10 Key Success Factors for dealing with Enterprise Architecture

Secure the entire management commitment Secure scope(s) (partition) Customize methodologies to fit your intentions Use tools to support implementation Use training and coaching to secure knowledge and commitment is within specified limits. Use metrics to monitor the effects of Enterprise Architecture Create a set oriented fractal meta-model (yeah I know this sound weird) Use as few languages ​​as possible Manage materials, methods and resource Use […]

The no-plan Plan: architecture as story

Next part on that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘, with more detail on the theme about ‘architecture as story’. If you’ve been watching this blog for a while, you’ll know that this theme already goes back a few years, such as with the much-referenced post ‘The enterprise is the story‘. But I’ll admit that I was […]

The no-plan Plan: the ‘why’ of architecture

A bit more detail on what I see coming up in my ‘no-plan Plan‘, starting with the theme about ‘the ‘why’ of architecture’. One thing I’ve always found worrying in most current ‘enterprise’-architecture is that there’s been almost no attention given to the ‘why’. It’s seemed that ‘why’ was just a given: ‘orders from above’, […]

More on the ‘no-plan Plan’

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 […]

Making plans, sort-of

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, […]

Getting down to work in a different garden

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 […]

Time for this old toad to move on

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 […]

More on ‘the toad in the road’

How can we ensure that the ideas and models that we use are appropriate to the context? What methods can we use to evaluate new ideas? Perhaps more to the point, how do we protect ourselves from ideas that won’t fit in our architecture-ecosystem? This extends the previous post on ‘Coping with the toad-in-the-road‘, where […]