Enterprise Architecture Benefits

Author: Alex Matthews – Twitter: @remembermytweet Here is a free, un-formatted slide deck that describes some of the key benefits that can be gained from applying Enterprise Architecture. It can […]

Enterprise Architecture & Systems Thinking

Author: Alex Matthews – Twitter: @remembermytweet (See also the Enterprise Advocate’s post on Enterprise Architecture & Complexity Theory) I just discovered this brilliant presentation by Dr Russ Ackoff. In it he […]

How not to do social-business

At the Dachis Social Business Summit, one of the presenters, from Forrester, showed off their notion of the Always-Addressable Customer – combining geolocation and mobile to tailored marketing-messages. The presenter was clearly excited about it, and the two examples she showed

Interoperability and interresponsibility

(This one’s somewhat exploratory, so perhaps pardon me if I ramble a bit more even than usual here?) Reading Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent post ‘Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards‘ left me pondering on the whole thorny issue of interoperability, and

The Cloud is in the cloud

This one’s another follow-up from the model-development session with Stuart Boardman last Friday, and relates to a different way to understand the often over-hyped Cloud. [I hasten to add that most of what follows is just a minor elaboration on an

Using the ‘This’ game in EA modelling

A great session last Friday with enterprise-architect Stuart Boardman, using his Metropolis thought-experiment as a live test-case for my still somewhat-experimental ‘This’ game for service-modelling. Stuart developed Metropolis as a worked-example for service-modelling at very large scale – the scale of

I don’t know

I don’t know. There – how hard was that to say? For some people, seemingly impossible. But as an enterprise-architect and a generalist, I have to be able to say it often – very often, in fact. Because the fact is that I don’t know most things – not in fine-detail, anyway. Nothing like as well […]

Inside-in, inside-out, outside-in, outside-out

I’ve been brewing how to describe some key distinctions about the way we view our architecture, about how we see its role, and its relationship with everything else in its context. Seems to me that there’s a simple two-axis matrix we can use for this: where we focus – inside (centred on our own internal context) […]

Requisite-variety and stormy weather

Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty (or lack of it), complexity, disruption and much, much more. Okay, first, the […]

Assets and services

What is a service? And what do services do? Seems like it’s time to re-explore some of the routine questions that come up almost every day in a service-oriented enterprise-architecture… not least because these questions are right at the core of the Enterprise Canvas model. And, in turn, the discipline and rigour about services that modelling […]