Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
“Emergent” is a word that I run into from time to time. When I do run into it, I’m reminded of an exchange from the movie Gallipoli: Archy Hamilton: I’ll see you when I see you. Frank Dunne: Yeah. Not if I see you first. The reason for my ambivalent relationship with the word […]
Okay, so the title’s a little derivative, but it’s both accurate and it fits in with the “organizations as systems” theme of recent posts. Just as dependency management is important for software systems, it’s likewise just as critical for social systems. Failures anywhere along the chain of execution can potentially bring the whole system to […]
I’ve mentioned before that the idea of looking at organizations as systems is one that I’ve been focusing on for quite a while now. From a top-down perspective, this makes sense – an organization is a system that works better when it’s component parts (both machine and human) intentionally work together. It also works from […]
Over the last year or so, the concept of looking at organizations as systems has been a major theme for me. Enterprises, organizations and their ecosystems (context) are social systems composed of a fractal set of social and software systems. As such, enterprises have an architecture. Another long-term theme for this site has been my […]
One of the benefits of being a regular on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast is getting to take part in the year-end round table (episode 426). Jeremy Berriault, Steve Tendon, Jon M. Quigley and I joined Tom for a discussion of: Whether software quality would be a focus of IT in 2017 […]
Sometimes, what seemed to be a really good idea just doesn’t turn out that way in the end. In my opinion, a lack of a systems approach to problem solving makes that type of outcome much more likely. Simplistic responses to issues that fail to deal with problems holistically can backfire. Such ill-considered solutions not […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 407, features Tom’s essay on Test Driven Development, Kim Pries on what makes software “good”, Steve Tendon on TameFlow, and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Learning to Deal with the Inevitable”. Change is inevitable, dealing with it effectively […]
Early on in my EA career, I was very fortunate to become involved in a pioneering EA initiative at Westpac. My introduction to Westpac came when I helped its Group Data Resource Management team develop tool and repository support for its enterprise business model. During this engagement, I kept hearing people refer to an exciting Read more
Early on in my EA career, I was very fortunate to become involved in a pioneering EA initiative at Westpac. My introduction to Westpac came when I helped its Group Data Resource Management team develop tool and repository support for its enterprise business model. During this engagement, I kept hearing people refer to an exciting Read more
Gregory Brown tweeted a great series on the problem of distance last week: It’s amazing how much information can be conveyed in nine tweets. It’s amazing how many aspects of a very complex socio-technical undertaking, software development, are affected by this concept of distance. I would argue that this concept of distance applies likewise to […]
We’ve all heard the sayings about history repeating. Did we pay attention? Did we actually hear what was said, or were we just in the room when it was mentioned? Did we learn anything? Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts on innovation for more than seven months. His last post, “Black hat innovation”, […]
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. Wayne Gretzky Business people have a thing for sports metaphors, and this one in particular is a favorite. So much so, that Jason Kirby in “Why businesspeople won’t stop using that Gretzky quote” observed: Its popularity has much to […]