Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Enterprise-architecture is all about story. The enterprise itself is a story; but the practice of enterprise-architecture is all about stories too. Let me tell you a story… There once was this half-crazed guy who used to go on about an even crazier idea that there might be a bit more to enterprise-architecture than just, well, […]
What is ‘Why?’ And why, anyway? “Oh no, not again“, do I hear you cry? Actually, it’s not as bad as that: it’s not going to be yet another of those long tedious technical posts – honest! (It is a sort-of technical question, I’ll admit. And, in the event, quite long. But interesting to just […]
What do enterprise-architects do?
At first glance it’s not an easy question. We talk a lot, with many different people, about lots of different things; but we don’t seem to do much. We tend to use a jawbreaking jargon, about narratives of knowledge, terminology, taxonomy, and things with a 2.0 in the name; we mumble about […]
As all-too-usual, the previous ‘how-to’ post ‘Upwards sideways from business-model‘ – to complement the earlier post on transforming from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, to plan and verify the implementation – has turned out to be huge, because it included all of the explanation and context. Here’s a stripped-down version without any of the explanation […]
The past few posts in this series have focussed on moving ‘downward’ from the business-model, towards implementation, such as might be modelled in Archimate notation. That’s an aspect of the business-architecture / enterprise-architecture interface that makes immediate and practical sense to most people.
Yet to complete and verify the business-model and its proposed implementation, we also […]
Was showing a colleague one of my favourite small books yesterday: Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School. Briefly flicking through the two-page spreads, one caught my eye. Seems so apposite to enterprise-architecture and the like that it’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:
Two points of view on architecture
ARCHITECTURE IS AN EXERCISE IN […]
Okay, I think I’m finally getting somewhere, on looking for a way to connect a business-model to enterprise-architecture, to provide a full link between top-down intent and bottom-up real-world constraints.
This specific part goes from the business-model downwards, from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, and thence to BPMN, UML and other detail-layer models. (There’s another part […]
Just how much are organisations themselves ‘their own worst enemy’ for the enterprise?
Have been thinking about this one for quite a while, following up on some great conversations with Kevin Smith (of PEAF fame) and Nigel Green (of VPEC-T fame) about Kevin’s concept of Enterprise Debt – an expansion into the whole-enterprise scope of Ward […]
A great conversation yesterday evening with a former colleague from Sydney, Robert Phipps. Rambling over a range of enterprise-architecture themes: about the distinctions between organisation and enterprise, about the role of values in the defining vision (or ‘venture’, as he put it – a useful term), about the flow of value around the shared-enterprise, and […]
This is part of a series of posts that I’ll be doing about ‘The Really Big Picture‘ at a societal/economic level, in relation to enterprise-architecture.
This post sets out some of the scope and scale of the changes that are or are likely to be coming up on the horizon over the next few years and/or […]
This continues the themes of the previous posts, ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘ and RBP-EA: The dangers of business-centric ‘enterprise’-architecture.
Much like strategy, enterprise-architecture is one of the few business-disciplines that explicitly focusses on the mid- to longer-term future. As such, one of the unfortunate side-effects is that much of what we do is at risk […]
This is in part a follow-on to ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘.
As a discipline, enterprise-architecture is still in the throes of a multi-year struggle against IT-centrism – in our context, the dangerous delusion that enterprise-scope IT-architecture somehow ‘is’ enterprise-architecture. There are signs now that that struggle is at last beginning to be won: a […]