Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
I’ve just been reading Harish Jose’s latest post A Constructivist’s View of POSIWID. POSIWID stands for the maxim (THE) Purpose Of (A) System Is What It Does, which was coined by Stafford Beer.Harish points out that there are many different systems wit…
My previous post Where does learning take place? was prompted by a Twitter discussion in which some of the participants denied that organizational learning was possible or meaningful. Some argued that any organizational behaviour or intention could be …
This blogpost started with an argument on Twitter. Harish Jose quoted the organization theorist Ralph Stacey:Organizations do not learn. Organizations are not humans. @harish_josevThis was reinforced by someone who tweets as SystemsNinja, suggesting th…
I shared previously a short description of what is SASSY Architecture and a more detailed deck here. This is a shorter but more recent deck from my talk at the IRMUK EA Conference in 2019.
This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation, powered by O…
It was early November 2020. I escaped for a long weekend to Tenerife where I played tennis for the last time of what turned out to be a 5-month ban back in Belgium. It was over 20°C and sunny, two more things I was going to miss in the long winter of the second lockdown. […]
Metaphorum was established in 2003 as an NGO to develop Stafford Beer’s legacy and has organized a series of management cybernetics conferences and workshops over the years. I attended three Metaphorum conferences so far. In Hull, 2015, I shared ideas on how some of the findings of the enactive school of cognitive science can enrich […]
Cybernetics helps us understand dynamic systems that are driven by a particular type of data. Here are some examples:Many economists see markets as essentially driven by price data. On the Internet (especially social media) we can see systems that are …
Recently a friend of mine told me “I can’t get my head around the law of requisite variety”. I’ve heard that before. I have also heard the opposite and sometimes found it wasn’t the case. That’s why I wrote Variety – part 1 and part 2 back in 2013. Part 3 wasn’t that lucky to […]
Here are the slides from my talk at the SCiO open day in London earlier this year. You can watch them static and download the slide-deck from here, or play it with animations below. Related posts: SASSY Architecture From Distinction to Value and Back What can Social Systems Theory bring to the VSM? QUTE: Enterprise […]
In 2015, when the Metaphorum was in Hull, I tried to kick off a discussion about potential contributions from cognitive science, and particularly from the Enactive school. I shared some insights and hinted at other possibilities. This year the Metaphorum conference was in Germany for the first time. It was organised by Mark Lambertz and hosted by […]
To be healthy, organisations – like human beings – have to operate in balance. Going temporarily out of balance is OK, but if this goes on for too long, it’s dangerous. Just like riding a bike, the balance is the minimum organisations need to be able to move forward. What kinds of things need to […]
SASSY Architecture is a practice of combining two seemingly incompatible paradigms. The first one is based on non-contradiction and supports the vision for an ACE enterprise (Agile, Coherent, Efficient), through 3E enterprise descriptions (Expressive, Extensible, Executable), achieving “3 for the price of 1”: Enterprise Architecture, Governance, and Data Integration. The second is based on self-reference […]