Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Okay. Seems there are indeed times when I have to accept that, yes, it is 3am, and I have indeed been woken up by an idea that isn’t going to let me sleep until I’ve written it down. Oh well. So best just get on with it, I guess. In a comment to my earlier […]
Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.) Why? Simple reason, […]
When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture. Am I giving up? No, not at all. Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll […]
Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]
What is simple, complex, complicated, or chaotic? And from whose perspective? For a long time now I’ve been using those context-categories – often referred to as the ‘Cynefin-categorization’ – with a straightforward cross-map to levels of repeatability, somewhat analogous to the states or phases of matter: Although we do need to be wary of misusing […]
Okay, let’s go back to something that’s perhaps a bit less controversial than the past few posts… This one starts with a ‘rant’ (as he put it) by Anders Jensen, about the ongoing hype over (gosh!) ‘the Cloud’: aojensen: As phk of FreeBSD says: #cloud is no different to the IBM mainframe. // It puzzles […]
“What would be the smallest service? Did anyone ever look for the/a boundary condition of a service?” – an important pair of questions from Jan van Til in an earlier comment here. The first question is a bit difficult, because the only correct answer would be that ultimately it’s right down at the sub-cellular level – […]
An interesting follow-on this afternoon from the themes of the previous post, ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘. I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer […]
Why is management the way that it is? Does it work well that way? And what part does the architecture of management play in determining how well it does or doesn’t work? (This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… ) In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four […]
What would be the ‘backbone’ of an enterprise-architecture? And where would business-rules fit into that picture? This is a perhaps somewhat tangled follow-on from four different threads: my previous ‘backbone’ posts ‘Agility needs a backbone‘ and ‘Architecting the enterprise backbone‘ Peter Bakker‘s exploration ‘The Enterprise Backbone‘ Carole-Ann Matignon‘s post ‘Visual Logic: A picture is worth […]
This one’s back on the metamodel theme again, and is a follow-up to a query by Peter Bakker in his post ‘Thinking about Graeme Burnett’s questions‘, in reply to my previous post ‘EA metamodel: two questions‘. Peter wrote: I think that the most important question of all is still missing, namely: – What do you rely […]
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 […]