Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
The big bang that started The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach was, appropriately, a presentation related to astronomy. Chris Gerty gave a keynote on Big Data at NASA, where he is Deputy Program Manager of the Open Innovation Program. And that exploration – as is often the case with successful space missions – left us wondering what lies beyond. … Continue reading →
This post is the second in a series of ten about real life experiences of using business model thinking as a foundation for planning and delivering change. Writing this post I’ve had the help of a true friend and admirable colleague (Eva Kammerfors) whom I’ve shared many of the referred to business model experiences with. […]
This post is about real life experiences of using business model thinking as a foundation for planning and delivering change. The collection of these experiences have been a long slow journey started out in the early 90′s, experimenting with creating small businesses. During the last six years experiences from the field and theory has accelerated […]
The Troux Worldwide Conference is returning to Austin, Texas on March 19-20, 2013. If you are a Troux customer, partner, or actively involved in Enterprise Architecture (EA) or Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM), this is your opportunity to enjoy peer networking…
This is in response to the recent article of Richard Veryard “Arguing with Mendeleev”. There he comments on Zachman’s comparison of his framework with the periodic table of Mendeleev. And indeed there are cells in both tables with labelled columns (called “groups” in Mendeleev’s) and rows (“periods” respectively). Another similarity is that both deal with […]
In the first post about my first app, I quoted Tim Berners-Lee, who says “every single web page out there, if you like, is like a computer” with reference to HTML5. I took one single HTML5 web page and turned it into something “like a computer”, namely an app. I mentioned that Gartner talks about hybrid architecture, which “combines the portability of HTML5 […]
We recently assembled a panel of Enterprise Architecture (EA) experts to explain how such simultaneous and complex trends as big data, Cloud Computing, security, and overall IT transformation can be helped by the combined strengths of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®) and the ArchiMate® modeling language. … Continue reading →
We’re excited to announce the formation of a new forum, specifically designed to advance The Open Group vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ by helping enterprises to take advantage of these convergent technologies. This will be accomplished by identifying a set of new platform capabilities, and architecting and standardizing an IT platform by which enterprises can reap the business benefits of Platform 3.0. Continue reading →
There is a growing interest among enterprise architects in systems theory or thinking. (In this context, the words “theory” and “thinking” seem to be for all intents and purposes interchangeable.) There are several possible reasons for this interest.1….
In the professional world, inhabited by pretty much anyone likely to be reading this, we tend to borrow words from natural language to describe very specific concepts. Sometimes the usage is often a form of metaphor or analogy, but with familiarization that fact becomes forgotten and it becomes just another word we take for granted. Continue reading →
As a lot, Enterprise Architects are not terribly humble people. We name frameworks after ourselves, and sometimes go to great lengths to correct the “misinterpretations” of others who describe our work in a way that we don’t agree with.
Yet, recognizing that the field is young requires that we should be willing to change as the field of EA changes; that we should be willing to look back on our models, developed in the past, and admit that we missed a few steps that we wouldn’t miss today.
I recently had the opportunity to discuss, on LinkedIn, a blog post that I made five years ago. I look back on that blog post and must admit that my opinions are a bit different now than they were five years ago. I still agree with my post, but I would certainly use different words today than I used in the past. I am more than willing to admit it.
I also look at the efforts of Alexander Osterwalder whose Business Model Canvas has proved both practical and flawed. He missed the fact that he needed to create a differentiation between the customer’s needs and the value proposition of the business offering to fill some of those needs. Did he go back and create an updated canvas? Nope. He created a new canvas to describe demand as though it fits with his older one (hint: it’s a mess).
The venerable John Zachman, probably one of the most humble men I’ve met, also made this same mistake. While his original model was only a couple of columns, and was updated only a few years later into the table we see today, the field of EA has changed. The table is no longer representative of companies with multiple business models (most of them) and the lack of a “customer” row simply relegates his “ontological table” to the dust bin.
Neither man will change. They have “legacy” models, with their names attached. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, humble is as humble does.
I would like to think that my willingness to upend my EBMM and replace it periodically with new versions shows my willingness to admit that (a) I’m often wrong, and (b) I’d rather learn than become stale. That said, I’m no paradigm of humility, myself.
After all, a truly humble EA would not have written this blog post.
(As my teenage daughter would say: Oh snap, you pwned yourself!)
I did well in school (after High School cough, cough). I especially liked the sciences and courses that involved analytical thinking.
If A = B, and B = C, then A= C.
This is a simple axiom that most of us learned when we took that one required …