Types of Cost
When planning and measuring business benefits there are three basic contributing elements: revenues, costs and intangibles. If you look for guidance on “types of cost” most sources decompose cost types […]
enterprise
Successful Enterprise Architecture using the TOGAF® and ArchiMate® Standards
The discipline of Enterprise Architecture was developed in the 1980s with a strong focus on the information systems landscape of organizations. Since those days, the scope of the discipline has slowly widened to include more and more aspects of the enterprise as a whole. Architects, especially at the strategic level, attempt to answer the question “How should we organize ourselves in order to be successful?” Continue reading →
What is a value-proposition?
‘Value-proposition’ is a term much-bandied-about in business-models and the like. Yet what exactly is it? A tweet by Alex Osterwalder pointed me to an article by Steve Blank on ‘How to build a billion-dollar startup‘, which included this brief section on the role of…
On the business of the business
What is business? For that matter, what is – or is not – ‘a business’? Seems a kinda important question for business-architecture, doesn’t it? And yet no-one seems to ask it… So let’s just do some proper enterprise-architecture thinking around this one –…
More on reframing entropy in business
My previous post on ‘Reframing entropy in business‘ kinda triggered off a veritable storm of correspondence, both in the comments and offline – hence seems it’s worth summarising and revisiting those themes here. Perhaps the first point is that yes,…
Big Data Security Tweet Jam
Please join us on Tuesday, January 22 at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. GMT for a tweet jam, moderated by Dana Gardner (@Dana_Gardner), ZDNet – Briefings Direct, that will discuss and debate the issues around big data security. Key areas that will be addressed during the discussion include: data security, privacy, compliance, security ethics and, of course, Big Data. Continue reading →
Market as organisation, market as enterprise
Is a market an organisation, or an enterprise? Seems to me the only valid short-answer is ‘Yes’… Can we design a market? We’d probably say ‘Yes’ there too, though perhaps with a fair few ’It depends…‘ riders attached to that answer. And…
The Death of Planning
It’s not so long ago that we still had debates about whether complex projects should be delivered as a “big bang” or in phases. These days the big bang has pretty much been forgotten. Why is that? I think the main reason is the level of risk involved with running a long process and dropping it into the operational environment just like that. Continue reading →
Flying in the Cloud by the Seat of Our Pants
In the early days of aviation, when instruments were unreliable or non-existent, pilots often had to make judgments by instinct. This was known as “flying by the seat of your pants.” It was exciting, but error prone, and accidents were frequent. Today, enterprises are in that position with Cloud Computing. Continue reading →
Reframing entropy in business
What is entropy? What – if anything – is its relevance to business? And how does chaos come into the picture? The physics definition of entropy is straightforward enough: it’s a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows…
The unique contribution of enterprise-architecture
What do enterprise-architects actually do? What unique contribution do they bring to the enterprise? What triggered this was one paragraph in Len Fehskens’ item on current and future enterprise-architecture, in the Open Group blog ‘2013 Open Group Predictions, Vol.1‘. Here’s the…
2013 Open Group Predictions, Vol. 1
As we wrap up 2012, we couldn’t help but look towards what is to come in 2013 for The Open Group and the industries we‘re a part of. Without further ado, here they are… Continue reading →