system thinking

Mel Duval wrote a nice piece in Information Management about enterprise architecture (EA) and our book - http://www.information-management.com/news/-10016459-1.html – It’s entitled “Averting Disaster Through Enterprise Architecture.”  Mel writes, " In all the debates about what drove the world economy into its worst recession in decades, rarely does the concept of enterprise architecture come into the discussion. Yet, perhaps it should."

Although there may be some truth in claiming "too big to fail" applies in the case of the still-standing among Bear, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Merril, Citi, BofA, GM, Chrysler, and the rest of the cast of bankrupt characters, the greater truth is that they are too big to manage without enterprise-wide, integrated, and detailed models.  The truth is that just about every part, as well as the whole, of these enterprises was profitable and management of every part and the whole were getting their incentive bonuses for a job well done.  All were regulated too.  Yet no one saw the risks to the whole enterprise, let alone the whole US and global economies, that were right in front of them, more or less plain as day. 

Why was that?  Short answer is "All we will ever know is our models."  And our models did not take those connections or all those systemic risks into account.  They were effectively invisible to all but a few.  Among the blinded was economics professor and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, but now at least he recognizes the problem too and in his's 6-Sept-09 New York Times piece "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?" opines about the models and theories of "the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth."

EA is about modeling the whole enterprise, knowing all there is to know about it, its parts, and their interactions, whatever the goals or objectives of the enterprise may be.  Yet our research (as reported in the SIM Guide to Enterprise Architecture - http://eawg.simnet.org/) indicates that only about 1/3 of IT people agree with that statement.  Probably to be expected at this early stage in the adoption of EA concepts to managing enterprises and their technologies.

So what is EA and what is its purpose?  Over the years we've come up with sound bites such as:

The purpose of EA is to provide the holistic set of descriptive representations about the enterprise over time. -- SIMEAWG (http://simeawg.simnet.org).

The purpose of EA is to “model” the enterprise. -- Leon Kappelman

The purpose of EA is to bridge the chasm between strategy and implementations -- Leon Kappelman

The purpose of EA is the creation of a shared language (of words and pictures) to communicate about, think about, and manage the enterprise. -- Leon Kappelman

Lately, though, I've been thinking that the greater "purpose of enterprise architecture is to bring all the IT people together, so they can bring all the rest of the people in the enterprise together."  Getting "everyone on the same page" might be another way to say it, and certainly there are other ways too, but I think I'll stick with "bring ... together" for now. 

But if the IT people can't even agree that EA is about the whole enterprise and not just its ITs, how will they ever come together, let alone help the rest of the people in the enterprise come together?  I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm pretty sure it's going to take some time, happen incrementally, and that this article by Mel Duval will help.  The SIM Guide to EA will help too.  I'm glad we've gone to a second printing already.  But non-IT enterprise management needs to get the message too.  Because it’s the decisions of non-IT people that brought the economy to the brink, and many organizations far past it.  I certainly hope some of them are listening, and reading up on using enterprise models to manage too, whether they call EA or something else.

What happened to global warming?

By Paul Hudson. Climate correspondent, BBC News

(Page last updated at 15:22 GMT, Friday, 9 October 2009 16:22 UK)

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. ...

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up."

More precisely, the debate about whether there even is any such thing as "global warming" (or more accurately "anthropogenic climate change") is far from over.

Read the entire article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm.  Think for yourself.  Our brains are still the most powerful computers on the planet.  All the computer models, theories, and hypotheses are merely tools to help us think, not think for us.  Be aware of your biases too, we all have them.  Almost everyone believes that humans should (even must) be good stewards of the planet and its environment -- Regretably this can make almost everyone suceptible to manipulation in the name of doing good for the earth and its inhabitants.  Moreover, since this is a political debate as well as a scientific one, it may be revealing to follow the money.  And keep in mind that power, influence, and money are fairly fungible these days when it comes to political and business decisions; and sadly, scientific ones too (e.g., see http://chronicle.com/article/Medical-Journals-See-Cost-in/48393/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en, http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/346/24/1901).

This report is probably indicative of the state of the art on climate models.  The good thing about this report (http://globalchange.mit.edu/files/document/MITJPSPGC_Rpt180.pdf) is that (1) they take a systems thinking approach and make a real effort to deal with the complexity of the question, (2) they disclose all the models they cobble together, all the assumptions they make, the parameters they estimate, the sources of their data and the component models, and (3) then run Monte Carlo simulations to develop probability estimates.  The bad news is that the media will probably never look the details and just report the headlines and the colorful graphic (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/climate-change-1002.html). 

What astonishes me is how much time and money are going into this kind of work, how many government agencies and energy companies appear to be funding this, how complex the model is, and how many assumptions it requires.  In some ways this makes their findings appear to have high face validity and will limit serious examination of their work.  The fundamental underlying weaknesses of this work are (1) how suspect much of the underlying science is that they assume to be true before this research even begins, (2) that they appear to assume the component models and estimates are perfectly right before they begin the simulation, and (3) that they fail to disclose or include the probability or confidence intervals of any of the assumptions or component models (perhaps because this research assumes them all to be perfectly right before beginning).

Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry line "Are you feeling lucky, punk?" comes to mind as I ponder to what extend the world's policy makers, in their desire to be good stewards of the environment, may bet their national economies on this model which is basically no more than a weather forecast on steroids and mega-vitamins.

• "All we ever know is our models, but never the reality that may or may not exist behind the models and casts its shadow upon us who are embedded inside it. We imagine and intuit, then point the finger and wait to see which suspect for truth turns and runs. Our models may get closer and closer, but we will never reach direct perception of reality's thing-in-itself." – Stephen Hawking

• “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.  It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” — Albert Einstein

While there is no doubt that we do have serious human-caused pollution issues that critically need to be addressed, it appears that the current nearly obsessive focus on the questionable relationship between humans, carbon, and climate may be diverting our attention from other environmental matters about which we are far more scientifically certain as to the harm they cause to life on this planet (like mercury, airborne particulate, acid rain, MTBEs, excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, and so on).  Also of concern are the many understudied health-related issues that may well have pollution-related connections to our air, food, and water (like cancer, asthma, autism, and diabetes to name but a few).  Agricultural and industrial polluters could not have conspired to better divert our attention from so many important environmental and health matters.  The fact that most of the world’s so-called environmental groups have joined in this distracting obsession is profoundly troubling.  That many of our politicians and corporations have joined in this fixation has potentially devastating public policy, national security, and economic implications for the USA and the world.  That the US media is almost totally on board this questionable train provides stark evidence as to the incapacitation and possible death of investigative journalism in this country.

"For every complex and difficult issue, there is always an answer that is simple, easy, and wrong." H. L. Mencken

We have terrible pollution and very real environmental problems and we should be doing much more about them instead of wasting our good intentions on this very questionable theory of human-made climate change. There is no definitive scientific evidence that carbon dioxide is causing climate change; there's barely any decent evidence to support the hypothesis at all and plenty to disconfirm it -- All the predictions and projections are basically just long-term weather forcasts based on imperfect computer models filled with assumptions, estimates, and human bias.  Would you bet your life on a 5-day weather forcast, or the economic future of your country on a 40- or 50-year weather forcast?

The unscientific obsession with anthropogenic climate change is harming the environment by diverting our attention from very real environmental problems.  Science is not dogmatic, so keep an open mind.  Try to remember the complexity of climate and how poorly the local news does predicting tomorrow's weather -- Think they're any better at 10, 20, or 100 year projections?  After all, it is basically the same computers and programs.  Then check out the 700 scientists in this report who also question the carbon-climate connection … http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_i...  Or these and hundreds of other credible sources that are strangely ignored by our politicians and the mainstream media – Then ask yourself, why is this so? 

The debate is not over and anyone who says so is either disingenuous, has not examined the facts, and/or does not know how science works.

Here's some links on carbon and climate, in no particular order.  Some scientists, some journalists, some others.  All thought provoking ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEJ5pHVKjiI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1_eaZ74Z_A&feature=related

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124286145192740987.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ai7HGQoteE

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/10662

http://icecap.us/index.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUmsw1lwcY0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfafW_3oJ3Q&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1_eaZ74Z_A&feature=related

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4990704/Nobody-listens-to-the-real-climate-change-experts.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKhnUqrqVqQ&feature=related

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=164002

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=164004

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3312921/The-deceit-behind-global-warming.html

http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/38574742.html

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/6855

http://fora.tv/2008/08/19/Environmentalism_is_the_New_Religion

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/04/scigore104.xml

http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1551

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm