complexity

Some notes on NOTES

What is a narrative-oriented approach to enterprise-transformation? Why use it, and where, and how? And where did all this NOTES stuff come from, anyway? NOTES is, I admit, a somewhat-forced acronym for a way to look at business-change: Narrative-Oriented Transformation of Enterprise (and) Services.…

NOTES – putting it into practice

How do we use an narrative approach in enterprise-transformation? What’s different about it, in real-world practice? How does it work? In the first post in this series, I introduced the core ideas for NOTES – Narrative-Oriented Transformation of Enterprise (and) Services –…

NOTES – an alternative approach for EA

If – as we’re often told – business-design is about the relationships between people, process and technology, what is it that links all of themes together? Answer: a story. Okay, yes, this is a theme I’ve explored a lot here on this blog…

More on backbone and edge

How do we build the right support in our architectures for the balance between certainty and uncertainty? How do we decide what needs to go into backbone, edge, or somewhere in between? This is a follow-on to the themes in various recent…

Scalability and uniqueness

What actually do we mean by ‘scalability’ in enterprise-architecture? What can and can’t we scale within the architecture, or the process of architecture itself? These questions came up for me in thinking about a comment by Dave Duggal to the previous post ‘The…

“Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?”

“The world still reels from the fallout from the crisis of 2008 :: Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?” Those are the frame-captions for a cartoon-style advert that’s currently running on the Forbes website, for an upcoming conference called ‘2013…

A Science of Enterprise Architecture? Really?

I've seen quite a few discussions over the last couple of years about whether enterprise architecture (EA) is amenable to disciplined, rigorous methods - sometimes described as a scientific approach. A lot of what I've seen strikes me as anything but scientific.

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…

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…

At Integrated-EA 2013

Earlier this week I was at one of my favourite enterprise-architecture conferences, the annual Integrated-EA conference in London. It’s oriented towards the Defence context, but does cover the broader scope as well: for example, this year’s programme included presentations on EA in…

Requisite Inefficiency

In his latest article Ancient Wisdom teaches Business Processes, Keith Swenson reflects on an interesting story told by Jared Diamond. In short, the potato farmers in Peru used to scatter their strips of land. They kept them that way instead of amalgamating…
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