The social construction of process

That previous post on process was, yes, I’ll admit it, a bit long: but the key point is that the term ‘process’ is necessarily a bit blurred, and that we get into trouble if we try too hard to sharpen up

Using the ‘This’ game in EA modelling

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

New book ‘The enterprise as story’ is published

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 […]

Presentation ‘The enterprise is the story’ now online

‘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 […]

Work-in-progress – two more books

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects. The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years […]

Use EA to identify hidden costs in outsourcing

Why do we need enterprise-architecture in a business? And why does that EA need to be broader than just IT, often all the way out to a true enterprise-wide scope? One reason is implied this Tweet by Belgian consultant Patrick Van Renterghem: itworks: Big discussion now about what happens when cloud vendors go bankrupt or out-of-service. […]

Five EA app ideas – anyone interested?

This is another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work’ – this time about how to bring all of this to a wider audience and market, and help bring ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ ideas into more general use. If you’ve been around this weblog for a while, you’ve probably noticed I tend […]

The ‘This’ game and EA toolsets

Continuing on the theme of the ‘This’ game for engaging people in enterprise-architecture exploration and development, as described in the two previous posts ‘This: an exploratory game for service-oriented EA‘ and ‘More on the ‘This’ game for enterprise-architecture‘. The final note in that last post was about EA toolsets, and the need for appropriate support […]

More on the ‘This’ game for enterprise-architecture

A great session yesterday with Kevin Smith, brainstorming ideas for the ‘This’ game for service-oriented enterprise-architecture. I’d originally envisaged ‘This‘ as a kind of card-game, with questions and supporting-information printed on playing-cards: There would be that small set of mandatory ‘setting-the-scene’ questions – perhaps printed on cards with a different-colour back – but all of […]

This: an exploratory game for service-oriented EA

For a while now I’ve been brewing a kind of ‘exploratory game’ for enterprise-architecture, with the somewhat uninventive title of This. It’s based on the same service-oriented view of the enterprise as Enterprise Canvas – in fact we would typically use the game as part of modelling some aspect of the enterprise with Enterprise Canvas, […]

Back to the roots for EA toolset metamodels

Time to get back to the themes from the post ‘More on that enterprise-architecture ‘help wanted’‘, with a focus on toolsets and metamodels. The usual approach to toolsets – just about any kind of toolset, as far as I can tell – is to describe the overall context, knock up a metamodel, and then build […]