What is the boundary of a service?

“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 – […]

Rebalancing top-down management-architectures

One of the points that came up in the previous posts on the management-architecture theme is that most management-structures are top-down, which doesn’t fit well with the ‘everything is just another service’ nature of most service-architectures – especially at a whole-of-enterprise scope. Yet if so, how can we create a better balance in the overall management-architecture? […]

ArchiMate Support in System Architect

We at Corso are seeing many EA practitioners gravitating to the ArchiMate framework as the tool for delivering Enterprise Architecture.  Why is this?  Unlike many frameworks to date that do not specify how model views are represented, ArchiMate provides a clear notation and language for the communication of EA.  The ArchiMate framework is currently at version […]

Management as ‘just another service’

What do I mean when I say that, in a service-oriented architecture of the enterprise, we need to view management and the like as ‘just another service’? This came up in a comment to the previous post ‘Why are the elite the elite?‘ The notion of ‘just another service’ is worth exploring more – especially […]

Why are the elite the elite?

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 […]

Rethinking the architecture of management

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 […]

Five Things to do in order to deal with KPIs for Enterprise Architecture Processes

Measuring Enterprise Architecture Processes In most enterprises that applies Enterprise Architecture will there be a need to measure how the enterprise is progressing from adapting the Enterprise Architecture Program and there will be some stakeholders who would like to know … Continue reading

Backbone and business-rules

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 […]