Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Following on from the previous post ‘Rules, principles and the Inverse-Einstein Test‘, there’s an important corollary about real-time sensemaking and and decision-making – it was in my notes for the post, but I forgot to include it, so I’ll do…
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. 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 […]
The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough. Just Enough Detail. To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much detail is ‘Just Enough Detail’?”. And I’ll have to admit that there isn’t […]
At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my own business. How does that sound to you?” Uh, no. Not a good […]
If it’s not a cycle, don’t call it a cycle. In the past few days I’ve had a fair bit of struggle to get clients to understand the difference between a linear-sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end, versus a true cycle where the end of one sequence links to or becomes the […]
I have at last found a viable workflow to produce e-books of my various books and blogposts, via Leanpub. There’s one significant constraint in this form of publishing: Leanpub uses Markdown text-files for input, which is a fair bit more limited in its formatting than my books normally use. But that constraint fits well with the […]
Also launched at the Integrated EA 2012 conference was my new book ‘The enterprise as story‘: Full title: The Enterprise As Story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture ISBN: 978-1-906681-34-0 Description: Most current approaches to enterprise-architecture describe everything in terms of structure. Yet people work better with story than with structure – and people are the enterprise. As […]
‘The enterprise is the story‘ – my presentation from the recent Integrated-EA enterprise-architecture conference in London – is now online on Slideshare: The enterprise is the story View more PowerPoint from Tetradian Consulting The slidedeck is just under 80 slides, split into five sequences: “What’s the story?” – introducing the idea of story as a […]
The echoes of the ‘naming-problem‘ around business-architecture and the like continue to rumble on, this time via another happy Twitter-exchange with Ron Tolido: rtolido: @tetradian just show me the non-IT people that invented #entarch and / or #bizarch tetradian: @rtolido we’re in a circular-definition here: what you call #entarch or #bizarch is whatever was ‘invented’ […]
One of the key reasons why I’m so vehemently against any-centrism and suchlike revolves around the question of competence – or, more usually, the lack of it. Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, often don’t bother to say that they’re competent – perhaps because they don’t need to […]
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 […]