R&A IT Strategy & Architecture
Insights on all things 'digital', both technical and non-technical
R&A is the vehicle for Gerben Wierda’s ‘extracurricular activities’ (what he does next to his day job and family life — or what’s left of that). Mostly writing and sometimes a bit of training or consultancy. R&A is also the publisher of Mastering ArchiMate and Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture.
This site combines the previous separate content of masteringarchimate.com and enterprisechess.com.
[Sticky] Link to the YouTube video of the ‘fundamentals’ part of my 2024 talks on insights into the digital revolution. About how the IT revolution provides reliable performance, but the price paid is less agility (IT is brittle and thus ever more It becomes ever more difficult to change). About how we humans react/have reacted to this and why ‘Complexity Crunch’ and not a ‘Singularity Point’ is coming.
Also contains links to related posts on the site for those that rather read than watch..
[Sticky] About the role ‘convictions’ play in human intelligence, starting from the practical situations ‘advisors’ — such as IT advisors — find themselves in.
Advisors need (a) to know what they are talking about and (b) be able to convince others. For architects, the first part is called ‘architecture’ and the second part could be called ‘the psychology of architecture’.
Our intelligence — and that of our audience — is mostly ‘mental automation’, which makes us humans fast and energy efficient, but only ‘quick and dirty’. And like all automation: change is hard.
What is the information revolution doing to us humans? A very condensed journey from essences of digital technology and human intelligence to the role of talk, trust and the impact of IT — especially social media — on society.
We are most intelligent on the planet, but that is a relative measure. Our intelligence has serious weaknesses, some of which the IT revolution is now making painfully visible. We must hope that we’re intelligent enough to accept that we’re not very intelligent. That may be an even more difficult paradigm shift than Copernicus’ or Darwin’s.
We introduce a new term: “AI-slopcast”. This is a podcast that is created by Generative AI and — surprise! — is AI-slop. The victim: one of my own posts.
It turns out that AI has created a whole new language. Humans do not speak it, and they may even mistake it for talk about sex. But luckily Generative AI is able to translate it to something humans can understand (and where the sex doesn’t show up).
‘Reasoning models’ such as GPT4-o3 have become a well known member of the Generative AI family. But look inside and while they add a certain depth, at the same time they add nothing at all. Not ‘reasoning’ anyway. Just another ‘level of indirection’ when approximating. Sometimes powerful. Always costly.
GPT-3o has done very well on the ARC-AGI-PUB benchmark. Sam Altman has also claimed OpenAI is confident that it can build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But that may be based on confusions around ‘learning’. On the difference between narrow, general and (introducing) ‘wide’ AI.
Google has announced ‘Willow’, a quantum computer that can calculate so fast it would take a supercomputer 10 septillion (a 10 with 25 zeros) years to do the same. But while the science is real and cool, the message is misleading. An explainer for non-physicists.
Mastering ArchiMate 3.2 has been released. Finally. This post contains release information, and a link to the book’s page where you can order the free excerpt (with the entire language description as well as a short BPMN primer) or the entire book (both PDF).
You’re on the Titanic. The engineers are shouting: “The bulkheads are too low! The rudder is too small! There aren’t enough life boats!”. The sailors mumble: “It has been cold, there will be many more icebergs than usual and further south”. The owners are pressing the captain: “You should be in New York in six days, we desperately need a record!”. And the captain thinks: “I have execution power. I can break through. I will be successful.” and orders: “Northerly course and full steam ahead!”.
Move fast and break things…
Fundamental properties of digital IT have set ons on a road not to a Singularity Point, but towards Complexity Crunch. That has consequences for our strategic (IT) choices and landscapes.
A ‘long read’ (sorry) about lessons we can learn by now after half a century of Digital Revolution so far. Written as I have been giving talks about the subject this pas half year.
The early machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution produced ‘cheap’ (in both meanings) products and it was the introduction of that ‘cheap’ category that was actually disruptive. In the same way, where ‘cheap’ is acceptable (and no: that isn’t coding), GenAI may disrupt today.
But there is a difference. Early machines were separate inventions creating a comparable product. GenAI is trained on the output of humans, their skill is ‘cloned’ and it is this ‘cloned skill’ that produces the ‘comparable product’. GenAI is not ‘copying art’, it is ‘cloning the artisan’. And our intellectual rights haven’t yet caught up.
What happens when your organisation suddenly loses all of its IT? There are enough realistic ways for that to happen. Think: a really successful ransomware attack.
As it turns out, first turning ourselves into ‘digital organisations’, and then requiring a speedy recovery from ‘digital armageddon’ creates a weapons grade challenge.
A story about ‘Out-of-Systems’, ‘Out-of-Sync’, and your ‘Minimal Viable Organisation’ (MVO), and a ‘fix’ that may only make matters worse.
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it. What it does is something else and that something else only becomes summarising in very specific circumstances.
R&A IT Strategy & Architecture 