Analyst as lawyer, doctor and accountant
Being a business architect or analyst in government means I often need to interpret legislation or understand legal procedure. I’ve often wondered if I should become qualified as a lawyer, or just continue playing one on TV.
Today I’m trying to untangle a financial process model. Now I get to pretend to be an accountant! A few months ago, I needed to be a car or truck mechanic to understand the people I was interviewing.
Occasionally I get to analyze the health system or medical concepts. I don’t think I’ll become a doctor any time soon.
A client perspective on eHealth
Last week I started another contract with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, until November. I’m one of three Business Architects collaborating to write a detailed, formal description of the entire Road User Safety Division, in preparation for re-engineering and software acquisition. It’s a huge job but we are standardizing procedures to collaborate effectively.
This week I was supposed to be working, but ended up in hospital! I needed intravenous medication for a viral infection, and am now recovering well, thanks to the skill & kindness of staff at Toronto Western Hospital.
This was my first experience as a hospital in-patient, and it was of course scary, painful, uncomfortable, and disempowering. There were mistakes and delays aplenty, and I wonder how many of them could have been avoided with better eHealth systems. The doctors were still using paper and telephone to record & communicate medical information quickly.
Now that I have seen some of the complexities that can arise in a hospital, requiring dozens of specialized staff to collaborate without being able to schedule in advance, I’m intrigued to work on eHealth projects. Medical information management makes Transportation’s licensing rules look easy!
Making Business Architecture business-friendly
A Business Architecture is usually controlled by Information Technology people. How can it be made more accessible to business people? What should and shouldn’t be included in an accessible BA? Read more…
Clarity, Guaranteed, and Available Now
I’ve got some free time in June and July, so now is the time to announce my Clarity, Guaranteed spot consulting service.
This short consultation can be a meeting (with preparation and written recommendations) about the big issues in your project or organization. I could also review a document in detail, or provide customized training, or sketch out your system’s architecture, or produce other custom deliverables.
What’s this about a Clarity Guarantee? If your organization did not get clarity from a Metimea one-day engagement, simply request an extra meeting, a revised document, or a refund.
Metimea is of course able to provide more than one day of assistance, at reasonable rates. I also volunteer my services to causes I support, so non-profit organizations could get free consulting! As always, consulting is available in Toronto, or by telephone, telecommuting or travel.
Wondering how I could provide something useful in such a short engagement? Today I finished a 20-day contract at Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation. My clients were thrilled at how much detail I could gather in subject-matter-expert consultations. I’ve used that same curiosity to deliver top-quality documentation and advice to organizations large and small – and yours could be next!
Wherever you work or volunteer, think about whether bringing Alana in could be helpful, and drop me a line.
EA as a forecast
Enterprise Architecture involves a lot of forecasting and planning, and there are benefits to making it explicit.
The “to-be” architecture is a plan for changes to business strategies and technology resources, based on guesses about the future external environment. Even the “as-is” architecture involves predicting which architectural elements are important enough to document. Read more…
PowerDesigner for Business Architecture at MTO
Yesterday I started work on a one-month contract with Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation (MTO). Four of us are rapidly assembling the business architecture for the Road User Safety division, to support their Modernization automation project. I’m already impressed with team they have assembled for this huge job. Most of my questions have been answered with “We’ve already been working on that”.
One architect is dedicated to standardizing our methodology and our use of PowerDesigner. MTO has customized this CASE tool for many smaller business architectures, which is a fantastic improvement over the usual Visio method. (See my earlier commentary on why CASE tools are better, but still not sufficient to support business thinking.) Merging the smaller architectures will still require a lot of effort, due to different PowerDesigner extensions and versions, as well as varying levels of detail and quality in the architecture content.
Reading The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg is causing me to reflect on the viability of another management fashion: Enterprise Architecture.
When a management guru or an IT “paradigm shift” promises wide-ranging, long-term, hard-to-measure benefits, some even-handed evaluation is in order.
I believe EA is a useful practice, but it will be hard to get return-on-investment in some situations. If EA is applied inappropriately, it may get a bad reputation just like Strategic Planning did. So here are some guidelines (inspired by Mintzberg’s book) for where to apply EA: Read more…
The Business Doesn’t Care About the Data
The data management literature is full of exhortations to recognize business needs: hold workshops to gather requirements, get approval for data models, appoint Data Stewards with a vested interest in data quality. Makes sense, because data is an asset, the basis for important business decisions and actions, right?
When a seminar speaker talks about getting good attendance at data-stewardship meetings by offering good snacks, I begin to wonder. When business representatives don’t find time to read through the data model before implementing the system, I wonder. Why don’t the business people care about the data? Here are some reasons more fundamental than the snacks – and what you, a data architect or data management person, can do about them: Read more…
Gaps in academia
This week in the New York Times, a Columbia University department head declares that academia has become too specialized, and he proposes some radical reforms, including interdisciplinary problem-solving departments. This, and more, is needed to advance the fields of enterprise architecture and information management. Read more…
LinkedIn group for public sector consultants
Just a note to my fellow consultants: if you do contracts in the public sector in Ontario (for any jurisdiction), please join the LinkedIn group that I started. You may find useful new contacts; people are joining all the time.
I am very carefully screening the membership, so the group does not become overrun with job ads or other irrelevancies. This is a common problem with groups on LinkedIn, a service I can otherwise recommend to every professional. My LinkedIn profile includes an alternate version of my resume.
Think, Document, Reuse
Think, Document, Reuse: these are the purposes of doing Enterprise Architecture, and also the steps. Read more…
Not an April Fool’s joke
Part of my general philosophy is that it’s OK to make fun of the work we do. That’s a somewhat contrarian philosophy in the public sector. About a year ago, some colleagues really liked my proposal for a massive UML-modeling exercise with vague promises of indirect benefits. When I told them it was an April Fool, some still didn’t get the joke.
It’s that time of year again, but I’m having trouble coming up with a too-good-to-be-true architecture innovation that would be funny to my wide spectrum of professional contacts. Since I’m now looking for the next contract, perhaps the marketing imperative is inhibiting my sense of humour.
What have I been up to?
This week I’m wrapping up work for Smoke-Free Ontario on their Tobacco Inspection System. Last fall I researched and wrote their business architecture, privacy impact assessment and threat-risk analysis, and got them approved by three committees.
This winter I worked with the Public Health Unit stakeholders and Ministry of Health Promotion staff, to figure out their requirements for immediate system development. Read more…
On CASE tools and diagramming tools
One of the big reasons people don’t like Visio (or any diagramming software) being used as a CASE tool is: Visio doesn’t differentiate between an Object and a Symbol. In a complex diagramming situation, you may want to describe a real-world object once, then display it in multiple diagrams, with different relationships to other objects. You might even want to show that object as a different symbol or style in the various diagrams.
Data models and feelings
Yesterday a colleague said “How are you feeling?” in the elevator. My response was “Data model.” (I was in the midst of editing a data model.) “If you’re feeling anything while working on a data model, then something is wrong. “
Upon reflection, that is very true, at least for me.
If I’m enjoying the data modeling process a lot, I am probably making it too complex or too generalized for the business to understand. Read more…
