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|In: App Dev Methodologies|Last Updated:

Your resolutions for 2018:

Resolution #1: Send me ManagementSpeaks. Keeping an ear open for these is an excellent way to keep yourself grounded. Also, my supply is getting low.

Resolution #2: Send KJRs you like to your friends, family, colleagues, and especially people you don’t like and want to irritate. They’ll thank you. Except for the ones who won’t.

Resolution #3: Let me know how I’m doing … not only on the subjects I write about, but also on whether I’m writing about the right subjects.

Resolution #4: Give up on TOGAF.

This one might need a bit more explanation …

For those unlettered in the arcana of enterprise architecture, TOGAF stands for The Open Group Architecture Framework. According to the Open Group, TOGAF®, an Open Group Standard, is a proven enterprise architecture methodology and framework used by the world’s leading organizations to improve business efficiency.

Before diving into the important reasons to abandon TOGAF, a question: In what way is TOGAF proven? I Googled “TOGAF SUCCESS RATE” and came up dry. So far as I can tell neither the Open Group nor anyone else has even defined a TOGAF success metric, let alone tracked improvement against a baseline.

And a quibble: According to the above explanation, TOGAF’s goal is business efficiency. But … efficient with respect to what? Cost? Electrical consumption? Weight loss per hour of exercise? “Efficient” is meaningless without this information. And anyway, efficiency isn’t always what’s most desirable in a business. Effectiveness is the better goal; efficiency is one form of effectiveness among many. Target the wrong goal and the rest really doesn’t matter.

More important (but not most important) is a TOGAF intrinsic: It’s a high overhead approach to business and technical architecture management that ends up fostering rigidity rather than agility.

Documenting the current state is labor intensive. Designing the desired future state is labor intensive. Maintaining the documentation for both as projects finish and IT deploys new or changed information technology is labor intensive.

Meanwhile, attempts to secure funding for architecture remediation generally fail in the competition for budget and staffing with projects whose purpose is delivering direct business value.

But we’ve covered this ground before in KJR. What’s new that makes TOGAF abandonment a 2018 imperative?

TOGAF’s foundation contains a fundamental flaw. We’ve been able to wallpaper over it so far, but won’t be able to ignore it much longer. The flaw: its fixed-layer model.

In the world according to TOGAF, which to be fair has, until today, been quite similar to the world according to KJR, architecture has four layers with well-defined boundaries: the Business layer, Application layer, Data layer, and Technology layer.

But their boundaries are increasingly blurry.

Start with the technology layer. It’s really two distinct layers, infrastructure and platforms.

Infrastructure includes everything applications run on and data are stored in and managed by: facilities; networks; virtualization technology; servers, both physical and virtual; and so on.

Platforms are the tools IT uses to build applications. Except that in many cases the tool IT uses to build an application is an application, not a platform. IT organizations create new capabilities using tools or APIs built into ERP packages, Salesforce, and, for that matter, SharePoint all the time.

And it’s even messier than that, because increasingly, IT doesn’t build applications using just one underlying application as a platform. IT uses an enterprise service bus (ESB) or some equivalent integration technology to create a virtual “source of truth” service out of a collection of “systems of record.”

It builds applications out of these services rather than making direct use of application APIs.

Unless they’re expert systems built out of business rules … and it isn’t remotely clear whether business rules are code or data.

Then there’s intersystem integration, something TOGAF has never represented well. Too bad, because in my experience, integration is where most of the architecture improvement opportunities lie.

Somehow, most companies have still failed to replace their tangle of custom, point-to-point, largely batch, poorly documented and increasingly fragile inter-system interfaces with well-engineered integration. And yet even depicting systems interfaces and integration is pretty much an afterthought for TOGAF and its brethren.

SOA (service oriented architecture) with an ESB provides tools for building engineered integration, but not a methodology for designing it. Documenting the current mess? Even less.

So stop trying to implement TOGAF. Instead, clean up your interface tangle while waiting for the Open Group to address TOGAF’s deficiencies.

And finally …

Resolution #5: Stop making resolutions. Resolutions motivate people to be better than they are by making them feel guilty when they don’t live up to them. But really, don’t you have enough people in your life trying to make you feel guilty without piling on yourself?

# # #

Elsewhere in the news: Check out Bob’s latest in CIO magazine: “How to kill a dead project.” Okay, that isn’t really a resolution. Check it out anyway.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

We’re living in an explosion of information, or so we’re told. And we are, although the usual metrics tossed around … bytes added to the Internet in a unit of time … have little to do with it.

Information is, properly defined, the stuff that reduces uncertainty. Most of these bytes don’t do this. Some deliberately increase uncertainty because their publishers want to confuse us. Some decrease uncertainty but in the wrong direction — they encourage us to believe things that just aren’t so.

Then there’s entertainment. It accounts for a lot of those bytes, but reduces no uncertainty. Unless, that is, you think knowing more about the ways of The Force counts.

But even filtering all that out, we know a lot about a lot, and more every day.

About that word we. No matter the subject and what’s known about it, even though we might know a lot, most of us don’t.

We can’t. So while, for example, we know new species arise through “survival of the fittest,” we’re wrong.

A relative few of us know it’s more interesting than that: New species are the result of random DNA mutations, some of which are sufficiently advantageous within the mutant’s environment that he, she, or it leaves behind more descendants.

Except, there’s much more to it than that. If you’re curious, Google “epigenetics” to discover just one dimension of the overall complexity.

The survival-of-the-fittest we vastly outnumbers those of us who understand the random-mutation-and-reproductive-advantage version of evolutionary theory. That we, in turn, is far more numerous than those who know what’s known about the subject.

And that’s just one subject. Imagine how much the 7+ billion people on earth know in total — how much there is to know that no one of us will ever be aware of.

We reached that inflection point — the accumulation of knowledge that made it impossible for any of us to know even a small fraction of what all of us know — a very long time ago.

I think we’ve reached another inflection point in the accumulation of knowledge that is, in its own way, even more daunting. To understand what it is …

A month or so ago my wife called my attention to an article about Edward Witten, a physicist who researches “dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature” (“A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality,” Quanta, 11/28/2017).

Prior to reading the article I wasn’t just ignorant about dualities in physics and math. I was ignorant that dualities is a subject, and only barely more aware of emergent space-time.

This is the new inflection point in human knowledge. We’re in a time when none of us knows even a tiny fraction of the subjects the collective we know something about.

We knew we were ignorant. We no longer even know what we’re ignorant about.

Faced with knowing none of us can even know all of the questions the collective we are asking, let alone what we know about the answers … faced with this, we’re each left with choosing how to cope.

There are those who simply reject it. They’re in denial, figuring anything they don’t understand just isn’t very important. Or, if it is, it’s really much simpler than what the so-called experts say.

But that makes no sense. Our brains are roughly the size of a cantaloupe. We’re using them to try to understand a universe that’s roughly 529,474,682,880,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger (linearly, assuming I did the math right). When someone thinks they might possibly have an accurate bead on what is and isn’t important to comprehend they’re displaying, I think, the height of arrogance.

If denial doesn’t work for you, consider despair. From nature’s perspective we aren’t merely physically miniscule, but as individuals our knowledge will forever be miniscule as well. Faced with this realization, giving up isn’t entirely irrational. What’s the point of learning anything, we might wonder, given the impossibility of putting even the slightest detectable dent in our individual ignorance?

What’s the point? Just turn it around. Our situation is I think, marvelous, maybe humbling, certainly not depressing. Every new discovery can be an unalloyed pleasure … like encountering Van Gogh for the first time. Human knowledge is a collection of experiences on a scale. Those on one end are merely nifty, those on the other awe inspiring. As Pogo put it, “We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”

If knowledge is wealth, then no matter where we each turn there’s an embarrassment of riches to be had.

Feel free to take as much as you want. There will be plenty left for the rest of us to enjoy.

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