Talks on Enterprise Architecture February 2012

Update: slides now available

#Event	Date	Location	Booking
Richard Veryard, Architecting the multi-sided business	13 February 2012	IASA London EC2	via EventBrite
Bernie Cohen, Subjects are not Objects - Enterprise Modelling using Projective Analysis (slides zip)	16 February 2012	BCS London WC2	via BCS

Architecting the multi-sided business

A modern business typically needs to operate in multiple markets simultaneously, and satisfy the overlapping needs of different stakeholders. The emerging architectural response to this challenge is to configure the enterprise as a platform of services, rather than a traditional value chain. For example, a retail company can define its business model as providing a platform for manufacturers to sell their good to consumers. But this kind of transformation involves profound architectural challenges, which business architects need to be able to master.

In this talk, I will present an extract from my 2-day Business Architecture Bootcamp. For details of the full bootcamp, please go to the Unicom website.

http://unicom.co.uk/product_detail.asp?prdid=1864

Subjects are not Objects - Enterprise Modelling using Projective Analysis

A systems analyst who seeks to identify an enterprise's requirements for systems and services will try to elicit from the enterprise's stakeholders their models of the enterprise's structures, functions, purposes, performance, supply chain, markets, competition etc., and to articulate those models in the style of the day, be it object-oriented, agent-based, formal, structured or soft.


Accounts of this practice reveal that stakeholders are often reluctant to expose their 'true' models, either because they conflict with some 'authorised version' or because they don't actually know 'what is going on', or why.

A side-effect of the analysis is often an altered understanding by the enterprise's stakeholders of relationships between their own desires and those of their peers, managers, customers etc., which usually reveals political, personal, technical and financial risks that extend far beyond those envisaged by the original project brief.

This phenomenon reveals the sources and, to a large extent, the components, of enterprise models to be 'subjects' — systems that anticipate the satisfaction of their own desires — rather than the 'objects' with which our classical engineering modeling frameworks were designed to cope.


My friend and colleague Bernie Cohen will introduce 'Projective Analysis' (PAN), a modeling praxis, framework and toolset in which subjects' models of their enterprise may be articulated, composed and manipulated to reveal the risks to which their enterprise is exposed and to evaluate the actions that they propose to alleviate them.


Bernie Cohen spent 18 years as a telecom systems engineer with ITT, developing real-time software for Europe's first SPC telephone switch and the world's first PCM exchange, and eventually founding the Software Research Group at STL Harlow, where he wrote one of the first textbooks on Formal Methods. In 1984, he was appointed to the Racal Chair of IT at the University of Surrey. In 1990, he briefly returned to industry with Rex, Thomson and Partners, a safety critical systems consultancy, before taking the Chair of Computing at City University, from where he retired in 2003. His research interests have gradually moved from telecom systems design to the gaps between formal computer science and human agency..