Posts by: Tom Graves

Services, customers and citizens

If we provide a service that is a monopoly or natural-monopoly, how should we relate with those who use our services? What’s the most appropriate metaphor to use, to guide our decision-making? I’ve been thinking hard about this for quite a while…

Requisite-fuzziness

How should we respond to inherent-uncertainty in qualitative-requirements, for enterprise-architecture and the like? Yes, we can reduce every qualitative-requirement to some sort of metric, but is that always a wise thing to do? And if not, how can we tell whether it is…

Metrics for qualitative requirements

Just how should we handle qualitative requirements in system-design and enterprise-architecture? Should we, for example, reframe them into quantitative terms, as metrics – because it’s a lot easier to keep track of ‘measurable things’? Over the past couple of days I’ve been…

Control, complex, chaotic

What exactly is ‘the chaotic’ in enterprise-architectures? How do we work with it, design for it rather than ‘against’ it? Yeah, I know this is a theme I’ve visited often here, but to me it’s a challenge that’s right at the core of all of…

At Unicom-EA 2013

Another week, another conference? Yes, I know it does sometimes seem a bit like that, but that’s part of what I do – getting the word out about enterprise-architecture, particularly at the larger whole-enterprise scope. This time it was in London, for…

Open Group TweetJam on business-architecture

What is business-architecture? What is its relationship with enterprise-architecture? And what is the business-value of either, or both? The Open Group ran a very useful ‘TweetJam’ – a ‘twitter-conversation – on these themes yesterday, using the hashtag #ogChat. I pulled the various…

On not eating the elephant

How do we make sense of an enterprise? Is analysis the best or only way to do it? That now long-running LinkedIn thread about capability, function, service and process that I referenced in a couple of recent posts just keeps rolling on, and…

Should companies go to jail?

Could companies go to jail? An odd-seeming question, I know, but I’ve been musing somewhat on the deeper implications of that strange legal fiction of ‘corporate person’… What started this off was that I went to the local HMV video-store, bought a…

More keywords for SCAN

Some notes that came up for me almost a month back, on the SCAN framework for sensemaking and decision-making, and that I hadn’t gotten round to documenting until now. I was reminded that I hadn’t posted these notes when I saw Mark Foden…

Price, value and ‘the market’

How do we make sense of ‘value’ in enterprise-architecture – particularly when we introduce the economists’ notion of ‘the market’ into the picture? In the midst of the same LinkedIn discussion on capability and suchlike, mentioned in the previous post here on…

Product and service

What’s the difference between product and service? And in what ways does that difference affect the various aspects of enterprise-architectures? This question came up as a follow-on to an unusually-good LinkedIn discussion, started on The Enterprise Architecture Network list by Michael Clarkson,…
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