Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
“Profound garbage” – that was how he described my work. Well, I can’t complain: at least he described it as ‘profound’… Over the past few days there’s been a fair amount that’s gone all kinda philosophical and ‘meta’ on me,…
How about a nice, simple, first-hand everyday example of SCAN in action? Here’s the context: toasting my mid-morning snack – that old English delicacy, a hot-cross bun. Except that the toaster didn’t work. So here’s the toaster, with the two…
Sometimes I really do despair of the ‘Just Do It’ crowd… In a previous post, I described the practical challenges faced by anyone starting out on something new, and used a few personal examples in my own work to illustrate this.…
Is culture essentially chaotic? Or is it a complex adaptive system? So asks Stephen Bounds in his post ‘Chaos, complexity and CASes‘ – itself a response to William Powell’s ‘Culture is chaotic‘. Both posts are well worth a read, and seems…
Uh-oh, Ric Phillips is back… And I do mean that as a compliment! Too often, when people ‘get it wrong’, it’s because they haven’t bothered to read the description, or to think, or both. But when someone like Ric –…
A great question from Jeff Sussna, as a follow-on to my ‘manifesto‘ post: RT @jeffsussna: @tetradian question: can complex systems like your ‘enterprise’ actually be ‘architected’? And yeah, it’s also a tricky question, because a lot of any answer depends…
What can we do about the NHS – the UK’s National Health Service? Costs are spiralling, its IT failures are internationally infamous, and after several horrendous scandals, morale is at an all-time low. The British government knows exactly what to…
Can you deal with it? It is amazing how language evolved to adapt to reductionist mindset. “Deal”, which originated from divide and initially meant only to distribute and then to trade, is now used as synonym for cope, manage and control. We manage things by dividing them. We eat elephants peace by peace, we start […]
The cybernetic concept of variety is enjoying some increase in usage. And that’s both in frequency and in number of different contexts. Even typing “Ross Ashby” in Google Trends supports that impression. In the last two years the interest seems stable, while in the previous six – non-existing, save for the lonely peak in May […]
[The new editor of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, Len Fehskens, asked me to expand my previous post ‘Dotting the joins’ into a formal paper for the Journal. Which I did, and it was duly published in the August 2013…
Have we gone dotty? – all the way out to the level of the entire economy? And if we have, what can we usefully do about it? It’s a metaphorical question, of course – but perhaps not quite in the…
For enterprise-architecture and systems-thinking alike, how can we reach towards the opposite of their too-common anti-pattern – all those endless ‘academic’ arguments on LinkedIn? More to the point, how can we bring it out of the abstract, and down into…