Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Ric Phillips Heal the Eternal Disconnect Between Project Managers and Enterprise Architects!:
Excellent rumination on the relationship between project management and enterprise architecture. From,
@elbanoitca
Design is scope.
The budget is a fence that will make good neighbours of project management and architecture.
The more design (scoping) you do before the budget the better.
The less design (changing scope) you do after the budget the better.
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 easily outweighs the benefits of a more sophisticated model.
Disruptive technology take two.
Enterprise architecture is about the design of useful systems. Usefulness is first, second, and lastly a function of human intentions.
75% of NMIT students use exactly none of their institution-provided file storage:
They use consumer cloud service instead.
The service designers did not bother to discover and understand the technical subjectivity of their intended users.
So, have you asked these two questions lately:
If you haven’t asked yourself some version of these questions then you have not yet understood, social identity, consumerisation, BYOD, mobile, and a whole host of so-called disruptive technologies – because you don’t understand how they disrupt your system.
Never fear, these two discussions of cell-phone subjectivity should help fire up your imagination.
Frameworks, models and meta-models, governance policies, standards, boards, processes – these are the means to your architecture. Tools to help you get there.
They are the scaffolding that supports the building.
To observe some enterprise architects, one would be forgiven for thinking they were in the business of building scaffolding.
Should you design for bad behaviour or try to control it?
This is a very bad question. It leads you straight into the governance trap.
Advances in traffic engineering and automative safety have dramatically reduced road trauma in the developed world.
But no matter how much forgiveness is designed into a system, individuals will always remain accountable for their behaviour.
Good governance never trades one off against the other.
The Complicated Complexity Confusion Principle
Complexity is an objective quality of the real world. Complexity expresses itself in the wonderful behaviour of systems.
Complicated is a psycho-social phenomenon. It is a missmatch between the complexity of the world and our ability to understand and control it. Complications express themselves as confusion.
Confusing the two is the anti-pattern. It expresses itself in two ways.
“Anti-Collaboration and the Hungry-Hippo Secret Society.”
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Trapped inside their plastic bubble-land, committed forever to competing for access to worthless inedible coloured plastic baubles that represent to them a measure of status, members of the hungry-hippo secret-society collaborate in isolation from the world around them, waiting for their plastic environments to be exhalted as wonderful contributions to the mission, the project, the policy, the business requirements, the strategy, or whatever it is these self-professed dippy maven-muppets believe they are achieving without consultation, without reflection, and without harnessing the power and good intentions of the collective.
I studied Art History a long time ago. One of the ways they test you is to show you two works of art side by side and ask you to discuss the similarities and differences. I am not sure of the pedagogical theory behind that. But we did it and it was taken as a […]
For every innovation in technology there have been corresponding innovations in how we use information. For a lot of us social media is a ‘meh’ technology. Perhaps we maintain the semi-obligatory Facebook page, tweet our tweeps over breakfast, dabble a bit in Google+, and poke around on Pinterest for gift ideas. If that’s you, you […]
For years the failure of production IT to deliver fully on its own vision has been in large part due to constantly attempting to solve design problems with management thinking. These days, the abiding anxiety of large-scale production IT is expressed most often through the ‘alignment’ cliche. Forget the specifics for a minute. Suffice to […]