Five principles I use to plan my day

Make the day enjoyable!
Doing my work outdoor with a hot drink.

Have you ever invested a lot of effort to get into your dream college but then sloughed through it because there were just too many interesting classes and you ended up taking more than you had time for?  Or waking up feeling nervous because of the many items on your to-do list?  Or move from task to task with such precision in time planning that you felt like you were doing a combo move in a computer arcade game?

Well, if that is you, you are definitely not alone because that is me too.  Summer term has been pretty busy for me as class schedules are condensed to accommodate this shorter term.  Moreover, other demands for my time--like family, church, friends--added to the tension.

To make matter worse, I know that I should enjoy the journey and not be caught up with getting things done.  It can be really enjoyable to slowly mull over a topic taught in class, do the class readings in a park with a cup of coffee in hand, and then take time to reflect and blog about the topic.

The reality though is often different from this ideal.  Given the many things screaming for my time, my temptation is to squeeze as many tasks as I can into a day.  That makes enjoying the journey more difficult.  Moreover, sometimes when I do have free time on hand, I feel a nagging feeling that I am wasting time, and that I should think about what task I can complete next.

I feel the key to resolving this tension between getting things done and enjoying the journey is to establish some principles for planning my daily schedule.  This relates to my life architecture.  Here are the five principles I distilled after untangling my thoughts as I wrote this post.

1. First things first; some things will have to go.  I have finite time and energy, so I cannot have everything!  Don't fall into the greed trap.
2. Make the day enjoyable!  If it looks like a breathless schedule, then drop some tasks so that it is more achievable.  Don't be overly ambitious.  The journey will not be enjoyable ALL the time, there will be moments when it will be a mad rush.  My aim is to make them the exception rather than the norm.
3. Leave half of the day unplanned to leave room for the unexpected (this one is tough! I'm still working on it)
4. Minimise switching of tasks in a day...focus on at most 2 topics to minimize "memory thrashing"

5. Better planning, squeezing time from between events, multi-tasking can help me do more, but beware of making more room just so that it gets filled up with other busyness...

Where the CIO sits makes no difference to EA?

Photo titled "sit where you want".  Pretty apt for this article!
(photo credit: DorteF)

Enterprise Architecture deals with the blueprint of enterprises, so it might make sense that the blueprint function sits close to the Chief Executive Officer in the organization chart to ensure alignment between planning and execution. Is there a correlation between where the Chief Enterprise Architect sits in the organization chart and the Enterprise Architecture maturity of that enterprise?

Figure 1 shows the data from an interview of almost 20 government agencies that included questions about their EA maturity as well as the number of layers between their CEO and Chief EA.  No clear pattern can be identified from the interview data.  Some might even argue that having two to four layers between the CEO and the Chief EA is the best!


Figure 1 Relationship between Chief EA's distance to CEO and EA Maturity

In addition, my discussions with a researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the same finding: that there has been no support in data of correlation between an organization’s Chief EA’s proximity to the CEO and its EA maturity.

Does this mean that it does not matter where the chief EA sits in organizations? In many organizations, the Chief Information Officer is the chief EA, so does that also mean that it does not matter where the CIO sits in organizations?

Through the interviews, I noticed that the organizations who reported having mature EA roughly falls into three groups. The first group is made up of organizations with very influential CIOs who reported either directly into the CEO or to a direct report of the CEO. The second group has stories of their CEO believing strongly in EA, and pushed the EA agenda top-down. The third group consists of organizations that I was not clear why they reported high maturity for their EA. It might be a lack of understanding on my part, but I also suspect some of them are still early in their EA journey and thus not yet equipped to provide an accurate assessment of their EA maturity.

Analyzing the mature organizations gives the following thought: where the chief EA sits is less important to an organization’s EA maturity than EA’s mindshare among senior managers. If the CEO believes in EA, the organization is more likely to have mature EA. If the CIO is influential and believes in EA, it is more likely that he can influence the CEO to think the same. The challenge though is that it is difficult to measure EA’s mindshare among senior managers, but this does reinforce an often-repeated EA best practice on the importance of gaining top management’s sponsorship to achieve successful EA implementation.

Feedback loops: the central tool for understanding everything around us?

Loops, loops, loops.  How much do we understand, how much do we not, and how much more understanding do we need? (photo credit: wolfpix)

Heard an excellent talk by MIT Professor Jay Forrester this week.  He is the founder of Systems Dynamics, a growing field offering powerful tools and frameworks for understanding complex systems such as organizations, urban cities and healthcare systems.

A key idea Professor Forrester shared, is that everything that changes through time is controlled by feedback loops.  And that means that we can understand things around us better if we understand feedback loops better!  City growth, spread of infectious diseases, stagnating profits, misbehaving children, you name it.  Even a simple task like filling a glass with water is controlled by feedback loops, as shown in the diagram below:  as water is being poured in the glass, the level of water in the glass goes up, and that prompts the pourer to slow down the pouring.  You can even use feedback loops to better understand the popular children story "The Lorax" (see "Studying The Lorax with Feedback Loops")!

However, most of us are not accustomed to feedback loop thinking.  Professor Forrester said that we are more used to "open-loop thinking", instead of "closed-loop thinking".  This means that usually we look at a situation, think about possible actions and consequences, decide an action, and then move on. Rarely do we think about how our actions result in ripple effects in a larger context, and somehow comes back to impact the originator.  It feels as if we need to worry about how the fluttering of wings of a butterfly in China could create a tornado in the United States.  How does one even start thinking about impacts like these?  It is too complex for most people to handle, or to have an interest in.  Feedback loops (or more accurately System Dynamics) seem to offer tools to help us manage such complex analysis, and avoid the pitfalls of open-loop thinking.

Professor Forrester envisioned that the world will be a better place if more of us are trained to analyze situations with feedback loops.  He pointed out three ways in which the world would be bettered if people are trained:

1. We would make better citizens

Many national policies are bad because they are made with open-loop thinking.  Those policies focus on short term gains, at the expense of creating long term burdens.  But why are policy-makers still making them?  It is because the general public is better at identifying the short term gains.  But when citizens of countries are able to tease out short term and long term impacts of policies using feedback loops, they would be more discerning of short-sighted policies and provide the necessary support for long term investments that have less short term gains.

2. We can learn faster

Professor Forrester shared how one Masters student was able to very quickly get to the research frontier of a new field using feedback loops to do his analysis.  In the same way, he believes that all of us can benefit from the power of closed-loop thinking.

3. Our children can learn faster

A very interesting project that Professor Forrester is pushing now, is teaching feedback loops to K-12 children, and helping them using this tool learn better.  From literature to math to science, it is quite unbelievable how broadly this tool is targeted to be applied.  I am excited to try this out myself and evaluate its effectiveness in educating children and helping them gain better analysis skills.  Check out Creative Learning Exchange for more information on this initiative.

I am currently learning more about feedback loops.  Definitely hope to share more about it as I learn.

The Journey from Visibility to Governance to Standardization to Reuse

Firms need to have a single picture to guide their efforts, to build a “foundation for execution” as described in Enterprise Architecture as Strategy[1].  It is not enough to have a single picture of the vision, mission and strategies of the firm.  Firms will need to decide what business processes need to be standardized and what data need to be integrated.  There is no right answer, but not having a common picture will mean that different parts of the firm will be building to their own visions.

However, I noticed through my interviews with CIOs that not many companies had this single picture.  In fact, on probing further, some of them were not able to provide a high-level, organization-wide view of their organizations’ processes.  As such, I postulated that organizations must mature through two stages before they can get to the standardization (and integration) stage. 

Even star war troopers need mirrors!
photo credit: Kalexanderson

Firstly, they need to firstly establish an organization-wide, regularly updated view of the current situation in their organizations.  This is akin to individuals looking into the mirror to decide what to change about their appearances.  Similarly, organizations need visibility into their current state before they can decide what to standardize and what to leave alone.  This is not a trivial exercise, especially in large organizations.  Creating a current view from scratch can take months; keeping the view updated as the organization changes is an even bigger challenge.

Can you tell if something is out of line?
photo credit: chekobero

Second, organizations also need to have strong governance processes in place, so that changes to existing processes and data are channeled through a common approval body.  How can any organization standardize unless all changes and new initiatives are checked against standardization requirements?  In many of the organizations I studied that had mature EA practices, the organizations had strong governance in place.  The Enterprise Architecture team was involved in approving new business initiatives, to ensure that the initiatives are not deviating from the organization’s standardization and integration vision.  Without such a governance framework in place, standardization is just talk that has no teeth to be realized.  It is possible for organizations to have strong governance first before having visibility.  However, as mentioned above, organizations will need to establish visibility before they can move into the standardization stage.

Re-use seems to be a long way off for many organizations.  Or is it?  Maybe a iterative approach with fast and short iterations will work?  I will be keen to hear from your experience of standardization and reuse.

[1] Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David C. Robertson