Society

Competition-against or competition-with?

What’s the point of competition, in a business-context? Perhaps more to the point, what is competition in a business-context? And why? Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are very important…

Belief and faith at the point of action

What is it that drives decisions at the exact moment of choice and action? – even in the most mundane, everyday action? If the choice-point itself is a true moment of chaos – a point where literally anything is possible – then…

Marketing and the service-oriented enterprise

As the economy shifts ever onward from manufacturing toward services, how do marketing and market-relationships need to change with this shift? And what enterprise-architectures do we need to support this? [In part this is a follow-on from Dave Gray's excellent Dachis Group…

When identical is not the same as equal

Is ‘identical’ always the same as ‘equal’? Not in service-design – and one of the issues we need to watch for is to ensure that identical service-provision does not lead to far-from-equal service-outcomes. If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem…

Looking at the big picture

In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ranting about those apparently-abstract ideas about ‘Possessed by possession‘ and the like… What I’ve been calling ‘Really-Big-Picture enterprise-architecture‘ is about looking at how we can apply enterprise-architecture ideas at a much larger scale, right…

Charisma, connection and brand

How do we make sense of brands and the like? How do brands actually work? And how does that connect with charisma, with ‘self-as-brand’? The starting point for this one was a re-tweet from narrative-knowledge guru Shawn Callahan: unorder: RT @thaler: Yesterday, in…

Standing up for the value of our work

How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. Several people…

For or against?

Looking at your enterprise vision – or any kind of future intent – is it defined in terms of being for something? Or against something? That distinction can sometimes seem subtle – yet it’s very important indeed… On the surface, it always seems…

How do we make EA make sense?

Those notions of ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ that I’ve been describing in the ‘no-plan Plan‘ series of posts make solid sense to a fair few people – particularly those who’ve some experience of systems-thinking, design-thinking and the like. But it’s painfully clear that it…

The no-plan Plan: people in architecture

Okay, time for the final theme in that ‘no-plan Plan‘ – which somehow seems to be turning into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’ or something like that, for some reason. Oh well. Anyway, this part’s about what is perhaps the most-serious…

Making plans, sort-of

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague…
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