Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
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 […]
I must admit I’m pleased with this brief interview, filmed by the AV crew at AE Rio 2011 (many thanks, guys!). It covers a lot of ground in barely four minutes: the importance of stories and culture in enterprise-architecture, key differences in the Latin America market compared to elsewhere, and much else besides.
(There’s supposed to […]
Right now I should be writing a formal paper on enterprise-architecture and social-media. Instead I’ve been tracking one small yet deeply fascinating (literally…) aspect of the rebellion in Libya: the social-media ‘war’ that’s happening on the LiveBlog pages (e.g. April 27, April 28) of the Al Jazeera English-language website.
I’m a complete outsider, of course, relative […]
Each enterprise has its own distinct language. More to the point, the enterprise-architecture is a language.
I probably need to take a step or two back at this point…
For quite some while I’ve been using the metaphor of ‘hologram’ to describe how we collect and store and describe information about the enterprise. Once we’ve done the […]
Just one of those too-early-in-the-morning ideas that arise between getting up and getting moving for the day.
Been thinking back to my (too-many) years of programming, and the various ways we described the process of change, right down at the level of code.
As a language, English fits quite well with the ideas we express in software. […]
If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with huge problems arising from a massive earthquake and tsunami all down its north-east coast, and […]
Why vision? Whose vision? What do we mean by ‘enterprise vision’, anyway? And who’s responsible for it? – who should create it?
This enquiry arose from a great multi-way Twitter-conversation following my previous post ‘Yes and No‘:
tetradian: [post] Yes and no: a question of commitment http://bit.ly/fJUqcA #entarch #culture #responsibility
MartinHowitt: @tetradian if an explicit vision does not […]
This one’s a return to the themes from that previous post on Power, people and responsibility in enterprise-architecture, and the dichotomy between power as ‘the ability to do work’ versus a supposed ‘power’ as ‘the ability to avoid work’.
We can also see this as the difference between yes and no; between for and against. In […]
We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power.
In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to do work. Wherever there’s work to be done – in whatever form that that ‘work’ might […]
One of the practical problems of the innovator’s lifestyle is that, by definition, we tend to work a long way away (metaphorically speaking) from the mainstream. It’s true that there are some real advantages to playing the Outsider role – for example, it’s one of the few ways to bypass the ‘groupthink’ trap. Yet the […]
“Gotta rush! Time equals money, ya know!”
But does it?
More accurately, are they ever actually equivalent?
It’s not a trivial question – because if they’re not equivalent, just how much damage is that metaphor doing to our enterprise-architectures, business-architectures and much else besides?
Closely related to this is another metaphor: “money equals value”. And that one can do […]