How To Understand The Difference Between Value-Proposition and a Product or Service

One of my startup heroes Steve Blank wrote in a blog post that “value proposition is the fancy name for your product or service” It is with some trepidation that […]

Enterprise Architecture & Systems Thinking

Author: Alex Matthews – Twitter: @remembermytweet (See also the Enterprise Advocate’s post on Enterprise Architecture & Complexity Theory) I just discovered this brilliant presentation by Dr Russ Ackoff. In it he […]

Measure What Really Matters

I ran across a very interesting op-ed by Tim Jackson on productivity today in the New York Times. The gist of his well-articulated argument is that due to our relentless drive for increased output, certain professions and their attendant tasks…

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 […]

Power, people and enterprise-architecture

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 […]

Modelling people in enterprise-architecture

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the key characteristics of ‘crossing the chasm’ to a viable whole-of-enterprise architecture is the explicit inclusion of people. In short, we need to be able to model and map where people fit in relation to the architecture.
But there’s a catch. A big catch. People should not be […]