Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
This post has been updated, and all updated text should be highlighted blue. I was asked the question I love to get the other day, “what do you mean by capability?”. I usually try to be brief when I explain my point of view and so I was this time to. However in this post […]
I’ve been involved in a number of meetings recently as our IT teams try to come to consensus on answering this question: What is a Roadmap? It’s been a fascinating series of discussions. One thing that strikes me is that most of the int…
In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ranting about those apparently-abstract ideas about ‘Possessed by possession‘ and the like… What I’ve been calling ‘Really-Big-Picture enterprise-architecture‘ is about looking at how we can apply enterprise-architecture ideas at a much larger scale, right up to a fully global scope. The simplest way to describe this is as […]
How do we make sense of brands and the like? How do brands actually work? And how does that connect with charisma, with ‘self-as-brand’? The starting point for this one was a re-tweet from narrative-knowledge guru Shawn Callahan: unorder: RT @thaler: Yesterday, in a program for Brazilian professional communicators, a participant defined charisma as the ability […]
#entarch @Cybersal asked me to expand on my previous post on three dimensions of EA maturity.
Instrumentality
This is about regarding EA as a tool, a means to some ends. What outcomes are expected from EA?
For example, do we regard EA as a planning t…
Have been struggling hard for the past few days with a truly brilliant challenge from Bulgarian enterprise-architect Ivo Velitchkov, when he dropped by for a visit near here over the weekend. And I’d have to admit I’m no nearer solving it as yet. Hmm… His point is this: there’s a huge body of knowledge – […]
Vaughan Merlyn explains Why the Notion of the IT Organization is Deeply Flawed!
“Having an IT organization that translates business requirements into IT specifications and solutions is always, at best, a flawed approach” [via Ross Jimenez]
Gartner’s de…
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 […]
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 […]
For a while now I’ve been brewing a kind of ‘exploratory game’ for enterprise-architecture, with the somewhat uninventive title of This. It’s based on the same service-oriented view of the enterprise as Enterprise Canvas – in fact we would typically use the game as part of modelling some aspect of the enterprise with Enterprise Canvas, […]
This is in part an addendum to the previous post. The main aim here, though, is simply to provide some practical guidance on how and where the Cynefin framework should and should not be used in enterprise-architectures and the like. This advice draws on my own practical experience with use of Cynefin since 2003, and […]
How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping […]