The Most Important EA Deliverable

Originally posted on Alec Blair:
So, you’re busy working away at your models.  The team is busy discussing the nitty, gritty things around taxonomies and ontologies.  Others are creating detailed elaborations of different aspects of one of the dimensions of your enterprise architecture.  You look at the work and say, “Damn this is good stuff!”…

Gordian knot, butterfly effect:Organizations are a study in complexity

Business is complex.  Gone are the years of simplicity in business operations.  Exponential growth and change in regulations, globalization, distributed operations, changing processes, competitive velocity, business relationships, disruptive technology, legacy technology, and business data encumbers organizations of all sizes. Business … Continue reading

What Happened to the Fine Art of Business Analysis? – Revisited 2013

Link: http://taotwits-too-big-to-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-happened-to-fine-art-of-business.html

From Taotwit's Too-Big-To-Tweet

Back in 2008, I wrote a paper on Business Analysis. Recently, I’ve been revisiting this subject in my day-job and this made me realise how little things had changed and inspired me to write this post, which is, basically, the original article re-written, with additional thoughts (in italics).


The role of the Business Analyst has never been more important but needs refocus on Information Systems not the technical solution. Many of us can recall a time when a distinction was made between the hardware and software supporting the business and the information used by the business – there was a clear difference between IT, to describe the former, and IS to describe the latter. 
IS stood for Information Systems: 
IS: The landscape  of business  information used by people within an organisation 
and how they use information to deliver business outcomes. 

IT, in contrast, meant: 
IT:  The  hardware  and  software  technology  that  automates  or  otherwise  supports 
information processing. 

This distinction between these two concepts is all but lost, and the disciplines associated with Information Systems (such as Business Analysis and IS Architecture), are have become too obsessed with IT. 

Read more

What Happened to the Fine Art of Business Analysis? – Revisited 2013

Link: http://taotwits-too-big-to-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-happened-to-fine-art-of-business.html

From Taotwit's Too-Big-To-Tweet

Back in 2008, I wrote a paper on Business Analysis. Recently, I’ve been revisiting this subject in my day-job and this made me realise how little things had changed and inspired me to write this post, which is, basically, the original article re-written, with additional thoughts (in italics).


The role of the Business Analyst has never been more important but needs refocus on Information Systems not the technical solution. Many of us can recall a time when a distinction was made between the hardware and software supporting the business and the information used by the business – there was a clear difference between IT, to describe the former, and IS to describe the latter. 
IS stood for Information Systems: 
IS: The landscape  of business  information used by people within an organisation 
and how they use information to deliver business outcomes. 

IT, in contrast, meant: 
IT:  The  hardware  and  software  technology  that  automates  or  otherwise  supports 
information processing. 

This distinction between these two concepts is all but lost, and the disciplines associated with Information Systems (such as Business Analysis and IS Architecture), are have become too obsessed with IT. 

Read more