Requisite Scatter
In my first blog on this site, ‘For What It’s Worth’, I referred to Ross Button’s Scatter Architecture.
complexity
NOTES – actors, agents and extras in the enterprise
If the enterprise is a story, who are the actors in that story? What are their drivers and needs? How do we model and manage the relationships between those actors in the story? (This is part of an overview and…
A simpler SCAN
The SCAN frame provides a simple means to make sense of complexity and decision-making in almost any context. Yet is there perhaps an even simpler way to describe the principles and practice behind it? I’ve been nibbling at that question for quite…
Mr Ashby’s Bright Idea
Great theories come in two sorts: the type that is so fundamentally foreign to one’s existing worldview that it’s a major effort to get your head round it (think Special Relativity here); and the type that is so staringly obvious that you can’t believe…
Some notes on NOTES
What is a narrative-oriented approach to enterprise-transformation? Why use it, and where, and how? And where did all this NOTES stuff come from, anyway? NOTES is, I admit, a somewhat-forced acronym for a way to look at business-change: Narrative-Oriented Transformation of Enterprise…
NOTES – putting it into practice
How do we use an narrative approach in enterprise-transformation? What’s different about it, in real-world practice? How does it work? In the first post in this series, I introduced the core ideas for NOTES – Narrative-Oriented Transformation of Enterprise (and)…
NOTES – an alternative approach for EA
If – as we’re often told – business-design is about the relationships between people, process and technology, what is it that links all of themes together? Answer: a story. Okay, yes, this is a theme I’ve explored a lot here on…
More on backbone and edge
How do we build the right support in our architectures for the balance between certainty and uncertainty? How do we decide what needs to go into backbone, edge, or somewhere in between? This is a follow-on to the themes in…
Scalability and uniqueness
What actually do we mean by ‘scalability’ in enterprise-architecture? What can and can’t we scale within the architecture, or the process of architecture itself? These questions came up for me in thinking about a comment by Dave Duggal to the previous…
“Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?”
“The world still reels from the fallout from the crisis of 2008 :: Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?” Those are the frame-captions for a cartoon-style advert that’s currently running on the Forbes website, for an upcoming conference…
A Science of Enterprise Architecture? Really?
I’ve seen quite a few discussions over the last couple of years about whether enterprise architecture (EA) is amenable to disciplined, rigorous methods – sometimes described as a scientific approach. A lot of what I’ve seen strikes me as anything but s…
The craft of knowledge-work, the role of theory and the challenge of scale
If enterprise-architecture is a kind of craft – part art, part science – then how do we get it to scale? Is it even possible to get it to scale? – because if not, the whole enterprise of enterprise-architecture itself…