Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Often we talk about narrative and narrative-knowledge as if there’s only a single story in play at any one time, a single thread of meaning that’s carried by the words that that one person says. Yet in reality there are many different threads of meaning in every narrative, and sometimes it’s the subtler threads – […]
Given the responses to my previous post ‘Guess I could do with some help here…‘, seems it’d be useful if I clarify a bit more what kind of help I most need. (Or we need, rather, as an industry and discipline: probably the only ‘I’-part here is that I seem to be one of the […]
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been kinda pouring out the posts on enterprise-architecture and the like, over the past few weeks or so… (A few people have complained about the overload, and probably with good reason, too! Oh well. My apologies, anyway.) What’s happening for me is that it seems all of the work […]
When we talk about enterprise-architecture, what is ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, what is ‘enterprise’? Seems they’d be fairly foundational questions, yet most of the answers we see seem, well, kinda thin… If we hunt around on the net, we’ll find plenty of definitions for ‘enterprise’: “a business venture”, “a project or undertaking, typically one […]
Enterprise-architecture is all about story. The enterprise itself is a story; but the practice of enterprise-architecture is all about stories too. Let me tell you a story… There once was this half-crazed guy who used to go on about an even crazier idea that there might be a bit more to enterprise-architecture than just, well, […]
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 […]
Yes, I admit it: I’ve been kinda pouring out the posts lately. Sorry…
But why all this fuss about business-models and enterprise-architecture? What’s the point about the bottom-line not being the baseline to work from? If everyone’s selling something to someone, is there really any difference between a for-profit and a non-profit business-model? And who would […]
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 […]
Back on business-models again, this time with more of an emphasis on the implications for enterprise-architecture, rather than solely for business-architecture.
The initial challenge posed by my colleague was to describe my own business model, by which he meant “how do I make money?”. But there’s a bit more to it than that, which is what […]
As the old phrase warns us, “vision without implementation is just hallucination”. That’s why all architects do some form of design, and ideally guide the implementation too. But do enterprise-architects design the enterprise? And if so, how do they do it? Or, for that matter, should they?
These are not trivial questions, as indicated well by […]
People seem to struggle so much with the word ‘enterprise’ in ‘enterprise-architecture’. So often they seem to think it’s about technology. Or money.
But if you want to understand ‘enterprise’, look for the story.
And if you want to see where and how people really commit themselves to an enterprise, look for the tattoos.
That’s commitment…
And […]
All right, I admit it: my novel Yabbies doesn’t say much about real-life yabbies. In fact they only put in one cameo appearance in the whole book:
“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud […]