Fwd: What's Missing from VPEC-T?

[nigel green]

thx to Tom...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Graves <t...@tetradian.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:34 AM
Subject: What's Missing from VPEC-T?
To: "nigelp...@googlemail.com" <nigelp...@googlemail.com>


Hi Nigel

(Apologies, seem to have lost [or never properly set up] my membership to VPEC-T group, so will have to email you this response instead. Following is for posting to the group: )

This sounds much like the discussion about 'missing dimensions' in Zachman, with people wanting to add columns such as 'interface' and the like.

I'm with Nigel here: I would strongly recommend leaving the basic structure of VPEC-T alone. There's an interesting discussion about the role of the '-' that might be worth revisiting, but otherwise that should be it.

'Meaning' and 'Outcome' are definitely relevant, but it's misleading to try to kludge them on to the existing structure. If we think recursively as well as iteratively, 'Outcome' is close to "that which is valued" - i.e. a Value - at a higher level of abstraction; 'Meaning' is in effect close to a kind of outcome, though in a perhaps different sense.

Thinking in Zachman terms, the VPEC-T lenses are equivalent to Zachman's columns. They're not dimensions as such, but a distinct set of 'primitives' that can not be resolved into each other, yet may also exist as members of 'composite' or layered composite (e.g. Nigel's 'Use Patterns'). In Zachman's case, the original columns had several fundamental taxonomic flaws, some of which could only be resolved by adding what truly _is_ another dimension of 'asset-type' (see http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/12/silos-frame-ref/ ). In VPEC-T I believe the columns are already valid and 'complete-enough': it may be useful to add 'Meaning' or 'Outcome' and the like as backplanes (i.e. true intersecting dimensions - e.g. 'meaning of value', meaning of event', 'outcome of process', outcome of trust' etc), but should not be added to the column-set itself.

Might also be useful to compare VPEC-T usage with Zachman's rows. The latter imply different sets of stakeholders, in layers of abstraction from strategy and above to real-time operations and their performance-outcomes. A recursive as well as iterative usage of VPEC-T might help in this, too.

Hope this helps, anyway.

Best etc
- tom g.

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