Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Tom Graves In enterprise-architecture, in what sense are we using the word ‘enterprise’? As adjective, or as noun? This is another point of language that turns out to be surprisingly important… We can use ‘enterprise’ as adjective, to describe a scope for something else. That’s the sense that’s used in classic IT-oriented ‘enterprise-architecture’: the context or concern is IT-architecture, […]
Ends and means are not the same: everyone knows it’s not a good idea to mix them up. The same is true of ‘enterprise’ and ‘organisation’. The enterprise represents the ends of what we do; the organisation is part of the means. It’s really important not to mix them up. [Apologies, but this is another one where […]
What is it that drives decisions at the exact moment of choice and action? – even in the most mundane, everyday action? If the choice-point itself is a true moment of chaos – a point where literally anything is possible – then what is it that guides us through each of those infinitesimal yet ubiquitous […]
I’m currently sifting through my past blog-posts of the past five years or so, with a view to republishing some of them in ebook-format, to make them more accessible in a more convenient and more portable form. So far there are well over 400 blog-posts here on enterprise-architecture and related themes, plus a few more […]
What do we do when we don’t know what to do? – and how do we ensure that whatever we do is the right thing to do? How do we make sense fast, at business-speed? I’ve been tussling with this one for quite a while, most recently culminating with a simple sensemaking framework called SCAN: The horizontal green-line […]
As the economy shifts ever onward from manufacturing toward services, how do marketing and market-relationships need to change with this shift? And what enterprise-architectures do we need to support this? [In part this is a follow-on from Dave Gray’s excellent Dachis Group article ‘Everything is a service’: I strongly recommend to read that post first […]
This is another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work’ – this time about how to bring all of this to a wider audience and market, and help bring ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ ideas into more general use. If you’ve been around this weblog for a while, you’ve probably noticed I tend […]
How do we make sense of uniqueness in enterprise-architecture? How do we support decisions at ‘business-speed’ – especially when the context is in part unique? And what architectural support do we need to provide for sensemaking and decision-making at business-speed? In the first part of this series we looked briefly at uniqueness, and why it’s […]
Is ‘identical’ always the same as ‘equal’? Not in service-design – and one of the issues we need to watch for is to ensure that identical service-provision does not lead to far-from-equal service-outcomes. If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues […]
What are the sensemaking-domains in SCAN? What are the boundaries between those domains? A great challenge in an earlier comment from Roger Sessions, where he asked me for the mathematical basis for those domains and boundaries. I think he was a bit shocked when I said there wasn’t one – but in fact there is […]
How do we make sense of uniqueness? How can we use uniqueness? And how do we make appropriate decisions when some or all of a context is inherently unique? In the first post in this series, we skimmed through Max Boisot’s I-Space and its impact on sensemaking in relation to complex-adaptive-systems. I then added a […]
Several people picked up on this one after Gerold Kathan sent out a note about it, but perhaps David Sprott said it the best: davidsprott: RT @gkathan: John Seddon – a master class in how NOT to use IT in services. Optimize value, not cost. Brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/dygdcpg It’s a 40-minute video (split into three parts) […]