Posts by: Janne J. Korhonen

Tripartite Approach to Enterprise Architecture

I recently co-authored a journal paper [1] on Enterprise Architecture, in which we propounded that architectural work in an enterprise be designed and built around organizational accountability levels and be divided into three distinct yet interlinked architectures: Technical Architecture, Socio-Technical...

How information systems learn

In his book "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built," Stewart Brand notes that building architectures are mainly designed from the spatial perspective, whereas the temporal dimension receives less attention. Building on the notion of Shearing layers, he states...

There is Not a Simple Solution to Every Problem

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." This maxim, attributed to Albert Einstein, bears particular relevance to how problems should be approached. There is not a simple solution to every problem. Simple problems can be solved...

Agility Starts Above the Clouds

Can you feel the pace increasing? Is it hard to keep up with the speed? Is your organization too rigid, or do you feel in over your head yourself? You know you should be more agile and you may even...

Scaling Agile Beyond the Team

The agile movement has traditionally focused on agile software development at the team level. Team-based approaches, such as Scrum, focus on delivering day-to-day customer value, but do not, per se, ensure a strategic approach to business agility at the enterprise...

How to Make Work Take Off?

In his best seller book Getting Things Done, David Allen identifies six vertically arrayed perspectives from which to define work. Using an aerospace analogy, he recognizes the following "altitudes": 50,000+ feet: Life 40,000 feet: Vision 30,000 feet: Goals 20,000 feet:...

Work Systems and Requisite Inquiry

In my previous post, I expounded upon Hoebeke's (1994) notion that work is vertically organized as recursively interlinked work system domains and postulated a link between these structural domains and the ontological domains of the Cynefin framework (Kurtz and Snowden,...

Taming the Chaos Is a Spiritual Deed

Work is Organized as a Holarchy of Viable Systems In his excellent book "Making Work Systems Better", Luc Hoebeke (1994) develops a work systems framework that provides an alternative to monolithic, hierarchic models of organizations. Arguing that the 'span of...

Levels of Governance

In my previous post, I put forth the general -- and trivial -- idea that the increasing complexity of the strategic context calls for increasingly sophisticated governance models. In the following, I will further develop the notion and outline five...

IT Governance is Contingent on the Strategic Context

Peterson (2004) identifies three basic value drivers of IT governance: service infrastructure, solution integration and strategic innovation. In service infrastructure, the value lies in IT operations and services that are delivered with maximum reliability and availability. It focuses on standardization...
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