Two kinds of Why

What is ‘Why?’ And why, anyway? “Oh no, not again“, do I hear you cry? Actually, it’s not as bad as that: it’s not going to be yet another of those long tedious technical posts – honest! (It is a sort-of technical question, I’ll admit. And, in the event, quite long. But interesting to just […]

Upward and sideways from business-model (short version)

As all-too-usual, the previous ‘how-to’ post ‘Upwards sideways from business-model‘ – to complement the earlier post on transforming from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, to plan and verify the implementation – has turned out to be huge, because it included all of the explanation and context. Here’s a stripped-down version without any of the explanation […]

Upwards and sideways from business-model

The past few posts in this series have focussed on moving ‘downward’ from the business-model, towards implementation, such as might be modelled in Archimate notation. That’s an aspect of the business-architecture / enterprise-architecture interface that makes immediate and practical sense to most people.
Yet to complete and verify the business-model and its proposed implementation, we also […]

Why business-model to enterprise-architecture?

Yes, I admit it: I’ve been kinda pouring out the posts lately. Sorry…
But why all this fuss about business-models and enterprise-architecture? What’s the point about the bottom-line not being the baseline to work from? If everyone’s selling something to someone, is there really any difference between a for-profit and a non-profit business-model? And who would […]

From business-model to enterprise-architecture

Okay, I think I’m finally getting somewhere, on looking for a way to connect a business-model to enterprise-architecture, to provide a full link between top-down intent and bottom-up real-world constraints.
This specific part goes from the business-model downwards, from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, and thence to BPMN, UML and other detail-layer models. (There’s another part […]

Rethinking the layers in enterprise-architecture

Still plodding away on ideas for a systematic process to translate a business-model in Business Model Canvas down into real-world architecture and implementation. (This links up with quite a few previous posts, such as ‘More on business-models‘, ‘Enterprise-architecture – let’s keep it simple‘ and ‘Is Archimate too IT-centric for enterprise-architecture?‘)
[Note: this is a work-in-progress post, […]

Is Archimate too IT-centric for enterprise-architecture?

Archimate aims to be the standard notation for enterprise-architectures. But has it become too IT-centric to be usable for that purpose? And is there any way we can get it to break out of the IT-centric box?
These questions came up for me whilst exploring the architectural processes we could use in expanding a business-model developed […]

Using Business Model Canvas for non-profits

How do we use Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas for the business of a not-for-profit organisation? Or, for that matter, the non-monetary aspects of a commercial organisation?
Over the past while have been asked by quite a few folks – Shawn Callahan, Alan Rodriguez, Robert Phipps and others – about how to use the Business Model Canvas in […]

Who is the customer?

Who is the customer, in a business model?
That’s perhaps not as simple as it sounds. I’ve been working on a long how-to post on using Business Model Canvas in a non-profit context, and realised that even in a commercial context it can get very messy once we move outside of the relatively simple ‘world’ that […]

Where marketing meets enterprise-architecture

Rethinking the enterprise from a customer-centric perspective was another theme that came up in that conversation with Robert Phipps last week, in this case with a bit of virtual help from Chris Potts.
The ‘conventional’ way of viewing an enterprise is that of the stock-market – and, apparently, US commercial law – which seems to regard the […]

Notes on architecture versus design

Several people, including Nigel Green, Doug Newdick and Kris Meukens, picked up on my comments about architecture versus design in my earlier post ‘Great conversations on enterprise-architecture‘. Nigel kindly wrote a follow-up post on his Posterous blog, and Kris pointed to an earlier blog-post of his own, whilst Doug also added useful comments to both of those […]

Great conversations on enterprise-architecture

A busy week this has been. The Gartner EA Summit and the Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners conference were both on in London at the same time, little more than a few hundred yards apart. And a lot of other things starting to happen in the enterprise scene as well: more good news on the […]