Richard Veryard

The Startling Cost of Inefficient Collaboration

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@BillIves @tetradian and @gagan_s point to some recently published research suggesting that “collaboration can exact heavy time costs if done inefficiently” [MIT Sloan November 2010]. Yes indeed, that is what the word “inefficiently” usually means. Spe…

Visual Cliché in Architectural Discourse

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@JohnCleese has made some great management training films, published by his company Video Arts. In the one I remember most vividly, he mocked the compulsive need for visual aids in corporate presentations by imagining what Hamlet’s soliloquy would be l…

Strategy by Design

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Great tweet from @judyrees this morning. “Metaphor can create powerful insights that become distortions, as the way of seeing created through metaphor becomes a way of not seeing.”

When people talk about the “alignment” or “gap” between business a…

Collaboration Impact Zones

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In my previous post Collaboration Chasm, I looked at the adoption of collaboration technology in the enterprise, drawing on Collaboration Framework published by the CISCO community earlier this year [Insights from the Collaboration Consortium Year On…

The Power and the Glory

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#entarch A debate on Twitter about the power of enterprise architects (enhancing? enabling? influencing?), and another debate about the relationship between architecture and knowledge (does architecture count as a form of knowledge?) led to a question …

Organizations as Brains

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This post is based on Chapter 3 of Gareth Morgan’s classic book Images of Organization (Sage 1986), which opens with the following question: “Is it possible to design organizations so that they have the capacity to be as flexible, resilient, and in…

Selling Business Architecture

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#entarch @alexcullen asks “How Would You Sell Business Architecture To Your CEO?” Alex’s own answer to this question is in the form of a 15-minute pitch, based on the following three points.
Your business is complex, and consistency is a challenge.
IT…

Enterprise Structure

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#entarch There are some critical structural issues for business organizations, which have critical implications for IT architecture, including generating new requirements for management information systems and collaboration platforms. However, these st…

Enterprise Tempo

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An enterprise operates at several different tempi. For example

A retail chain has one tempo aligned to the customer visiting the store, a longer tempo for purchasing and logistics, and a longer one still for planning and establishing new stores
A mili…

Wisdom of Confucius

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#entarch My friend @taotwit appeals to a saying of Confucius in relation to enterprise architecture.

What is necessary is to call things by their right names. … If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If lang…

Coherence Premium

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Interesting article by Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, The Coherence Premium. HBR June 2010 http://www.booz.com/media/uploads/HBR_Coherence_Premium.pdf

The authors define the “coherent company” as one that “has aligned its differentiating internal…