Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Just how applicable are ‘best practices’? How certain can we be that they’ll be ‘best’ for each seemingly-equivalent context? I’ve been brewing on this for quite a while, when via serendipity up comes this retweet by software-architect Simon Brown: RT…
Just how restricting – 0r even dangerous – is our seeming ‘need’ for certainty? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring links between the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework and Cynthia Kurtz’s more socially-oriented Confluence sensemaking-framework. I still…
What’s the trend? What’s going to be the New Normal, in business and elsewhere? Perhaps it’s just that time of year when people indulge in pointless ‘predictions’, but I’ve been seeing lots of articles recently that something-or-other either is or…
You can’t go wrong if you follow the rules, right? But what happens when you come across something where the ‘rules’ don’t make sense – and yet you still try to hold on to the certainty of ‘the rules’? Or,…
What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or…
What is chaos? What does that word mean, in practice? And how – if at all – can we use chaos in enterprise-architecture? I’ve been having a great email back-and-forth on this with Cynthia Kurtz, co-originator of Cynefin, and – probably more relevant here – originator of the Confluence…
In the last days a great blog post of Gerben Wierda was brought via various channels to my attention which contains a very good video about Enterprise (IT) Architecture: I do not want to add much to the tribal war between Enterprise Architecture and En…
What happens when other people take our cautious ‘It depends…‘ as an explicit Yes or No? What are the risks that we face as enterprise-architects when others force us to give a definite ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in relation to something that’s…
How do we use sensemaking-models in enterprise-architecture? What’s different about this discipline that can so often cause such use to become problematic? I know I need to move on to more of that current series on power and politics in enterprise-architecture,…
Ran across a post from someone who is pondering platform building. As someone who has been building platforms for a while, I figured I should provide some feedback!There are very few standards in this area. Few can even agree on what a “pla…
Ran across a post from someone who is pondering platform building. As someone who has been building platforms for a while, I figured I should provide some feedback!There are very few standards in this area. Few can even agree on what a “pla…
This is the ‘review’ follow-on to the previous post ‘Cynefin and the Chaotic domain – an update‘. Back in that post I pointed to a report by Dave Snowden that he’s posted an update on ‘Cynefin subdomains in the Chaotic’,…