How not to do social-business

At the Dachis Social Business Summit, one of the presenters, from Forrester, showed off their notion of the Always-Addressable Customer – combining geolocation and mobile to tailored marketing-messages. The presenter was clearly excited about it, and the two examples she showed

Interoperability and interresponsibility

(This one’s somewhat exploratory, so perhaps pardon me if I ramble a bit more even than usual here?) Reading Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent post ‘Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards‘ left me pondering on the whole thorny issue of interoperability, and

The Cloud is in the cloud

This one’s another follow-up from the model-development session with Stuart Boardman last Friday, and relates to a different way to understand the often over-hyped Cloud. [I hasten to add that most of what follows is just a minor elaboration on an

Using the ‘This’ game in EA modelling

A great session last Friday with enterprise-architect Stuart Boardman, using his Metropolis thought-experiment as a live test-case for my still somewhat-experimental ‘This’ game for service-modelling. Stuart developed Metropolis as a worked-example for service-modelling at very large scale – the scale of

I don’t know

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 […]

Inside-in, inside-out, outside-in, outside-out

I’ve been brewing how to describe some key distinctions about the way we view our architecture, about how we see its role, and its relationship with everything else in its context. Seems to me that there’s a simple two-axis matrix we can use for this: where we focus – inside (centred on our own internal context) […]

Requisite-variety and stormy weather

Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty (or lack of it), complexity, disruption and much, much more. Okay, first, the […]

Assets and services

What is a service? And what do services do? Seems like it’s time to re-explore some of the routine questions that come up almost every day in a service-oriented enterprise-architecture… not least because these questions are right at the core of the Enterprise Canvas model. And, in turn, the discipline and rigour about services that modelling […]

On ‘stupid’ organisations

To link up with a discussion on ‘Possible examples of stupidity (or brilliance)‘, on  the LnkedIn ‘Organizational Intelligence’ group, Richard Veryard and Geoff Elliott asked me to post this diagram, from my book Everyday Enterprise Architecture: I believe Richard and Geoff want to use this diagram to comment on the current JP Morgan bank-losses case, […]

A nice not-quite-scam?

Received an email-flyer this morning from one of my web-hosting providers, inviting me to join their new cloud-storage service, JustCloud. “It’s Free!”, it says, everywhere on the flyer and on the website; “Get Your Free Cloud Storage! – Sign Up Now!”. Um. Yes. Well, I’m a cautious sort of bloke, and when I see the […]

Modelling mixed-value in Enterprise Canvas

One of the more subtle problems in enterprise-architecture – in English-language, anyway – is the distinction between values (plural) and value (singular, but often used as plural). The Enterprise Canvas frame provides several useful methods via to disentangle an existing values-mess, and prevent getting into that kind of mess in the first place. In Enterprise Canvas, we […]