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The Role of Cyberinfrastructure in Economic Development (07.01.09) Much has been written in the last decade about the emerging role of cyberinfrastructure, especially in the domains of e-science, military and infrastructure protection applications. The recognized benefits and accelerating scientific developments coming from these applications continue to produce enabling information technologies that permit its use in broader fields of endeavor, including education, healthcare delivery, law enforcement, transportation and manufacturing applications. Further, these new application domains now frame discussions of cyberinfrastructure in economic terms, value propositions not fully appreciated by the early adopters. More importantly, these value propositions are emerging in support of an expanding global service economy—where cyberinfrastructure is becoming the default platform for delivery of both old revitalized and new innovative services in the government, public and private sectors of the economy. Services, together with their enabling cyberinfrastructures, have merged to define the principle elements of new approaches to value production, in the form of service systems. Additionally, service systems are motivating new multidisciplinary academic and professional disciplines, resulting in new operational frameworks supporting accelerated creativity, innovation and economic growth. With present upheavals in interdependent global economic systems; with effects of these upheavals felt by governments, industries, corporations and individuals; with the situation compounded by financial, political and social realities; it is even more imperative that we consider employing a systems approach to proposed remedies. We should work to avoid solutions that do not take advantage of new technologies, do not address weakness in underlying capabilities, miss opportunities to change default isolationist paradigms, or worse, that compound existing problems by adding to complexity. We should instead think more broadly and systematically, in terms of service-oriented solutions based on shared resources that support a co-dependent constituency wishing to utilize their collective wisdom and energy to collaborate on requirements for and development of more effective solutions. Today, virtually every significant problem depends on information technology (IT) for its solution, whether in the most productive and wealthiest economies or in the least developed and poorest emerging economies. Whether focused on social services, safety and security, commerce, agriculture or transportation needs, solutions demand varying degrees of networking, data management, applications software, technical skills and effective human interfaces. This has been true for years, but within the last decade, IT infrastructure has evolved through standards, exponential improvements in cost and performance and openness to the point it is now commoditized and broadly scalable. The Internet has made the interconnection of heretofore-isolated systems almost routine. Issues of security and privacy remain, but various solutions are available for specific requirements. The essential issue now is the willingness of individuals and interdependent agencies to combine forces and collaborate to identify requirements for interoperability and mutually beneficial solutions to shared problems. Consequently, solutions to major economic development challenges must include IT and service systems that enable and support collaboration and high-performance distributed computing. Cyberinfrastructure: Cyberinfrastructure is an interconnected and managed set of high performance voice, video, and data computing systems and associated management services that define an information infrastructure for interconnecting users and their independent IT systems to shared application-oriented (i.e., problem domain-specific) service systems. In the same way federal highways enable trans-national transportation systems, cyberinfrastructure enables trans-organizational service systems. Service System: Service systems provide network-accessible services. A service system is an orchestrated collection of processes, resources, people and policies offered to humans or other service systems, governed by service level agreements (SLA) and delivered through a service-oriented application that is hosted on a cyberinfrastructure. Economic development, when viewed in this context, results from the creation, deployment and management of innovative service systems supporting various application domains, whether in the governmental, financial, commercial or educational sectors of the economy. In each sector, the suite of required services, the user communities served and the features of the underlying cyberinfrastructure may have unique requirements. In general, however, they will share much in common. Consequently, scale economics and the need for a degree of standardization argue for developing and sharing a regional cyberinfrastructure (aka, regional “grid”) for use by service providers representing the needs of all service domains. Further, as these applications address various interdependencies (e.g., government-to-commercial), they will naturally build higher-level service systems that bind them. Without a common underlying cyberinfrastructure, higher-level service systems are even more difficult to conceive, design and deploy. A principle goal of the Milwaukee Institute is to support the emergence of a regional cyberinfrastructure and a service-enhanced economy. This infrastructure will foster efficient economic development through creation of service systems within and among scientific research, educational, governmental and commercial activities in the SE Wisconsin region. Initially, the Institute is focusing on the research community, where understanding and experience with cyberinfrastructure is most mature. We anticipate that the success of this community’s activities will quickly flow into commercial and educational activities, which will lead to creation of innovative service systems that have measurable economic impact. Municipal Government Service Systems (03.28.09) Operating a municipal government is challenging; especially in balancing its responsibility to develop a region’s economy while simultaneously providing an efficient suite of public sector services. Furthermore, these two requirements must operate in financial equilibrium. Successful administration of this government enterprise requires managing a set of public service systems, each defined by specific value propositions as perceived by various user communities. Through enlightened design or cultural heritage or happenstance, municipal governments, typically decades in the making, have evolved to provide their services through multiple agencies. Agencies may be largely autonomous, or by policy, procedure or shared infrastructure their behaviors may be tightly coordinated. In many cases, their performance depends as much on longstanding social traditions and ad hoc operational paradigms as it does on efficient “engineered” operational designs. Consequently, municipal governance systems often operate as complex interactive social systems that persist for years across many changes in elected leadership. Effective budgeting may or may not exist, especially when economic conditions make year-over-year planning problematic. When structural or process upgrades are needed, they must take place incrementally over time, allowing services to continue to function during implementations. Change management in such an environment puts a premium on coordinating short- and long-term planning and execution. It also places special requirements on identifying and documenting the present “as is” and future “to be” models of service systems and their respective value propositions. In short, providing for continuous (evolutionary) process improvement of governance systems requires that they become “engineered systems” rather than merely ad hoc bureaucracies predicated on historical and political precedent. Viewed as an engineered set of service systems, government is better able to address the design, implementation and operation of individual services. Analysis of efficiencies of capital, information, energy and human resources becomes possible. Computational models of government services can be developed, exercised and used as a basis for planning, investment and deployment imperatives. Scale economics, achievable when service systems share IT and physical infrastructure, can lead more quickly to integrated information systems, smaller energy profiles and improved utilization of skilled human resources—all with potential cost benefits. Finally, with a more efficient and operationally stable government enterprise, non-governmental (e.g., academic, healthcare and commercial) enterprises have increased incentives and lower barriers to engaging in public-private partnerships. Interdependent value propositions are easier to calculate; public and private service systems may be linked; human resources can participate more freely between organizations; and shared IT and physical infrastructure important to both public and private enterprises can develop in harmony. The promise of efficient municipal government complemented by growth in public-private partnerships depends heavily on establishing shared and more open municipal infrastructure, both physical and informational. Physical infrastructure includes roads, buildings, water systems and other traditional “brick and mortar” resources. Information infrastructure (aka, “cyberinfrastructure”) includes communications, computing, databases and other IT systems and services. Municipalities have a long tradition with managing physical assets; they have very little experience with managing information assets. Paradoxically, essentially all productivity improvements in today’s service systems are inherently dependent IT infrastructure. Even physical asset management is an IT issue, spanning the design, acquisition and training, operation and maintenance and retirement and replacement phases of their lifecycles. Conclusions resulting from this perspective lead to a straightforward and systematic sequence of steps (somewhat oversimplified below).
The selection of the initial set of high impact service systems will force a number of important issues. First, it requires a dispassionate technical view of government service systems. Second, it forces creation of an unbiased measure of “value” that supports definition of value propositions for services, measures that will allow comparison of service systems, alone and in combination over time. Third, this process moves the dialog from a typically subjective (e.g., political) plane to a more objective (e.g., operational) one. Fourth, the process decouples and extracts issues of physical and informational infrastructure from the core value of the service, allowing for their independent and parallel evolution, investment and operation. Finally, this process enables government to move formally and pragmatically towards an information-based service-oriented operational model.
Optimism in a Pessimistic Time (02.10.09) In response to the excellent Sunday 02.08.09 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial entitled “Optimism for a pessimistic time,” we at the Milwaukee Institute want to declare our optimism. Difficult times typically force us to identify critical near-term needs. Often, however, our focus on the near-term is at the expense of adequate concern for what may appear as an uncertain future. While the world, the nation, Wisconsin and this region may have some hard times ahead, we can ill afford to ignore these longer-term issues. Our optimism stems from the belief that these challenges will temper us, help us to be more respectful of one another, to collaborate more effectively on thorny problems and will make us stronger as a result. Challenging times often lay bare what is most important, helping us see more clearly, becoming more responsible, individually and collectively, and allowing us to achieve higher levels of awareness, compassion and capability—to have clearer vision. That said, our challenge now is to avoid the despair, introversion and isolation the current economic crisis can engender. History provides many compelling examples where the key to overcoming fear and the resulting paralysis is a clear vision of higher goals and articulate leadership that is both forward-looking and action-oriented. By its nature, vision is an expression of hope. Leadership is a catalyst for action. In these times, the Milwaukee region can use more of both. As Roosevelt and his New Deal showed, the then depressed and paralyzed nation needed to invest in its financial and civil infrastructure to allow a more capable industrial economy to emerge. We are now experiencing something very similar. While reinvesting in that aging infrastructure is clearly necessary, it is far from sufficient. Our service-oriented economy, accounting for an estimated 70%-80% of GDP, has outpaced the capability of our national and regional information infrastructure and, more to the point, our vision to architect and skills to engineer, operate and utilize efficient and reliable services in nearly every sector of our economy. The financial meltdown was, in no small way, the byproduct of insufficient and, where present, archaic and ineffective automation of our financial institutions. Consequently, a new vision is needed that complements, while transcending, industrial-era paradigms. Realizing new information-based financial, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, education and government service systems demand strategic thinking and action. It requires improved K20 educational programs that introduce basic information and service concepts and associated technical skills. It requires new thinking about ways in which management guides development and deployment of systems that offer efficient commercial and governmental services. And it requires strategic planning and a greater commitment to both short and long-term IT capital investments, in both the public and private sectors. We are already, not at some ambiguous future date, an information-based economy. Yet our current contentious and partisan discourse in Washington, in Madison and in Milwaukee, is too often dominated by policy and investment paradigms rooted in the post-New Deal industrial economy. This is not a pessimistic or half-empty glass perspective. It is recognition of an opportunity, the half-full glass. Using President Obama’s “Yes We Can” mantra and his successful appeal for “Change,” we at the Institute envision a more competitive and vibrant regional economy. By employing improved IT infrastructure, we envision ways to motivate and educate our youth and to reach out and train an older workforce. We see ways to better analyze and deliver healthcare and emergency services, to improve delivery of critical social services, to empower people to fully participate in their government, and so much more. All of these initiatives require statewide and local commitments to building a stable, scalable and shared information infrastructure (a regional “cyberinfrastructure”), the IT analog of the federal highway system, which complements necessary investments in more traditional educational, commercial and governmental programs. Indeed, failure to do so would represent more than a mere loss or postponement of investments and opportunities. It would represent a commitment, while under tremendous economic pressures to become more efficient, to “doing the same things we’ve done in the past while expecting different results.” More poignantly, it would represent the continued atrophy of the region’s economic vitality, viability and competitiveness. The Milwaukee Institute is not only upbeat about the region’s potential; we are passionate in our belief that the region has the necessary academic research, commercial and governmental resources to move purposefully towards a modern and competitive information-based and services-oriented economy—If only we would utilize our capabilities. With leadership and modest investments, we believe we can improve the efficacy of collaboration among and the services provided by public and private enterprises. We can expand the quantity and quality of scientific research and its positive commercial byproducts. We can help motivate our youth to learn the skills they need to compete in global information-based markets, now and in the future. We can do so through the development a regional information infrastructure that allows us to compete with other technology savvy regions of the world, places whose vision and actions are already expanding their business development, entrepreneurship, social services and workforce development capabilities and options. Yes, let us definitely be prudent and consider carefully how we can most effectively and proactively respond to the current economic situation. But let us not become stoic, lacking vision, passion and conviction, or tighten our belts or make this a partisan political issue or, worse, allow the short-term nature of the Economic Stimulus Bill, whatever it turns out to be for Wisconsin, be excuses for ignoring what is really at issue here—our economic future. Rather, this situation should be a clarion call to jointly considering, planning for and acting upon what the region can be when, inevitably, we emerge to face a brighter day and a host of new opportunities in a more competitive, service-oriented, information-based and global “brave new world.”
Enlightened Discourse? (06.27.07) "The Higher the Climb, the Clearer the View" This was the title of an essay I wrote several years ago (circa 1997), the point of which was to express the value of viewing complex situations from an intellectual altitude above the base that polarizes and renders discussions contentious. People with vested interests in one side of a situation are not always rational, sensitive to others' points of view or objective about their own values. In these situations, arbitration afforded by neutral (philosophically higher level) perspectives can be of considerable value. The challenge, of course, is that allowing oneself to climb to a higher vantage point requires exerting extra energy and accepting value propositions defined from the broader perspective--putting one's values to a test. I have several friends and acquaintances whose religious, political and cultural values are so deeply engrained and whose responses are so automatic (programmed) that they are not, without considerable effort and gentle assistance, capable of seeing themselves and their views in a broader context, let alone entertain rational debates about alternative points of view. For them, there is no concept of a higher climb, a higher vantage point, alternate value propositions. They are snug in the familiarity and comfort of their current self images. Given that a significant part of our public discourse takes place in the media and further that the media seems more concerned with the entertainment value of issues than objective reporting and analysis of news, we seem to be constantly brought to the lowest common level of discourse, certainly not the highest. Consequently, rather than raising public awareness the media provides information that, like water, seeks its lowest level. Case in point: consider the silly and superficial format of CNN's email "polls," as found on Lou Dobbs' and Jack Cafferty's (Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room) shows. Other cases in point: the media's recent obsession with Paris Hilton, Ann Coulter's conservative diatribes and the often insulting blather found on liberal talk radio and TV political satire shows such as Bill Maher; all discourage studied opinion and a willingness to respect the diversity of opinion and the value of finding a higher plane on which to seek rational solutions to contentious issues. The media seems to exist to polarize. What is worse, contemporary discourse on complex matters requires a degree of intellectual honesty and a willingness to study issues. In lieu of that, antagonists have fallen to attacking people who hold opposite opinions. This tendency to "blame" some individual or group for the ills of the world has become pandemic. The world's favorite target today seems to be President George Bush. He has become the individual responsible for our collective discomfort for issues ranging from global warming, to poverty, immigration, education, terrorism and the state of the US healthcare system, to name a few complex matters. Regardless of what you think of President Bush, blaming him or his administration for the state of such complex maters is not rational. It doesn't seem to matter to those who seek simple answers to complex problems that these issues are deeply rooted in social, religious and political dogma with roots in global and historical contexts. This isn't a rant on left vs. right politics or Jewish vs. Muslim religious leanings or any other seemingly dichotomous issue. Having philosophical roots is certainly not the issue; being philosophically bigoted and wearing intellectual blinders is. This is a rant on those who hold on to their opinions in the face of compelling and contrary facts or fear of change or, at least, on those whose biases are so deeply engrained that they cannot see their personal forests for their inherited trees. One of my liberal friends is so upset with US policy in the Middle East (focused, of course, on the Iraq war), that he thinks Bush and Cheney should be impeached, if not something worse. Asked about the roots of Arab enmity for the US, he points to the last six years of Republican led government. It apparently doesn't matter that poverty, history and ignorance provide fuel for the flames burning in Arab populations. He is a Jewish fellow, and seems to have no clue that our support of the state of Israel since the end of WWII might have something to do with the intensity of hatred that led to pre- and post-091101 terrorist events in the US, Spain and the UK, let alone to present conditions in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Iran, Indonesia and Syria. How ironic that his religious freedom in the US has more to do with current events than the result of the most recent free and democratic elections in the US. Here's to all of us, here and abroad, showing more willingness to climb up from our local and typically selfish biases to see the world and its peoples with compassion, more holistically and to shed our intellectual blinders, entertaining open conversations that results in solutions that do not require attacks on individuals. Our problems are bigger than that--we live in a global village that requires religious, social and political tolerance. Idealistic as this sounds, it is desperately needed. We must stop blaming others for our ignorance and biases and get on with doing the hard lifelong work of gaining and improving awareness and seeking solutions rather than pointing fingers. If you must point, point upward while climbing.
Opinions? Or Noise? (03.14.07) Time was when you could expect people to actually think before they spoke. The blogsphere has done away with much of that. You can now blurt out for all the world to hear (read) just about any irrational thought as though it was actually the byproduct of a studied opinion. What's more, the media and their 24 hour news cycles seem so starved for "content" that they are willing to listen and reflect on this cacophony. CNN, MSNBC, FOX and the rest have now dedicated their non-prime time hours to the "trivial pursuit" of blogsphere ramblings. We now have "soap opera news," the equivalent of gossip masquerading as news. The scary part of this "trend" is that it may reflect the soft underbelly of a world population that is increasingly unprepared, and therefore largely incapable, of making rational judgments about what's going on around them. The educational divide (with its digital accelerants) is providing more and more people with cell phones, game consoles, and web browsers that allow them to believe their opinions really matter. Being enabled is not the same as being able. The fact that the world votes more on American Idol than in national and local elections should be a hint that we've got our priorities out of synch. The fact that more people graduate with technical degrees in India and China than in the US should also be of some significance. Are we losing grip? I think so, but it's never too late. One result of this breadth versus depth reality is that we have lost the ability for reasoned discourse--everything must be black or white, good or bad, Democratic or Republican. These are icons for false dichotomies. The world is much more nuanced and varied to fall into nice neat either-or situations. Our political process has become hamstrung, if not seriously damaged, by politicians bickering over left versus right. Republicans suffer from polarization caused by religious zealots on the right; Democrats are equally frozen in the headlights of their lunatic left. The resultant inability to actually discuss solutions (that by nature exist only in the middle) has left the political process and the people who aspire to public office mired and looking increasingly irrelevant. Here's to the web as, ultimately, a place where reason emerges from the noise of unstudied opinion (especially in the soapy media!) and effective political and social processes emerge from enlightened discourse.
Half Full- Half Empty (10.05.06) Is it just me, or are we culturally stuck in the "half-empty" glass syndrome? No matter where I turn, our public discourse about nearly everything seems to focus on what's wrong and who's to blame. It would seem much more constructive if we could focus, at least periodically, on what is right and how, through continuous incremental improvements, we can make things better--the proverbial half-full glass syndrome. We, as witnessed by the tenor and content of news reported on ABC, FOX, CNN, etc., aren't just pessimistic, we're down right antagonistic--polarized and unwilling to listen to those who have different views, resorting to obnoxious (rude!) characterizations and accusations. Civil society demands that this bipolar behavior get moderated. Maybe we all need to take some Rytalin, practice a little Yoga or at least learn some manners. Personally, it appears that the media has an important and unmet role to play in our collective consciousness. Instead of the cacophonous noise they condescendingly pass as "news" via ostensibly negative, sound-bite sized, sensationalistic and Paparazzi-style coverage of events in the world, it seems logical (reasonable, prudent, and certainly preferable) that they seek to educate and enlighten us. Good teaching (Plato) involves asking good questions and encouraging open discourse. They could encourage discussion (as opposed to those silly and superficial sound-bite email responses they solicit to typically significant and convoluted national or international issues), preceded with a balanced presentation of what we do know about issues (rather than what we assume within a given news cycle).
The present Sen. Mark Foley "scandal" is a case in point. While his behavior is reprehensible and demands that he be held accountable, the firestorm that has followed is largely theatrical, filled with political agenda and media sensationalism. We are, once again, being encouraged to rush to judgment, to blame someone or some party and to polarize our opinions about a situation that none of us understand. When did the media become a courtroom? Where are the rational arguments presented by the accused and the accusers? Where is the judge responsible for enforcing "rules of order" and providing guidance to those whose opinions actually matter? The media seems to think its role in our public discourse is that of judge, jury and executioner. Accused individuals whose situations become public, for the sake of politics or entertainment, are pilloried in the media and "stoned" without being afforded due process and the presumption of innocence. "News" is looking increasingly like the covers of magazines on the rack at the grocery store check out counter: superficial, naive, salacious and silly. Where's Edward R. Morrow when we need him?
What is "Enterprise" (06.12.06) "Enterprise" is a term used throughout the business community, often in context of IT-related matters, but generally without clear meaning. It is sometimes used as an adjective (as in "enterprise IT") or as a noun (as in "commercial enterprise"). It may refer to a specific operational component (manufacturing) or a specific suite of transaction processing application (ERP). We offer a more precise definition here in an effort to foster a conversation about effective enterprise governance. Definition An enterprise is an individual, identifiable and sovereign entity (noun), whether large or small, commercial or governmental, public or private, domestic or multi-domestic. It is a mission-oriented unit of organization whose existence is defined in terms of a one or more value propositions. A viable enterprise is one whose value propositions remains valid over time through efficient adaptation to variations in both its surroundings and its internal capabilities. Accordingly, sustainable enterprises are evolutionary, necessarily maintaining awareness of unfolding tactical, operational and strategic situations. Such awareness is a precondition to subsequent complex, calculated and time-bounded responses. Additionally, enterprises form communities, functioning in one or more “operational commons” in concert with other enterprises. Within these commons they compete for limited resources and cooperate for mutual benefit. They are thus codependent and coevolutionary, requiring that their individual governance systems support control capabilities providing unilateral and multilateral (joint) situational awareness, planning (both proactive and reactive) and plan execution (including shared policies, resources and performance metrics). Control capabilities must, in turn, be guided by command (decision) capabilities that allow responsible human actors to supervise achievement and maintenance of the enterprise’s value propositions, unilaterally and jointly.
The Healthcare Enterprise (05.05.06) Wednesday and Thursday this week I attended the Digital Healthcare Conference 2006 at the University of Wisconsin Madison. It is the third year of this event and once again it brought together researchers and hospital executives to present and discuss topics related to healthcare delivery and the role of information technologies in improving patient safety, increasing clinic and hospital productivity and, hopefully, lowering costs. A keystone issue in this pursuit has been and remains the goal of achieving a unified and accessible electronic (i.e., digital) patient record. Caveat: I am not a healthcare provider. I have been and will in the future be a consumer of healthcare systems and services. Furthermore, I wish to better understand how the US healthcare industry, and its component clinic, hospital and educational enterprises can and "should" operate under the stresses imposed by significant (i.e., catastrophic) natural and terrorist disasters - especially the approaching potential avian flu pandemic. As a senior executive and a systems scientist, one that professes to understand requirements for effective enterprise governance, these conferences provide a concentrated emersion into the thinking and pragmatics of healthcare delivery. Consequently, they provide an excellent opportunity to test the theories and architectural principles that underlie our "theory of enterprise command and control." The conference left me with several impressions and a few conclusions. 1. The private healthcare infrastructure in the US, as well as it does perform and as well-supported it is by academic research into drugs, genomics, and other fields, is in crisis. The cost of patient care is disproportionate to the efficacy of that care as measured in public health terms. The number of deaths or prolonged hospital stays caused by human errors, by any reasonable measure, is exceptionally high. And the costs are rising significantly faster than all other economic indicators, perhaps with the exception of energy. The current system is not sustainable in it current form. 2. The philosophy and practice of healthcare delivery, including the training of doctors, in spite of enormous investments in computing, communications and diagnostic equipment, is patterned much as it was following WWII, as we witnessed on TV with Dr. Welby during the period 1968-1976. 3. One major difference is the loss of the generalist and a form of holistic medicine, replaced today by specialists of every sort. Patients in hospitals are more like shoppers (albeit involuntary) in a mall, moving from one clinical silo to another; from one set of specialized processes, practitioners and diagnostic equipment to another. This reductionist approach to medicine has provided significantly improved diagnostics, but arguably poorer overall results. We learned at the conference that US longevity actually fell, as reported by data from 2004. 4. Many physicians have privileges in more than one hospital. Policies, people and equipment vary across these enterprises, a significant source of error and a barrier to achieving unified patient records. 5. Clinicians have tremendous responsibility for capital expenditures, and their parochial needs often lead to information systems integration challenges - especially related to patient records. 6. Being necessarily a conservative industry, healthcare enterprises are late adopters of new processes and technologies. Being a follower can have significant benefits, especially if you adopt the mature best practices discovered by the early adopters. However, there seems to be an institutional need for healthcare to reinvent and ignore lessons learned in transportation, industrial automation, automobile, aircraft, and other aggressive users and early adopters of of information technology. 7. In the conference presentations by healthcare executives and practitioners spoke ostensibly about "information technology" as a "solution" to operating problems. There was little discussion about the policies, processes and people that are to be supported by the technology. The industry seems reluctant to [re] design their processes to be able to acquire and effectively utilize IT. IT is not a solution - its provides infrastructure. This issues is tied directly to the Dr. Welby service delivery paradigm. 8. Hospitals, hospital associations and clinics operate without coherent enterprise models on which to base operating assumptions, policies, capabilities and performance measures. Without such models it is hard to imagine "continuous process improvement" programs, integrated operations, effective asset management or uniform performance measures - let alone a unified patient record supported by effective information security (a la, HIPAA). Net-net: Healthcare enterprise command and control systems and services are necessary, but as a precursor the industry must a) want to change, b) develop enterprise models that admit to unified governance, c) learn to operate in federated "communities of interest" and be willing to accept lessons from other industries.
Enterprise Systems Series -- Part 1 -- (04.06.06)
In the words of Lawrence Lessig, professor of constitutional law at Stanford University, “architectures allow.” He was speaking ostensibly of challenges faced in developing legal frameworks that allow or encourage openness and innovation in the end-to-end architecture of the Internet, or more generally, in the virtual spaces we call cyberspace. But the notion is no less relevant to more traditional architectures, those of buildings, transportation systems, social systems and the infrastructures that underwrite institutions of government and economy. This brief paper outlines the dimensions of the architecture of enterprise, the operational frameworks that encourage innovation and growth in commerce. Such architectures are in contrast to enterprise frameworks that are closed, benign, or worse, that discourage innovation through legal, proprietary, predatory, or repressive practices. Innovation is a driver of growth. In the development of technology, commerce and government, and in the development of life within our biosphere, growth is a necessary component of viability, a gradient along which adaptation takes place. And viability is an obviously necessary property of sustainable, conscious systems (whether real or virtual) immersed within evolving contexts. Adaptability, in turn, requires that viable systems be reactive, responsive to both internal and external stimuli and aware enough to assimilate their unfolding experiences into knowledge (policies) and processes (mechanisms) that keep them in dynamic (homeostatic) equilibrium with their surroundings. This balance, this dance, this ability to perceive and selectively evolve, and the agility exhibited during such exchanges, is essential to a system’s survivability. Enterprise, whether governmental or commercial, biological or mechanical, whether focused on political, social or technical matters, must clearly be a dynamical system in order to offer and promote a useful value proposition to its clients. This value must be sustainable, depending in no small measure on the enterprise’s agility in adapting to forces exerted by environmental (e.g., financial, technical, competitive) pressures. A true measure, therefore, of appropriate enterprise architecture is its capability to exhibit sustainable value under such dynamic forces. The architecture of a system may be defined by specifying of its dynamic structure, the functions defining the value it provides its environment and its relative performance characteristics. Structural properties include its static and dynamic organization. Its functions are those services that the enterprise exists to provide its clients, both internal and external. And its performance characteristics are the objective measures by which it and others gauge its viability. The operating domain defined by its architecture “allows” the system to be viable, to evolve, and to sustain its principal value propositions – to develop and sustain its contributions to the community in which it is immersed. Architecture in and of itself does not guarantee viability It only enables it. The notion that systems must grow (expand, evolve, adapt, create, sustain) in order to survive is key to the argument that viable systems must be open to information and energy flows, out of and in to their containing environments. With an appropriate energy budget, information becomes a catalyst that, depending on the state of dynamic equilibrium of the system, may push it into new (improved or higher) states of equilibrium. Such changes in state constitute positive growth when one or more value propositions are enhanced, and constitute a step toward extinction when one or more value propositions are diminished. Thus, strategic goals of a viable enterprise include remaining open to information flow and using resources efficiently in order to evolve along lines of increasing value. Not unilaterally or selfishly, however. Expansion assumes that the community of enterprise is freely associative, and elastic. Information and resources are shared among entities with “common cause” on behalf of their mutually enlightened self-interests. Effective enterprise architecture provides a platform for creative behaviors individually and in associations in the same sense the Internet architecture enables connectivity and information exchange among interdependent entities. Viability in open, free market environments has other important determinants. As mentioned, enterprises do not operate alone. They are members of communities of interest, or common cause, where growth is sustained by both competitive and cooperative behavior, by individuals and the community as a whole. In today’s business climate, cooperation is increasingly required to sustain growth factors of 10% or more. This growth must be accompanied by profitability (e.g., sustainable returns on assets deployed) while at the same time providing customers with increased functionality in products and services, all at lower prices. So operating dynamics of viable business would logically require an enterprise architecture that not only allows innovation, but encourages it – for products, for services, for infrastructure, for operations, and for financing. The last decade of global business development witnessed consolidations in almost all segments of the market, with expansion of individual businesses often a result of synthetic growth caused by mergers and acquisitions, versus organic growth brought about by innovations in core value propositions. On one hand, the complexity of assimilating acquisitions has absorbed valuable time and financial resources of enterprise managements that could otherwise have been applied to innovation in other dimensions. On the other hand, many industrial sectors have witnessed the elimination of entire businesses. At minimum, their redundant and inefficient infrastructures and poor business practices have been purged. As a byproduct, these consolidations have fueled an expansion of information technologies in the form of “enterprise resource planning” (ERP), “systems integration” (SI) and the wholesale adoption of the Internet and its more open distributed computing model (e.g., global information grid, GIG [6]). We come full circle, again, to a realization that communities of common cause increasingly have become bound by life on the electronic frontier – its codes of conduct, or lack of them. Here innovation is more often found external to the enterprise – on the frontier, outside at the fringe of the network (so called "edge organizations"), far removed from the core value propositions of the dominant enterprises. It is here that openness and agility are requirements for sustainable growth; where “property” (e.g., copyrights, patents) is more likely to be shared (legally or illegally); and where the law, as Lessig likes to say [7], is the code. It is within this context then, that we should pose our questions about the principles of enterprise architecture, architectures that are appropriate for sustainable growth and innovation. What is enterprise in a global networked economy? What is the code of these enterprises? How do we manage proactively an enterprise that must survive in a web of globally competing and cooperating entities; where distance is technically irrelevant and timeliness matters more than ever? How do we deal with real-time decision and control in “always on” commerce, where timescales have been reduced from years to months to days to hours to (on the shop and trading floors) minutes and seconds? These are but a few of the pertinent questions whose answers challenge traditional business management practices. Most of these practices were firmly entrenched in the post-WWII industrial economies, and most are predicated on the socio-financial structures of management – as opposed to the architecture, instrumentation and engineering of enterprise. Answers are emerging, many at the intersection of these two philosophies. There is already evidence that the architectures that will win – that will enhance enterprise viability in a global, real-time [5], networked economy – will exhibit new characteristics. First, enterprise managements will recognize the need for new tools to simultaneously satisfy the growth objectives of their two distinct and equally important clients: the financial community (investors) that provide capital and expect financial returns at least as good as other financial markets [1]; and the consumers of products and services that expect quality, price and performance at least as good as the best competitor. Second, satisfying these two constituents requires a level of innovation that will continually exceed an enterprise’s internal capabilities, requiring the creation and management of external value-producing alliances [2]. Third, to be effective such alliances require an “intellectual commons”, a place (most likely in cyberspace) where intellectual property rights are relaxed if not suspended, at least in principle, so that members of the alliance community can freely engage in the creation of added value that sits above and extends beyond current knowledge and best practices and generates meaningful financial returns for all participants. Fourth, partnerships will require more efficient engagement rules, supported by more efficient contracts with less onerous intellectual property laws, supporting the sharing of the resulting intellectual property derived from association. And fifth, dynamic and complex enterprises will need to be managed more holistically, taking advantage of information technology in concert with the science and engineering practices typically associated with automation and control of complex systems (cybernetics [4]). On this last point, enterprise engineering must emerge from its traditional academic silos in departments of manufacturing, business, IT and industrial engineering. Enterprise engineering is not only about programming machine tools, or doing a better job of production scheduling. It must also be about providing instrumentation for automating processes that include decision and control at higher levels of the enterprise. We can automate whatever we can exactly specify, and since architecture requires specification we can automate many processes that have traditionally been the purview of ad hoc management practices. Thus, enterprise engineering can and should be about autonomic behavior in complex decision (aka, command) and control systems, and about releasing management resources to deal with knowledge and institutional learning in anticipation of change, rather than solely monitoring and responding to routine operational issues. Enterprise engineering should become an accepted and widely applied business discipline that merges the best practices in business and finance with those of systems science, including what we now associate with back office “IT.” Enterprise engineering should be about the harmonization (integration) of business and engineering best practices mixed with a heavy dose of new thinking. It is, in principle, capable of creating practical implementations of enterprise architectures that will allow the kinds of adaptive enterprises needed on the frontier. Just as bio-informatics and bioengineering are providing a new and exciting framework for research and development in biology and chemistry, we expect that advances in enterprise engineering will enable an equivalent revolution in research, design and development of global, real-time, distributed enterprise – enterprise appropriate for the codes of cyberspace [3]. This brief discussion is in not offered as a criticism of traditional business or academic engineering practices currently in vogue. It is an observation that we have reached a new plateau, and if we are to successfully architect (i.e., proactively and holistically design) enterprise systems for a global networked economy, ones that are agile and that encourage innovation, we must imbue current disciplines with more formal applications of management, systems science and technology. A decade of ad hoc application of computing and communications technologies (in the form of "business process engineering"), while significantly increasing productivity and quality in many aspects of business and government, has yet to realize anything close to an enterprise architecture and associated operations “bridge”, where captain and officers meet and in real-time, cooperatively manage the present and plan for the probable futures of an enterprise – let alone to do so with expressed commitments of stewardship for the ecology of relevant local and global communities – and their emerging intellectual commons. References[1] Bayne, J.; A Software Architecture for Control of Value Production in Federated Systems; accepted for publication at 7th World Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics & Informatics (SCI2003), July 2003. [2] Bayne, J.; Architecture of Federated Enterprise; accepted for publication at ISA EXPO [3] Bayne, J.; Automation and Control in Grid-Connected Federations; available at www.echelon4.com. [4] Beer, S., Brain of the Firm, Wiley, 2nd Edition, 1995 [5] Clark, R., et al, Distributed Real-time Specification of Java: A Status Report, Revised 2002, www.real-time.org [6] Global Grid Forum, 2002, www.gridforum.org [7] Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace; Basic Books, 1999
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