business-IT divide

Enterprise-architecture – which way forward?

by

Which way forward for enterprise-architecture? It’s common to think of enterprise-architecture (EA) as a discipline that’s mainly about getting the best use of the organisation’s IT. Yet whilst, yes, most job-descriptions for EA these days will still revolve around some…

NOTES – an alternative approach for EA

by

If – as we’re often told – business-design is about the relationships between people, process and technology, what is it that links all of themes together? Answer: a story. Okay, yes, this is a theme I’ve explored a lot here on…

Requisite-fuzziness

by

How should we respond to inherent-uncertainty in qualitative-requirements, for enterprise-architecture and the like? Yes, we can reduce every qualitative-requirement to some sort of metric, but is that always a wise thing to do? And if not, how can we tell whether…

Metrics for qualitative requirements

by

Just how should we handle qualitative requirements in system-design and enterprise-architecture? Should we, for example, reframe them into quantitative terms, as metrics – because it’s a lot easier to keep track of ‘measurable things’? Over the past couple of days…

The unique contribution of enterprise-architecture

by

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…

On human ‘applications’ in EA models

by

In enterprise-architecture, how should we model a human-based ‘application’ such as a customer-service line or reCaptcha or Amazon‘s ‘Mechanical Turk‘? [Note: on a first glance, this all looks really simple. As soon as we delve anywhere beneath the surface, though, it’s…