Posts by: Richard Veryard

Cloud and Continuity of Supply Risk

@dougnewdick points out the risk of a company becoming over-dependent on Google. His particular example is prompted by Google's announcement that Google Reader will be discontinued. I have previously commented on the subject of Creeping Business Dependency, the fact that many companies…

Danish metamodels

My Danish friends @gotze and @aojensen comment on the latest release of OIO EA, which is a national enterprise architecture framework and meta-model published by the Danish Government Agency for Digitization. Both John and Anders feel that certain key artefacts have been…

Arguing with Mendeleev

@JohnZachman insists that his classification scheme is fixed—it is not negotiable. Comparing his Zachman Framework with the periodic table originally developed by Dmitri Mendeleev, he says, "You can't argue with Mendeleev that he forgot a column in the periodic table". Well, actually,…

Knowledge and Memory

Once upon a time, people thought of an information model as defining the structure of the stuff you want to remember. Nowadays, this definition is too restrictive: it might possibly be adequate for a system/database designer, but is not adequate for an…

System Theory for Architects

There is a growing interest among enterprise architects in systems theory or thinking. (In this context, the words "theory" and "thinking" seem to be for all intents and purposes interchangeable.) There are several possible reasons for this interest. 1. The idea that…

Intelligence and Governance

Katy Steward of @TheKingsFund asks What Makes a Board Effective? (Feb 2013). She's looking specifically at the role of the Board in the National Health Service, but there is much that can be generalized to other contexts. She asks some key questions for…

Developing cultures of high-quality care

#kfleadership Excellent lecture at @TheKingsFund this evening by Professor Michael West. Here are some of my notes. When he left college West was short of money, so he took a job in the coal mines. Productivity was important to everyone, and the…

Cybernetic Entropy

The pioneers of cybernetics borrowed the concept of entropy from thermodynamics, the tendency of systems to become less organized over time.They regarded structure and information as ways of halting or reversing entropy, and information is sometimes defined as negative entropy (negentropy). In…

Complexity is not a problem

There is a common view in the enterprise architecture world that complexity is a big problem, perhaps the biggest problem, and that the primary task of enterprise architecture is to deal with this complexity. "The most pressing problem of the organization is…

Agility and Fear

Frank Furedi argues that human thought and action are being stifled by a regime of uncertainty. The only thing we have to fear is the ‘culture of fear’ itself (April 2007), McGregor introduced the distinction between Theory X and Theory Y, referring to different…

How Offices Make People Stupid

@benhammersley at #RSAwork talks about the future of office work, and identifies some of the ways that organizations make themselves stupid. The irony is that a lot of these mechanisms were supposed to make offices more productive and efficient, and to promote collaboration and creativity.…

Are we making progress?

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013) In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some…
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