Coherency Management

Change is hard; not changing is easier…it just hurts more!

That is to say, we agree with the idea that you must change to survive. It is a law of nature. And right now there are major changes happening, and everybody (people and enterprises) must deal with them. Whether it is the economic crisis of 2009, environmental awareness, globalization, or the information age … things are changing. New ideas are needed in such times. Maybe it is idea of co-creation through globalization as a strategy for continued value creation that C.K. Prahalad talks about, or maybe it’s dealing with the ‘flat world’ as described by Thomas L. Friedman.

Let’s look at the “Information Age”. We might differ on the exact definition or interpretation, but there can be no doubt that the global economy is moving from and expanding beyond the production of physical goods to the production and trade of information. The growth of Information and Communication Technology over the past 50 years has been evident in all aspects of daily living in developed countries, and is gradually becoming so in the developing world too.

The explosion of information has been unbridled, but it is our contention that the information being created and exchanged lacks the inherent coherency for it to sufficiently support decision-making. In any large organization numerous reports, designs, descriptions and artifacts describing the activities of the organization can be found, but they are held in different formats, different medium, following different rules for describing, and using the same words with different meanings. For example, it recently took several months for a national level government to answer the question. What services do we have that benefit a certain target group? It did not take this long because the information was missing, it was mostly there, but in thousands upon thousands of documents in hundreds or forms and formats. This government is very well run but the example illustrates that a mountain of information (or data) does not actually guarantee knowledge. And it certainly does not provide assurance that things are operating coherently.

It is certainly paradoxical that in the information age, we can collect, process, and exchange mountains of data (documents, pictures, messages, mails, etc) almost instantaneously across vast distances, but at the same time, we suffer from a knowledge deficit or, as Chris Pollitt and others have called it, “Institutional Amnesia”.

One could say we are in a period of incoherency within the Information Age. It started a few years ago but it many take some decades resolve, enough for us to say it is no longer a significant issue. This period of incoherency starts with the recognition that we simply have too much information to process. One might say that that
the unintended plague of the information age is …information. Not information in and of itself, but rather, incoherent information.

Communication Etiquette

Many people are inundated with information of every sort in their personal and professional lives on a daily basis. We may think it’s all too much but we willingly participate in the creation and consumption of huge amounts of information and we set ourselves up for the collapse of “communication etiquette”. Communication etiquette used to happen when it was hard to create and distribute knowledge. Back in the days before e-mails and the internet we would ensure our non-verbal communications were complete, in and of themselves, we would check things over and be certain that our asks (and our replies) were correct and complete. Communications would be clearly addressed, provide the necessary context,
and usually with some clear instruction on follow up. Today, you are lucky to know who sent the note, let alone have sufficient context to allow the note to stand on its own.

With this sort of explosion of information and a lack of care around its management we easily end up in the state of ‘information indecision’. We have all the information we need (e.g. annual plans, contracts, process flows, sales agreements, client research databases, etc), but no information we can use. It simply is taking too long to knit it together in to a coherent story for decision-making purposes.

We are good at producing and communicating information but it is not easily consumed. It is likely that the information about the collapse of Enron, WorldCom and Lehman Brothers, existed well before anyone heard of them; we just never saw the information coherently enough to understand the full picture. It is quite likely that if you had added all the business plans together at the height of the Dot Com boom you would have had clear knowledge on the impending collapse. Maybe we would have seen that, for a reasonable number of the businesses to be successful the average household would have to have a dozen fully busy high speed internet connections with a total on-line spend of $10 Million a year.

A thousand facts and no information, such is the case as we sit in this period of incoherency. Incoherency makes enterprises less manageable. As Gary Hamel said in The Future of Management, “Management is out of date. Like the combustion engine, it’s a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and that’s not good.”

We believe that Coherency Management, as a practice within the overall meta framework of Enterprise Architecture is the next frontier in management innovation that is bound to become a pervasive management practice.

However, the EA profession is mired in a technology paradigm that grossly undersells its capability to bring coherence to the entire business. Infosys recently published a Survey in which the major finding is that “Alignment of business and IT organization is the #1 objective of enterprise architecture …” That is certainly goodness, but how about assuring the all parts of the business are aligned with each other? How about ensuring all the oars are pulling together? According to the same survey some business-oriented indicators are starting to gain traction. We are here to promote that evolution, something that started years ago with John Zachman.

Competitive Advantage?

John Zachman, the originator of the “Framework for Enterprise Architecture” which has received broad acceptance around the world as an integrative framework, or “periodic table” of descriptive representations for enterprises, tells us we are in the transformation to the Information Age, and that we should leverage something called Enterprise Architecture (EA). In a recent interview with Roger Sessions, Zachman said,

My opinion is that in the Information Age, it is the Enterprise that is increasing in complexity and changing dramatically and that whoever figures out how to accommodate and exploit Enterprise Architecture concepts and formalism, and therefore can accommodate extreme complexity and extreme change of Enterprise, is likely to dominate the Information Age”.

From the perspective of coherency, we would say managers need a coherent view of things to be successful. Those who do that best will dominate in the information age. You may be familiar with the idea that:

You can’t manage what you can’t see.

In this Information Age, the phrase needs to go a little further. For thousands of companies and governments around the world that need to survive and thrive the better phrase might be:

You can’t manage well what you can’t see coherently.

We, too, believe that those that are good with Enterprise Architecture will best address the coherency challenge. There are other disciplines to involve in Coherency Management but Enterprise Architecture provides the key structures, design rigor, techniques and ’science’ to make it the cornerstone discipline.

Quite often EA only gets considered as part of a major effort of change. However laudable that might be, this also falls well short of EA’s full potential. If we only ever do EA as part of a transformation project, how can EA ever tell us what transformation to make? EA must become pervasive and regularized.

When we talk of coherency for large enterprises it may seem a bit like boiling the ocean or tilting at windmills but, ironically, Coherency Management, in the way we talk about it, is exactly the opposite. It is the practical, stepwise approach to getting superior results and the best possible return on asset. With Coherency Management, managers will understand and design the business better than ever. The oceans of information will continue to be created in ways we can’t predict and our need to know things will also change in ways we can’t predict. The only thing we know for certain in the change will be constant and growth will be unrelenting on the demand and supply side of information. The solution is to set up the enterprise such that it continually improves its coherency. A coherent enterprise deals with complexity and change better, and hence is more manageable. For instance, a coherent enterprise is better able to plan and react appropriately in situations of crises. A good example is the difference between handling of Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Gustav in 2008. In 2008, the concerned authorities had open communication lines; information was being processed into actionable knowledge. In short, things were a lot more coherent.

Coherency Applied

As you read the book it is important to know some context of application. We are not proposing that enterprises do a ‘Coherency’ project, and then everything will be better. In considering an improvement to a functioning organization, one approach might be performing the change (or transformation) as an external influence on an operating organization/system. That is, you might launch a project to make a change. Once that project completes, the functioning organization returns to operating without that external influence.

For example, if a company has too many and incoherent procedures, you could launch a project to change them all in one fell swoop. Once completed, the well-formed set of procedures would likely operate very well, but in a few short months new procedures and changes would creep in to the system, and years later you would be no farther ahead.

Coherency Management proposes that in addition to (or instead of) the conventional approach you consider the system as the target of the change, not the procedures themselves. In this example you would adjust processes and services in the organization to spot and correct incoherency. This could be in the procedure writing or approval process or maybe annual assessments models. After making the changes you would observe and determine if the procedures started to rationalize and become more coherent. If not, you would make more adjustments until the system starts to self-correct. In this way, the system continually improves and does not return to incoherent tendencies, at least in regard to procedures.

This then brings us to the role of the Enterprise Architect. Moving forward, we see this role expanding to include a large ‘coaching’ and/or ‘mentoring’ aspect. A bulk of the architecting work will actually be done by line managers and their team themselves. This is a massive shift as compared to what we are used to now. Our assertion is that such a shift would eventually (and literally) make EA the mastery of the ‘architecture of the enterprise’.

Call to Action

Ten years ago, in The Next Common Sense, Lissack & Roos wrote that:

The mastery we are alluding to is that of the craftsman, not that of the M in MBA. The ability to act coherently in the face of complexity, and to do so on an ongoing basis, is the hallmark of a true master. … Coherence is the key to mastering complexity because it is the enabling force that allows conscious intention to replace inertia, overload, and unconscious flailing about. It is all too easy to let complexity get the better of you. Coherence offers you the alternative of mastery – but the choice is yours.”

This book is for those who choose mastery.

Although Enterprise Architecture is a few decades old, evolving it to include Coherency Management is a new idea. As such, this book seeks to present ideas, start dialogues, and launch the evolutionary development process.

We invite you to contribute to the conversation and evolution. As we gradually extend and expand the ideas and application of Coherency Management, we will break through this period of incoherency and maximize the full potential of the Information Age.

With a coherent enterprise, knowledge will be complete, understanding will be real and action can therefore be swift and certain. This will certainly help private sector organizations compete well in the global economy but the altruistic value should not be forgot. For with Coherency Management, public sector organizations will dramatically improve effectiveness and efficiency. When all orders of government start saving time and money, they will be able to invest in new outcomes for their constituents.