Abstract
Even though the amounts of information in enterprises are rapidly increasing, it does not directly provide the organizations with competitive advantages. A paradox of the Information Age is that while information have never been available in such vast amounts as now, the vast volume has caused the organizations to lose sight of the overall picture; what is required is a way to enhance and manage the information to provide a coherent vision. This can be described as Coherency Management.
This thesis examines how the novel concept of Coherency Management (CM) can be enhanced based on pragmatic problems identified in a complex enterprise. Carlsberg, which is currently undergoing a major standardization transformation, provides a unique opportunity to assess the standardization process and the effect on the enterprise. The empirical data obtained is analyzed to enhance the Coherency Management concept described in (Doucet et al, 2009), advancing it to cope with those problems found to be inside CM’s scope.
On the basis of the identified problems and findings in the thesis, a CM framework has been developed. This framework represents a more pragmatic view on CM, and can be implemented in an enterprise to introduce CM there. In addition, the framework can be utilized as a foundation for the further development of the concept.
The thesis asserts that: Coherency Management should only to a lesser extend possess domain specific knowledge; it should not be included in the Enterprise Architecture discipline; and it should only concern the improvement of cooperation between the departments and programs in the enterprise – by using the three modes for architecture.
The thesis also discusses how the scope of Coherency Management is best determined and the differences between CM and Enterprise Architecture. The paper concludes by elaborating on the findings of the thesis and discuss if the problem statement has been sufficiently answered.

I have been ‘playing around’ with the dataset FORM makes up. In the blog menu, you will find links to pages about Project NemFORM.

To demonstrate how the reference model can be used, I have created this simple application (autosuggesting services; reference), which can also be used on a mobile device (tested on Android only, so far).

If you are interested in the geeky details, read about my experience with FORM XML, and JQuery-empowered FORM usage. You can also read about my implementation of the new FORM widget from Digitaliser.dk.

My project is mentioned in a news story on Modernisering.dk, the Ministry of Finance’s website for digitization of government (and owners of FORM). ‘Innovative use’, they call my project. How nice of them

Full disclosure: The Ministry of Finance is a client of EA Fellows. NemFORM is however a private project of mine.

• Toronto from July 17th to 25th.
• Washington, DC from July 26th to 31st.
• Ottawa from July 31st to August 6th.
• Boston from August 7th to 14th.
  oh, and then a stopover in Iceland:
• Reykjavík from August 14th to 18th.

Along the way I will attend The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto, where I have three contributions: Particapant in Panel Discussion and podcast on Architecture’s Scope Extends Beyond the Enterprise, my lecture Coherency Management and the Future of Enterprise Architecture, and participant in Panel Discussion: Enterprise-Centric Architecture and the Role of “Business”.

I will probably sneak in a bunch of meetings around the Coherency Management book, which is now with the printer, and with a bit of luck, will be able to announce a few events around the book as I travel on. And then I’m planning some meetings around a new book project I plan to announce shortly. Which reminds me: allow me to introduce two new tags: Government 2.0 and Open Government.

If you are located – or happen to be – in one of the locations I visit, and are interested in any of the tags to this post, and want to meet, get in touch.

Peter Bernus chairs IFIP WG5.12 Architectures for Enterprise Integration, and arranges the ICEIMT Workshop Next Generation Enterprise Architecture on 23-24 June in Leiden, which I have just registred for (unfortunately only last day). Themes on the agenda:

• Next Generation Enterprise Architecture (NextGenEA): what is it, what does it need to succeed and what does it include: Interoperability, ‘Cloud Computing’, new ways of Visualization, Enterprise Integration, Enterprise Resource Management, Enterprise Data Consolidation
• Role of the senior Decision Maker: What is the role of the senior decision maker? What types of information and tools do they require to be effective? Can NextGen EA make a difference or indeed add any value to the day to day activities and key decisions made by senior business managers within a modern Organization?
• Decision Support Tools: What are the current EA tools on the market? What are the current management decision support tools available to senior decision makers? Is there a gap or a cross over point between the two or is the current marketplace effectively being served by existing product offerings?
• Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (practice and theory): What do existing EA frameworks say about the role of senior decision makers in the architectural process and what is the role of architecture in the making of critical business decisions within the modern Organization?
• Interoperability: ­ present and future trends & standardization across Organizations? How do these trends support or refute the case for NextGen EA as a tool for senior decision makers within the modern Organization?
• NextGen EA: New theories and techniques, interdisciplinary approaches for combining Management Theory and traditional EA topics, such as Enterprise Modelling / Enterprise Engineering / Enterprise Integration
• Which Research Frameworks are appropriate for the investigation of the above questions?  Human understanding and communication as a condition of interoperability. Suitable social and organisational structures that create the motivation and the opportunity to achieve common understanding and consensus and the potential need for new organisational forms and cultural change

Being a ICEIMT workshop means it is part of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modelling Technology, a series of landmark conferences held since 1992. ICEIMT originally started as a strategic initiative of NIST and the European Union to review the state of the art in Enterprise Integration (EI) and to make recommendations to industry and research, creating roadmaps for EI research and product development. I’m proud to say that I have just joined the ICEIMT’2010 Steering Committee.

Before the actual ICEIMT’2010, which is not yet scheduled/placed, the will be another workshop, on 14-16 December in Bled in Slovenia. The main objective of this workshop is to bring together management scientists, engineers and enterprise architects to hold an open discussion on the future synergies of these disciplines.

• business design and business management — the use of enterprise architecture practice in various transformations
• coherency of decision making — from senior management to low level control
• whole of life and complete life cycle approaches to enterprise engineering — the systems science of EA and management
• decision support tools — enterprise modelling, business process management & analysis, and business intelligence
• the fusion of the management and engineering disciplines
• the enterprise architect as a profession: skills, education, training and accreditation
• unifying theories and enterprise ontologies
• architecture frameworks and their use in managing projects, programmes, enterprises and networks of enterprises
• case studies
• open research questions
• etc.

The Leiden-workshop is part of ICE2009 conference on “Collaborative Innovation: Emerging Technologies, Environments and Communities”. ICE stands for International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising. The term Concurrent Enterprising is

an amalgam which brings together the paradigms of Concurrent Engineering and Extended/Virtual Enterprising: The Concurrent Enterprise is a distributed, temporary alliance of independent, co-operating manufacturers, customers and suppliers using systematic approaches, methods and advanced technologies for increasing efficiency in the design and manufacturing of products and services by means of concurrency, parallelism, integration, standardisation, team work and more for achieving common goals on global markets.

Sounds interesting, but I only have time to attend the NextGenEA workshop. Actually, only half of it.

The book introduces the idea of Coherency Management, and asserts that this is the primary outcome goal of an enterprise’s architecture.

Editors of the book are Gary Doucet, John Gøtze, Pallab Saha, and Scott Bernard. With submissions from over 30 authors and co-authors, the book reinforces the idea that EA is being practiced in an ever-increasing variety of circumstances – from the tactical to the strategic, from the technical to the political, and with governance that ranges from sell to tell. The characteristics, usages, value statements, frameworks, rules, tools and countless other attributes of EA seem to be anything but orderly, definable, classifiable, and understandable as might be hoped given heritage of EA and the famous framework and seminal article on the subject by John Zachman over two decades ago. Notably, EA is viewed as an Enterprise Design and Management approach, adopted to build better enterprises, rather than a IT Design and Management approach limited to build better systems.

We will use the coherencymanagement.org website not just to promote the book, but also to be a platform for continued dialogues about coherency management and for publishing further studies. We’re especially interested in relevant case studies, and have published one such: Neil Kemp’s interesting case study about Winnipeg Fleet Management.

If big challenges don’t scare you; and
If you like to eat elephants one bite at a time; and
If you want to know what we do for who and why; and
If you want to be part of solutions that contribute real and enduring value;
Then Enterprise Architecture and New Business Architecture is right for you.
– Gary Doucet

The keynote speaker at the annual Architecture Conference organised by the Danish government, and held in Ã…rhus on 2-3 April, is Gary Doucet, Chief Architect of the Canadian Federal Government. He reports to the federal CIO in the Treasury Board Secretariat. Last week, I caught Gary in between his snow shoveling exercises the other day, and conducted an interview with him. It has now been cleared, so here goes:

Why don’t you start by telling us about what is going on in general in government in Canada?
“There is always a lot going on in the government. We are constantly working to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies in delivering quality programs and services to Canadians.”

What are the priorities?
“The Government of Canada is working to improve accountability through transparency, enhancing the collective ability to manage and reallocate resources, improving the quality and reliability of information to support decision making, and its management practices as well as streamlining its processes, policies and administrative functions. We are doing this through a number of initiatives, such as:

• the Federal Accountability Act, which brought forward specific measures to help strengthen accountability and oversight in government operations;
• the Corporate Administrative Shared Services Initiative, which helps us identify opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of corporate administrative processes such as finance, HR and material management and services government-wide;
• IT-Shared Service Organization, whose mission is to be the Government of Canada’s centre of excellence for the delivery of IT infrastructure solutions to federal institutions. They have the mission to consolidate the IT infrastructure of the Government of Canada (current emphasis is on data centres, desktop and network services);
• a Policy Suite Renewal initiative which is an effort to streamline our policies, standards and guidelines while at the same time clarifying responsibilities and accountabilities within government;
• an Expenditure Management System Renewal which is an effort to streamline our budget and management processes to ensure our focus is on maximized results for resources expended. Better outcomes for our investment dollar; and
• the Management Accountability Framework which sets out the Treasury Board’s expectations of public service managers, especially deputy heads, for good public service management measure the management performance of government organizations”.

The Federal Government of Canada is indeed busy it sounds! How do you get everything to work together?
“Getting things to work together in such a diverse array of initiatives is not easy. For our part, we’re starting to introduce some of our EA tools to support these initiatives as well as our improve existing management practices. In particular we are rolling out GSRM (Governments of Canada Strategic Reference Model) and BTEP (Business Transformation Enablement Program) where and when it makes sense.”

Tell us more about GSRM and BTEP, please.
“BTEP is essentially a collection of best practices knitted together around a common structure and language for the business of government. That common language is GSRM, which is a public-sector-business-driven model that was developed by municipalities years ago. Some of these municipalities (like Peel and the City of Winnipeg) used it (called MRM – Municipal (Services) Reference Model) to better understand their expenditures and results. It allowed cities to compare their results to each other. It allowed a better understanding between investment and outcome. Years later, provinces began to leverage the model, adding their unique features to handle the services of provincial governments. Calling their model PSRM – Public Service Reference Model. The province of Ontario was a leader in this space. About 5 years ago we started work to extend the model for the federal government. The model was missing a few elements, national defense as one example, but the basic constructs were the same. It was at this time that the idea that a method based on the reference models took hold.”

To many, GSRM may be seen as strange words and fancy talk. Is that really required?
“Think about the bridge you drive home on last night. As a user, you care about certain things, where is it, how many lanes, is it slippery when wet, and generally how it looks. You trust that people with engineering and architecture degrees built it safely. When those people get together, they will talk about the bridge using terms from the fields of Civil Engineering (e.g. Static’s and Dynamics) and they will talk about coefficients of elasticity, tensile strength of steel, etc. The argument I make is that Business is complicated, like a bridge. It takes real science to architect and engineer it. Precision around the language of business design is necessary the same way it is necessary for the bridge. Within this context, GSRM and BTEP were first written for the architect community of practice, not the end users. Moving forward, as EA matures as a recognized best practice, increasingly we are seeing the executive and business owner groups look to common consistent program, service, information, technology and organization design, guided by best practices – like those embodied with EA.”

Why would the CIO care?
“For years, CIO’s as a profession have been working on capturing business in order to build systems. Capture Business — Design Systems. To do this, the profession has come up with tools and methods to help with the process of capturing the business in order to build systems. These tools are pretty powerful. Then, something strange happened. Somebody, somewhere made the leap from: ‘Capture Business — Design Systems’ to ‘Capture Business — Design Business’. These methods and tools became business capable and business centric. That is, the common languages we are discussing today would be used not for the sake of building some IT solution; instead, we do it simply to design better business. Answering questions like: what do we do, why do we do it, who benefits, and how much does that outcome cost. This idea is not all new but there are things that make it different. The models, tools, forms, etc of this new approach form a type of ‘science’. It is holistic. It is powerful. This advancement might be seen as the pivotal change in Business – IT relationship. But it also – and more importantly – a vital tool for business designs.”

So what is the vision?
“How about this as a vision: Business/Program/Service experts plan and design their programs, services, processes and clearly identify outputs, outcomes, target groups, etc. using a set of tools and methods they are experts with. Their processes are detailed, their job descriptions are synchronized with the processes, citizens can understand their services and how other services within link to what they see. Business experts do all of this. Then one day, the business people decide the want to automate something and need to adjust an IT enabled part of the business. Instead of relying on the interview process, the IT people pick up the designs (from a tool they also know). That which was previously gathered in an interview is now already there because the business experts needed it there to design their processes, services, etc. That’s simply the business being better able to deal with IT folks. The real interesting challenge is business people speaking to business people. It is a common occurrence to have programs looks at clients in completely different ways. When we start projects with multiple jurisdictions we see even more challenges for interconnections. That is why GSRM is critical; it forces each player to look at the business through a different set of terms and within a rigorous common reference model and structure. But after a few exercises, the participants will begin to see connections they never knew were there. The BTEP method helps get through this initial hump. It is like many other strategic planning methods, the difference is that BTEP uses a common language and very strong structure.”

Is this really happening?
“Well, let me tell you a real story. I attended a meeting where Ken Cochrane (our CIO) was asked his opinion about the technology required to resolve this huge business issue involving billions of dollars of program delivery. Ken was asked to talk about recommended solution approaches. The conversation revolved around technology, managing large technology projects, service oriented architecture, ERPs, data centres, software, etc. Then it was time for Ken to speak. For the next hour we talked about business requirements, business design principles, service design, service standards, outcomes and designs with well understood recipients. We talked about business design and processes. Yes, we would help, but we would help by asking our business ‘scientists’ to work with the business owners. We would NOT address business questions with technology answers.”

Gary calls this stuff ‘Business Architecture’ to indicate how it is similar to how one might architect the bridge.

So in concluding the interview, Gary says, “We must start to address these bigger issues. It starts, I believe, in understanding your business. Like a builder understands a bridge, not how a driver understands a bridge.”

Yesterday, Computerworld broke the news (Gigantisk it-revolution pÃ¥ vej i staten): The government will establish two centralised, state-wide administrative service centres, one for IT service, and one for HR, travel admin, financial management, etc. Today, the Minister of Taxation came out and presented the IT service centre plan. Estimated savings: 425 million DKK annually, a lot of money compared to the US. Significant staff reductions are planned: In IT, from current 1.576 FTE to 1.132 over three years. The IT-consolidation will reduce today’s 4.000 servers to around 700.

On Tuesday, the Minister of Finance presented the central government budget proposal for 2008, which enforces a 1% spending freeze. Hmm, guess they’ve read Kotter’s eight steps to change management, where step one is to create a sense of urgency for changes.

Michael Karvø and other experts applauds the plan. And so do I. But just as Kim Viborg Andersen, professor at Copenhagen Business School, I do also see some if not many pitfalls and significant risk elements. The central government administration is a darn complex beast, and only rarely acts as one enterprise. On the other hand, over the past several years there has been many attempts at enterprise solutions at the state-wide level, especially with administrative services, so in some areas, these changes are just “natural” next steps towards “the state as an enterprise”.

Been there, done that? Dorte Toft reminds us that it is barely a decade ago since the Danish state had its own, central IT-service centre, the Datacentralen, which was then sold out to CSC. Whether the new plan is in fact a revival of Datacentralen – Datacentralen 2.0? – is quite unclear to me. From what I can read (also I haven’t seen the actual proposal/report) the plan will not necessarily mean more insoucing and “home taking” of tasks and operations. It’s more about re-souring, if you want – moving tasks and operations from individual ministries and agencies to the new service centre.

IMO, it’s a good strategy to go with Area 12 in this process of enterprising the state. “Area 12″ is the call name for the service area called “Administration and Management” in the Government Business Reference Model, FORM, which the Ministry of Finance released late last year. FORM must now be seen as a very essential tool in the implementation of the plan, and I really hope the decision makers will understand that. Basically, they need to understand what is administrative IT and what’s not, and that is exactly what FORM can help with.

I can offer a chief architect or CIO/CTO in an airline some intensive sparring with 15 skilled architects during the week of 8-12 October. Need review of your target architecture? Sequencing plan? Particular artifacts? Or just want to share some of your stories and experiences?

If you happen to be in Northeren Europe (esp. Belgium or Netherlands), and can come to Antwerp, you’d be invited to join us in person. Or if you’d like to help via phone or email, we can also work with that.

I would also appreciate comments, stories, links etc to anything of interest to EA in the airline industry (air transport and aerospace in general too).

I personally only know the airline business as a customer (frequent traveller), but judging from that, I can easily imagine EA being not just neceassy but indeed also challenging in an airline. In other words, same situation as in most other industries, but maybe even more so than most other places.

EA necessary?
Well, yeah, with all those standards, requirements and controls the business needs, and all the prescribed processes, data exhanges, and system interoperability/connectivity, of course EA is needed.

EA challenges?
Well, yeah for sure! With hub-locks, safety concerns, e-ticketing, traveller convenience demands, green house gasses, service valuation and process elimination, and many more drivers from the strategic level (what’s our mission?) all the way down to the technology and infrastucture level (99,9% uptime not good enough on mission-critical systems, etc.). Oh, and the VLJs and the fourth platform.

We started writing this report as a final deliverable from the ICA Study Group on Enterprise Architecture in Government, which we co-founded back in 2003. Having done that, we then thought, why not keep writing. So we did.

The result is, we hope, a report that anyone concerned with transformational government will find worthwhile reading.

Our concern is government enterprise architecture, which in our view is far from “a big fat joke”1. Having said that, we also find a gap between what we see in government EA around the world and what we would like to see.

That’s how Olov Östberg and I start off our report, Interoperability, Change and Architecture (PDF, 1,2MB), to the International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration, ICA, and the EA world at large.

We would love to get comments on the report.

I represented Denmark in the comittee that created the EIF and maintained the AG, so of course I read the Gartner-report with a biased view. Then again, I always tend to read documents from Gartner with a biased view.

These days I also read a lot of masters theses and other reports by my students, and I can’t help comparing the Gartner report to a student report.

The Commission asked Gartner inc. to “make a study, situating the European Interoperability Framework in relation to the current practices in the Member States and elsewhere and to give an independent view on the revision process and on its desired outcome.”

If the Gartner consultants were my students, they should fear the exam, because I would confront their problem understanding, their methods, their empirical depths/shallowness, and not least their pseudo-theoretical analysis and model-amok. Having said that, I admit to finding some of their proposals pretty interesting, for example, their Generic Public Services Framework is conceptually interesting, but not very well explained and motivated.

Researchwise, the Gartner report does not go into much if any detail with respect to the national interoperability frameworks that have been established in several member states: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.

EIF presented a pretty clear definition of open standards. EIF 2.0 will, Gartner suggests, “allow open standards and other recognized standards to coexist”, and Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se.

That calls for a campaign, someone decided. See openstandards.eu:

On the content of EIF v2.0, I ask

1. that EIF v2.0 recommends the use of open standards, as defined in the definition given by EIF v1.0 for all exchanges by public institutions and states, as did the EIF v1.0 document,
2. that recommends the use of open source software, by public institutions and states, as did the EIF v1.0 document,
3. that EIF v2.0 recommends the use of open standards for all communications eg. documents, videos, sounds … they publish, to and with the public for example on their websites, by the public institutions in Europe, at the European Commission and all the member states, and conform to open standards for the tools they provide,

On the elaboration process of EIF v2.0, I ask

1. for the explicite public consultation during a sufficiently long time, for the redaction of such an important report as EIF v2.0,
2. for the explicite participation of SMEs and a majority of members states for such a consultation and document redaction.

I signed it. Go sign it too!