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Archestra

The Architecture of Enterprise Strategy: an open studio of research on the link between how and why

Notes 2.0 about Web 3.0November 27 2008

The following accompanies and elaborates on the earlier archestra article "Notes 1.0 about Web 3.0".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview: online capabilities in search, collaboration and invention follow each other in a cycle driving the evolution of the "Web" from earlier levels of maturity to later greater levels. This diagram illustrates the interrelated dynamics.

Each of the capabilities continues to increase in functional sophistication and reliability over time. For each respective capability, this change broadens its range of usefulness, which increases the range of user-roles that may adopt it -- as in, adapt tasks to include it in the task. While each of the different basic roles -- Producer, Provider, and Receiver -- will take advantage of enhancements, the roles respectively tend to drive particular rates and types of enhancement of some capabilities more than others. This relative difference is represented by their positioning in the diagram.

Interaction of the roles is selective but continual, as all are active all the time. It is important to accept that much of the "selective" interaction is speculative; however, any person in the role may program the interactions in various ways, such as to c

Notes 1.0 about Web 3.0November 23 2008

Earlier I have written about how and why I hate the "Web 2.0" shtick.

In fact, demonstrating the disregard, I've generally completely avoided any semblance of writing anything about it to anyone but an invitational or hypothetical audience. Nonetheless, the popularity of the subject leads one to things said by others that warrant being remembered and shared. In which case, there is an ethical responsibility to give credit where credit is due.

Example: by Googling the phrase "Web 3.0", find a path to Sramana Mitra and more than a year of comments about her Web 3.0 "framework". For latecomers like myself, Mitra seems to already have "celebrity status" -- albeit earned. I mention that only to point out that except for the internet's easy way of cultivating coincidences, I may have never heard of her (as I'm sure she has not heard of me). I think that very fact is one of the main and most simply profound points of having the internet at our disposal -- which is to say that it reflects more about the internet than it does about Mitra, a point about which I hope she would share my appreciation. And it should fit into her greater scope of thinking about the web.

Suffice it to say that her framework for defining Web 3.0, offered as a catchy formula (Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS... see for yourself), provoked me to say what I have said on her website's comments and again said below. I do not agree with her definition of w

Control: Got, or Not?November 16 2008

Execution means operations, and whoever is behind the wheel must have control; otherwise we can pretty much anticipate that things won't predictably get where they are supposed to be, and/or that there will be a crash.

Control of operations, by definition, means controlling the range of effects produced by driving a collection of interactions. The usual approach to tracking degrees of control is to put gauges on each one of the smallest number of critical states (conditions) produced within operations -- and to use real-time gauges as continuously as possible. The correlation of the information from the various gauges tells whether overall operations are proceeding within an acceptable range of behaviors.

The collection of gauges is readily recognized as a dashboard. But the correlation of them is where the actual control begins. The diagram above shows the Archestra model for this correlation.

The model shows how to avoid non-sense metrics and focus on essential observations and connections. For example, there is a shared boundary between Priority and Plan, where the sharing indicates the need for an instrument that coordinates the priority and the plan. The instrument is Policy. Meanwhile, the primary rational coordinator of 

What Matters versus What Counts, EncoreNovember 1 2008

Any time you're busy with analysis, construction or movement, you're working on "distinctions". Such efforts generally result in ideas like Part X not Part Y or more vs. less; newer vs. older; or near vs. far (and here vs. there) ... These general differences each go on to be both specified and named with much more precision, for particular situations.

These efforts aren't happening by accident. So we often take it for granted that we should really bother seriously with their outcomes. But this default attitude might be a mistake.

Now that John Bogle's new book Enough is published, one of the fundamental concepts underlying archestra's separated definitions of "value" versus "worth" will be in the spotlight on a multinational basis for a while.

Outside of the book, but to recap archestra notes, there are a number of ways to summarize the working idea involved, such as the three cases below. In all of them, there is the underlying base dynamic that some kind of effort, let's call it work, is producing some measured distinction -- more... better... enough, or whatever -- that didn't exist before the work was done.

But all of the cases point at the need for understanding that unless we know what matters, counting by that measure is always possible but risks being (at least) irrelevant or even (at

The Busyness of InformationSeptember 22 2008

MicroStrategy has published an online article about the 5 Styles of BI, which is interesting primarily in its view that these are operational styles that "evolved" in the form of tool functionality.

It might be more precise to say that the article promises understanding of the adoption of BI capabilities by the currently recognized differing types of BI users, which are relabelled and listed here:

• activity monitors
• managers and dataset explorers
• information explorers and power users
• professional information analysts
• information subscribers

This offers a view of how business is learning to adapt to BI technology so that the tools can be more effective. The individual user may find it easier, as well, to identify where he or she fits into the big picture of possibilities. In turn, that refines demand for the BI tools and helps to organize deployments.

But to get a real grip on this, it makes sense to reorganize the groups into producers, providers and consumers.

• Information Producers find and manipulate data to create information appropriate for describing and distinguishing events and conditions.
• Information Providers group and package information for managed delivery to designated recipients per requirements mandated by rules and/or agreements.
• Information Co