effectiveness

Order, unorder and effectiveness

A quick follow-on from the previous post on ‘Complex, complicated and Einstein’s dice‘, in relation to effectiveness in enterprise-architecture. There’s a common phrasing in business and elsewhere that places efficiency and effectiveness as kind-of opposites: efficiency, we’re told, is doing things right, whereas…

Checklists and complexity

Re-reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, to write a book-review for the current edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, it struck me that the SCAN frame provides a useful means to understand and describe the relationship between checklists and complexity. At…

Interoperability and interresponsibility

(This one’s somewhat exploratory, so perhaps pardon me if I ramble a bit more even than usual here?) Reading Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent post ‘Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards‘ left me pondering on the whole thorny issue of interoperability, and the way…

I don’t know

I don’t know. There – how hard was that to say? For some people, seemingly impossible. But as an enterprise-architect and a generalist, I have to be able to say it often – very often, in fact. Because the fact is that…

Requisite-variety and stormy weather

Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty…

On ‘stupid’ organisations

To link up with a discussion on ‘Possible examples of stupidity (or brilliance)‘, on  the LnkedIn ‘Organizational Intelligence’ group, Richard Veryard and Geoff Elliott asked me to post this diagram, from my book Everyday Enterprise Architecture: I believe Richard and Geoff want…

The safety-guys would have kittens (or goats)

Sadly, I don’t have a photo for this one – they always pass by so fast that I don’t have time to take the camera out. Anyway… One thing that amazes me about life in much of Latin America is the –…

Just Enough Detail

The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough. Just Enough Detail. To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much…

There’s no short-cut to experience

At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my…

An architecture of enterprise-culture

[A collection of notes that I made somewhen around May 2010 that I don't seem to have published before, and seem to be relevant now as I explore my own business-model. (Not an April-Fool joke, by the way. ) ] A culture [enterprise-culture] is…

Don’t start with How

Don’t start with How. Or What, for that matter. It’s been kinda quiet on this blog the past few weeks, but I’ve been horrendously busy behind the scenes. Some of the ‘busy’ you’ve sort-of seen here, in previous posts about writing and publishing.…

New book ‘The enterprise as story’ is published

Also launched at the Integrated EA 2012 conference was my new book ‘The enterprise as story‘: Full title: The Enterprise As Story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture ISBN: 978-1-906681-34-0 Description: Most current approaches to enterprise-architecture describe everything in terms of structure. Yet…
3 of 10
1234567