Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Seems a lot of people in the enterprise-architecture space wonder why I don’t toe the ‘party-line’, and push for IT-centric automation-of-everything, like almost everyone else in ‘the trade’. Well, here’s a nice first-hand example as to why… I’ve been doing…
Are you playing ‘pass the grenade’ with your business? Is your entire industry doing it? And if so, what can you do to defuse the metaphoric grenade? What’s the ‘grenade’? Well, it’s kinda like a hot-potato – except that you’ll…
Sirens blaring, blue lights flashing, the large white truck howls across the junction just ahead of us. Unusual markings, too: ‘Bomb Disposal’. In these troubled times it could be anything, of course; but out here, in the quiet backwaters of…
Is there an IT-based solution to every business problem? And is the IT-based solution always the most efficient and effective option? One of my more constant struggles in EA is to get supposed ‘enterprise architects’ to think about each context in its…
Is convenience even more fundamental to an enterprise than either efficiency or effectiveness? That’s the curve-ball that Nick Gall threw to me, in a comment on my earlier post ‘Efficient versus effective‘. It’s quite a long comment (and, unfortunately, quite…
What is efficiency? From whose perspective? Just a quick follow-on to the previous post ‘Efficient versus effective‘, with a couple of insights that came up just after I’d published it. First is that the distinction between efficient and effective is often…
What is ‘efficiency’? – in particular, ‘efficiency’ in any system that’s subject to real-world variances? Starting-point for this one was yet another passing item in my Twitterstream: RT @MentalHealthCop: If providers are contractually obliged to run hospitals at 98% capacity, is…
“Profound garbage” – that was how he described my work. Well, I can’t complain: at least he described it as ‘profound’… Over the past few days there’s been a fair amount that’s gone all kinda philosophical and ‘meta’ on me,…
Is ‘manager’ the same as ‘leader’? Are leaders always managers? And are hierarchies – and, in particular, classic management-hierarchies – always a natural, necessary and unavoidable fact of (larger) enterprises? These questions came up for me whilst reading three articles…
Sometimes I really do despair of the ‘Just Do It’ crowd… In a previous post, I described the practical challenges faced by anyone starting out on something new, and used a few personal examples in my own work to illustrate this.…
All that discussion about capabilities – yeah, great, fine. But how do we use them? How do we use this notion of ‘capabilities’ in designing our business-models and suchlike? I was kinda reminded about this from another direction yesterday, in a great…
Enterprise-architecture is dead; long live the architecture of the enterprise? Or something like that, anyway… Time for a kind of manifesto, I guess? As is perhaps too usual in my writing, the full-length version of the ‘manifesto’ ended up, uh, kinda long……