Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
We write frequently on this blog about our proven method to deliver IT architectures based on industry-standard tools and approaches like UML and IT Risk Management. We also write about the critical intangible skills that an architect needs to succeed, such as meeting facilitation, diplomacy and organization. One needs to be steeped in all these […]
What’s the difference between requirements and constraints? How do we identify and use them in change-projects and in enterprise architectures? This is a query that came up in my web-stats yesterday – and it should (I hope…) be one that I…
Objectives and requirements – they are what makes the project world go ’round. Changing a business’ operations for the better requires one to decide what are the objective of the change, and what are the requirements a change must meet to satisfy the objective. Implementing the change usually starts with someone needing to know what […]
Those notions of ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ that I’ve been describing in the ‘no-plan Plan‘ series of posts make solid sense to a fair few people – particularly those who’ve some experience of systems-thinking, design-thinking and the like. But it’s painfully clear that it doesn’t seem to make much sense to anyone else: and I must admit […]
That description of ‘the plan that is no plan’, about the direction that I’m moving into after moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, kind of ended up a bit longer than intended. (No surprise there, unfortunately… ) Oh well. In effect, though, it’s also a kind of ‘manifesto’ for whole-enterprise architecture – about what needs to […]
Okay, time for the final theme in that ‘no-plan Plan‘ – which somehow seems to be turning into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’ or something like that, for some reason. Oh well. Anyway, this part’s about what is perhaps the most-serious ‘the Forgotten’ in almost all current ‘enterprise’-architectures, namely people. I’ll keep this one […]
And the next part of that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘ (or ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’, or whatever it is): this time on the dynamics of architecture. In other words, it’s a focus on how we handle changes to the architecture itself, rather than mainly about changes that that architecture needs to address. Most of this […]
Next part on that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘, with more detail on the theme about ‘architecture as story’. If you’ve been watching this blog for a while, you’ll know that this theme already goes back a few years, such as with the much-referenced post ‘The enterprise is the story‘. But I’ll admit that I was […]
A bit more detail on what I see coming up in my ‘no-plan Plan‘, starting with the theme about ‘the ‘why’ of architecture’. One thing I’ve always found worrying in most current ‘enterprise’-architecture is that there’s been almost no attention given to the ‘why’. It’s seemed that ‘why’ was just a given: ‘orders from above’, […]
Purchasing a showroom kitchen can be an unpleasant experience, especially if you’re not sure of the value of what you are buying. Kitchen showrooms tend to have the atmosphere of a prestigious car dealership, perhaps because the price tag of a well-designed kitchen is similar to a mid-sized car. If you happen to linger at […]