Business

"A company's enterprise architecture is unique — neither good nor bad, but only appropriate or inappropriate in regard to management's vision of the future. The current enterprise architecture either supports the vision or it does not."

"The integration technology and infrastructure elements available today, in 1993, would enable an enterprise to develop a significant integration infrastructure. However, integration projects are constrained by cultural inertia, financial and resource limitations, and, significantly, risk management Thus, projects and their supporting integration infrastructures tend to be deployed in an incremental and evolutionary manner. Since each enterprise chooses its integration path based on particular business needs, the corporations visited in this study each presented a different road map of integration efforts to date and a unique snapshot of current integration infrastructure.... DoD, in concert with leading companies, should formulate an R&D strategy to create a new generation of enterprise architectures, models, tools, and software systems, and to determine the potential for new business operations, engineering practices, and manufacturing concepts. To achieve potential functional and performance improvements, integrators should combine the leverage of several emerging threshold technologies, such as operational integration frameworks, object-based and knowledge-based product and process representations, application-oriented network services, near-term and mid-term solutions to database integration, and wide-area object brokerage and execution.-"

"This is an intermediate work that describes PERA, which is a general enterprise reference architecture model that is suited for manufacturing enterprises. The book explains PERA as a layered architecture, and within the context of an architectural life cycle. PERA at the conceptual level is focused on the integration of physical plant, human resources, and information systems. This approach is clearly suited to manufacturing, and in fact, the model has been adopted and adapted by Fluor Daniel Corporation (among others) and has been proven in practice..."

"Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP) results in a high-level blueprint of data, applications, and technology that is a cost-effective, long-term solution; not a quick fix. Management participation provides a business perspective, credibility, and de-mystifies the systems planning process. EAP can be labeled as business-driven or data -driven because"

"The creation and implementation of integrated information systems involves a variety of collaborators including people from specialist departments, informatics, external advisers and manufacturers. They need clear rules and limits within which they can process their individual sub-tasks, in order to ensure the logical consistency of the entire project. Therefore, an architecture needs to be established to determine the components that make up the information system and the methods to be used to describe it. The ARIS architecture developed in this book is described in concrete terms as an information model within the entity-relationship approach. This information model provides the basis for the systematic and rational application of methods in the development of information systems. It also serves as the basis for a repository in which the enterprise's application - specific data, organization and function models can be stored. The ARIS architecture constitutes a framework in which integrated applications systems can be developed, optimized and converted into EDP - technical implementations. At the same time, it demonstrates how business economics can examine and analyze information systems in order to translate their contents into EDP-suitable form."

"A key ingredient to an enterprise architecture is the ability to link multiple and disparate systems into a coherent whole. has been gradually putting together the technology that will enable it to offer enterprise LANs that are capable of supporting distributed applications running across a variety of computer Internetworking and multi- routing are essential building blocks."

"For the IT department [the] change towards commodity products, open standards, end-user decision making and fundamental change in the Business platform, will imply substantial challenges. The role of the IS function will change. The formal IS budget in the US, according to Gartner Group Inc, is 2.4% of revenue in 1990, and will grow to 2.7% in 1995. End-user IT spending is estimated t0 2.4% in 1990, split 50/50 between budget and unseen expenses. This item is assumed to increase to 5.0% in 1995, bringing the total to 7.7% This total amount must be managed, and the rules must be set by the IS manager. Following the rule of "Least resistance", will lead to crisis and complete loss of control. IT resources must be managed. An Enterprise Architecture must be established and adhered to. Standards must be established, and partnerships between IT professionals and end-users formed."

"When one enterprise architecture dominates, Grumman plans to use it as a "manager of managers." This single, enterprise-wide network-management architecture will run over all other network-management systems being used: no existing scheme will be scrapped."

"The Enterprise Architecture is a combination of the Business and Computing architectures. The Computing Architecture, at the least, identifies hardware, software and data communications."

"Enterprise architectures are required to support and maximize the efforts of virtual teams within decentralized organizations. Vendor products exist today to start evolving towards a standards-based multi-vendor architecture. The underlying networking technology, 802.3/Ethemet, is robust and will provide for a cost-effective investment that will last for many years to come. Complimentary LAN technologies are already available to ensure transparent growth of networked systems. Combining human resources with information technology will be the key differentiating factor for successful manufacturing enterprises in the 1990s."

"Automatic control in manufacturing requires a very rigourous and well defined model of the operation to be controlled. A model which on one hand reflects reality as closely as possible and on the other hand allows easy and fast modifications and updates to reflect the continuous changes in the real world. provides the modelling concepts to describe and maintain the complete manufacturing systems. In addition, CIM-OSA aims to provide at providing consistent engineering and operational environments to model for execution as well as for real time operation control. Keywords: CIM; CIM architecture; enterprise architecture; enterprise modelling; enterprise optimisation; enterprise control; real time control;"

"Traditional manufactures tend to view human resources contained within highly segmented functions whereas integrated manufacturers view the entire organization as a series of resource centers. Integrated manufacturers allow and promote the sharing of critical skills on an as needed basis throughout the enterprise while Traditional manufacturers fall victim to resource hoarding. Given the breadth of change that new manufacturing technologies and operations philosophies will bring to many organizations, an assessment should be made as to how ready the organization and the various business functions are to accommodate these technology and non-technology changes. The recommended approach of course is to begin with corporate vision, objectives and strategies leading to a determination of the overall Enterprise Architecture in the areas of People, Management Practices, Support Structures and Corporate Cultures. This would ensure that all of the complementary shifts in the components of the Enterprise Architecture would be orchestrated under an overall plan of enterprise wide change."

"DOD will create a Department-wide blueprint (enterprise architecture) that will prescribe how the Department's financial and non-financial feeder systems and business processes interact. This architecture will guide the development of enterprise-level processes and systems throughout DOD."

"Architecture is defined as a clear representation of a conceptual framework of components and their relationships at a point in time... a discussion of architecture must take into account different levels of architecture. These levels can be illustrated by a pyramid, with the business unit at the top and the delivery system at the base. An enterprise is composed of one or more Business Units that are responsible for a specific business area. The five levels of architecture are Business Unit, Information, Information System, Data and Delivery System. The levels are separate yet interrelated... The idea if an enterprise architecture reflects an awareness that the levels are logically connected and that a depiction at one level assumes or dictates that architectures at the higher level."

"Architecture discussions frequently focus on technology issues. This paper takes a broader view, and describes the need for an "enterprise architecture" that includes an emphasis on business and information requirements. These higher level issues impact data and technology architectures and decisions... There is not a single correct way to develop an architecture or implement standards for every enterprise; they must be customized to the environment."

"With increasing size and complexity of the implementations of information systems, it is necessary to use some logical construct (or architecture) for defining and controlling the interfaces and the integration of all of the components of the system."

"The state of the art in software design is the "enterprise architecture", where separate software components implement data processing (or other application specific-tasks), data storage, and user interface functionality. This approach enables, for example, the replacement of a database engine without changing the software components that process the data and those that support the interaction with the user."

"Although many popular information systems planning methodologies, design approaches, and various tools and techniques do not preclude or are not inconsistent with enterprise-level analysis, few of them explicitly address or attempt to define enterprise architectures."

"Le courant des affaires devant toujours s'expédier, il surnage une certaine quantité de commis qui se sait indispensable quoique congéable à merci et qui veut rester en place. La bureaucratie, pouvoir gigantesque mis en mouvement par des nains, est née ainsi."

"There comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions."

"Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other."

"Bureaucracy is [...] simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms."

"How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians."

"I meant the petitions to provoke thought, to create discussion, but I underestimated the inertia in the system. I forgot that inertia is what bureaucracies are all about!"

"Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making."

"The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow."

"In sharp contrast to the modus operandi of swarm dynamics, political bodies are ill-equipped to protect the integrity of their components and lack the collective wisdom for synchronization. Instead, highly layered command-based systems invade, institutionalize, and indoctrinate society with centralized directives, straitjacket bureaucracies, and self-serving officialdom. These systems hungrily feast on what others have created, cannibalizing other people’s resources like a tribe of pragmatic headhunters."

"The administrative character... is liable to be influenced much more strongly by the choice of letter carriers and policemen than by the choice of a High Commissioner."

"If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't."

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. [...] The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."

"The state—or, more precisely, the Communist Party—has no choice but to accommodate this new class because it depends on it to stay in power. And under Communism, the officialdom grows by leaps and bounds for the simple reason that inasmuch as all aspects of national life, the economy very much included, are taken over by the state, it requires a large bureaucracy to administer it. This bureaucracy is the favorite scapegoat of every Communist regime, yet none can manage without it. In the Soviet Union, within a few years of the Bolshevik coup d’état, the regime began to offer unique rewards to its leading cadres, which in time evolved into the nomenklatura, a hereditary privileged caste. This spelled the end of the ideal of equality. Thus to enforce the equality of possessions it is necessary to institutionalize inequality of rights. The contradiction between ends and means is built into Communism and into every country where the state owns all the productive wealth. True, periodic attempts have been made to shake off the grip that the Communist officialdom secured on the state and society. Lenin and Stalin tried purges, which under Stalin led to mass murder. Mao launched his “Cultural Revolution” to destroy entrenched party interests. None of these attempts succeeded. In the end, the nomenklaturas won out because without them nothing would work."

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

"When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the king only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice and in fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the king, divides and sub-divides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannises under the pretence of obeying."

"In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government—the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many—bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership."

"Earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."

"Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them."

"It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence."

"Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity."

"The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting — so that the big people don't always win — is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality — which is again grounded in human nature. And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else's in-basket. But, of course, it isn't. It's not done until AT&T delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies. They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if I've got a department and you've got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, there's sort of an unwritten rule: "If you won't bother me, I won't bother you and we're both happy." So you get layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They're too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them. The constant curse of scale is that it leads to big, dumb bureaucracy — which, of course, reaches its highest and worst form in government where the incentives are really awful. That doesn't mean we don't need governments — because we do. But it's a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave."

"Bureaucracy can have dehumanizing effect upon employees, making them more like machines, especially those at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy"

"A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy."

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."

"Bureaucratic thought does not deny the possibility of the science of politics, but regards it as identical with the science of administration."

"My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

"Project management has long been discussed by corporate executives and academics as one of several workable possibilities for organizational forms of the future that could integrate complex efforts and reduce bureaucracy.... This approach does not really destroy the vertical, bureaucratic flow of work but simply requires that line organizations talk to the other horizontally so work will be accomplished more smoothly throughout the organization"

"There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country."