Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Over the past few months, I have touched on a variety of what might seem to be disparate topics: the need for architects (or at least architectural design), estimates, organizations as systems/enterprise architecture, customer-centricity, and IT management and governance. I suspect the trend will continue for a while, so it’s time for a post to […]
In my post “Architecture and OODA Loops – Fast is not Enough”, I stated that sense-making and decision-making were critical skills for the practice of software architecture. I further stated that I found the theories of John Boyd, particularly his OODA loop, useful in understanding and describing effective sense-making and decision-making. My conclusion was that […]
Sense-making and decision-making are critical skills for the practice of software architecture. Creating effective solutions (i.e. the collection of design decisions that make up the product) is dependent on understanding the architecture of the problem. In other words, the quality of our decisions depends on the quality of our understanding of the context those decisions […]
The one thing you can be sure of is that nothing is dependent on only one thing. Michael Feathers‘ tweet last week brought this to mind: Too often we construct simplistic mental models that fail to account for outcomes that are possible, but inconvenient for us in some way. As Aneel noted while discussing OODA […]
Prof Bo Molander once pointed out to me and the other students in the class that when you try to change people, you go up against billions of years of evolution, “good luck with that” and when you try to change groups, you go up against millions of years of evolutions, “good luck with that […]
One of the few downsides to being a Great White shark is that they must continually move, even while sleeping, in order to keep water moving over their gills. If they stay still too long, they die. Likewise, organizations must remain in motion, changing and adapting to their ecosystem, or risk dying out as well. […]
What do medicine, situational awareness, economics, confirmation bias, and value all have to do with all have to do with the architectural design of software systems? Quite a lot, actually. To connect the dots, we need to start from the point of view that the architecture is essentially a set of design decisions intended to […]
Value is a term that’s heard often these days, but I wonder how well it’s understood. Too often, it seems, value is taken to mean raw benefit rather than its actual meaning, benefit after cost (i.e. “bang for the buck”). An even better understanding of the concept can be had from Tom Cagley’s “Breaking Down […]
First, let me say I am not talking about highly productive organizations. Productive organizations get more work done than expected. High performance organizations produce the unexpected. They not only produce more, they also produce “different”. Defining a true high performance organization is difficult. When we think about personal or organizational performance, we tend to see […]
The elusive high-performance organization I have recently turned my thinking to high performance organizations and how to create them. Though most of us have worked in good organizations (and a few bad ones along the way), few have firsthand experience of really great, high-performing organizations. They are in fact very rare creatures. We know they […]
In previous posts, I have identified four types of contextual elements. Management: Understanding the Management Context Structural: Understanding Structural Context Cultural: Got Culture? Personal: Personal Context: The ME Factor In my 30 years of managing and consulting, I have seen some really bright, talented, driven people fail, some quite spectacularly, by ignoring or misreading their […]
As I have done more reading and thinking about organizational context, I have come up with a fourth category to add to the three I have already defined: structural, cultural, and personal. The new category is management context. While structural context describes the context that has been designed into the organization through the organizational design, […]