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February 20, 2006

Alignment, Coordination, Integration and Lifecycle

Business presumes that relevant achievements on a sustained basis will bring success.

Relevance is often a matter of timing as well as being very sensitive to the periods and duration of elapsed time. Without changing anything about itself, an organization's achievements may change in relevance simply because of who is paying attention from outside of the organization.

Sustainability is different. Functional organizations can be distinguished from dysfunctional ones in ways that do not begin with measuring their outcomes. Functional organizations are not always successful performers, but good performance itself is not a guarantee that the organization has avoided being dysfunctional.

Performance is part of relevance; targets or goals are provided as the perspective from which achievement is interpreted, so a suitable level of ability to achieve is as wide ranging as is the "stretch" of the targets from easy to hard. The big issue is about who sets the targets. As we say, "who's calling the shots"...

But as we know, just setting targets doesn't cause success. Our attention invariably dwells on what mechanisms we need for reaching the target.

Discussions about alignment therefore have two flavors.
- One considers issues from a design perspective: should a certain arrangement of elements and components logically suffice for the desired purpose?
- The other considers execution: should the typical activity of the mechanism likely meet the requirements

The second consideration, execution, itself has two flavors. One considers whether the mechanism is "keeping the target in its sights"; the other considers whether the mechanism, composed of many parts, is structurally sound enough in the real-time of effort (that is, actually constructed well enough) to get the job done. Today, these are both usually referred to as Alignment.

Although it is strangely rare these days to hear it called otherwise, both flavors of "alignment" are simply the issue of co-operation.

In the execution sense, which is essentially about quality, the combination of technique and management coordinates the parts for a unified, systematic cooperation. By coordination, it's meant that all parts conform their availability and output to the pertinent requirements of a common objective. No two parts need to be similar, but all must be explicitly assigned to the operation that meets the objective. Coordination is the most actively managed form of cooperation, and it is the form that is easiest to change.

The efficiency and security of that coordination is largely dependent on what level of readiness the coordinator finds the elements or components to have for the sake of their being combined. Combination unifies separate parts, but again for the sake of real-time confidence in the effort we normally see integration employed. Integration prefabricates the readiness of the parts, establishing their suitable availability independently of the actual frequency of demand or use.

Integration makes a big assumption, however, which is that the condition of each of the parts stays within a range of tolerances that allow the integration to persist. Managing the condition of the parts means attending to their lifecycles of arrival, interaction, ageing, and replacement or removal. Essentially, this lifecycle management is strategic to the maintenance of integrations that optimize coordination -- resulting in alignment.

But what about ad hoc coordination that does not rely on integration?

Lifecycle management prepares for ad hoc coordination by managing changes within a part's lifecycle according to predictions about future coordinations and the utilization that those predictions suggest. For each predicted use of the part, its degree of usability is certifiable at each of its lifecycle stages.

An architecture typically contains a documentation of the predictions and can produce part specifications that identify the quality tolerances for the anticipated use.

Lifecycle Management's benefit flows through architecture and integrations into real-time coordination.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at February 20, 2006 5:00 AM

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