Working with ‘I don’t know’
How do we work on something when we don’t know what to do? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we keep going? I had some useful first-hand experience with this earlier this week. Some while back, I’d…
Tom Graves
What is a value-proposition?
‘Value-proposition’ is a term much-bandied-about in business-models and the like. Yet what exactly is it? A tweet by Alex Osterwalder pointed me to an article by Steve Blank on ‘How to build a billion-dollar startup‘, which included this brief section on the role of…
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 –…
More on reframing entropy in business
My previous post on ‘Reframing entropy in business‘ kinda triggered off a veritable storm of correspondence, both in the comments and offline – hence seems it’s worth summarising and revisiting those themes here. Perhaps the first point is that yes,…
“Science, which is a belief-system”
A fascinating throw-away line in an article on the BBC website today, ‘Arizona: Naming the dead from the desert‘: The forensic scientists and I have a lot of faith in science, which is a belief system. It requires trust in…
Enterprise-architecture and organisational health
My mother is a retired general-practitioner (family doctor), and still has the BMJ (British Medical Journal) delivered here each week. It’s always a useful contrast to my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architecture, and every-now-and-then there’s a real jewel of an article there…
Sinan Si Alhir on antifragility
Sinan Si Alhir is one of the more prolific tweeters that I follow, and has a perhaps-unfortunate habit of sending out sudden Twitterstreams of valuable insight that really should not be lost to the evanescence of the internet. So, in…
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…
Reframing entropy in business
What is entropy? What – if anything – is its relevance to business? And how does chaos come into the picture? The physics definition of entropy is straightforward enough: it’s a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows…
The unique contribution of enterprise-architecture
What do enterprise-architects actually do? What unique contribution do they bring to the enterprise? What triggered this was one paragraph in Len Fehskens’ item on current and future enterprise-architecture, in the Open Group blog ‘2013 Open Group Predictions, Vol.1‘. Here’s the…
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…
Family
Another Christmas, another cold. I just don’t seem well adapted for English winter… Nor for families either, I guess. In England at least, Christmas is both a religious festival and family festival – yet even at best I’ve never felt…