#entarch to business speak translator

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I had quite a positive meeting with someone from the business regarding enterprise architecture (EA) . It’s an interesting engagement, which we’ve yet to do in any other part of the business. To put it mildly, the area is terribly unhappy with their IT support. I’d suggest their issues are mostly with delivery and communication, program management, application portfolio management, technology modernisation, and business automation in general. This is why I am absolutely certain an EA view and strategy will provide massive benefits. The entire enterprise is so EA immature though, broaching the discipline with the business carries some risk. This wasn’t a major concern for me. It’s clear from the size of the above issues and the major stakeholder’s passion and urgency to fix them, that they “get” it.

To prevent any bad first impressions of EA, I carefully spoke to their needs. I stayed well-clear of our usual enterprise architecture mother-tongue/pseudo speak. (I feel describing enterprise architecture in any real detail intimidates even some IT folks who are more comfortable on the software side.) I was out of practice in business discussions, but the outcome was OK.

I thought it’d be interesting to take the time to record some of the key concepts I remember avoiding, and publish the business-friendly versions which worked. And it’s helpful to consider some more this “enterprise architecture to business speak translator”. Anyone is welcome to contribute their own. I’ve been to presentations some time ago which covered IT to business communication more generally. And there are probably stacks of posts on this topic which I’ll maybe reference later.

Enterprise architecture concept Business description
Meta model Big clear picture to describe everything we need to understand.  Ordinarily this is not something I’d recommend sharing anyway, but this was a special case.
Conceptual to logical to physical Going from the big picture of what you need, down to the level of detail where we know what we’ll put in place
As-is picture View of what’s there today
Business architecture Everything we need to know about how the operation is organised, and how it runs
Data entities Information
Association matrix Mapping
Business to IT alignment Implementing the right supportive technology that business processes require.  (The meaning changes slightly, but was correct in that instance.)
Tactical solutions What we can do in the short-term to help
Standardisation
Thanks Chris
Increase profit by reducing waste

The inverse effect of policy

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This is not new. But statistics just in show how very wrong policy makers in the USA got things when they tried to help suffering airline passengers.

The agency’s intention was to improve on-time performance, by issuing fines to the value of $27,500 per passenger to airlines where flights are delayed significantly.

U.S. airlines are not dumb, they knew what they urgently had to do. They DID NOT put money into fixing on time performance, they instead cancelled a whole lot of flights that may have reached this point where it would cost them serious money.

In fact, the end result has been, WORSE on time performance, along with lots of flights being cancelled entirely which had a risk of delay. The poor suffering passenger is now in a worse position than ever before.

“U.S. Airline Cancellations Rise 62% After Tarmac Rule”, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/u-s-airline-cancellations-rose-62-in-september-after-tarmac-delay-rule.html, accessed11 Nov 2010.

Notepad logging, farewell

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I will always have a soft spot for Microsoft’s Notepad. It comes from my persistence with it to manually web site code for the web.  In the mid 1990s I became totally obsessive/compulsive with web site design and especially updating HTML source code. At one stage I may have used Notepad more than I used my legs. It was around this time that I suffered a continual and uncontrollable right click whenver I surfed the web.

Sadly (or maybe fortunately), my web design days are behind me. I continued to use Notepad in the years since for note taking, task controls, and communication logs. That was until recently.  Lately I’ve begun moving to more sophisticated and integrated tools like Microsoft’s OneNote, Evernote, and so on. I find these tools a lot better to manage these work tasks as they offer more comprehensive features (like global search) and the ability for numerous people to asynchronously read and update  from other locations.

I often fall into my old habits and take initial meeting notes in Notepad before moving into proper document formats, but I think my usage of it for just about everything else has expired.

Before I forget how to do it, thought I’d record a tip I found quite helpful. Some times I found it useful in recording notes which were maintained along with a timestamp of the entry, as a chronological log. I found it invaluable to learn that Notepad can automatically add that timestamp for you. The way to do this is to type .LOG in the first line of the file, then add a line break and save the file. Then each time you open the file, Notepad will record a timestamp on a new line, where you can add your respective notes.

Wow, what workers

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I wish I had earlier taken a picture of the scene across the road. It was a vacant lot, with a base of sand – like anywhere in Dubai where there’s nothing built, or planted and given a whole lot of water.  When the shops are open, it doubled as a car park.  And then it would be fenced off at other times, and people would walk through or stand in there for a chat.  Actually, it wasn’t quite a vacant lot.  It also had a single large tree – left there for the shade I imagine.

The other night when I was walking home, despite the near darkness, the lot was quite different. Instead of seeing the light colour of sand, there was clearly a layer of something that resembled oil roughly splashed all over. I stood out the front of the complex with our security guard hypothesizing what they could be doing. We both reached the conclusion that they were probably improving the car park.

The next morning when I woke-up just as the sun was rising at 5am, there was no doubt about it. 75% of the plot was covered in bitumen. There were about 6 or 7 men rushing around in the near dark.  They had a “Bessie” (for those familiar with the animated movie ‘Cars’ featuring Lightning Macqueen’); and four or five trucks waiting in the park with bitumen in their trailers. It was absolutely amazing.  By lunch time the entire car park was completed, with lines marked and fence posts cemented in.

You see a lot of  this in Dubai. The Sheik has had such amazing and grand plans, that there really is a furious pace from everyone to get it done in time. Some industries, more obviously than others. Construction work is primarily resourced from expat Indians. I’d really not like to be working in their conditions. You see whole mini-buses filled to the brim with the workers who pile out at the work site, to be replaced by the next shift so a lot of the sites are effectively working 24 hours a day. Mind you, I think that only requires two shifts in most places. Although some friends mentioned they no longer see the lights of cranes swinging about at night like they used to.

Although the conditions look extremely tough. Apparently they have improved somewhat over the years. Allegedly a few years back, instead of packed mini-buses, the workers would be packed into the back of a caged cattle truck.  I have heard people referring to it as modern day slave-labour.

Despite this, Dubai is still a fantastic place for a lot of the workers. Although they toil hard here to earn a meagre salary, it’s a huge improvement on what they would be enduring at home.

An example of this is our security guard, Manoj.  Manoj is from Nepal, and he has my utmost respect. Each, and every, day he works a 12 hour shift. He looks tired all the time, but he always has a smile for everyone and enjoys a good chat. I don’t know how someone can do it, then I learned he has a family back home – including a baby girl.  He told me he’s going to see them again in maybe July or August this year. 12 hour shifts x 7 days a week for the next 22 weeks or so, before he can see his family again.  Lots of people talk about making sacrifices, but I doubt they really know the meaning of the word next to some of the people I see.

Due to the financial crisis, the local press has been doing a number of exposes on how some example individual residents have been affected. It even detailed their incomes, and how it’s broken down. If the figures are accurate, some of the workers here are sending 100% of their incomes home while living in basic share accommodation, and eating whatever food the company provides them – which, if you see the battalions of labourers piling out of the buses, is a pretty small plastic bag full.

Some of the people the paper interviewed were illiterate so they didn’t know anything about the financial crisis, like how it was caused. All they knew is they were getting even less money for what they did before.

It’s a bleak picture I’m painting, but it’s one that still looks on the bright side of life. Despite working crazy hours here for not much, huge distances away from their families, these people are able to provide for their family like they may not have imagined back home. And still remain quite happy throughout it. Kudos and big props to them.