The perils of prior-art (Five Elements)

I’m sitting in a friend’s office, talking about book-production and enterprise-architecture. Whilst he’s struggling with his recalcitrant computer, my eyes drift to a Wikipedia page pinned on the wall just beyond his head. ‘Galbright_star_model.png‘, says the label. A five-pointed star, apparently describing some kind of business-related concepts. Interested. Look at it again, notice the word […]

Notes on architecture versus design

Several people, including Nigel Green, Doug Newdick and Kris Meukens, picked up on my comments about architecture versus design in my earlier post ‘Great conversations on enterprise-architecture‘. Nigel kindly wrote a follow-up post on his Posterous blog, and Kris pointed to an earlier blog-post of his own, whilst Doug also added useful comments to both of those […]

Round in circles on enterprise-architecture

One of the real pleasures of enterprise-architecture is that it covers the entire panoramic panoply of the enterprise, the many ways in which everyone and everything can work together towards a shared goal, creating a common bridge from Why to How to What and When and Where and Who.
One of its huge frustrations, though, is […]

Agility needs a backbone

Something that’s been concerning me quite a bit over the past year or so in enterprise-architecture has been the over-obsession with agility: agility for its own sake, perhaps, without much thought behind it, much thought about why or how we need to be so agile.
No matter what it is, it seems – whether in IT-architectures, […]

Tweets from Troux 2011 conference, day 2

Tweets and links from the second (and final) day of the Troux users (enterprise-architecture) conference in Austin, Texas, on 23-24 March 2011 – once again courtesy of Brenda Michelson, Todd Biske, Mike Walker, Aleks Buterman and others in a very active Tweet-active band of enterprise-architecture folks.
As on the previous post, I’ve edited slightly to remove most of the #Troux2011 and […]

Tweets from Troux 2011 conference: day 1

Courtesy of a very active band of Tweeters – including Brenda Michelson, Todd Biske, Mike Walker and Aleks Buterman, we have a fairly comprehensive description of what’s been going on at the Troux users (enterprise-architecture) conference in Austin, Texas, on 23-24 March 2011.
I’ve edited slightly to remove most of the #Troux2011 and #entarch hash-tags; I’ve […]

Modelling people in enterprise-architecture

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the key characteristics of ‘crossing the chasm’ to a viable whole-of-enterprise architecture is the explicit inclusion of people. In short, we need to be able to model and map where people fit in relation to the architecture.
But there’s a catch. A big catch. People should not be […]

People, assets, relationships and responsibility

A great meetup yesterday with Shawn Callahan (@unorder) and Kevin Bishop (@kevinbishop) of Australian consultancy Anecdote, and their upcoming launch of Zahmoo – a new web-based tool to manage stories and narrative-knowledge, for organisations, communities and families.
Over lunch the conversation wandered onto my work on enterprise-architecture and the Enterprise Canvas, and my latest book Mapping […]