Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
My mother is a retired general-practitioner (family doctor), and still has the BMJ (British Medical Journal) delivered here each week. It’s always a useful contrast to my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architecture, and every-now-and-then there’s a real jewel of an article there…
Sinan Si Alhir is one of the more prolific tweeters that I follow, and has a perhaps-unfortunate habit of sending out sudden Twitterstreams of valuable insight that really should not be lost to the evanescence of the internet. So, in…
What is entropy? What – if anything – is its relevance to business? And how does chaos come into the picture? The physics definition of entropy is straightforward enough: it’s a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows…
(A brief note on enterprise-architecture and the like that came up over the Christmas break.) Emotions are facts. Feelings are facts. (Subjective facts, it’s true, yet facts nonetheless.) Assertions about emotions and feelings – in particular, about what Self or…
Just how applicable are ‘best practices’? How certain can we be that they’ll be ‘best’ for each seemingly-equivalent context? I’ve been brewing on this for quite a while, when via serendipity up comes this retweet by software-architect Simon Brown: RT…
Quite a few times on this blog I’ve talked about kurtosis-risk (‘fat-tail’ risk), and why it’s a crucially important issue for enterprise-architecture. But what exactly is it? What does it look like in real-world practice? Why is it such a…
What would make something ‘anti-fragile’? And how could we support that in our enterprise-architectures? Over the past few months I’d noticed various references to Nassim Taleb‘s recent work on ‘antifragility‘, but had largely dismissed as just a made-up term for…
Just how restricting – 0r even dangerous – is our seeming ‘need’ for certainty? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring links between the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework and Cynthia Kurtz’s more socially-oriented Confluence sensemaking-framework. I still…
What’s the trend? What’s going to be the New Normal, in business and elsewhere? Perhaps it’s just that time of year when people indulge in pointless ‘predictions’, but I’ve been seeing lots of articles recently that something-or-other either is or…
You can’t go wrong if you follow the rules, right? But what happens when you come across something where the ‘rules’ don’t make sense – and yet you still try to hold on to the certainty of ‘the rules’? Or,…
What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or…
What can our business-capabilities do? As our business-needs and business-context change, what options do we have to re-purpose and re-use those capabilities? These questions came up for me from a brief yet excellent LinkedIn thread on affordances. To me that thread…