Learning to Deal with the Inevitable

  My last post, “Barriers to Innovation”, began with a question. Is innovation inevitable? By the end of the post, that question had changed. Is innovation inevitable for your organization? Tom Cagley left a comment suggesting another change: Think about changing the question again. “Is innovation inevitable?” might be better stated as “Is change inevitable?” […]

Abstract Dangers – When ‘And’ Meets ‘Or’

There’s an old saying that if you put one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in a bucket of boiling water, on average you’re comfortable. Sometimes analyzing information in the aggregate obscures rather than enlightens. A statistician named Francis Anscombe pointed out this same principle in a more visual (though less colorful) […]

Innovation – What’s Old can be New Again

There’s an old rhyme about what a bride should wear for luck on her wedding day: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…”. While reading an article on the origins of the US highway system, I thought about this rhyme in relation to the concept of innovation. Part of that article related the US […]

Enterprise Architecture and the Business of IT

I’ve been following Tom Graves and his Tetradian blog for quite a while. His view of Enterprise Architecture (EA), namely that it is about the architecture of the enterprise and not just the enterprise’s IT systems, is one I find compelling. With some encouragement on Tom’s part, I’ve begun touching on the topic of EA, […]

The Business of IT – Customers, Clients, and Fit for Purpose

Over the past few months, I have touched on a variety of what might seem to be disparate topics: the need for architects (or at least architectural design), estimates, organizations as systems/enterprise architecture, customer-centricity, and IT management and governance. I suspect the trend will continue for a while, so it’s time for a post to […]