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 […]

Uniqueness and coincidensity

Coincidensity – a really nice neologism that I first saw in a Tweet by social-business specialist David Cushman: davidcushman: RT @stoweboyd: the right word isn’t serendipity, it’s coincidensity: the likelihood of serendipity jonhusband: @tetradian @davidcushman @stoweboyd … I much enjoy the #neologism coincidensity .. bravo ! From the Tweet, I’d assumed that the term had […]

Competition-against or competition-with?

What’s the point of competition, in a business-context? Perhaps more to the point, what is competition in a business-context? And why? Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are very important in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and business-model design: not least because if we get it […]

SCAN – work in progress

Yes, I know I’ve gone a bit quiet in the past couple weeks, and no, I haven’t abandoned those ideas about SCAN sensemaking and real-time decision-making and the like. Reality is that those ideas are very much in the ‘work in progress’ stage at the moment, and as yet still quite some way from a […]

Use EA to identify hidden costs in outsourcing

Why do we need enterprise-architecture in a business? And why does that EA need to be broader than just IT, often all the way out to a true enterprise-wide scope? One reason is implied this Tweet by Belgian consultant Patrick Van Renterghem: itworks: Big discussion now about what happens when cloud vendors go bankrupt or out-of-service. […]

Belief and faith at the point of action

What is it that drives decisions at the exact moment of choice and action? – even in the most mundane, everyday action? If the choice-point itself is a true moment of chaos – a point where literally anything is possible – then what is it that guides us through each of those infinitesimal yet ubiquitous […]

Five EA app ideas – anyone interested?

This is another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work’ – this time about how to bring all of this to a wider audience and market, and help bring ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ ideas into more general use. If you’ve been around this weblog for a while, you’ve probably noticed I tend […]

When identical is not the same as equal

Is ‘identical’ always the same as ‘equal’? Not in service-design – and one of the issues we need to watch for is to ensure that identical service-provision does not lead to far-from-equal service-outcomes. If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues […]

How not to use IT in services

Several people picked up on this one after Gerold Kathan sent out a note about it, but perhaps David Sprott said it the best: davidsprott: RT @gkathan: John Seddon – a master class in how NOT to use IT in services. Optimize value, not cost. Brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/dygdcpg It’s a 40-minute video (split into three parts) […]

Why should anyone do enterprise-architecture?

A nice quick one this time! I came across this tweet today from business-model guru Alex Osterwalder: business_design: A business model’s performance is due more to the harmonious relationships among its elements than to the elements themselves I tend to describe a core driver for enterprise-architecture and the like as one very simple idea: things […]

The ‘This’ game and EA toolsets

Continuing on the theme of the ‘This’ game for engaging people in enterprise-architecture exploration and development, as described in the two previous posts ‘This: an exploratory game for service-oriented EA‘ and ‘More on the ‘This’ game for enterprise-architecture‘. The final note in that last post was about EA toolsets, and the need for appropriate support […]

More on the ‘This’ game for enterprise-architecture

A great session yesterday with Kevin Smith, brainstorming ideas for the ‘This’ game for service-oriented enterprise-architecture. I’d originally envisaged ‘This‘ as a kind of card-game, with questions and supporting-information printed on playing-cards: There would be that small set of mandatory ‘setting-the-scene’ questions – perhaps printed on cards with a different-colour back – but all of […]