Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What methods do we need for experiment and research in enterprise-architecture and the like? Should and must we declare exactly what our hypothesis will be before we start? Those are some of the questions that Stephen Bounds triggered off for…
A really nice SCAN challenge from Luc Taesch, in four parts, via Twitter: I need a ‘SCAN in 2mins’ simple explanation, for my CognitiveBias meetup I’d like to story tell a kid, discovering a topic, and going in the N…
Are we looking at wicked-problems in the wrong way? Does the term itself mislead us about how to work with them? Perhaps more to the point, should we be describing them as ‘wicked’ at all? Would another term be a…
Quick, brief and practical – three phrases that every enterprise-architecture should know by heart, and act on, too: “I don’t know… (but I know how to find out, or find someone who does)” “It depends… (and I know how to…
“What concerns me is the dilution of what EA means to the point it has no meaning.” That’s what he said. But is this a real concern that we should be worried about in enterprise-architecture? Or a red-herring that arises…
I’ve been arguing repeatedly that trying to get the Viable System Model from overviews, introductions and writings based on or about it, can put the curious mind in a state of confusion or simply lead to wrong interpretations. The absolute minimum is reading at least once each of the three books explaining the model. But […]
How do I think? How do I think, really? How do you think, exactly? How does anyone think – and describe their thinking? Especially about ‘big-picture’, often-abstract themes such as enterprise-architecture? Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this one a long time – a very…
The “slides” supporting my talk on Requisite Inefficiency a couple of months ago have been on Slideshare since then but I haven’t had the time to share them here. Which I do now. The various manifestations of Requisite Inefficiency in both organisms and organisations can be understood by observing the maintenance of balances between homeostasis […]
Is there an IT-based solution to every business problem? And is the IT-based solution always the most efficient and effective option? One of my more constant struggles in EA is to get supposed ‘enterprise architects’ to think about each context in its…
Regular readers of this blog will know I refer quite often to one of the core techniques in futures-studies, Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). But as of a couple of weeks ago, you won’t find any reference to it on…
The SCAN framework describes sensemaking and decision-making in terms of four distinct ‘domains’, by convention labelled as Simple, Complicated, Ambiguous and Not-known. But what happens at the edges? (The domains themselves are fairly distinct, anyway, in the sense that viable…
Always an interesting event, this one: Integrated-EA, the annual Defence-oriented enterprise-architecture conference in London that’s been a favourite part of my calendar for some years now. This time I was only able to go to the second day – I…