condition for proceeding with any further steps in the above processes. But only after 30 minutes spent on printing out five-six different request forms and allocating all of our bank accounts did the service officer actually ask for our driver's licenses in order to confirm that I was actually me. Now, what if I had forgotten my driver's license and I had to come by another day? That could have saved both her and I for 60 wasted minutes, although I fortunately had remembered my license. It is probably the most basic conditional task (or in BPMN terms: decision gateway) for all basic client processes. All requests demand confirming the correct identity. Move all conditional, security and identity related decision points to the earliest possible point in your banking process. It might sound like common sense, but with multiple entry points for invoking a client request (online, in person, phone call), it is crucial to use integrate all authentication in a uniform fashion across all business processes.
4. No visual graphic of process path and progress---neither for the service officer or client. A visual progress overview generally makes people more patient and clarifies the tasks at hand (imagine having a non-technical EPC or BPMN model of all of the above processes for the customer service officer to follow).
5. No process Key Performance Indicators or client feedback integrated into the workflow. The friendly, but frustrated customer service officer could have ended the (albeit very lengthy) transfer process by asking me: how would you rate this transaction? Is there anything we can do better? Process improvement demands learning and systems feedback being fed back into the next process cycles. Only from incremental improvement cycles can significant process improvements be won (Seddon & Caulkin, 2007). This demands a balance between quantitative (e.g. processing time, number of mouse clicks, processing/systems exceptions) and qualitative process indicators (client satisfaction, that friendly smile on the face, welcoming clients in the branch, offering them a glass of water whilst the banking transaction is cooking) (Zokaei et al., 2010).

These recommendations and conclusions are by no means revolutionary or unique. The important difference is that ideas emerged from a---at least in the blueprints---simple visit to my local bank; a visit that in the end brought a lot of frustrations and ultimately improvement ideas on the table. With the billions of dollars each year spent on IT portfolio management and business analysis in the financial sector and a GFC finally returning to the historical wastelands of our capitalist society, one would assume that significant improvements---and (systems) learning---have been discovered. Paradoxically enough, the budgets are apparently still spent on building cluttered unintuitive user interfaces and manually integrating disparate data sources at the cost of redundancy, whilst ignoring the fundamental structure of systems learning and feedback.

References

Harmon, P. (2007), Busines Process Change, 2nd edn, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Seddon, J. & Caulkin, S. (2007), `Systems thinking, lean production and action learning', Action Learning: Research and Practice 4(1), 9-24.

Zokaei, K., Elias, S., O'Donovan, B., Samuel, D., Evans, B. & Goodfellow, J. (2010), Lean and Systems Thinking in the Public Sector in Wales (Report for the Wales Audit Office), Technical report, Lean Enterprise Research Centre, Cardi Business School, Cardi , Wales, UK

Update: End of Thesis, New Book

This blog has been dead for a while, partially due to a major, positive change of circumstances in my private and professional life. First of all, I married my wife on September 25 in Sydney. Hence, my surname has changed to Jensen-Waud. I will use this on all blog entries, e-mails, and social networks---including LinkedIn---from now on.

Secondly, I finished my master's thesis with the final (catchy) title: Government Enterprise Architecture Adoption: A Systemic-Discursive Critique and Reconceptualisation (click here to download a PDF format from Google Docs). I was awarded full marks (ECTS cale: A, Danish scale: 12, Australian scale: HD) for the final product with the a remark of excellence from my supervisor, Dr. Gotze: apparently it has excellent potential to evolve in to a full-scale PhD thesis. I will examine my options and possibilities in the near future for turning this in to a full-scale PhD or doctorate in business administration. 

My next project is to work on a book with the Sourcing Initiative with the headline: Enabling Collaboration. The time frame of the book is 12 months with  updates released publicly on an incremental basis. The book is a not-for-profit project with the final product being released under the Creative Commons license, very similar to the loosely knit network of authors contributing to Dr. Gotze's popular and important book on e-government and government 2.0.

So what will the agenda of my contributions be? The theoretical foundation of the book is that Enterprise Architecture is an important instrument for managing organisational sourcing processes. Given the recent interest of describing and architecting business and operating models for building and shaping the modern enterprise---particularly when shed in the theoretical light of the virtual organisation (Raffaini 2001)---I have formed my own research area of interest. When sourcing business operations and enabling collaboration in the extended enterprise, it is crucial to understand how each enterprise relates to others, especially in terms of regulations, knowledge production, profit generation, collaboration, and communication. In the classic, Zachman-inspired view of the enterprise (Zachman 1987), an enterprise architecture provides a static, consistent snapshot of an (extended) enterprise at a certain point in time. Building several architectural representations of all the enterprises sourcing and collaborating in the extended enterprise is thus key to managing efficient and effective sourcing processes. However, as I stated in my master's thesis, the enterprise is too complex to build a uniquely transparent and consistent picture at any point in time. Instead, I argue, it is the core role of Enterprise Architecture to highlight the communicational and discursive processes taking place within and in between the virtual enterprises. 

A second, important research factor is that the analysis and management of sourcing processes should depart from and emphasise systems thinking as a means for understanding how social and communicative entities in the extended enterprise cooperate, constrain, and collaborate with each other. 

Sourcing enabled by Enterprise Architecture thus carries two important dimensions: 

1. A systemic dimension describing how the virtual network of enterprises emerges and is managed in a coherent fashion through architectural thinking
2. A communicative (discursive) dimension describing how the flow of information and knowledge in the sourcing value chain should be captured and understood in a holistic manner.

The final theoretical foundation is built on K. E. Weick's theory of sensemaking (Weick 2001) and Luhmann's general theory of social systems (Luhmann 1995, Luhmann 2000).

For now, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year wherever in the world you may be.

References

Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Writing Science, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Luhmann, N. (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Raffaini, M. (2001). The Virtual Organisation, in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising, Bremen.

Weick, K. E. (2001), Making Sense of the Organization, Blackwell Publishing.

Zachman, J. (1987), `A Framework for Information Systems Architecture', IBM Systems Journal 26(3), 276-292.

Case Study Mode

Hello Fellow Followers, 

I am sorry for the radio silence, but I have been extremely busy writing up my case studies for the last month. It is the biggest and most important part of my thesis. Luckily, I have been provided to really interesting case studies from two Australian state government agencies: Ipswich City Council in QLD and Land and Property Management Authority in NSW. 

Both case studies focus on the adoption of EA and meta-modelling practice within a government context. The results have been very interesting, and I honestly can't wait to publish my findings. 

Meanwhile, hang on. I am still here, and there are some interesting writings to be released!

Cheers

Anders

On Government Adoption of Enterprise Architecture as an Institutional Process

 During the past few days, I have been reviewing Kristian Hjort-Madsen's PhD 'Architecting Government: Understanding Enterprise Architecture Adoption in the Public Sector' in relation to enterprise ontology and enterprise modeling methodologies. A vast amount of his referenced research publications is framed around institutional theory, in which organisations are seen as acting in various institutional fields (e.g. professionalism, legislations, polices, technological trends) that stimulate and constrain organisational decisions (Dimaggio & Powell, 1983). Hjort-Madsen believes that this is one of the key influences behind EA adoption [1], but it also comes at the cost of theoretical lopsidedness with a paradoxical backlash: institutional forces might explain certain reasons for EA adoptions in government, but institutional analysis tends to ignore the importance of free will of agency and rather draw its explanations from abstract, nearly autonomic forces in the organisational environment. Ultimately, the importance of free will—both on the individual level and within organisations—is trapped inside an institutional iron cage manifested in socially contrived institutions that—paraxodically enough—were created, maintained, and bureaucratized by human free will in the first place. Several researchers have criticised the institutional approach:

1. Hasselbladh and Kallinikos frame the popularity of institutional analysis in organisation theory whilst acknowledging its analytical tendency to reify social, emergent structural forces: “[...] the social and cultural processes that make up the project of rationalization and shape the structure functioning of work organisations have either been bypassed or given an exogenous status, reified to ’reality’, ’society’ or ’environment’ and treated as independent variables in cross-sectional or longitudinal empirical research.” (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000, p. 698) Neo-institutionalism, the authors say, grew out of a organisation studies as a response to classic positivist thinking: “[Neo-institutionalism emphasises that] Organizations are not responses that eolve as detached rational calculations. [...] The realist-materialist conception of organizations as adapting systems in natural environments of resources, threats and opportunities has, thus, again been brought to the fore and criticized as inadequate, on several grounds.” (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000, p. 698) This shift might get rid of some problematic assumptions, but the result is merely another reduc- tionistic approach: organisational rationality now happens “by reference to legitimacy, as the major prerequisite for organizational survival and success.” (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000, p. 699)—but praising legitimacy as the key variable in organisational logic is merely shifting the influencing parameter in the same first order systemic view of organisations [2].
2. Another key problem with institutionalism is tendency towards generalisability and the perceived birds-eye view of the organisational field, which tends to neglect local actions: “Neo-institutionalism offers no account of the means through which a domain of action is conceived, rules of conduct, performance principles and devices of controls are developed and forms of actorhood constituted.” (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000, p. 701) The global, generalising institutional perspective thus takes precedence over local meaning production, whilst failing to account for how and why a specific process of institutionalisation emerges and exerts influence (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000, p. 702).
3. Mintzberg extends the above problems into management and strategy (Mintzberg et al., 2002, ch. 10), where he clearly explains the problems of institutional theory: organisations are turned into fruit flies swerving wildly in a thick, hazy porridge of policies, regulations, and cultural norms. Individual, strategic decisions (e.g. government adoption of ITIL) is turned into a programmatic stroke of the environment, invisibly but collectively manuscripting the behaviour of every CIO. After all, as Mintzberg writes, “what is an ’industry environment’ but all the organizations functioning in it?” (Mintzberg et al., 2002, p. 297)—or is the environment merely a social construction that actorhood applies locally in order to cover up for mistakes or irrational behaviour? Mintzberg rightfully labels this view “looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope” (Mintzberg et al., 2002, p. 293), and this is exactly what Hjort-Madsen tends to practice when he backtraces government practice to an illusorily forceful environment.

In summary, selecting an institutional foundation for analysing EA programs might provide a more qualitative framing of EA, but it is still: 

1. reductionistic in the sense that organisational behaviour and rationality are mainly shaped by external institutional processes reified into a certain corporate reality. Rather, these processes are created and sustained by social, contrived entities (e.g. bureaucracies)—and not prescribed through scientific laws of society.
2. ontologically paradoxical, since an institutional understand pays more attention to the so- called environment than the organisations inhibiting the environment, but fact is that the environment is constituted by nothing but the inhibiting organisations in the first place.
3. ontologically imbalanced since it removes the analytical focus from local, immediate and particular to a birds-eye view in search of generalisability.

It follows from these conclusions that institutional theory is -- on its own -- insufficient for describing and explaining the complex social mechanics of government adoptions of EA -- or any other transdisciplinary methodology with a high degree of organisational volatility and complexity.

I will work on how to developing and extending these views. Feel free to comment as I am looking for counterpoints and additional material and research material for inclusion in my thesis.

Footnotes
[1] For instance, see (Hjort-Madsen, 2007) (Publication II in (Hjort-Madsen, 2009)), (Hjort-Madsen & Marjin, 2007) (Publication III in (Hjort-Madsen, 2009)), (Hjort-Madsen, 2007) (Publication IV in (Hjort-Madsen, 2009)), and (Hjort-Madsen, 2009, p. 18, 20, 36, 61).
[2] As Hasselbladh and Kallinikos assert, Parsons’ structural functionalist framework for sociology already high- lighted the importance of inter-subjective meaning and interpretation in 1951 (Trevino, 2001). Thus, some aspects of institutional theory are very close to Parsons’ systems theory of society—and therefore not an inherently new theory of paradigm for understanding social organisation.

Sources

Dimaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizartional fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147-160.
Hasselbladh, H., & Kallinikos, J. (2000). The project of rationalization: A critique and reap- praisal of neo-institutionalism in organization studies. Organization Studies, 21(4), 697- 720.
Hjort-Madsen, K. (2007). Institutional patterns of enterprise architecture adoption in govern- ment. Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy, 1(4), 333-349.
Hjort-Madsen, K. (2009). Architecting government: Understanding enterprise architecture adop- tion in the public sector. Phd doctorate.
Hjort-Madsen, K., & Marjin, J. (2007). Analyzing enterprise architecture in natinal governments: the cases of denmark and the netherlands. In Proceedings of the 40th hawaii international conference on systems sciences. Big Island, Hawaii.
Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2002). Strategy safari (2nd ed.). LT Prentice Hall. Trevino, A. J. (2001). Talcott parsons today: His theory and legacy in contemporary sociology.
New York: Rowan and Littlefield.

Enterprise Ontology Practice

I have great news! Firstly, I have today (tentatively) put the last dot into my chapter on Enterprise Ontology Practice. Secondly, I have converted all of my Word/docx and Omnigraffle sources into LaTeX and vector graphics. I simply wasn't happy with the quality of Omnigraffle's diagrams (despite the tool's great modeling features), so I decided to go with Tikz/PGF instead. Granted, it took a great effort to convert my graphics, and for non-technical people it might be a hassle to manually sketch out your graphics inside a text editor, but the result is absolutely stunning. Below is an example of a relatively simple Tikz/PGF diagram, which frames the adaptive enterprise within first order systems theory: 

The above is a compressed PNG version, so it does not look as nice as on my high-quality PDF publication from LaTeX. It took me half a day to really get into Tikz/PGF, but once you get the basics it is really easy to build high quality graphics and diagrams. 

As far as the Enterprise Ontology practice chapter concerns, I have until now completed my examination of three EA modeling tools and their relation to organisational concepts from second order cybernetics. And example of this would be: how well does the tool handle fuzzy, semi-structured processes or human workflows? Another example is: how well does the tool model and capture the different dimensions of knowledge (as an example cf. Ikujiro Nonaka's SECI model for knowledge creation). Not surprisingly, this support is very limited; qualitative and interpretative concepts are merely limited to full-text meta data attributes hidden well behind the formal BPMN diagrams.

I am very excited about posting my results, but I yet have to wait a bit. It still requires a sharp pen and a peer review from my supervisor.

Journal Recommendations

Often getting access to a specific scientific journal can be very cumbersome or expensive, unless you have bulk access through an academic or research institution. In the past few weeks I have been looking for journal articles at the intersection of Enterprise Architecture, radical constructionism, and systems science, and I came across this free, public journal: Constructivist Foundations. It is a free, peer-reviewed journal with several famous researchers and academics onboard, including S. A. Umpleby and Terry Winograd. The content is definitely promising and interesting.

On a personal note, I am currently working on the next chapter of my thesis, which concerns the enterprise ontology in practice and the application of engineering and modeling tools. I already have an extensive experience with taxonomy modeling in ARIS (Software AG), but the test bench will also include tools from IBM, SAP, MEGA and Sparx Systems.