Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
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 […]
Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty (or lack of it), complexity, disruption and much, much more. Okay, first, the […]
To link up with a discussion on ‘Possible examples of stupidity (or brilliance)‘, on the LnkedIn ‘Organizational Intelligence’ group, Richard Veryard and Geoff Elliott asked me to post this diagram, from my book Everyday Enterprise Architecture: I believe Richard and Geoff want to use this diagram to comment on the current JP Morgan bank-losses case, […]
Sadly, I don’t have a photo for this one – they always pass by so fast that I don’t have time to take the camera out. Anyway… One thing that amazes me about life in much of Latin America is the – to my Anglo eyes – startlingly-cavalier attitude to safety. Why bother with a […]
The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough. Just Enough Detail. To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much detail is ‘Just Enough Detail’?”. And I’ll have to admit that there isn’t […]
At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my own business. How does that sound to you?” Uh, no. Not a good […]
[A collection of notes that I made somewhen around May 2010 that I don’t seem to have published before, and seem to be relevant now as I explore my own business-model. (Not an April-Fool joke, by the way. ) ] A culture [enterprise-culture] is a set of prioritised values and goals – usually ill-expressed, conflicting, a muddled-mixtures […]
Don’t start with How. Or What, for that matter. It’s been kinda quiet on this blog the past few weeks, but I’ve been horrendously busy behind the scenes. Some of the ‘busy’ you’ve sort-of seen here, in previous posts about writing and publishing. Other bits you won’t have seen yet, such as the preso for the […]
Also launched at the Integrated EA 2012 conference was my new book ‘The enterprise as story‘: Full title: The Enterprise As Story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture ISBN: 978-1-906681-34-0 Description: Most current approaches to enterprise-architecture describe everything in terms of structure. Yet people work better with story than with structure – and people are the enterprise. As […]
‘The enterprise is the story‘ – my presentation from the recent Integrated-EA enterprise-architecture conference in London – is now online on Slideshare: The enterprise is the story View more PowerPoint from Tetradian Consulting The slidedeck is just under 80 slides, split into five sequences: “What’s the story?” – introducing the idea of story as a […]
The echoes of the ‘naming-problem‘ around business-architecture and the like continue to rumble on, this time via another happy Twitter-exchange with Ron Tolido: rtolido: @tetradian just show me the non-IT people that invented #entarch and / or #bizarch tetradian: @rtolido we’re in a circular-definition here: what you call #entarch or #bizarch is whatever was ‘invented’ […]
One of the key reasons why I’m so vehemently against any-centrism and suchlike revolves around the question of competence – or, more usually, the lack of it. Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, often don’t bother to say that they’re competent – perhaps because they don’t need to […]