Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
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 […]
Still going round my all-too-usual loop: what the heck am I doing here? (In a business sense, of course… ) This is a follow-on to my previous post ‘Don’t start with How‘ – about how I’ve been needing an urgent rethink of all my websites and other stuff, and how I ended up going round […]
How is it that what we do doesn’t necessarily match up with what we plan to do? How can we best ‘keep to the plan’? Or, alternatively, how do we know how to adapt ‘the plan’ to a changing context? What governance do we need for this? How do we keep everything on-track to intent […]
How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect our enterprise-architectures? What we’ve been looking at in this series of posts is […]
How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect our enterprise-architectures? This is Part 2 of this exploration: the first part is […]
In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ranting about those apparently-abstract ideas about ‘Possessed by possession‘ and the like… What I’ve been calling ‘Really-Big-Picture enterprise-architecture‘ is about looking at how we can apply enterprise-architecture ideas at a much larger scale, right up to a fully global scope. The simplest way to describe this is as […]
Looking at your enterprise vision – or any kind of future intent – is it defined in terms of being for something? Or against something? That distinction can sometimes seem subtle – yet it’s very important indeed… On the surface, it always seems a lot easier to be ‘against’ something. Many NGOs define themselves this way; […]
Those notions of ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ that I’ve been describing in the ‘no-plan Plan‘ series of posts make solid sense to a fair few people – particularly those who’ve some experience of systems-thinking, design-thinking and the like. But it’s painfully clear that it doesn’t seem to make much sense to anyone else: and I must admit […]
That description of ‘the plan that is no plan’, about the direction that I’m moving into after moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, kind of ended up a bit longer than intended. (No surprise there, unfortunately… ) Oh well. In effect, though, it’s also a kind of ‘manifesto’ for whole-enterprise architecture – about what needs to […]
Okay, time for the final theme in that ‘no-plan Plan‘ – which somehow seems to be turning into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’ or something like that, for some reason. Oh well. Anyway, this part’s about what is perhaps the most-serious ‘the Forgotten’ in almost all current ‘enterprise’-architectures, namely people. I’ll keep this one […]
And the next part of that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘ (or ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’, or whatever it is): this time on the dynamics of architecture. In other words, it’s a focus on how we handle changes to the architecture itself, rather than mainly about changes that that architecture needs to address. Most of this […]
And more on that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘, which does seem to be morphing somewhat into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’… Anyway, this part is about that theme of ‘architecture as change’ – though perhaps ‘architecture for change’ might be a better way to put it.. [Obviously this is related to the next […]