Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
A quick follow-on from the previous post on ‘Complex, complicated and Einstein’s dice‘, in relation to effectiveness in enterprise-architecture. There’s a common phrasing in business and elsewhere that places efficiency and effectiveness as kind-of opposites: efficiency, we’re told, is doing things…
What’s the real source of that infamous ‘business/IT divide’? And is there a way to bridge it? The answers would seem to be both complicated and complex – and might involve Einstein’s dice… At which point I probably ought to…
(Don’t worry: this is little more than a Public Service Announcement for those enterprise-architecture folks who are interested in the Cynefin framework.) From knowledge-management guru David Gurteen, I hear via Twitter that David Snowden is currently updating some of his…
Re-reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, to write a book-review for the current edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, it struck me that the SCAN frame provides a useful means to understand and describe the relationship between checklists and…
Following on from the previous post ‘Rules, principles and the Inverse-Einstein Test‘, there’s an important corollary about real-time sensemaking and and decision-making – it was in my notes for the post, but I forgot to include it, so I’ll do…
It started with one of those first-thing-in-the-morning ideas that seemingly turn up from nowhere: Principles create a bridge between order and chaos. Order is expressed in rules; principles are expressed in story. Order, principles and chaos: order is an abstraction…
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…
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Sadly, I don’t have a photo for this one – they always pass by so fast that I don’t have time to take the camera out. Anyway… One thing that amazes me about life in much of Latin America is the – to my Anglo eyes – startlingly-cavalier attitude to safety. Why bother with a […]
[A collection of notes that I made somewhen around May 2010 that I don’t seem to have published before, and seem to be relevant now as I explore my own business-model. (Not an April-Fool joke, by the way. ) ] A culture [enterprise-culture] is a set of prioritised values and goals – usually ill-expressed, conflicting, a muddled-mixtures […]