Architecture in Digital World

It always makes me think about the differences between the architectures in digital world (e.g. for digital enterprise/entities, solutions, and systems) and the architectures in physical world (e.g. for buildings and cities). The later has mature disciplines with less changeable targets, while the former does not have such fortunate. On another hand, the former also provides more opportunities to explore, to make progress, and to evolve towards maturity and discipline.

For architecture in digital world, the aspects to explore include:

1)     The Conceptual Model

This is the starting point and also the foundation layer for architecture creation. The architecture concept generation for digital world entity construction is more abstract than the one for physical world. In addition, it also has to consider the interconnections and mutual relationships among the widely-networked entities, as indicated earlier in my article “Inter-Enterprise Architecture”. A well-established conceptual model has to consider this world-wide networked environment with shared economy, as well as potential activity models.

2)     Open and Flexibility

Open and flexibility are characteristics must to have for architectures in digital world, due to the continuous advancement in technologies, business requirements, and people behaviors in the inter-connected environments. Architectures must be able to evolve along the way. Open and flexibility are usually associated with technology-agnostic concepts, models, and solutions. To enable them, the creative, well-thought-of, and solid conceptual and logical architectures and frameworks should be in place, before they can be further developed and be implemented by various technology options.

3)     Guidance + Governance vs. Organic Growth

It is the intrinsic role of architecture to provide guidance and governance for its engineering construction, as is in physical world. However, in digital world, there should be a balance between architectural guidance + governance and organic growth, due to human limitations in comprehend the widely-connected big pictures in digital world. If it is too strong in guidance + governance, human limitations could restrict the meaningful natural growth for further advancement. If there is too much in organic growth without regulation and guidance, things may end up in a place where we don’t want to be, or even be dangerous considering the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and smart machines with self-learning capabilities.

4)     On-Demand Requirements

Standardized production is mainly associated with Industrial Age, while Digital Age is associated with on-demand production and services. Product and service tends to be provided in on-demand fashion to meet the specific requirements, which are one-on-one based, instead of mass production. The architectures have to enable such capabilities, which means unique in creation and flexible in customization.

5)     Discipline vs. Standard

Architecture practice should form discipline to become mature. However, it may be hard to imagine any standards to form. Actually, we don’t have standards for building architectures or for city planning in physical world either, which is how we get landmark buildings and new cities, although we do need and have standards for engineering. Current architecture practices in digital world are lean to engineering aspects too much, which lost their own identities as architecture practices in certain degree.

In summary: architectures in digital world have both similarities and differences from the ones in physical world. For architectures in digital world, we have seen too much influence from engineering disciplines, instead of forming one for its own. It is worthwhile to explore the discipline of architectures for the continuous evolving digital world.

Federal Forum and Step to New Economy

Yesterday, I attended the “2016 Federal Forum: The Intersection of Innovation and Action” in Washington D.C. Thanks Brocade Communication Systems for organizing such great event. The messages conveyed are clear and in good timing, especially with the directional keynotes from Tony Scott, U.S. CIO, Executive Office of the President, and Terry Halvorsen, CIO of DOD. Government is looking for proposals for next generation IT. With Silicon Valley tech fever winding down, this is the time that we should adopt the great new technology innovations to enhance the main street economy, in both private and public sectors. We should carry further the innovations to business applications and adoptions.

It is not unknown that the IT spending in business programs has grown rapidly. However, such growth is mainly due to the increasing maintenance and operation cost dealing with the silo legacy systems accumulated since 80s and 90s. As Tony mentioned, about 80% Federal IT spending is on operation and maintenance, while other 20% has been used mostly to support policy changes that imposed to systems. There has been little capital spending that supports new system constructions. However, this is supposedly to change now. In order to take advantages from the new generation technology innovations and to evolve into digital new economy, government is looking for ideas to build next generation IT. Action is Now!

In order to build the next generation systems, the big picture understanding is essential, due to the inter-connection and inter-relationship in currently Internet-connected environment. The notion and practice of Inter-Enterprise Architecture (as introduced in previous articles) can play an important role in this endeavor. Technology innovations provide us with point solutions and better construction components and materials; we also need next level innovations to put things together with new technology adoptions and utilizations in business domains.

We need to build common infrastructures for shared economy, where the business and operation models need to be well-designed. We may need to rethink the currently private ownership of the infrastructures for public utilization, how far this can go, who should be the owners of various common infrastructures in operation (e.g. for different business domains, geographical areas, communities, etc.), and what the eco-system should look like. The Inter-Enterprise Architecture is in a good position to unit them and to help new model designs.

Inter-Enterprise Architecture Paper

Inter-Enterprise Architecture paper:
http://www.architechllc.com/uploads/Publications/jea_march2016_zhao.pdf

Foundation-Based Approach for Digital Business Transformation

Big changes are going on towards digital enterprise and business. Businesses and governments are adopting shared services and cloud computing, which implies a paradigm shift in how digital transformation and IT can impact business opportunities, performance, processes, and organization dynamics.  Businesses increasingly rely upon IT to achieve its goals and to implement its strategies. With technologies and products of many generations, and with stove-piped implementations, current IT complexity is growing faster than ever in replying to the required changes, integrations, and transformations. IT costs are increasing exponentially.  Enterprise architecture, SOA, and Cloud Computing are aimed at meeting these challenges. We proposed a Foundation-Based Approach with an Enterprise Foundation Framework© to provide a cohesive practice in EA, SOA, and Cloud Computing. This solution is essential in providing a disciplined manner to achieve the modernization and evolution objectives for digital and IT enables businesses.

For instance, it would be helpful to have an Enterprise Architecture in place during cloud computing adoption and digital transformation. While cloud computing may be over stated with its indirect influences during the hype, it is a practical implementation mechanism for Service Oriented Infrastructure, which is a subset for Service Oriented Architecture adoption.  Business advantages are gained mainly via shared services in many different ways.

About Digital Eco-System

Talking about eco-system, our universe is an inter-connected and harmonic natural eco-system. It’s well designed by nature or superpower, while it’s up to human to find the natural laws. The digital eco-system is one step forward in human efforts to be connected in digital manners. Our work and life are emerging into a universally connected digital eco-system. The increasing networking in digital manner and boundary-less data flow are the new trendy characters in forming. The dynamic nature of such digital eco-system is revolutionizing our current autonomic social structure, culture, and environment. Some noticeable phenomenons include:

Correlation and Unity
Digital eco-system brings the correlation and unity to this world. We are an Internet connected one world now. Any local event can cause much broader influence, and also any local optimization may not be good enough to achieve desired results due to the complex connections and influence from the outside world. We have to understand the big picture and relationships of the involved components. This is what “architecture” and “landscaping” supposed to do, and have to do it in extended scales and scopes, with including components in all forms: material, digital, and human; and with identification of relationships, establishment of connections, and suitability of context.

New Characters in Digital Age
Our current social structure, culture, and environment are pretty much formed to suit the industrial age, while digital age requires differences in many ways:

• Social Structure: changing from autonomic groups to widely connected social communities on Internet.
• Organizational structure: changing from vertical to horizontal and flattened
• Culture: changing from territory focused to collaboration
• Communication channels: extending from traditional face-to-face to new media with digital multi-channel connections and social networking. We are seeing people talking to their smart devices and computers more frequently than human
• Communication style: moving from out spoken in person to writing, composing, and publishing in digital media and on Internet
• Leadership and management style: moving from command-control to motivation and inspiration focused, due to the increasing mobility of the work force
• Competition landscape: moving to suit more constructive and “win-win” approaches, due to the complex inter-connections we are experiencing that beyond human recognition. The biggest enemy for us will be the limitation in understanding the complexities brought by the digital connections in this unified world, which is far beyond the challenges from business competitors.

The Man-Machine Relationships
During this evolution, we need to re-think about our relationships with digital systems and mechanical elements. We need to ensure that the purpose of our design is to benefit human being with digital assistance, instead of being hijacked by them or having to compete with them. We need to think about what to automate, where need human intelligence, how human work and live with the digital components and smart mechanical objects introduced by IoT (Internet of Things), We need to explore how to best use human’s potential, and the meaning of an enjoyable life for human.

Also, it is necessary and important to explore how business should be architected to overcome the challenges and to take advantage from this in forming digital eco-system environment. This is becoming essential for new age business conduct, to keep business agile, and to take advantages from collaboration across organization boundaries.

Note: I have presented the content in this article as a panelist in the recent Open Group conference:
http://events.opengroup.org/events/the-open-group-baltimore-2015/speakers-c552ab4d26ff4eaea2bb465aea5e0755.aspx