#entarch
#bizarch
#UnicomEA
#SSM
#VSM
#VPEC-T
At yesterday's EA Forum, a rich picture of the oil industry was presented by
Mesbah Khan, who then posed a question about the possible use of such a picture, for enterprise architecture and beyond.
The rich picture is a core technique of the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). Over the years, there have been many attempts to produce hybrid methodologies combining SSM with more structured systems approaches. One of the earliest such attempts was Multiview, produced by Trevor Wood-Harper and others in the mid 1980s. In Multiview, a version of SSM is used to analyse issues, and these are then aligned with the analysis of tasks using a more conventional IS modelling approach.
Among other things, Mesbah's rich picture model features stakeholders and their concerns (shown as bubbles), and identifies the conflicts between different stakeholder concerns (shown as crossed swords). This is clearly equivalent to Multiview's analysis of issues.
Nowadays, the terms "stakeholder" and "concern" are mandated by ISO 42010, and incorporated into several enterprise architecture frameworks. (However, stakeholder concerns are often presented as a relatively homogeneous and consistent set of goals and objectives, e.g. using the Business Motivation Model or other schemata, and there is often not enough attention given to the conflicts between stakeholder concerns.)
As I see it, each of these conflicts calls for a series of capabilities or activities to govern the conflict - to allocate resources, balance priorities, and contain the risks. (However, these capabilities and activities are often absent or marginalized in the structured models produced for IT purposes.) They also have important implications for organizational design and trust.
One way of looking at these management and control capabilities is to use a cybernetic view of the enterprise, such as Stafford Beer's VSM. Mesbah indicated that his rich picture can be mapped onto VSM, but he did not have time to present this mapping at yesterday's forum.
Meanwhile, the trust issues may require a different style of analysis, such as VPEC-T, which helps to highlight those issues that are typically "lost in translation" when we go from a "rich" model to more abstract and homogenized "structured" models. See my note Does Rigour Matter?
Showing posts with label VPEC-T. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VPEC-T. Show all posts
Friday, September 28, 2012
Thursday, January 05, 2012
Unruly Google and VPEC-T
Google has been hoist by its own petard: it seems obliged to ban its own browser from its own search engine for infringing its strict rules. Apparently the infringement resulted from some misbehaviour somewhere down the subcontract chain, unknown to Google itself or its prime subcontractor (which with fitting irony is called Unruly Media). A number of blogposts were created to promote Google Chrome, containing direct hotlinks to the Chrome download page. Google has recently penalized a number of other companies for such behaviour, including J C Penney, Forbes and Overstock. See also my 2006 post on BMW Search Requests.
A number of offending posts were discovered because they contained the magic words This post was sponsored by Google
, and the Google search engine dutifully delivered a list of webpages containing these words. (This kind of transparency was foreseen by Isaac Asimov in a story called "All the troubles of the world", in which the computer Multivac was unable to conceal its own self-destructive behaviour.)
As a number of search engine analysts have pointed out, there are two problems with the sponsored pages. Besides containing the offending links, they are also pretty thin in terms of content. (Google has recently developed a search filter code-named Panda, which is intended to demote such low-value content, but this filter is extremely costly in computing power and is apparently only run sporadically.) Many of these pages credit Google Chrome for having helped a company in Vermont over the past five years, despite the fact that Google Chrome hasn't been available for that long. None of them explain why Google Chrome might be better than other browsers.
So here we have an interesting interaction between the elements of VPEC-T.
Value - How is commercial sponsorship reconciled with high-value content? Does this incident expose a conflict of interest inside Google?
Policy - How does Google apply its strict rules to itself?
Events - How was this situation detected (with the aid of Google itself)? Will any future incidents be as easy to detect?
Content - What is the net effect on the content, on which Google's market position depends?
Trust - What kinds of trust have been eroded in this situation? How can trust be restored, and how long will it take?
Sources
Aaron Wall, Google caught buying paid links yet again (SEO Book 2 Jan 2012)
Danny Sullivan, Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome (SearchEngineLand 2 Jan 2012)
Charles Arthur, Will Google be forced to ban its own browser from its index? (Guardian 3 Jan 2012) Google shoves Chrome down search rankings after sponsored blog mixup (Guardian 4 Jan 2012)
Related post: Towards a VPEC-T analysis of Google (October 2011)
Monday, October 10, 2011
Towards a VPEC-T analysis of Google
#entarch Enterprise architects need to understand values and policies. VPEC-T is an approach that is particularly useful for situations where there are multiple conflicting values and policies, or multiple interpretations of What-Is-Going-On.
In this post, I want to look at Google. Can we infer its values and policies from its observed behaviour (over time).
We may start by asking what events we think Google is paying attention to. Here are some of the events that are available to Google.
1. You search for "XYZ"
2. You skip over the first few items, and click on the third item on the second page.
3. You look at a webpage and then come back to continue your search.
4 You rephrase and clarify your enquiry.
Google is pretty coy on its exact use of these events, but most Google-watchers assume that these events have an influence on its search algorithms and/or its advertising algorithms. In other words, we may presume that Google is generating valuable content from these events.
Google has indulged in a wide range of initiatives over the years, many of which have no obvious line to revenue. But all of them have the potential to generate vast amounts of rich content - much of it related to the observed behaviour of internet users. On this interpretation of Google's strategy, initiatives are dropped, not because they fail to generate revenue but because they fail to generate enough of the desired kind of content. Google is betting its future on building and maintaining this content through powerful positive feedback.
Google's strategy is therefore surprisingly traditional - it involves capturing some territory and defending it against its competitors. Here's an example - Google provides the Android platform to mobile device manufacturers. When Motorola wanted to use Skyhook's voice recognition instead of Google's, Google forced it to fall into line. Daniel Soar argues that this was not because Google executives feared losing revenue but because they feared losing access to an important source of content. As Soar puts it, "Google faced the unfamiliar problem of the negative feedback loop: the fewer people that used its product, the less information it would have and the worse the product would get." (Google has since bought out Motorola Mobility, which presumably resolves some of the trust issues as well.)
Daniel Soar, You can't get away from Google, London Review of Books, Vol 33 No 19, 6 October 2011
Can we understand Google's phenomenal collection and use of data as an example of organizational intelligence? Google is certainly seeking to differentiate each Internet user's experience, as well as integrate across multiple domains (web browsing, email, blogging, voice, video, satnav, and so on). Google already has an army of brilliant engineers as well as an alarmingly large carbon footprint. There is lots of evidence of Google's integrating these resources into one of the most innovative sociotechnical systems on the planet.
(By the way, when I asked Google itself about its carbon footprint, it recommended I look at a recent story in the Guardian (8 September 2011). I can see that Google has been asked this question many times before, because it pops up so quickly as an expected search term. But why should I trust Google's recommendation, and how can I ever discover what newspapers would be recommended to a browser with a different browsing history to mine?)
But a lot of this learning looks suspiciously like first-order learning. So the content gets better, based on better capture of events, but to what extent is there any systematic evolution of policies or questioning of values? There may well be some second-order or third-order learning, but it's not easy to see from the outside. There is also an important question about the relationship between Google's own ability to learn from its accumulated content, and Google's ability or willingness to provide a rich platform for learning by others in its ecosystem - in other words, a broader notion of collective intelligence.
I wonder if there are any lessons for other organizations? Sometimes firms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four) seem pretty far removed from most other organizations, but their platform strategies and operating patterns will surely become increasingly relevant in other sectors. A traditional retailer may now collect and analyse a much larger quantity of data about its customers' behaviour than ever before, even if this is still several orders of magnitude less than what Google does. A traditional telecoms or media company may now see itself as a platform business in a multisided market. Therefore instead of seeing Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four as impossibly remote and mysterious organizations, populated by unbelievably talented and creative engineers, we should start to think of them as harbingers of the enterprise of the future.
See also my post Google as a Platform (not)
book now Business Architecture Bootcamp (November 22-23, 2011)
book now Workshop: Organizational Intelligence (November 24th, 2011)
In this post, I want to look at Google. Can we infer its values and policies from its observed behaviour (over time).
We may start by asking what events we think Google is paying attention to. Here are some of the events that are available to Google.
1. You search for "XYZ"
2. You skip over the first few items, and click on the third item on the second page.
3. You look at a webpage and then come back to continue your search.
4 You rephrase and clarify your enquiry.
Google is pretty coy on its exact use of these events, but most Google-watchers assume that these events have an influence on its search algorithms and/or its advertising algorithms. In other words, we may presume that Google is generating valuable content from these events.
Google has indulged in a wide range of initiatives over the years, many of which have no obvious line to revenue. But all of them have the potential to generate vast amounts of rich content - much of it related to the observed behaviour of internet users. On this interpretation of Google's strategy, initiatives are dropped, not because they fail to generate revenue but because they fail to generate enough of the desired kind of content. Google is betting its future on building and maintaining this content through powerful positive feedback.
Google's strategy is therefore surprisingly traditional - it involves capturing some territory and defending it against its competitors. Here's an example - Google provides the Android platform to mobile device manufacturers. When Motorola wanted to use Skyhook's voice recognition instead of Google's, Google forced it to fall into line. Daniel Soar argues that this was not because Google executives feared losing revenue but because they feared losing access to an important source of content. As Soar puts it, "Google faced the unfamiliar problem of the negative feedback loop: the fewer people that used its product, the less information it would have and the worse the product would get." (Google has since bought out Motorola Mobility, which presumably resolves some of the trust issues as well.)
Daniel Soar, You can't get away from Google, London Review of Books, Vol 33 No 19, 6 October 2011
Can we understand Google's phenomenal collection and use of data as an example of organizational intelligence? Google is certainly seeking to differentiate each Internet user's experience, as well as integrate across multiple domains (web browsing, email, blogging, voice, video, satnav, and so on). Google already has an army of brilliant engineers as well as an alarmingly large carbon footprint. There is lots of evidence of Google's integrating these resources into one of the most innovative sociotechnical systems on the planet.
(By the way, when I asked Google itself about its carbon footprint, it recommended I look at a recent story in the Guardian (8 September 2011). I can see that Google has been asked this question many times before, because it pops up so quickly as an expected search term. But why should I trust Google's recommendation, and how can I ever discover what newspapers would be recommended to a browser with a different browsing history to mine?)
But a lot of this learning looks suspiciously like first-order learning. So the content gets better, based on better capture of events, but to what extent is there any systematic evolution of policies or questioning of values? There may well be some second-order or third-order learning, but it's not easy to see from the outside. There is also an important question about the relationship between Google's own ability to learn from its accumulated content, and Google's ability or willingness to provide a rich platform for learning by others in its ecosystem - in other words, a broader notion of collective intelligence.
I wonder if there are any lessons for other organizations? Sometimes firms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four) seem pretty far removed from most other organizations, but their platform strategies and operating patterns will surely become increasingly relevant in other sectors. A traditional retailer may now collect and analyse a much larger quantity of data about its customers' behaviour than ever before, even if this is still several orders of magnitude less than what Google does. A traditional telecoms or media company may now see itself as a platform business in a multisided market. Therefore instead of seeing Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four as impossibly remote and mysterious organizations, populated by unbelievably talented and creative engineers, we should start to think of them as harbingers of the enterprise of the future.
See also my post Google as a Platform (not)
book now Business Architecture Bootcamp (November 22-23, 2011)
book now Workshop: Organizational Intelligence (November 24th, 2011)
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