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 […]

Basics of consolidation

Nothing new, just a reminder of how-to… There is perhaps nothing new in this post, still it may remind us of the fact that continuous improvement cycles should not stop. Five basic codes of conduct when doing consolidation Be inclusive – As you take inventory gather as much data as possible. Don’t be hampered by […]

Unravelling the anatomy of Archimate

The Archimate notation aims to be the standard to be used by everyone in enterprise-architecture and related fields. But what exactly is its anatomy – its underlying structure? And if it’s aimed at enterprise-architecture, what is it about that structure that makes it seem only to support IT-architecture, and in such an awkwardly IT-centric way?
(Apologies, folks, […]

A week in Tweets: 10-16 July 2011

Oops… running late again… apologies. Here it is, anyway: another week’s collection of Tweets and links, somewhat delayed. Hope it’s useful to someone, anyway. Usual categories, of course, after the ‘Read more…’ break.

Enterprise-architecture, business-models and all the usual ‘business big-picture’ stuff:

vernaallee: RT @siraju: John Seddon: Why Lean is a Wicked Disease http://bnet.io/dBvsFj #lean #collab #orgarch […]

Assets and Resources

More on translating Business Model Canvas to Archimate etc. (Yes, it’s another of those long, interminable technical posts – my apologies, though they are necessary…)
This one picks up on a couple of sort-of-mistakes that I’ve made in the previous post, ‘Questions on business-model to enterprise-architecture‘, and which need a bit more clarity in explanation. In […]

Questions on business-model to enterprise-architecture

Following up on one of the previous posts on Business Model Canvas and Archimate, British/Dutch enterprise-architect Stuart Boardman sent in a comment with a stream of questions that it seems would be worthwhile to reply to in detail here.
You advocate starting (“for now”) with one Business Service. How are we to determine what this business […]

The is-ness of business

What do enterprise-architects do?
At first glance it’s not an easy question. We talk a lot, with many different people, about lots of different things; but we don’t seem to do much. We tend to use a jawbreaking jargon, about narratives of knowledge, terminology, taxonomy, and things with a 2.0 in the name; we mumble about […]

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 […]

Two points of view on (enterprise) architecture

Was showing a colleague one of my favourite small books yesterday: Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School. Briefly flicking through the two-page spreads, one caught my eye. Seems so apposite to enterprise-architecture and the like that it’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:
Two points of view on architecture
ARCHITECTURE IS AN EXERCISE IN […]

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 […]

Business Model Canvas to Archimate (the short version)

The previous post, ‘From business model to enterprise-architecture‘, turned out to be another of my monster essays. Sorry…
The detail’s there if you need it, but if you just want to do the translation from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, without worrying too much about the ‘Why’ behind it, here’s the short version.
Step 1: […]