complexity

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…

Take Every Opportunity to Document

I am always surprised (and I really shouldn’t be) that we do a great job of responding to critical incidents but almost always fail to document what we did so it can be referenced in the future. As IT leaders we need…

Four principles for a sane society: an addendum

What architectures do we need for a society and economics that’d be viable and sustainable over the longer term? And how do we scale that down to the the everyday work we do at present in enterprise-architectures and the like? In the…

Knowing What You Have Supports Planning

Enterprise Architects all over the world build guiding principles to support their practices and planning. We built one in 2005 and it still holds true today. “Reuse before Acquire, Acquire before Create, Create Reusable Components” The big problem with this is that…

Four principles for a sane society: Summary

How do we make sense of the big-picture in enterprise-architecture? The really big-picture? For those who didn’t (or couldn’t!) read the full series, here’s a (shortish) summary of each of those (rather over-long) posts… From the Introduction Part of the work I’ve been doing at…

Four principles – 4: Adaptability is everything

How do we work with change – and, especially, extreme-change – in an enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? This is the fifth in a series of posts on principles for a sane society: Four principles for a sane society: Introduction Four principles: #1: There are…

Four principles – 3: Money doesn’t matter

What’s the real role of money within design for an enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? [Apologies, folks: this one's turned out to be really long, even by my usual standards - but unfortunately this theme is so darn controversial that it really does need the depth of…

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…
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