What’s the difference between requirements and constraints? How do we identify and use them in change-projects and in enterprise architectures? This is a query that came up in my web-stats yesterday – and it should (I hope…) be one that I can answer…
What happens when other people take our cautious ‘It depends…‘ as an explicit Yes or No? What are the risks that we face as enterprise-architects when others force us to give a definite ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in relation to something that’s inherently uncertain?…
How do we make sense of story – the stories and narratives and anecdotes that people tell each other and themselves about their world? How can we link between the layers of story to help us make sense of some broader picture,…
Yes, I know I tend to write long; some others, though, tend to write such short Twitter-length phrases that there’s a real risk that what they say may be lost in the noise. Here’s a real example of something that needs to…
How did enterprise-architecture get to be so broken? I know I promised to move on to tactics that we can use to recover from the brokenness – and I will do so in the next post. But I must admit I’m still…
If the mainstream approach to enterprise-architectures is broken – and so badly broken, at that – then why is it broken? In what way is it broken? What are the core reasons behind why it’s so broken? And why ask this? Well, short…
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…
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…
Still going round my all-too-usual loop: what the heck am I doing here? (In a business sense, of course… ) This is a follow-on to my previous post ‘Don’t start with How‘ – about how I’ve been needing an urgent rethink of…
How is it that what we do doesn’t necessarily match up with what we plan to do? How can we best ‘keep to the plan’? Or, alternatively, how do we know how to adapt ‘the plan’ to a changing context? What governance…
How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect…
How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect…