methodology

How to build a Roadmap – Define End State

An earlier post (How to Build a Roadmap) discussed the specific steps required to develop a well thought out road map. This method identified specific actions using an overall pattern ALL roadmaps should follow. The steps required to complete this work: 1) Develop a…

Best practices – adapt, then adopt

Just how applicable are ‘best practices’? How certain can we be that they’ll be ‘best’ for each seemingly-equivalent context? I’ve been brewing on this for quite a while, when via serendipity up comes this retweet by software-architect Simon Brown: RT @simonbrown: RT @ntcoding:…

Metaframeworks in practice, Part 2: Iterative-TOGAF

What methodology-frameworks do we need for broad-scope enterprise-architecture in a human-services government-department? This is the second of five worked-examples of metaframeworks in practice - on how to hack and ‘smoosh-together’ existing frameworks to create a tool that will help people make sense of a…

A quick metablog

Why is it that some mornings start with a flood of ideas, each of which demand a blog-post that would take a day or more to research and write? Sigh… Hence a quick metablog – a post about things I’m either writing…

How to build a Roadmap – Define Current State

Introduction In an earlier post (How to Build a Roadmap) I discussed the specific steps required to develop a defensible, well thought out road map to identify specific actions using an overall pattern all roadmaps should follow. The steps required to complete…

Unbreaking

Current mainstream enterprise-architecture [EA] is broken, more broken and yet more broken, and has real problems with wickedness. But what can we do about this? How can we mend EA, make it unbroken? As in those posts linked-to above, I’d suggest that…

Enterprise-architecture is wicked

How do we cope with the wickedness of enterprise-architecture? I don’t mean here the implicit wickedness of people promoting term-hijacks and other half-baked notions as ‘the truth’ of enterprise-architecture – though heaven-knows there’s enough of that wickedness around. I also don’t mean…

Framework versus body-of-knowledge

What’s the difference between a framework and a body-of-knowledge? A colleague asked me to write some notes on this, and it seems worthwhile doing so in more generally-available form – in other words, a blog-post. To me this is much like the…

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…

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…

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.…

Decision-making – linking intent and action [4]

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…
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