The Information Age

Here is a little context around the Information Age. In the interest of time and space, I will try to be brief but there is a key point I have to make. Having made this observation, I will limit my comments about the Information Age to some well-known works by Alvin Toffler, and I will probably break this blog into three separate parts based on the following, so look for those shortly:

"Future Shock" (1970) - The rate of change.

"The Third Wave" (1980) - The structure of change.

"Powershift" (1990) - The culture of change.

-Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler is a well-known name, certainly in the academic community. He is a sociological prognosticator, a futurist, and has written a lot of books. The ones that I refer to above are the ones he wrote that have to do with change.

Here are some samples of seminal works that constitute the origins of Enterprise Architecture:

1. Frederick Taylor "Principles of Scientific Management" 1911
2. Walter A. Shewhart "The Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product" 1931 (Dr. Edward Demming's Mgr.)
3. Peter Drucker "The Practice of Management" 1954
4. Jay Forrester "Industrial Dynamics" 1961
5. Peter Senge "The Fifth Discipline" 1990
6. Eric Helfert "Techniques of Financial Analysis" 1962
7. Robert Anthony "Planning and Control Systems: A Framework for Analysis"
8. 1965 Sherman Blumenthal "Management Information Systems: A Framework for Planning and Development"
9. 1969 Alvin Toffler "Future Shock"
10. 1970 George Steiner "Comprehensive Managerial Planning" 1972
11. Etc., etc., etc.

The Enterprises of today (2015) have never been engineered. They happen... incrementally... over the life of the Enterprise as it grows and requires formalisms... “systems”, manual and/or automated. 

So, why is it that an Enterprise needs Information Technology people in their Enterprise in the Information Age?

When I happen to be talking to some IT folks and I raise the question, “Why does the Enterprise need Information Technology people in their Enterprise in the Information Age?” I usually warn them at this point that I haven’t had an hour and a half or so to soften them up and I am going to make a radical comment... so don’t fall of their chairs when I say this but... 

There presently appears to be a gross misunderstanding about Enterprise Architecture among management... but also among the information community as well. Enterprise Architecture is NOT an Information Technology issue... it is a Management issue. It is likely perceived to be an Information Technology issue as opposed to a Management issue for two reasons: 

We've been having a great GovEA Conference this year- no shortage of good speakers, exhibits and vendors.

I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my long-time friend and colleague, Scott Bernard who has been the U.S. Federal Chief Enterprise Architect for the last several years.

Architecture Is Not a New Idea

The ideas about Architecture have been around for a long time. In the old days we used to call this kind of thing “Enterprise Analysis." The whole concept of Enterprise Analysis was, or is, you try to understand the Enterprise first, before you try to overlay infrastructure kinds of things against it.

The problem with infrastructure kinds of things is, it takes a long time to create it... and it costs a lot of money... and after you get it created... it is hard to change it. So the best thing to do is to understand what you are going to do with it before you take the time and sink the money into creating it. That is not a new idea... I think it came from Julius Caesar... or maybe it was Adam... in any case, it came from somebody a long time ago and I did not invent it. Even in the context of Enterprises, it is not a new idea. I probably spent more than 40 years of my professional life focused around these kinds of ideas in Enterprises.

Peter Drucker points out that that this is not the first Information Revolution, this is "The NEXT Information Revolution,"(1) the fourth Information Revolution.

“The next information revolution is well underway. But it is not happening where information scientists, information executives, and the information industry in general are looking for it. It is not a revolution in technology, machinery, techniques, software or speed. It is a revolution in CONCEPTS.”

I recently ran across some notes I took from a presentation at an IBM SHARE Conference, August 1991 that may shed some light on the idea of Professionalism.

Roger Greer, who at the time was the Dean of the School of Library and Information Management at the University of California (USC), made some observations about a Professionals in contrast with Labor. He defined the Professional Service Cycle as depicted in Figure 1.

The advent of the commercial employment of computers in the 1950’s ushered in an era of dramatic productivity improvements in both the private and public sectors. Clearly, using a computer to perform the processes of the business rather than people performing the processes is better because computers do things the same way every time whereas people make mistakes, computers perform in electrical (or electronic) cycle times and people in human cycle times and computers (in most cases) are cheaper than labor.

Manufacturing descriptive representations are holistic descriptions of individual parts such that the part (system) can be manufactured quite independently of the entirety of the Enterprise. The description of the part must be complete, “holistic,” because any characteristic that is requisite to the existence of the part, if not made explicit, is potentially defective. That is, any characteristic not made explicit is implicit and therefore, assumptions are being made which may be right ... or may be wrong. Erroneous assumptions are the sources of defects.

The common perception (or more appropriately, mis-perception) of Enterprise Architecture in the general marketplace today is that it is one of an Information Technology (IT), model-building exercise. There is validity to that perception because, in order to engineer the Enterprise, the engineering design artifacts (the descriptive representations of the Enterprise) have to be created as they are the “raw material” for doing engineering work and the IT community seems to have the skills to produce those engineering design artifacts.

It is useful to discuss the differences between Primitives and Composites because this is the paradigmatic problem of the Information community of the day.

After 30 years of talking about this, I am still shocked at the predominant misconception that the Rows of Zachman Framework define "level of detail," or "waterfall," or "decomposition." This is just not true. The Rows of the Zachman Framework define TRANSFORMATION, NOT decomposition. Level of detail is defined in the HEIGHT of each cell (or Row), NOT the height of the Framework itself. While I originally I called the Rows "Perspectives," the underlying theory that defines the Rows is the philosophical concept of Reification.

I was asked by a PhD student to fill out a survey for research he was doing about the Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. This is a typical question I get, and it is no wonder because of the confusion about the word "Framework." Just because Enterprise Architect Frameworks have the word "Framework" in their titles, it doesn't mean you can compare the Zachman Framework with them. The Zachman Framework is the ontology. The other frameworks are METHODOLOGICAL frameworks, and the artifacts you create by following those methodologies potentially can be mapped back onto the Zachman Framework Ontology. Nevertheless, I wanted to include my answer to this fine student and thought you'd like to see it too: