Time for this old toad to move on

Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]

One more try…

Oh well. The past couple of posts on a ‘thought-experiment‘ in using enterprise-architecture methods to guide a fundamental rethink of economics both seem to have gone down like the proverbial lead-balloon. Fair enough. But I guess I’ll do one more try before going back to more conventional enterprise-architecture themes. (If anyone is interested in this, we can […]

A simpler version of the ‘EA-governance thought-experiment’

The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded […]

Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture

I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise […]

Rethinking the architecture of management

Why is management the way that it is? Does it work well that way? And what part does the architecture of management play in determining how well it does or doesn’t work? (This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… ) In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four […]

What I do and how I do it

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why? That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘: On a selfish note… It’s apparent that […]

Anti-clients, kurtosis-risks and public riots

In quite a few of my posts on enterprise-architecture, you may have seen two unfamiliar terms: anti-client, and kurtosis-risk. To see these two concepts in real-world action, and to get some understanding of how important they are in enterprise-architecture practice, you need look no further than the rioting that’s been taking place in London and […]

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 […]

Trust and the enterprise

Trust is the core of the enterprise in action. So why do so many businesses and other organisations seem to go out of their way to destroy that trust? And what can we as enterprise-architects do to make it work better?
This came up in a tweet yesterday from the Open Group Brazil’s Isabela Abreu, pointing a […]

Enterprise Debt and the Shirky Principle

Just how much are organisations themselves ‘their own worst enemy’ for the enterprise?
Have been thinking about this one for quite a while, following up on some great conversations with Kevin Smith (of PEAF fame) and Nigel Green (of VPEC-T fame) about Kevin’s concept of Enterprise Debt – an expansion into the whole-enterprise scope of Ward […]

Yabbies – a novel

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!
(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)
At present you […]