Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
By Stuart Boardman, KPN Ruth Malan recently tweeted a link to a piece by Alistair Cockburn about the Last Responsible Moment concept (LRM) in Lean Software Development. I’ve been out of software development for a while now but I could … Con…
Maslow’s Hierarchy isn’t a hierarchy. Spiral Dynamics isn’t a spiral. They’re not levels in a stack; they’re not linear progressions. They’re dimensions. I was reminded of this by an excellent post on the Psychology Today website, by Pamela Rutledge: Social Networks: What Maslow Misses. She makes the point that none of the ‘levels’ in the ‘hierarchy’ make […]
By Raghuraman Krishnamurthy, Cognizant Technology Solutions If your enterprise is predominantly a consumer goods enterprise, you would have noticed tectonic shifts in the marketing focus. Traditionally, the goods and services were promoted through the …
Enterprise Architecture is all about supporting strategic planning and business transformation activities, although many organisations seem to almost wilfully forget that this is one of the main purposes of Enterprise Architecture if not the most important one. A business strategy is a long-term plan of changes for the whole enterprise which will address things like offering new products an […]
A nice quick one this time! I came across this tweet today from business-model guru Alex Osterwalder: business_design: A business model’s performance is due more to the harmonious relationships among its elements than to the elements themselves I tend to describe a core driver for enterprise-architecture and the like as one very simple idea: things […]
@dougnewdick asks Why Bother With Concepts? In his answer, he quotes the Gang of Four song Why Theory. “Each day seems like a natural fact/but what we think changes how we act.”
I think there is a critical difference between two interpretations of the…
I’ve been involved in a number of meetings recently as our IT teams try to come to consensus on answering this question: What is a Roadmap? It’s been a fascinating series of discussions. One thing that strikes me is that most of the int…
Continuing on the theme of the ‘This’ game for engaging people in enterprise-architecture exploration and development, as described in the two previous posts ‘This: an exploratory game for service-oriented EA‘ and ‘More on the ‘This’ game for enterprise-architecture‘. The final note in that last post was about EA toolsets, and the need for appropriate support […]
A great session yesterday with Kevin Smith, brainstorming ideas for the ‘This’ game for service-oriented enterprise-architecture. I’d originally envisaged ‘This‘ as a kind of card-game, with questions and supporting-information printed on playing-cards: There would be that small set of mandatory ‘setting-the-scene’ questions – perhaps printed on cards with a different-colour back – but all of […]
For a while now I’ve been brewing a kind of ‘exploratory game’ for enterprise-architecture, with the somewhat uninventive title of This. It’s based on the same service-oriented view of the enterprise as Enterprise Canvas – in fact we would typically use the game as part of modelling some aspect of the enterprise with Enterprise Canvas, […]
This is in part an addendum to the previous post. The main aim here, though, is simply to provide some practical guidance on how and where the Cynefin framework should and should not be used in enterprise-architectures and the like. This advice draws on my own practical experience with use of Cynefin since 2003, and […]
How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping […]