The no-plan Plan: people in architecture

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 […]

The no-plan Plan: architecture as story

Next part on that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘, with more detail on the theme about ‘architecture as story’. If you’ve been watching this blog for a while, you’ll know that this theme already goes back a few years, such as with the much-referenced post ‘The enterprise is the story‘. But I’ll admit that I was […]

The no-plan Plan: the ‘why’ of architecture

A bit more detail on what I see coming up in my ‘no-plan Plan‘, starting with the theme about ‘the ‘why’ of architecture’. One thing I’ve always found worrying in most current ‘enterprise’-architecture is that there’s been almost no attention given to the ‘why’. It’s seemed that ‘why’ was just a given: ‘orders from above’, […]

More on the ‘no-plan Plan’

Okay. Seems there are indeed times when I have to accept that, yes, it is 3am, and I have indeed been woken up by an idea that isn’t going to let me sleep until I’ve written it down. Oh well. So best just get on with it, I guess. In a comment to my earlier […]

EA metamodel: two questions

Following on from the previous work on EA metamodels, I keep coming back to those two questions from Graeme Burnett: for everything in a context, we need to be able to ask “tell me about yourself?” and “tell me what you’re associated with?”. That focus does help to keep things simple here… (Please remember that […]

What’s the point of this ‘EA metamodel’?

I’ve been writing a lot recently about metamodels for enterprise-architecture and the like: but what’s the point? Why bother? Why all this fuss about something that’s way too technical to be of interest to almost anyone in the real workaday world? The real point behind all of this discussion (and there’ve been some really valuable comments […]

EA metamodel – the big picture (and the small picture too)

In the various previous posts about EA metamodels, we’ve been exploring some of the detailed structures for toolsets and the like at a very, very low-level. But what’s the big-picture here? What’s the point? So let’s step back for a moment, and look at real-world EA practice. Much of our work consists of conversations with […]

EA metamodel – a possible structure

What would this ‘generic modelling metamodel’ look like? And how could we implement it? This continues the work from previous posts on this theme, such as ‘More detail on EA metamodel‘ and ‘EA metamodel and method‘. The legal bit: The aim is that this should contribute towards an open standard, and should not be used […]

EA metamodel and method

How would this EA metamodel actually work? And why would we need it, given that we have more than enough frameworks and models already? This follows on from the earlier post ‘More detail on EA metamodel‘, and in particular part of a comment there from Stuart Boardman: I completely agree that method and governance should […]

More detail on EA metamodel

Moving on to more detail on that EA metamodel. (By the way, a quick thank-you to Nic Plum and Sally Bean for really helpful peer-reviews on this. ) The legal bit: There’s a heck of a lot of unpaid work that’s gone into this, and also a lot of my own ‘prior art’ on these themes, […]

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 […]

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 […]