Coherency Management

Change is hard; not changing is easier…it just hurts more!

That is to say, we agree with the idea that you must change to survive. It is a law of nature. And right now there are major changes happening, and everybody (people and enterprises) must deal with them. Whether it is the economic crisis of 2009, environmental awareness, globalization, or the information age … things are changing. New ideas are needed in such times. Maybe it is idea of co-creation through globalization as a strategy for continued value creation that C.K. Prahalad talks about, or maybe it’s dealing with the ‘flat world’ as described by Thomas L. Friedman.

Let’s look at the “Information Age”. We might differ on the exact definition or interpretation, but there can be no doubt that the global economy is moving from and expanding beyond the production of physical goods to the production and trade of information. The growth of Information and Communication Technology over the past 50 years has been evident in all aspects of daily living in developed countries, and is gradually becoming so in the developing world too.

The explosion of information has been unbridled, but it is our contention that the information being created and exchanged lacks the inherent coherency for it to sufficiently support decision-making. In any large organization numerous reports, designs, descriptions and artifacts describing the activities of the organization can be found, but they are held in different formats, different medium, following different rules for describing, and using the same words with different meanings. For example, it recently took several months for a national level government to answer the question. What services do we have that benefit a certain target group? It did not take this long because the information was missing, it was mostly there, but in thousands upon thousands of documents in hundreds or forms and formats. This government is very well run but the example illustrates that a mountain of information (or data) does not actually guarantee knowledge. And it certainly does not provide assurance that things are operating coherently.

It is certainly paradoxical that in the information age, we can collect, process, and exchange mountains of data (documents, pictures, messages, mails, etc) almost instantaneously across vast distances, but at the same time, we suffer from a knowledge deficit or, as Chris Pollitt and others have called it, “Institutional Amnesia”.

One could say we are in a period of incoherency within the Information Age. It started a few years ago but it many take some decades resolve, enough for us to say it is no longer a significant issue. This period of incoherency starts with the recognition that we simply have too much information to process. One might say that that the unintended plague of the information age is …information. Not information in and of itself, but rather, incoherent information.

Communication Etiquette
Many people are inundated with information of every sort in their personal and professional lives on a daily basis. We may think it’s all too much but we willingly participate in the creation and consumption of huge amounts of information and we set ourselves up for the collapse of “communication etiquette”. Communication etiquette used to happen when it was hard to create and distribute knowledge. Back in the days before e-mails and the internet we would ensure our non-verbal communications were complete, in and of themselves, we would check things over and be certain that our asks (and our replies) were correct and complete. Communications would be clearly addressed, provide the necessary context, and usually with some clear instruction on follow up. Today, you are lucky to know who sent the note, let alone have sufficient context to allow the note to stand on its own.

With this sort of explosion of information and a lack of care around its management we easily end up in the state of ‘information indecision’. We have all the information we need (e.g. annual plans, contracts, process flows, sales agreements, client research databases, etc), but no information we can use. It simply is taking too long to knit it together in to a coherent story for decision-making purposes.

We are good at producing and communicating information but it is not easily consumed. It is likely that the information about the collapse of Enron, WorldCom and Lehman Brothers, existed well before anyone heard of them; we just never saw the information coherently enough to understand the full picture. It is quite likely that if you had added all the business plans together at the height of the Dot Com boom you would have had clear knowledge on the impending collapse. Maybe we would have seen that, for a reasonable number of the businesses to be successful the average household would have to have a dozen fully busy high speed internet connections with a total on-line spend of $10 Million a year.

A thousand facts and no information, such is the case as we sit in this period of incoherency. Incoherency makes enterprises less manageable. As Gary Hamel said in The Future of Management, “Management is out of date. Like the combustion engine, it’s a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and that’s not good.”

We believe that Coherency Management, as a practice within the overall meta framework of Enterprise Architecture is the next frontier in management innovation that is bound to become a pervasive management practice.

However, the EA profession is mired in a technology paradigm that grossly undersells its capability to bring coherence to the entire business. Infosys recently published a Survey in which the major finding is that “Alignment of business and IT organization is the #1 objective of enterprise architecture …” That is certainly goodness, but how about assuring the all parts of the business are aligned with each oth