How do we work on something when we don’t know what to do? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we keep going? I had some useful first-hand experience with this earlier this week. Some while back, I’d been asked…
‘Value-proposition’ is a term much-bandied-about in business-models and the like. Yet what exactly is it? A tweet by Alex Osterwalder pointed me to an article by Steve Blank on ‘How to build a billion-dollar startup‘, which included this brief section on the role of the product…
What is business? For that matter, what is – or is not – ‘a business’? Seems a kinda important question for business-architecture, doesn’t it? And yet no-one seems to ask it… So let’s just do some proper enterprise-architecture thinking around this one – otherwise we’ll…
My previous post on ‘Reframing entropy in business‘ kinda triggered off a veritable storm of correspondence, both in the comments and offline – hence seems it’s worth summarising and revisiting those themes here. Perhaps the first point is that yes, it’s confusing…
A fascinating throw-away line in an article on the BBC website today, ‘Arizona: Naming the dead from the desert‘: The forensic scientists and I have a lot of faith in science, which is a belief system. It requires trust in officials, in…
My mother is a retired general-practitioner (family doctor), and still has the BMJ (British Medical Journal) delivered here each week. It’s always a useful contrast to my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architecture, and every-now-and-then there’s a real jewel of an article there that reflects…
Sinan Si Alhir is one of the more prolific tweeters that I follow, and has a perhaps-unfortunate habit of sending out sudden Twitterstreams of valuable insight that really should not be lost to the evanescence of the internet. So, in the interests…
Is a market an organisation, or an enterprise? Seems to me the only valid short-answer is ‘Yes’… Can we design a market? We’d probably say ‘Yes’ there too, though perhaps with a fair few ’It depends…‘ riders attached to that answer. And when seeking…
What is entropy? What – if anything – is its relevance to business? And how does chaos come into the picture? The physics definition of entropy is straightforward enough: it’s a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows from a…
What do enterprise-architects actually do? What unique contribution do they bring to the enterprise? What triggered this was one paragraph in Len Fehskens’ item on current and future enterprise-architecture, in the Open Group blog ‘2013 Open Group Predictions, Vol.1‘. Here’s the first sentence…
(A brief note on enterprise-architecture and the like that came up over the Christmas break.) Emotions are facts. Feelings are facts. (Subjective facts, it’s true, yet facts nonetheless.) Assertions about emotions and feelings – in particular, about what Self or Other ‘should’…
Another Christmas, another cold. I just don’t seem well adapted for English winter… Nor for families either, I guess. In England at least, Christmas is both a religious festival and family festival – yet even at best I’ve never felt more than…