Competition-against or competition-with?

What’s the point of competition, in a business-context? Perhaps more to the point, what is competition in a business-context? And why? Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are very important in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and business-model design: not least because if we get it […]

Making plans, sort-of

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.) Why? Simple reason, […]

Women’s rights? – just say No!

You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!? I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it?  And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? […]

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 […]

Do enterprise-architects design the enterprise?

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 […]

Yabbies story-fragment: ‘Mishie’

Most of the Yabbies novel is made up of story-fragments that in principle could come together in any sequence: we make sense of them in whatever way we choose.
What follows is perhaps my favourite story-fragment, “Mishie’. (A gentle reminder that it’s fiction? ) A bit of context first, though. The fragment takes place perhaps […]

Yabbies – a novel

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 […]

Fact and propaganda: war and real-time social-media

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 […]

There is no right to not-care

For all the talk of supposed ‘rights’ to this-that-and-the-other, there is one ‘right’ that we do not, can not and must not have: the right to not care.
There is no right to not-care.
And yet so many aspects of our society and culture and everything else are built upon exactly that ‘right’. Everyone who drops a […]

Responsibility versus anti-possession as response to disaster

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 […]

An architecture of responsibility

Following on from the previous post on ‘Possessed by possession‘, if it’s true that there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable, then it seems worthwhile to take a look at some of the implications.
First, though, a story, and a warning, from history.
I’ll admit I’m no true scholar of Australian Aboriginal history or […]