More on backbone and edge
How do we build the right support in our architectures for the balance between certainty and uncertainty? How do we decide what needs to go into backbone, edge, or somewhere in between? This is a follow-on to the themes in…
Complexity / Structure
Direction and governance flows in Enterprise Canvas
This one’s a quick item of technical detail about service-modelling with Enterprise Canvas, as requested by Oliver Baier: OliverBaier: Enterprise Canvas: Does the XG flow go down to the next *lower* layer? If not, how does it relate to eg…
Enterprise Canvas and the Service Cycle
How do we make sense of a service, for service-review and service-design? How can we usefully partition the service-activities to help make sense of that service? And how do we link those activities to the various forms of value that…
Scalability and uniqueness
What actually do we mean by ‘scalability’ in enterprise-architecture? What can and can’t we scale within the architecture, or the process of architecture itself? These questions came up for me in thinking about a comment by Dave Duggal to the previous…
“Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?”
“The world still reels from the fallout from the crisis of 2008 :: Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?” Those are the frame-captions for a cartoon-style advert that’s currently running on the Forbes website, for an upcoming conference…
Requisite-fuzziness
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
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 craft of knowledge-work, the role of theory and the challenge of scale
If enterprise-architecture is a kind of craft – part art, part science – then how do we get it to scale? Is it even possible to get it to scale? – because if not, the whole enterprise of enterprise-architecture itself…
Control, complex, chaotic
What exactly is ‘the chaotic’ in enterprise-architectures? How do we work with it, design for it rather than ‘against’ it? Yeah, I know this is a theme I’ve visited often here, but to me it’s a challenge that’s right at the core of…
On not eating the elephant
How do we make sense of an enterprise? Is analysis the best or only way to do it? That now long-running LinkedIn thread about capability, function, service and process that I referenced in a couple of recent posts just keeps rolling…
More keywords for SCAN
Some notes that came up for me almost a month back, on the SCAN framework for sensemaking and decision-making, and that I hadn’t gotten round to documenting until now. I was reminded that I hadn’t posted these notes when I saw…
Price, value and ‘the market’
How do we make sense of ‘value’ in enterprise-architecture – particularly when we introduce the economists’ notion of ‘the market’ into the picture? In the midst of the same LinkedIn discussion on capability and suchlike, mentioned in the previous post…