Not the New Normal

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

Disruptive technology take two. Enterprise architecture is about…

Disruptive technology take two.

Enterprise architecture is about the design of useful systems. Usefulness is first, second, and lastly a function of human intentions.

75% of NMIT students use exactly none of their institution-provided file storage:

@elbanoitca

They use consumer cloud service instead. 

The service designers did not bother to discover and understand the technical subjectivity of their intended users.


So, have you asked these two questions lately: What…

So, have you asked these two questions lately:

  • What possibilities for action does a system allow its participants?
     
  • How might participants in a system overcome or subvert its constraints?

If you haven’t asked yourself some version of these questions then you have not yet understood, social identity, consumerisation, BYOD, mobile, and a whole host of so-called disruptive technologies – because you don’t understand how they disrupt your system.

Never fear, these two discussions of cell-phone subjectivity should help fire up your imagination.

The Architecture of the Cell Phone

Cell Phones and Meeting Points in a Featureless Landscape

I don’t know

I don’t know. There – how hard was that to say? For some people, seemingly impossible. But as an enterprise-architect and a generalist, I have to be able to say it often – very often, in fact. Because the fact is that I don’t know most things – not in fine-detail, anyway. Nothing like as well […]

Work-in-progress – two more books

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects. The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years […]

Using SCAN: some quick examples

Yeah, right. ‘SCAN’. Yet another pretty acronym. What’s the point? What’s the use? Gimme some real examples, huh? This one’s a follow-up to the previous post “Let’s do a quick SCAN on this”, in which I introduced the SCAN frame for sensemaking at business-speed: (The above is the updated core-graphic – see ‘SCAN – an […]

SCAN – an Ambiguous correction

Yup, I admit: I got it wrong. (Well, the kind of ‘wrong’ that happens often in early-stage development-work, anyway. ) In my initial version of the SCAN sensemaking-framework, I wasn’t happy with the ‘A’ keyword for the ‘not-certain but we do have time to make it sort-of work’ domain (upper-right quadrant). I’d started with Agile, […]

Comparing SCAN and Cynefin

Sensemaking in business? What is this [choose-your-expletive] ‘SCAN‘? Why complicate things with yet another sensemaking-framework? Isn’t SCAN just a rebadged rip-off of Cynefin? And why not just use Cynefin like everyone else does, anyway? I’ll be providing some detailed worked-examples of SCAN in the next few posts or so, but I’d better get these questions […]

Responses to ‘EA economics challenge’

There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it. (This gets long again: sorry…) Most of the responses pose good questions, which I’ll come on to in a moment. But first, one response was so […]

An economics challenge for enterprise-architects

As usual, the previous post ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘ ended up way too long and involved and ‘wordy’. Sorry… So let’s do a shorter version, in some ways going a bit deeper, but concentrating only on the issues and suggested actions. Here’s the problem: there is no way to make a possession-based economy […]