Structure in Threes: Design Strategy

Spent last night using the methodology I’m developing for the book to analyze the Data Insights and Business Intelligence line of business. While I like Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder, et al) for its visualization I find it lacking on the analytic side. There are no metrics in the approach so the business model analysis subjective. As such I’ve started to integrate Miles and Snow’s work and Peter Marks (Design Insight) -who’s methods I’ve used before for my major reengineering projects- and adapted these to provide a more metrics based approach. Peter’s work was originally based on Product Design strategy which from my perspective from years ago and the basis of my R&D over the years is that an Enterprise is a product. It happens to be a product with emergent behaviors; so the General Systems Theory and Industrial Dynamics research I did before and during my career at IBM has led me towards pushing the envelop in looking at Enterprise as a multidimensional exercise. Which became the topic of hours of discussion with my mentor John Zachman when we discussed expanding the framework. We were looking for exemplars for Time and Motivation to ensure these were valid for inclusion. The problem arose regarding behaviors which are motivation/intension but not.

I immediately though of my old drafting days and considered those perspectives auxiliary views. [For those who are not design engineering or architecturally knowledgeable, an auxiliary view is where to combine dimensions from two other views to create as third view that gives you another perspective] Unfortunately, in the Enterprise Architecture space, we’ve not been keen on creating a dimensional coordinate system which is where my research activities have been leading. While the metrics I’m proposing in my book are not as robust as those in the physical world (length, width, depth, and time) I think they’ll be consistent enough to be useful in analyzing an enterprise.

The one easy dimension which seems to always get placed in the corner is resource, specifically finance. I think this is because its both resource and measurement system which is confusing without context. However, I’ve taken a page from Markowitz on Portfolio Management and think I’ve got a holistic approach that integrates with the rest of the methodology well. Well back to office remodeling this morning.

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