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The Social Enterprise – what problem are we trying to solve?

Social Computing along with Cloud Computing is one of the hot IT buzz words – i.e., the Social Cloud must then be the ultimate in buzz word compliance. This is in fact what Andrew McAfee from MIT’s Management school and Mike Gotta from Cisco are discussing.

Andrew presents his Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way in a recent blog post. He describes a project done internally at Tata Consulting Services, where they build a social collaboration tool to rate and share the broad collection of project derived knowledge. It sounds deceptively simple, but on the other hand, I have seen the results from a number of similar projects deploying a very structured, formal approach to knowledge sharing – and none of those worked very well – so why not? The real trick at TCS didn’t seem to be so much about the tool, but what motivated the TCS consultants to engage. You could call it a bottom up approach to the Social Enterprise.

The opposite example is presented by Mike Gotta in his presentation: Build an Architecture of Participation. I have to warn you, it is heavy on models, slides etc. Although he is discussing the same thing, it is probably more of what you’d call a top down approach to the Social Enterprise.
Continue reading “The Social Enterprise – what problem are we trying to solve?”

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IT confuses (again)

I occasionally read Nick Malik‘s blog, Inside Architecture, and his latest post about ‘Business Capability’ reminded me of IT people’s general ability to take a perfectly understandable word, such as capability, and turn it into something confusing. This is not a criticism of Nick or Paul Harmon who wrote the article, Capabilities and Processes, that promoted Nick to write – but merely used as an example to illustrate my point.

Now, IT’s definition of ‘Business Capability’ is ‘what a business does at its core‘, and its description (e.g., model) captures ‘what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfil its objectives and responsibilities‘. The idea is to focus on ‘what‘ an organisation needs to do, rather than the actual ‘how‘. A conceptual view, if you like. And so the discussion continues in search of the ‘what’ and what it really is.

I think the confusion around ‘Business Capability’ stems from the fact, that a noun can refer to an entity, a quality, a state, an action, or a concept. Continue reading “IT confuses (again)”

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Architects as facilitators

Arthur Wright, a software architect from Credit Suisse, wrote an interesting article in an issue of the IEEE Software magazine, called: Lessons Learned: Architects Are Facilitators, Too! He describes a number of divergent behaviours causing the architecture to fragment through unauthorised interfaces, ill-considered technologies and protest designs. The article is an ‘anti-pattern’ to Conway’s Law. The form and structure of an architecture is often – when you deal with a certain level of complexity – closer related to the (human) organisational communication patterns and structure then a direct realisation of the (wishful) thinking of an architect – competent or not….

As Wright points out, technical skills are important, but if you cannot convince people to collaborate and follow your ‘architectural vision’ then those skills really aren’t to much use. Your skills as an architect needs to go ‘beyond the tools of the trade‘ including knowing how to ‘visualise your architecture‘ and be prepared to have the ‘software is not a building‘ conversation. Wright also provides a useful list of SWOT and cause-‘n’-effect analysis techniques.

If you are in a reading mood then I’d suggest reading some of my previous blog posts – all related to this topic: