Playing cards for the enterprise

I've just been lucky enough to spend a few days with Tom Graves, brought in to give our business architecture vision and approach a shot in the arm. His recent post describes his approach.

One of the things he spoke about was the 4 dimensions of an enterprise (or its context, or a service within it): relations, purpose, stuff and knowledge. These are similar to, but go beyond, the familiar people, process, technology triad (with information at their intersection). They fit with the view that a living organism with intent is a better metaphor for the enterprise rather than just a machine with processes. That seems to fit with original systems theory too.

Anyway, we spoke a bit about playing games to help draw out the big picture of the future enterprise. As a consequence, I've had a go at making a deck of cards with a suit for each of the Tetradian dimensions.

• Our organisation already had a published vision with 8 headlines could be read as our purpose. I added 4 more cards for the unstated tacit goals of the council too.
• Coming up with classes of people that the council relates to was also quite easy following Tom's workshop. I made 8 cards for them, then another 8 for other key organisations that we work with.
• Finding just 8 types of knowledge or information that are core to the enterprise and our operating context was a bit more more difficult. We have a quite well developed  catalogue of information assets already modelled in our team, but it seemed something more generic was needed for the wider top-level context.
• Defining 8 classes of stuff was also challenging, and it's possible those I came up with are too generic to be useful, but I thought they'd do for a first attempt.

The next step is about trying to find something fun and useful to do with these 44 cards. The could just be put on one poster, like a level 0 data flow diagram or a single Eriksson Penker process that says what the council does - in bidirectional interaction with all those people and organisations, using the identified information and stuff, and working towards the purpose-goals.

It makes more of a game, though, to shuffle the cards and deal them out until you've got at least one of each suit. The challenge is then to make a story for how those actors interact via the council, using the things and knowledge items turned up, whilst supporting one or more purposes. There should be two versions of this story - what happens now and what ought to happen in a leaner and more effective 21st century council. After playing this a few times, regular patterns behind the stories may emerge, and these represent the services that the council ought to be doing.

I'm hoping that these cards help with the question "what's the story". Even with our vision, we struggle to define the roadmap for our IT applications and service modernisation. Though playing with them is only a game to get discussions started, they do link directly to Tom's enterprise canvas and can be mapped to other frameworks too.