A simpler version of the ‘EA-governance thought-experiment’

The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded […]

A week in Tweets: 25 September – 01 October 2011

Another week’s collection of Tweets and links – somewhat oversized this time, don’t quite know why. Usual categories, anyway, after the usual break: Enterprise-architecture and the other ‘business big-picture’ stuff: SAlhir: RT @Jabaldaia Network analysis in innovation may surprise us http://bit.ly/nDy4eA ArtBourbon: RT @pbmobi: (high-level) Enterprise Backbone of Nespresso   http://bit.ly/mOJTuL #entarch #bizarch >>plus comment […]

Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture

I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise […]

A week in Tweets: 18-24 September 2011

It’s back again, by popular (lack of?) demand: another week’s collection of Tweets and links. All the usual categories, confusions and all-too-necessary break before we start: Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and the ‘business big-picture’: SAlhir: RT @complexified “Secrets of the Six Principles” – great primer on #complexity in orgs, and case studies. [PDF] http://bit.ly/q6JPcR thoughttrans: Can roadmaps […]

What can we simplify in enterprise-architectures?

A great conversation this morning with Nigel Green, about his post ‘When is striving for Simplicity in IT-EA a good thing, and when…?‘ (“…is it less important, or even unhelpful?”, was the completion of the sentence). He’d been having a long discussion with another well-known figure in the IT-architecture space, who’d insisted that we should […]

What is the boundary of a service?

“What would be the smallest service? Did anyone ever look for the/a boundary condition of a service?” – an important pair of questions from Jan van Til in an earlier comment here. The first question is a bit difficult, because the only correct answer would be that ultimately it’s right down at the sub-cellular level – […]

Rebalancing top-down management-architectures

One of the points that came up in the previous posts on the management-architecture theme is that most management-structures are top-down, which doesn’t fit well with the ‘everything is just another service’ nature of most service-architectures – especially at a whole-of-enterprise scope. Yet if so, how can we create a better balance in the overall management-architecture? […]

Management as ‘just another service’

What do I mean when I say that, in a service-oriented architecture of the enterprise, we need to view management and the like as ‘just another service’? This came up in a comment to the previous post ‘Why are the elite the elite?‘ The notion of ‘just another service’ is worth exploring more – especially […]

Why are the elite the elite?

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 […]

Rethinking the architecture of management

Why is management the way that it is? Does it work well that way? And what part does the architecture of management play in determining how well it does or doesn’t work? (This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… ) In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four […]

Backbone and business-rules

What would be the ‘backbone’ of an enterprise-architecture? And where would business-rules fit into that picture? This is a perhaps somewhat tangled follow-on from four different threads: my previous ‘backbone’ posts ‘Agility needs a backbone‘ and ‘Architecting the enterprise backbone‘ Peter Bakker‘s exploration ‘The Enterprise Backbone‘ Carole-Ann Matignon‘s post ‘Visual Logic: A picture is worth […]

Dependency and resilience in enterprise-architecture models

This one’s back on the metamodel theme again, and is a follow-up to a query by Peter Bakker in his post ‘Thinking about Graeme Burnett’s questions‘, in reply to my previous post ‘EA metamodel: two questions‘. Peter wrote: I think that the most important question of all is still missing, namely: – What do you rely […]