If data is the lifeblood, how’s your heart?

Organisations are paying more attention to data management, often driven by compliance, privacy or cyber security concerns. But simply holding data doesn’t generate value.

We need a thorough understanding of the relationships between data (numbers, text, pictures, audio, video, facts), information (data meaningful to humans: salary, sales, order, invoice, fingerprint etc), knowledge (richly connected data: contextual data, trend data, inference) and wisdom (deep insights, experience shaped). Value increases as we move up this hierarchy. Alongside that, if we are to understand what we have, manage it properly, secure it, use it, integrate it etc., we need meta data: data about data. Where is it from? How is it structured? Who owns it? How much can we trust it? How is it derived? What format is it in? Where do we keep it? How long should we hold it? What are the constraints on its use…

All of the above are complicated by the explosion of data brought on by new forms of data; technology capabilities to capture, store, manipulate, communicate, generate, represent and analyse data and innovative applications. Virtualisation of products and services compounds the problem, as more of what we offer and sell to customers is information rather than physical.

There are more opportunities than ever before to profit from data, information, knowledge and its proper use. But there are also more challenges associated with doing it properly, successfully, reliably and securely. All of these rely upon skills and capabilities. Specifically, we need high skills to understand, analyse, model, design and implement data related products and services. This is the realm of Data and Information Architecture.

Architects also need to understand business requirements, facilitate communication and build consensus, define vision, bridge gaps and scope initiatives. They need to guide projects and solution designers. Crucially, they need to connect the business/conceptual view of data with the logical (application) and physical (database and technology) views. They need to devise, apply and encourage use of good principles to evolve the data and information landscape in positive ways.

Data management is ultimately a business responsibility, but can be assisted by many technical skills, including: maturity assessment, modelling, meta data management, technology architecture, risk analysis, integration design and considerations of security and privacy.
A comprehensive data/information architecture and data management capability is vital to deliver business benefits as well as ensure security, privacy and acceptable risk.

These are all topics covered in depth in our Techniques and Deliverables of Information Architecture intensive online live course from the 7-11th November. See details here.

#dataarchitecture #informationarchitecture #digitaltransformation #bigdata #businessintelligence #bi #datamodelling

Satisfied Stakeholders

A stakeholder is someone (person, entity) that has an interest in the outcome of something. An investor in a business is a stakeholder, as are its CEO and its suppliers and its staff members. A sponsor in a project is a stakeholder, as are the people who will use the resulting system and maintain it. Stakeholders have different perspectives, motivations and expectations. Often, we will rely upon stakeholders for things that we want: investment, information, participation, approval, support, resources… So, it is really important to identify stakeholders, keep them engaged and to meet their expectations (within reason and without compromising our own goals).

Another reason to really keep an eye on stakeholders is this: If we are a business, we prosper to the extent that we continue to deliver value to our stakeholders; delivering that value requires capabilities, which in turn rely upon people, processes, systems, data, technology etc. So this guides where we put our focus and what we need to optimise in our business and enterprise architecture.

From a project perspective, our stakeholders are providing inputs (money, information, resources etc.) with the expectation of some desirable change or result (e.g. a new process, product, system etc. ). To produce the outputs that they require, we will need to carry out various tasks, apply skills, resources and effort to produce various artefacts. If we pay attention to what stakeholders need, we can translate that to product models (configurations of deliverables if you like), the tasks required to produce them, and the people, skills, resources and tools needed to perform the tasks. So, stakeholders can lead us directly into good project plans.

A technique we have evolved to rapidly analyse stakeholder interaction is the Stakeholder Net Value Exchange. This puts an enterprise or project in a central “black box”, surrounded by Stakeholder Types (e.g. Customer) & some important independent Stakeholders (e.g. Industry Regulator). We connect the stakeholders to the entity via edges in the direction of Value flow. You can think of these relationships as Stakeholder provides Value to Entity (inbound) or Stakeholder expects Value from Entity (outbound). For a compact diagram, the value can be recorded as text on the arrow. For a richer diagram (where we can start to see commonality etc. and define values more deeply) we put a Value symbol on the flow.

It is really illuminating to see an Enterprise or a Project from this perspective. It is also possible to model more than one collaborating entity this way, e.g. ourselves and a strategic business partner.
More detailed analysis easily ensues: We need to include all the Stakeholder types as concepts in our Domain Model; We can contemplate what Business Events occur with each Stakeholder, what Business Communication results and which Processes support them.

#Stakeholder #projectmanagement #enterprisearchitecture #businessarchitecture

The (Enduring) Value of Great Design

Prepping for my upcoming Techniques and Deliverables of Application and Solution Architecture course, I watched a video by the UX guru Jakob Nielsen talking about UX 2050. The future predictions were interesting, but what was more interesting to me was the information about the empirical work and iteration that went into the design of the humble telephone touch keypad by Bell Labs, way back when. They researched many models of keypad with different layouts, sizes, shapes, etc. They surveyed potential users, but they also empirically tested many models before settling on the final design. Nielsen estimates that the design has been employed 40 trillion times and has saved the world some 1 million person years of time! Would that some of our current web designers would take note!

On a related theme, Apple hired a Masters graduate in physics and computer science to work on the scrolling of lists, their acceleration and “bounce” at the bottom and top for IOS. This was an effort of some three plus months for a very qualified individual. Sounds crazy, but the lists behave beautifully, intuitively and feel natural. Just think how many times somebody, somewhere scrolls a list on an IOS device and you get a sense for how much this design attention has paid off. 

Staying with the Apple theme, after watching the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) for 2021 last week, I again came away with the conviction of how much good design contributes and pays off downstream. Consider Unix (also, originally, from Bell Labs), which was taken up in academia and evolved into the Mach kernel paired with the Berkeley Distribution (BSD) OS, which Steve Jobs and Next used as the platform for Next Step, which later evolved into Apple’s System X, now MacOS, but is also the foundation for iOS (on the iPhone), iPadOS (on the iPad) and even watchOS on the Apple Watch and tvOS on the Apple TV.

WWDC showed a variety of examples of how the unified concepts underlying these systems facilitate advanced features, such as seamlessly controlling apps across multiple devices in proximity with a single keyboard and mouse (Universal Control); The Notes App which is available across the family and supports quick note taking, handwritten notes, capture of images, task management, cloud syncing, attachments, maps integration, tagging and more; the Live Text feature allows recognising text in photos and images from various sources, including device cameras, websites and image files. By the way, it is 20 years ago that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and the company bought Next Step to form the basis for the next generation of Apple operating systems. 

Bottom line: It’s worth the effort to create great design, which is functional, human centric, efficient, durable and elegant. It pays off handsomely in the long term.