"DSDM Atern - overshadowed by SCRUM? How can it best raise its profile?

Kevin Downes on the linkedin DSDM Group started a discussion-
"DSDM Atern - overshadowed by SCRUM? How can it best raise its profile?

He started this with the comment ”I'm rather beginning to think that DSDM Atern has lost the race to adoption and recognition compared with Scrum et al. Certainly in the UK - recruiter agencies hardly ever seem to have heard of it and as far as I can tell you very rarely see it mentioned in job adverts (yet the terms "Agile" or "Scrum" will pop in 90% of them)."

My thoughts in this are: 

DSDM need to change business models and move to creative commons or "open source" approach; its copyrighting and restrictive practices on consulting and training as a way of generating income for the group are the core of its demise. Revenue models of the nineties which worked well in the past are not effective in the world we live in today. 

I'll give you an example: Alex Osterwalder author of Business Model Generation offers all of his IP on a creative commons basis, you would think originally this is crazy as everyone uses it for free, however the reverse is true because everyone uses, it trains it and talks about it. He makes his money from the sale of his books and extensive conference work and is highly successful. Even the book was given away free as a PDF covering the first half but so many people liked it they bought the actual one after their first look. The "freemium" model has resulted in evangelisation of this approach. 

As much as this may grate with the originators of DSDM; if they step back and change more money will be made by opening up than they realise I just hope it is not to late as I always loved DSDM.
DSDM Atern doesn't exactly roll of the tongue as an exciting and compelling brand - when one mentions DSDM "what's that they say" you reply " Dynamic Systems Development Method" - eyes glaze over nervous cough and "That's some systems I.T. methodology thing then - what was your journey like in from Winchester today?" conversation on DSDM ends.....

Whilst underneath DSDM is fantastic for all sorts of non I.T. development -Training development process improvement etc. let alone software ; I know that as most of us  do as well, but we have reached a point where I am concerned about its future.

In ecology species reach a population beneath which extinction is guaranteed, I do hope we haven't reached that point with DSDM.

Is Recession a Mass Extinction?

Mass extinctions in geological time have occurred many times, the best known is at the end of the Cretaceous when it is believed the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico was hit by rather a large asteroid causing catastrophic climate change through a dust created perpetual winter; death of the vegetation across the globe and the dependant ecosystem, including dinosaurs amongst other things. This allowed a new spurt in evolutionary change allowing the mammals to develop and dominate the planet. Did you know that roast chicken last Sunday was probably the evolutionary descendant of a dinosaur!

In business terms is the current recession a mass extinction and if so what evolutionary change will it bring for the positive. Things may well be dire at present but many strategists say that a good clear out is often good for innovation and creativity.

Will there be a re balancing of the UK economy now the results of off-shoring and manufacturing decline have suddenly hit us so there is no one left to buy the products at home that were off-shored. I always thought that off-shoring missed the macro economic point that if you sack the call centre classes in the UK then there won't be as many people able to afford the products in the UK that you service in India and the like! It might have been cheap and in mode but was it right for the country?

Will there be a new breed of SME businesses freed of the shackles of high  I.T. infrastructure investment enabled through new SAAS and cloud provisions.

Marketing has already been revolutionised by the web opening up a world that was once restricted to a select set of wealthy companies now open to anyone with a bit of creativity and a laptop; will this now extend to operations and service provision?

Oh, and if you here someone say "he is a dinosaur" tell them that the dinosaurs were around substantially longer than we humans have been so far; in fact a part from the unfortunate asteroid at the end, they were very successful for 60-80  millions years or so; we have only been around 200,000 years so far!

The Open Group Threaten To Certify Business Architects

During a recent forum thread in  - Business Architecture Community-  one poster declared the The Open Group's intention to start offering certification in business architecture.

Some are horrified at the prospect of an I.T. centric organisation claiming this space with one well known and  respected poster  declaring

"We must discourage Open Group and even some others from 'certifying' Business Architects using a short cut approach This will be very unhelpful and harmful for Business Architecture profession."

I do see his point when TOGAF (The open group architectural framework) doesn't provide a good example of this organisations approach to business architecture; indeed some say it is poor for enterprise architecture - let alone business architecture -and in reality many conclude that it is Enterprise Information Technology Architecture not EA.

Certification has pros and cons the latter being that many parts of I.T. have suffered quite badly from a culture of badge collecting which results in H.R. professionals and recruiters using the certification to exclude perfectly competent practitioners. You might say "get certified then" but this costs serious money and is alright for those working for larger corporate organisations with extensive personal development budgets but overall it impact inclusiveness and can create a potential elitist closed shop.

The debate on certification continues and we watch the discussions with interest.

Capabilities and Process Architectures "Old Chestnut"

There have been many posts in recent forum discussions within the business architecture community which describe the commonality,within some organisations, between higher level process blocks and capabilities.
Some have suggested that this makes capabilities less useful. This is due to a combination of factors either because the organisation is very process dominant with low levels of physical things like, manufacturing or logistical activities or perhaps even due to poor analysis.
Process folks think process and when searching for capabilities use their reference point, process in current organisational structures, to search for capabilities. In many cases it is not surprising that they "low and behold" discover capabilities fairly identical to their high level process and say " well that was a pointless task wasn't it ".Quite often they have missed a lot of capabilities that the organisation has that could be instrumental to a step change in business model. 
Thus the introspective continual reference to to current physical state of the business constrains the thinking of the logical. Peter Checkland recognised this feature in his Soft Systems Methodology in Action (P.Checkland, Jim Scholes, 1999, Wiley, Chichester).
To model capabilities properly it is necessary to detach from what you know and the current context that you work within i.e. process and look in at the business from the outside through a fresh set of eyes lifting up to root definitions and conceptual models. This is not easy when your analysis team are steeped in operational thinking.

Business Architecture Training early 2012

Just started to get some initial  interest for public business architecture courses in 2012. It looks like the February offering near Southampton will go ahead now on the 15th to 17th of February. We could do with a few more delegates to add to the initial provisional bookings to crystallise the event.

In all though, in house courses for groups seem to attract more interest, although this doesn't help individuals either those privately funded or from smaller organisations who don't have larger groups of staff they wish to train in business architecture.

The thinking with in house courses, as opposed to public events, is that companies like to keep their own issues private and also it is more cost effective for a trainer to visit them with one set of hotel and travel costs rather than sending four or five people away on a public course with all the subsistence expenses that that incurs.

The downsides are that off site venues allow focus on learning away form the day to day distractions of being still in the "office" and we do get a lot of interruptions from BAU in these - in house - circumstances as people go away from the training event to attend brief meetings or arrive late or leave early to attend to their issues. This can on occasions be quite disruptive for  the event for all concerned and limits delegates full appreciation of what is on offer as they miss critical points, techniques or concepts.