Why ethics is broken in enterprise-architecture

(This 'from the archives' article provides supplementary information for the YouTube video 'A question of ethics - Episode 66, Tetradian on Architectures', released on 02 May 2019. The post was originally published on the Tetradian weblog on 31 August 2012 as 'Why broken?'.)

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If the mainstream approach to enterprise-architectures is broken – and so badly broken, at that – then why is it broken? In what way is it broken? What are the core reasons behind why it’s so broken?

And why ask this? Well, short answer is that we’ll need a better understanding of what’s going on before we can do much about sorting out the mess…

To illustrate this, I’ll revisit some of the content from those mixed-up messages referenced in the previous post on ‘Broken’.

[Do remember, though, that those quotes represent merely one example amongst many: it’s not one person or organisation that’s screwing things up so badly, but an entire mindset that’s not just about enterprise-architecture, it’s the same mess turning up again and again in varying forms across almost every industry. So as before, I won’t provide a link to the original, and I won’t say who it’s from: it’s only an example. Fair enough?]

As we’ll see later, we can trace all of the problems seen here back to the same root cause: attempts to apply the linear-paradigm to contexts where by definition it cannot succeed. In effect, it’s exactly the same root-cause as in all the problems that we saw with ‘No jobs for generalists‘: a set of ideas and assumptions that are not inherently wrong as such, but definitely are wrong when applied to the wrong kind of contexts. Which, these days, mostly are the wrong kind of contexts.

Anyway, let’s get started. Here’s the first quote we’ll explore:

…it only influences toward a notional future that is still not totally proven

“A notional future that is still not totally proven”: right there, in just nine words, is the epitome of the linear-paradigm, and why it doesn’t work in business. There’s an explicit assumption there that the future is predictable, that we can have – and are entitled to have – proof that would provide certainty about future outcomes. Nice idea, and yeah, in many ways that would be nice to have, especially in business – but in reality, unfortunately, it is literally unrealistic.

Prediction only works when the real world is kind enough to line up to our assumptions. When it doesn’t line up… well, that’s when things are literally unpredictable. But we must never forget that the real world is the real world: if we don’t get the results that we expect, it’s our expectations that are at fault – not the real world.

A real non-business example: want to know why Mars has been such a graveyard for space-probes? The real reason is that, no matter how good the engineering may be, there are just too many factors there against making a safe landing a certainty – especially for an autonomous probe that has to make all of its decisions on its own. Landing on an airless moon is relatively easy: it’s just straightforward celestial-mechanics and thrusters plus a small amount of course-correction. Landing through a high-drag atmosphere is a lot more challenging – especially in terms of materials-engineering – but it’s still relatively predictable. Yet Mars manages to combine the worst of everything: just enough atmosphere – and unpredictable storms, too – to be a real problem, but not enough atmosphere to slow things down to a stop. Just take a look at what the NASA Curiosity team had to do to get their lander safely on the surface of Mars – and hear the elation in their voices when they did it…

But now turn the focus back to Earth, back to everyday business – and realise that most businesses are dealing with wicked-problems that are often many orders of magnitude worse than that of the Mars lander. And you expect that to be predictable, a ‘proven future’? – c’mon, let’s be a bit more realistic, shall we?

There is only one time when a future can be considered ‘proven’ – and that’s when it’s no longer a possible future, but the unchangeable past. Imaginary worlds are predictable; selected subsets of the real-world can be in some cases be almost-predictable; but in the real-world as a whole, there is always some inherent-uncertainty. Hence in the real world, there is no such thing as a ‘provable’ future – and the idea that there could be such a thing as a ‘provable future’ is a delusion, a fantasy, nothing more than that.

Yet it’s all too evident that it’s a very popular fantasy, a very desirable fantasy. Perhaps especially so in business: predictability and certainty and a sense of being ‘in control’ are the great promise of the linear-paradigm. As Iona Heath put it in the current issue of the BMJ:

So much of policy direction seems to be driven by a Faustian ambition to control the threat of the unknowable future.

Hence it’s a very easy fantasy to sell, and especially so when it’s sold by people who themselves already believe in that fantasy – otherwise known as ‘analysts’, because analysis is the core tool of the linear-paradigm. And the hard part is that there’s usually just enough evidence to make it seem credible – because when the variety-weather of a context stays calm, in effect it is predictable. Mostly. For a while. Until the weather changes…

The simplest summary is that the linear-paradigm does work well when the context is stable. It can have almost any amount of variety – be as complicated as it likes – as long as the variety itself of that variety remains much the same. And that is the kind of contexts that the business-world experienced for much of the past century – particularly from the early 1950s to perhaps the early to mid 1980s. Hence, not surprisingly, an increasingly-entrenched assumption that the linear-paradigm was the way to do things in business.

But the reality is that the linear-paradigm is not ‘the way’, but merely ‘a way’ – and it’s a way that only works well when the variety-weather is stable. Which, these days, is increasingly no longer the case in business: it’s already decidedly stormy, and every trend and indicator suggests that it’s going to get much, much stormier yet. Hence, in current business practice, and other than in certain very narrowly-constrained business-contexts, trying to rely on the linear-paradigm alone is guaranteed to fail.

Which is a problem when we come across an assertion such as this:

You don’t want your strategies following spaghetti roads — you want them moving through your company on logical, straight highways…

Because these days, for current business-contexts, that’s exactly what not to tell a business-client. If we did say that, all we’d be doing is propping up a dangerously-delusional fantasy for the context – a linear-paradigm fantasy that’s guaranteed to fail. Not good; not wise; and, if applied knowingly, not exactly ethical either. Oops…

Anyway, let’s move on a bit, to this:

Techies invariably screw up the business; business guys screw up the tech. For decades we’ve looked for someone to span both — and that’s what Enterprise Architects do.

Here’s the blunt reality:

• in general, techies do not screw up the business
• in general, business guys do not screw up the tech
• both techies and business guys do screw up each others’ expectations and predictions about the business, the tech and the relationships between them

In short, it’s the darn linear-paradigm again, but with an additional twist: our view is right, therefore everyone else’s is wrong.

Perhaps the best way to summarise this is one of Edward de Bono’s ‘Laws of Thinking’: everyone is always right, but no-one is ever right. Everyone is right from their own perspective, yet no-one does or can hold a fully-predictable version of the whole picture. So when there’s a clash of perspectives, all and none of the perspectives are ‘true’: they each hold a partial truth, not ‘the whole truth’. Which means that the moment we have a clash of perspectives, ‘the truth’ is going to be inherently ambiguous, inherently uncertain – and inherently arguable, too.

But here’s the catch: the linear-paradigm can’t handle ambiguity. That’s actually its great strength, because its refusal to accept ambiguity is what makes predictability possible. Yet that same strength will become a serious problem whenever the context is inherently-ambiguous: in a sometimes all-too-literal sense, the linear-paradigm collapses into a kind of insanity there.

Which means that, by definition, anyone who bridges across more than one domain – such as enterprise-architects – must be able to go ‘a little bit insane’, in order to reach above the self-contained ‘sanities’ of each of the different domains. Also, since everyone is always right but no-one’s ever right, there is no single domain that holds ‘the truth’ about the business: so in a viable ‘architecture of the enterprise’, we must assert that everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time.

And since business-strategies must, almost by definition, straddle across every domain of the enterprise, there is no way that we could move those strategies “through your company on logical, straight highways” – because the ‘logic’ itself will change as we go through each of the domains.

Just to make life even more fun, there’s another twist here, which we can perhaps illustrate best with the SCAN frame:

The horizontal axis here is a measure of modality in the context – in effect, the extent of its ambiguity and uncertainty. The red dividing-line represents what I call the Inverse-Einstein Test: to the left, doing the same thing gives the same results, whilst to the right doing the same thing maygive different results, or we may need to do different things to get to the same results. To use Cynthia Kurtz’s terms, the left represents a world of order, whereas the right is a world of unorder.

In effect, the real world bounces us around all of that frame, all of the time. But if we can constrain it for a while, we can usually get to something that sort-of resembles predictability or control. For a while, anyway. That’s how we get things done.

Most of business lives within contexts that always contain some degree of ambiguity and uncertainty – a world of at least some inherent unorder. Most business-folk don’t like this, will spend a lot of effort trying to get away from this – but they’ll know all too well that it is an inescapable reality in their world.

By contrast, most machines and, especially, most digital technology will and must reside almost exclusively in a world of order. (If whatever-it-is isn’t in that ordered world, we’d usually say that it’s not working, or broken.) In effect, it’s a world that really does depend on the linear-paradigm remaining valid within its contexts.

So whilst business guys and techies will both desire an ordered world, most techies will assume that they’re already in it: not just the linear-paradigm, but the linear-paradigm squared. Which means that the mindset most needed to work well with the often enormous complications of the IT-world is also likely to be the least suited to deal with the inherent ‘insanity’ of bridging between different domains.

Or, to put it another way, IT-folks are almost the least likely people to be good at doing any kind of true cross-function enterprise-architecture.

Which is why an assertion like this is kinda troubling:

93% of our clients … have EA [enterprise-architecture] practices whose epicenter is IT

In a viable enterprise-architecture, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time: there is no single epicentre. Asserting that a single point or domain is ‘the epicentre’ of an enterprise-architecture is, by definition, falling into the linear-paradigm delusion that there is a single ‘the truth’ to which all others should align (hence the dread phrase ‘business/IT-alignment’ and suchlike). Centring everything around a single epicentre almost invariably leads to an architecture whose ‘roads’ look straight and logical from that single viewpoint, but are completely broken and unusable when seen from anywhere else. Hence the moment someone asserts that there is a single epicentre to their enterprise-architecture, they’ve already blown the architecture – it really is as simple as that.

We can have a sort-of epicentre to a domain-architecture, because the whole point about a domain-architecture is that is all about that one domain. (TOGAF is a good example of a domain-architecture with its epicentre placed somewhere within the overall IT domain.) And we can use somewhere – anywhere – as a kind of ‘temporary epicentre’, a place where we focus most of our current attention: but that’s very different from asserting that it is ‘the centre’ – a perhaps-subtle distinction, but one that is crucially important in practice.

So what we have here, in that assertion that “93% of our clients have EA practices whose epicenter is IT”, is either one or both of the following:

• it’s IT-architecture, across one or more sub-domains of the overall IT domain
• it’s trying to apply IT-oriented linear-paradigm assumptions to the broader enterprise space

What it’s not is enterprise-architecture – a literal ‘architecture of the enterprise’ – because that requires:

• ability to bridge across all domains, without assigning arbitrary priority to any purported ‘epicentre’
• ability to resolve conflicts between different instances of the linear-paradigm in different domains
• ability to work ‘above’ the linear-paradigm, in order to cope with inherent-uncertainty and variety-weather

In short, if it’s not a literal ‘architecture of the enterprise’, don't call it ‘enterprise-architecture’. Please?

Anyway…

Yeah, you’re right, I’ve complained enough already… So in the next post in this brief series, I’ll stop complaining about what doesn’t work, and focus more on what does work: some real, practical, proven tactics for working with a true cross-domain space.

In the meantime, comments, anyone?