Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Ruth Malan How: Some Comments on Creating and Evolving the Conceptual Architecture
During early system conceptualization, we start to envision the form or shape of the system, its boundaries and interactions, its primary elements and their interactions. The sketchy shapes of these elements, expressed mainly in terms of their responsibilities, analogies, and drawing on patterns and experience, take […]
Why: Motivation for the Conceptual Architecture View
Conceptual Architecture is a key medium for describing the “big picture” and essential design ideas of our system, helping others to more rapidly comprehend a complex system, how it is composed and its critical mechanisms or interworking to achieve some key internal system capability essential to sustaining itself. The […]
What is Conceptual Architecture?
“Conceptual Architecture” is the conceptual view(s) of the architecture of a system. It describes at a broad brushstrokes conceptual level the significant design ideas of the system. In particular, this view includes diagrams and text which identify, explicate, rationalize and contextualize the key structures and mechanisms of the system, and the relationships […]
Our “The Art of Change: Fractal and Emergent” Executive Report covers
a model of change, showing how the vectors of change are different at different points in the lifecycle, so that agility means different things, depending on where in the lifecycle the product-market is
a discussion of how the meaning of business and the meaning of design […]
You’ve probably read Getting to Yes and heard of Getting Past No, so why Getting Past “But”? Well, because “but…” is insidious, making it harder to get past than an outright “no.” The person who says “yes, but…” is ostensibly aligning with you. Ostensibly agreeing but for this teensy caveat—this objection that is a showstopper! […]
Our Getting Past “But…” executive report covers two essential areas:
innovation, the circles of innovation model, the innovation process, and what all this means for architects.
scaling agile development projects with VAP (emphasizing just enough design upfront or JEDUF).
These map roughly to the first and second halves of the report, though we encourage those interested […]
The Wikipedia community describes Conway’s Law like this; I paraphrase it like this: if the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins. The organizational divides are going to drive the true seams in the system.
The architecture of the system gets cemented in the […]
Have you read The Goal? It is (still) a pivotal book in the Lean movement. I’ve been telling architects that The Wheel on the School (a children’s story by Meindert deJong) is the hidden jewel of that genre—namely novelization of business fundamentals. I believe it could be a pivotal book in the networked, collaborative, dynamic […]