Category Archives: Agile & Architecture

I don’t think the reason why the British travel infrastructure copes so badly with problems is actually down to a fundamental lack of capability or investment. The real problem is that the operators lack sufficient planning, and/or imagination, and/or flexibility to shift their services to alternative patterns better matched to changing circumstances. The only “plan B” seems to be “run what’s left of plan A and apologise”.

Take, for example, South West Trains, who run commuter services to the South West of London. There are two main lines out from Waterloo via Guildford and Woking, but also a number of parallel minor lines, like the secondary line to Guildford which runs past my house.

When North Surrey got a foot of snow for the first time in 30 years in February 2009, it was clear that no trains were going to run on any of these lines for a couple of days, but only a relatively short stretch of the lines was blocked. It was still possible, for example, to get from Surbiton (about 10 miles nearer to London than my home) to Waterloo.

I had to attend a course in London, and the roads were becoming passable, so I dug the car out and drove to Surbiton. It rapidly became clear that everyone else had had the same idea. How had SWT reacted? By running the same four commuter services an hour from Surbiton. These were, of course, enormously overcrowded and slow. What about the other trains which would, for example, have usually been running the express services carrying the rest of the traffic? These were nowhere to be seen, presumably sat in a siding near Waterloo. Would it have been beyond the wit of man to press some of these into use as additional shuttle services to carry the excess traffic from those stations which were accessible? Apparently so.

Last night, I got caught again. I got to Waterloo at 10:30 pm to see a blank indicator board. The cause of the trouble was signalling problems in turn due to cable theft at Woking. Now I don’t blame the rail companies for that, and I hope the perpetrators are found, hung, drawn and transported to South Georgia, but I do think the train companies’ response is inadequate.

True to form, they had reverted to “what’s left of plan A”, running a tiny number of overcrowded and delayed services under manual signalling procedures. Now theoretically my line should not have been affected. Not only should I have been able to get home, but my line is perfectly capable of carrying some additional “relief” traffic, as it does when there is planned engineering work on the main lines. (About once a month the 8 commuter services per hour are joined by about 20 express and freight services, and when planned that seems to work fine.) With a bit of ingenuity you could even alert taxi drivers at the intermediate stops to the sudden need for their services, at profitable late night rates.

Is that what happened? I should coco. Instead not even the regular services to my home station appeared to be running. I ended up on one of the overcrowded trains to Surbiton, and finished my day with a £40 cab ride.

Why is this so difficult for the train companies to get right? In both of these cases there was no fundamental problem with the remaining infrastructure or rolling stock. In both cases they even have a model for the alternative schedule. For last night it’s in a file marked “Saturday service with engineering work at Woking”. Staff flexibility might be the problem, but that must be resolvable, maybe via higher overtime rates?

There’s also an architectural lesson here. I design computer systems and networks. My clients run national power networks. In both cases the customers expect those systems and networks to be resilient, and to cope with growing demand without wholesale replacement. It’s not always possible to justify dedicated “DR” capacity, so you have to get inventive with alternative configurations of the capacity you do have, and then run tests and introduce clever asset monitoring and management practices to make sure those configurations can be used safely.

If we can do it, why can’t the transport operators?

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Location:Cobham,United Kingdom

Halfway through, and this is shaping up to be the best EAC I have attended for a while.

I was umming and aahing about whether to attend yesterday’s seminar sessions, and couldn’t make up my mind which to join. In the end I made up my mind about the morning session while having a cup of coffee on the way, when I recognised one of the speakers, Lawrence Helm, as having given an excellent presentation a couple of years ago on NASA’s knowledge management problems. This time he and his colleague Robert Stauffer were talking about NASA’s adoption of Capability Modelling, and how they have put it to use supporting some very high level decisions about NASA’s future shape.

This was another stimulating session, and really benefitted from the extra space from making it a half-day session. Lawrence and Robert actually ran out of time, which was probably a testament to the depth of the material and the discussions it engendered.

The principle of relating capabilities to strategic objectives was not new to me, although the NASA examples certainly were. What did surprise me was the level of detail required for capability definitions in that environment. For example, the launch capabilities relate specifically to certain target longitudes and temperature ranges, and could not be moved to a location outside those ranges (for example Korou or Baikonur) without re-engineering the rocket platforms.

The afternoon session was also a bit random, as I got confused between Mike Rosen’s half-day seminar and his separate one hour talk for which I had the slides. Not a problem, the half day session on case study methods was very educational. The example, of how Wells Fargo created a federated model to integrate their various systems under a common customer model was interesting, and plays nicely into my EAI talk tomorrow. Like a good sermon, I didn’t learn much new, but I felt thoroughly validated that Wells Fargo did what I would have recommended, and succeeded with it. We had a very robust discussion on the importance of stable service interfaces, so hopefully that will drum up some support for my talk.

You get a very good class of attendee at these sessions. Alec Sharp joined the NASA session, and John Zachman joined the afternoon session, although he didn’t participate much.

Thursday’s highlights have probably been the two keynotes: this morning on how different companies have developed different strategies to come through and out of the recession, and this afternoon on “how to think like a CEO” and get your messages across to senior managers. However, there was also an excellent talk this morning by David Tollow on how EA feeds management and planning of long term outsourcing deals, from the supplier’s viewpoint. Very relevant to many of us in the current day and age.

Just to make things interesting, Sally has asked me to swap slots with someone else tomorrow, so my talk which was carefully trimmed to the constraints of the last slot on Friday will now be at 10 am. This may or may not be a good thing.

Wish me luck!

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Location:Portman Towers,Paddington,United Kingdom

In an odd confluence, multiple streams of activity have come together to convince me that current IS thinking may be suffering from a bad dose of “the wrong orientation”. My work on data modelling at National Grid, an excellent course on business process modelling, my frustrations with the iPad software architecture and finally some exposure to Oracle’s latest SOA tools have all convinced me that we need to get back to designing systems with an “object-action orientation”, rather than the regressive move back to the alternative.