Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
And more on that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘, which does seem to be morphing somewhat into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’… Anyway, this part is about that theme of ‘architecture as change’ – though perhaps ‘architecture for change’ might be a better way to put it.. [Obviously this is related to the next […]
Why is it that some mornings start off with such a flood of ideas and connections that there’s no way to get it all down and done in the day? Hmm… [One urgent point first: this is not about Cynefin. I’m not going there: don’t worry. It’s in the title only because I thought that if you’re […]
Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.) Why? Simple reason, […]
You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!? I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it? And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? […]
When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture. Am I giving up? No, not at all. Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll […]
Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]
How can we ensure that the ideas and models that we use are appropriate to the context? What methods can we use to evaluate new ideas? Perhaps more to the point, how do we protect ourselves from ideas that won’t fit in our architecture-ecosystem? This extends the previous post on ‘Coping with the toad-in-the-road‘, where […]
Every discipline is blighted by their own versions of an all-too-common problem: “For every difficult, complex, challenging question, there’s at least one clear, simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer”. In Australian parlance, that type of magnificently-misleading ‘wrong answer’ is known as ‘the toad in the road’. Every ‘trade’ has its toads, in some form or another. In […]
Folks, we have an important issue on terminology that we need to address. In two comments to my previous post, Dave Snowden has made it clear that he objects to any reference to the term ‘Cynefin‘ that does not conform exactly to his specification for that term. This includes any usage of the term ‘Cynefin-categorization’, […]
What is simple, complex, complicated, or chaotic? And from whose perspective? For a long time now I’ve been using those context-categories – often referred to as the ‘Cynefin-categorization’ – with a straightforward cross-map to levels of repeatability, somewhat analogous to the states or phases of matter: Although we do need to be wary of misusing […]
Okay, let’s go back to something that’s perhaps a bit less controversial than the past few posts… This one starts with a ‘rant’ (as he put it) by Anders Jensen, about the ongoing hype over (gosh!) ‘the Cloud’: aojensen: As phk of FreeBSD says: #cloud is no different to the IBM mainframe. // It puzzles […]
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 […]