Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Okay, this is where it gets scary – for me, anyway… – because it’s time for me to return to RBPEA: Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture. (The reasons why it’s definitely scary for me – and for anyone doing any of this work, frankly…
I’m about to embark on a shift in direction or emphasis, to much more of what I’ve previously described as Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture (RBPEA), applying enterprise-architecture/systems-thinking principles and practices to concerns at much larger scopes and scales – all the way…
What is chaos? What does that word mean, in practice? And how – if at all – can we use chaos in enterprise-architecture? I’ve been having a great email back-and-forth on this with Cynthia Kurtz, co-originator of Cynefin, and – probably more relevant here – originator of the Confluence…
How can we collaborate in chaos? Or, to put it the other way round, how can we use apparent chaos to drive decisions that guide towards some desired yet emergent aim? As you’ll see, this post itself is a kind of…
I don’t know. There – how hard was that to say? For some people, seemingly impossible. But as an enterprise-architect and a generalist, I have to be able to say it often – very often, in fact. Because the fact is that I don’t know most things – not in fine-detail, anyway. Nothing like as well […]
Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects. The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years […]
Okay. Seems there are indeed times when I have to accept that, yes, it is 3am, and I have indeed been woken up by an idea that isn’t going to let me sleep until I’ve written it down. Oh well. So best just get on with it, I guess. In a comment to my earlier […]
Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.) Why? Simple reason, […]
You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!? I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it? And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? […]
When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture. Am I giving up? No, not at all. Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll […]
Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]
An interesting follow-on this afternoon from the themes of the previous post, ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘. I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer […]