Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Maslow’s Hierarchy isn’t a hierarchy. Spiral Dynamics isn’t a spiral. They’re not levels in a stack; they’re not linear progressions. They’re dimensions. I was reminded of this by an excellent post on the Psychology Today website, by Pamela Rutledge: Social Networks: What Maslow Misses. She makes the point that none of the ‘levels’ in the ‘hierarchy’ make […]
How do we make sense of uniqueness? How can we make sense of what’s happening at the exact moment of action? In the previous post in this series, I looked briefly at Boisot’s I-Space – promoted by some as ‘the answer’ to everything in the information-space – and discovered that, useful though it may be […]
A nice analogy that you might like to explore, in terms of SCAN for sensemaking: The Simple side of SCAN, over on the left, aligns well with ‘left-brain thinking’; the Not-simple, ambiguous, ‘none-of the-above’ side of SCAN, over on the right, aligns well with ‘right-brain thinking’. Yes, I know that analogy has been over-used in […]
We know how to do sensemaking in enterprise-architectures; but why do we do it? What’s the purpose? What’s the point? As a result of various recent proddings from Bruce Waltuck and Stephen Law, amongst others, I’ve finally gotten round to taking a more than just a cursory glance at Max Boisot‘s concept of information-space, or […]
What happens when the simple definitions of Simple and Complex become complex? Do they become so Complicated that they can collapse into the Chaotic? And if so, what can we do about it? This one’s triggered in part by a swathe of complaints from various enterprise-architecture folks about a certain ‘standard definition’ of Complex, and […]
What’s the relationship between sense-making and decision-making? And how does SCAN help with this? This is a kind of ‘double follow-on’ to a comment by Stephen Law on sense-making and decision-making; and another query by Cynthia Kurtz on the structure of SCAN. The structure of SCAN I’ll address Cynthia’s question first. She writes: I love […]
Yeah, right. ‘SCAN’. Yet another pretty acronym. What’s the point? What’s the use? Gimme some real examples, huh? This one’s a follow-up to the previous post “Let’s do a quick SCAN on this”, in which I introduced the SCAN frame for sensemaking at business-speed: (The above is the updated core-graphic – see ‘SCAN – an […]
Yup, I admit: I got it wrong. (Well, the kind of ‘wrong’ that happens often in early-stage development-work, anyway. ) In my initial version of the SCAN sensemaking-framework, I wasn’t happy with the ‘A’ keyword for the ‘not-certain but we do have time to make it sort-of work’ domain (upper-right quadrant). I’d started with Agile, […]
Sensemaking in business? What is this [choose-your-expletive] ‘SCAN‘? Why complicate things with yet another sensemaking-framework? Isn’t SCAN just a rebadged rip-off of Cynefin? And why not just use Cynefin like everyone else does, anyway? I’ll be providing some detailed worked-examples of SCAN in the next few posts or so, but I’d better get these questions […]
What’s a quick way to start making sense of some context? – fast enough to help in making good decisions fast, too? If you’ve been watching this blog or any of my other writing, you’ll know I’ve been working on this one for years, worrying at it like a dog with a bone. My first […]
A nice quick one this time! I came across this tweet today from business-model guru Alex Osterwalder: business_design: A business model’s performance is due more to the harmonious relationships among its elements than to the elements themselves I tend to describe a core driver for enterprise-architecture and the like as one very simple idea: things […]
What are the different types of assets that we need to deal with in an enterprise-architecture? What implications arise across the architecture from the differences between these types? In the first post in this series, we identified four distinct asset-dimensions: physical: physical ‘thing’ – independent, tangible, transferrable, alienable virtual: data, information, idea – independent, non-tangible, transferrable, non-alienable […]