taxonomy

On not eating the elephant

How do we make sense of an enterprise? Is analysis the best or only way to do it? That now long-running LinkedIn thread about capability, function, service and process that I referenced in a couple of recent posts just keeps rolling on, and…

Price, value and ‘the market’

How do we make sense of ‘value’ in enterprise-architecture – particularly when we introduce the economists’ notion of ‘the market’ into the picture? In the midst of the same LinkedIn discussion on capability and suchlike, mentioned in the previous post here on…

Product and service

What’s the difference between product and service? And in what ways does that difference affect the various aspects of enterprise-architectures? This question came up as a follow-on to an unusually-good LinkedIn discussion, started on The Enterprise Architecture Network list by Michael Clarkson,…

Enterprise and ecosystem

What is an enterprise, really? It’s a question that always seems to invoke a lot of discussion amongst enterprise-architects – perhaps not least because the answer is so essential to any description of whatever it is that we actually do! Anyway, for some…

On the business of the business

What is business? For that matter, what is – or is not – ‘a business’? Seems a kinda important question for business-architecture, doesn’t it? And yet no-one seems to ask it… So let’s just do some proper enterprise-architecture thinking around this one – otherwise we’ll…

Market as organisation, market as enterprise

Is a market an organisation, or an enterprise? Seems to me the only valid short-answer is ‘Yes’… Can we design a market? We’d probably say ‘Yes’ there too, though perhaps with a fair few  ’It depends…‘ riders attached to that answer. And when seeking…

Feelings are facts

(A brief note on enterprise-architecture and the like that came up over the Christmas break.) Emotions are facts. Feelings are facts. (Subjective facts, it’s true, yet facts nonetheless.) Assertions about emotions and feelings – in particular, about what Self or Other ‘should’…

Principles and checklists

What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or rather, to…

Two enterprise-architectures

What is enterprise-architecture? That’s, uh, one of the more awkward questions of the trade… (Quick summary: if you ask a dozen enterprise-architects, you’ll probably get at least a hundred different definitions… or just ‘It depends…’ ) In the continuing spirit of ‘Ending the shoot-out…

Architecture-by-definition is an anti-pattern. The goal of a…

Architecture-by-definition is an anti-pattern. The goal of a definition is to remove noise.  You add another layer of noise when your definitions are model-specific sub-definitions for commonly understood terms. For example: service, product, capability, or system. Special definitions introduce an additional cognitive load that…

Between the boxes

What happens when people get too fixated on the ‘boxes’ in our models and frameworks? And what can we do about it in enterprise-architecture? This one’s actually a follow-on to the previous post about ‘It depends…‘, but it starts with a Tweet:…

Same and different

Just how much is enterprise-architecture about the balance between same and different? Quite a lot, it seems to me… (In part this is a follow-on to ‘The theory of enterprise-architecture‘, about exploring the theoretical base that underpins a whole-enterprise approach to EA;…
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