Archives for January 2011

Data Quality for Real-time: Correctness and Tolerance

January 5, 2011 By brenda michelson

As part of my research agenda, I’m catching up on works by my thought-leading friends in the enterprise architecture field. Today, I read Gene Leganza’s Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch 2011 to 2013, published by Forrester’s EA Practice. [This is a client (for pay) report, which the good folks at Forrester shared with me.]

The themes of business visibility and responsiveness are present throughout the report, supported by several of the technology trends, including next generation business intelligence, business rules processing and policy-based SOA, smart technology management and event-driven patterns.

Tucked into the section [6-1] on Next-gen Business Intelligence (BI) is an extremely critical, and oft-overlooked, point on real-time processing and data quality:

“The shift from historical to real-time analytics will require that related processes such as data quality services also move to real time.”

The report continues to (correctly) state that “The complexity challenge [of Next-gen BI] will not be around the technologies per se but rather in the continued effort of gaining business consensus on data governance so that bad data is not driving strategic and operational decisions.”

I’ve written in the past how real-time operational adjustments can actually aid strategic decision-making, because the adjustments add a degree of correctness to the historical information base. However, that’s only true when the operational decisions are based on good data.

As Gene’s report points out, this is where things get tricky. You need to re-think and reposition data quality procedures to achieve correctness in real-time operational decision-making.

However, you need to be cognizant of the impact, in terms of delay, caused by adding data quality checks to real-time processing. Obviously, the tolerance for delay will vary by business scenario, and perhaps even by transaction.

If the business scenario (or transaction) has a low tolerance for introducing delay, then you need to shift your tolerance view to impact of error. If the outcome of the real-time decision falls within your error tolerance range, then proceed with the action. If not, don’t force a real-time decision that your business might regret.

As you work through data governance policies for real-time, be sure to include tolerances for delay, correctness and decision (action or inaction) risk.

Creating and Forgetting – Elemental Links 2011

January 4, 2011 By brenda michelson

Yesterday, I highlighted a Harvard Business Review article with the central point that “Before you can create, you must forget”. At the end of the post, I encouraged readers to consider three questions as they embark on 2011:

1. What am I willing to forget, in order to create long-term value and success?

2. What preparations do I need to make today, to achieve the longer view?

3. How can I free up organizational memory to embrace creation and change?

Today, I want to share my own ‘creating and forgetting’ decisions for 2011, which will influence the Elemental Links writing and service agendas for the foreseeable future.

First, the fun part. The creating. As first reported in June, I identified a business-technology-capability-value path that I want to pursue. If you’ve ever visited the Elemental Links business homepage, you won’t be surprised to learn this path pertains to increasing Business Visibility and Responsiveness.

The short story, I’ll be exploring the capabilities, techniques, architectures and technologies that contribute to organizations being Change-Friendly.

Along the way, I’ll incorporate all of my soapbox items, including how getting change-friendly connects to the transition of enterprise architects from archivists to activists.

I’m quite excited about this pursuit and mildly enamored with the current sketch on my whiteboard.

Now, the hard part. The forgetting. To effectively pursue the change-friendly line of research and grow the related services, I need to stop doing something else.

After much consideration, I made the difficult decision not to renew my advocacy work with the OMG’s Business Ecology Initiative and Communities of Practice. I truly enjoyed my time working with Richard, his team, and of course, the community members.

As for Elemental Links’ primary services – advisory and enterprise consulting – it is business as usual.

Thought for the New Year: Before you can Create, you must Forget

January 3, 2011 By brenda michelson

Thinking I might find some fodder for my business architecture research, I read The CEO’s role in Business Model Reinvention in the current issue of Harvard Business Review. While I didn’t find my “CEOs are the Business Architects” smoking gun, the article’s central point stuck with me: “Before you can create, you must forget”.

In the article, co-authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble discuss three equally important areas of responsibility for CEOs to ensure business success in the immediate term and relevance over time.

“For companies to endure, they must get the forces of preservation (box 1), destruction (box 2), and creation (box 3) in the right balance. Striking that balance is the CEO’s most important task, but most companies overwhelmingly favor box 1. Forces of preservation reign supreme. Forces of destruction and creation are overshadowed, outmatched, and out of luck.

To be sure, the work of preservation—the day-to-day execution of the existing business model—is vitally important. CEOs must get box 1 right or their tenures will be short. They must concentrate daily on performance excellence and continuous improvement, as companies such as Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines have done for years. The best box 1 companies are sleek and efficient, like a well-designed automobile. They coordinate an astonishingly complex array of human actions like so many gears, pistons, and camshafts.

But CEOs are not just responsible for box 1 [preservation]. They must also get boxes 2 [destruction] and 3 [creation] right. Sadly, most chief executives ignore destruction and creation until it is too late. They bow to a myriad of short-term pressures: intense demands for quarterly earnings, risk aversion, discomfort with uncertainty, resistance to change, linear extrapolation from past experience, and unwillingness to cannibalize established businesses. As a result, many companies fail to transform themselves.”

This tendency to win-the-day at the expense of tomorrow isn’t unique to CEOs. It’s a common trait across professions and roles. And while it might not be your trait, as a forward-thinker, it certainly becomes your obstacle as you navigate an organization.

What’s the answer? As the authors share, CEOs (and everyone else) need to operate in all three boxes simultaneously. More importantly,

“They must recognize that boxes 2 and 3 are not about what the business will be doing in 20 years; they are about the preparations it must make today…The CEO must also know exactly what to destroy and what to create.”

In regards to destruction (box 2) the authors emphasize the need to go beyond product, line-of-business and general portfolio pruning. An even greater inhibitor of creation is organizational memory:

“It’s harder to take a knife to a less-evident box 2 menace: organizational memory. As managers run the core business, they develop biases, assumptions, and entrenched mind-sets. These become further embedded in planning processes, performance evaluation systems, organizational structures, and human resources policies. Organizational memory is particularly powerful in companies that tend to promote from within and to have homogeneous cultures, strong socialization mechanisms, and long track records of success. Such deeply rooted memory may be great for preservation (box 1), but if it is not tamed sufficiently (box 2), it gets in the way of creation (box 3). That’s why all box 3 initiatives must start in box 2. Bottom line: Before you can create, you must forget.”

As the new year starts — and you contemplate the flood of (additive) predictions and watch lists — ask yourself the following: