Business Architecture in Pluralist and Coercive Situations
Business architecture (BA) is a discipline that “represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end-to-end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders.”
As such, BA is close to systems thinking and systems theory. This is true namely because of its emphasis on holism and usage of models to describe the current status quo or potential future alternatives, which might be instrumental for both decision making, by obtaining structured views on the current or future situations, as well as for “translation” of decisions made into actions, e.g. via the “Strategy to Execution” methodology.
BA is value-centric. The main instrument operating with value in business architecture is a value stream that “is the set of actions that take place to add value to a customer from the initial request through realization of value by the customer.” While the same technique can also be used in non-commercial environments, replacing the customer with other personae, such as constituent or patient, value streams always take the perspective of the initiating or triggering stakeholder. As such, it would categorize BA under unitary methodologies in the Jackson’s System of Systems Methodologies.?
For those who are not familiar with this framework, I recommend taking a look at this article or find the full description in this book by M. C. Jackson. In a nutshell, unitary are those situations in which all the stakeholders agree on what good or bad is, while in pluralist ones multiple groups of stakeholders, even groups within one type of stakeholders, might have different opinions, and hence “value” might be undecidable. Coercive situations are those pluralist situations in which one or more groups have means to coerce their interests, e.g. by controlling how resources are allocated.
My favorite example is the K-12 education, which is obviously not unitary. While it is obvious who the main beneficiary in this segment should be, those stakeholders have the least influence on the system. At the same time, the pupil’s or student’s interests cannot be taken as the only criterion, but they should rather be balanced with interests of other stakeholders, teachers, “the society” funding the system and having some expectations about its results, etc. What makes the situation even more complicated is that not even these stakeholders are homogeneous, and have different Weltanschauungen. In the Czech Republic, at least three such groups can be identified: traditionalists, based on Herbartianism, giving all the decision power to teachers and their superiors, progressivists, based on ideas of the Frankfurt School, focusing mainly on identifying and removing of disparities or educational inequities, and finally, pedocentric pragmaticists, based on on ideas of John Dewey, Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, and others, giving the decision power to pupils/students (or parents for children at a very young age) and positioning the teachers more as guides or accompaniments on that journey. The fourth direction could be state pragmatism, favoring the interests of the society. It was the case in the second half of the 19th century, when schools had a seminal role in the Czech National Revival.
Can BA as a unitary methodology be instrumental in such a messy situation? I believe so, but not without a change. Note, however, that Ackoff, who used a different categorization of systems as “mechanistic”, “organismic (animated)”, and “social”, warns against using methodologies from one realm in the other. Namely: “The effectiveness of any model used to describe and understand behavior of a particular system as a whole ultimately depends on the degree to which that model accurately represents that system. Nevertheless, there have been and are situations in which application of deterministic or animate models to social systems have produced useful results for a short period of time. However, in a longer run, such mismatches usually result in less than desirable results because critical aspects of the social systems were omitted in the less complex model that was used.”
The change in BA that, in my humble opinion, would need to take place concerns how value is considered by BA. At the moment, it seems to be an object on its own that is accumulated throughout the value stream, to be given to the triggering stakeholder. This can definitely be true for many situations, especially those where value can be translated to a certainty equivalent. This would, however, be unnatural for situations where there is no obvious way how such association could be done.?
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Fortunately, there is another approach to value. It is described in this book and it describes value as a result of an exchange. This means that there always have to be at least two actors, so that the exchange can occur. Conflict resolution, then, describes situations where more parties are involved: mediator, advocates or representatives for each party, advocates and a judge or arbitrator.
This approach has yet another advantage: in an exchange the final balance of value can also be negative. This represents a tremendous potential for improvements. Current and future potential exchanges in all VS stages can be classified from three perspectives:
Since the preferences in the pluralist world are asynchronous, chances are that there are lots of possible improvements on both increasing the positive value and eliminating the negative value exchanges.
Even this, however, might not be able to resolve all conflicts, if such exist. Yet, the representation of those conflicts in a form of a value stream could still be instrumental for other techniques, such as boundary critique from Critical System Heuristics (one of coercive methodologies) as it would provide a structured view on boundary judgments.
This suggestion has not been verified, so comments from both BA and Systems Thinking are welcome.?
Enterprise Designer/Lead Business Architect (Independent Consultant)
6 个月This is a excellent article Jiri Machotka. Systems Thinking has been at the heart of Business Architecture since its emergence in the mid-90s but has largely been ignored during its recent phase of popularity. I would also recommend Jackson's latest book Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner's Guide.
Certified Senior Business Architect at Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
6 个月Thank Jiri this is a great summary and is something I have been thinking about for the last 12 months. In the commercial world value streams work clearly. For example a Travel Agent. A customer is trying to book a holiday. The Travel Agent company is trying to make a profit for its share holders. There is a clear exchange of value and both the customer and the business are happy. I work for UK DWP - we pay benefits and help constituents to get into work. When we develop our business model canvas we have 3 value stakeholders - the constituent, business and the wider society. Paying benefit has a clear wider society benefits - it reduces poverty, protects constituents from harm, and reduces the risk of constituents getting into debt. BA Guild members have created the industrial reference models that describe the value streams. VS describe the triggering and recipient stakeholder. They are not clear on the wider society stakeholders, and the value proposition they get. Unfortunately I don't have the answer - I'm still at the point of trying to articulate the problem! Please keep going on this. Government and charities are a different beast than Amazon, Tesla or Apple.