GLUE Disease

In my last post I was writing about Tomorrow is Today. About working and being right now, this very moment. And I believe that is key, as I tried to point out in other recent posts, e.g. Architecting Past, Future or Present. Today I shortly like to talk about the concept GLUE Disease and it is related to learn from others.

"He who conceals his disease cannot expect to be cured",

Ethiopian Proverb

So a quote from Wiki: "A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism." So how do I translate that into GLUE and Real Enterprise Architecture? By looking at the GLUE Framework and particularly the Circulatory System the analogy is between the body and the GLUE Space.

So what is a GLUE disease then. Actually any dysfunction which causes the whole system at hand to start working unbalanced. The flow of information between in the circulatory system is the key for me to find out if something is going wrong and how wrong something is going.

Some examples (and the list is for sure not complete):

• New audit finding are found faster than solutions to the findings are build (GLUE Disciplines)
• New solutions are build and pushed in before the effect of a former solution has been checked (GLUE Disciplines)
• New solutions are pushed back and enforce changes in destination and discovery (GLUE Divisions)
• New solutions are build and pushed in before the organisation has adopted to it (GLUE Divisions)
• Integration into a higher Deck enforces changes on the higher Deck (GLUE Decks)
• New requests for one Deck are faster created than the lower Deck can integrate into the upper Deck (GLUE Decks)

By observing the flow of logical information , no matter who in the organisation does the particular delivery, I am able to find dysfunctions or diseases. These diseases are usually giving good signals where to focus to sort out architecture obstacles. My believe is that a steady flow of information in a balanced way is a signal of health. At the moment in time when that flow is unsteady or even worse completely blocked the GLUE Space becomes unhealthy. One area can easily spread to other areas and put the whole at risk. These areas I usually focus on and try to fix to let the flow be steady again.

In my next posts I like to explore the different techniques deeper on how to optimize the flow and what techniques to use. On top of that the what to learn from others series is under preparation. Feel free to comment or ask whatever you want via any channel you want to utilize.