Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
My mother is a retired general-practitioner (family doctor), and still has the BMJ (British Medical Journal) delivered here each week. It’s always a useful contrast to my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architecture, and every-now-and-then there’s a real jewel of an article there…
Continuing with the series on power and politics in enterprise-architecture, a brief summary-so-far, some practical suggestions on modelling of power-issues, and a very important warning… The quick summary is as follows: the practice of enterprise-architecture is often ‘relentlessly political’ one…
Anyone who’s involved in any form of enterprise-architecture would know that it’s best described as ‘relentlessly political’: seems almost everything we deal with turns out to be some kind of tortuously-intransigent wicked-problem. Which in turn seem so often to be rooted…
Are there any anti-clients for you in your enterprise? Who are they? How did they turn so actively against you? And what can you do about it, and them, in the design and implementation of your enterprise-architecture? Who are anti-clients? To…
How do we make sense of a context? How can we make sense in a disciplined way, without the discipline itself getting in the way? This is a follow-up to the previous post ‘Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor‘, to provide a bit…
Following on from ‘Boundary of identity, boundary of control‘ and ’inside-out versus outside-in‘, perhaps the quickest way to understand the difference: the boundary-of-control delimits what the lawyers think the organisation is the boundary-of-identity delimits what everyone else thinks the organisation is…
I’m angry. I’m disgusted. I’m sickened. Yet sadly, I’m not surprised. I’ve seen too much to be surprised at this… The direct reason for my anger this morning? – this article in today’s Melbourne The Age: ‘Virgin defends policy of separating men…
He slouched down the street, a scowl emblazoned on his face. The slogan on the grubby black T-shirt said it all: Days since I gave a sh*t: 4713 and counting… I’ll admit I got a bit annoyed about this –…
I don’t know. There – how hard was that to say? For some people, seemingly impossible. But as an enterprise-architect and a generalist, I have to be able to say it often – very often, in fact. Because the fact is that I don’t know most things – not in fine-detail, anyway. Nothing like as well […]
One of the key reasons why I’m so vehemently against any-centrism and suchlike revolves around the question of competence – or, more usually, the lack of it. Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, often don’t bother to say that they’re competent – perhaps because they don’t need to […]
This one is a pick-up from a Tweet by Bert van Lamoen: transarchitect: The priority shift we make is from efficiency to effectiveness to co-creativity. #complexity Of course. Yes. That’s obvious, the moment I look at it. Except that I’d completely missed before now. Oops… I’ve long since drawn a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. […]
In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way? Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and […]