Power-issues in EA – tread carefully…

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

Power and politics in enterprise-architecture

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

More on boundary of identity versus control

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

How not to do social-business

At the Dachis Social Business Summit, one of the presenters, from Forrester, showed off their notion of the Always-Addressable Customer – combining geolocation and mobile to tailored marketing-messages. The presenter was clearly excited about it, and the two examples she showed

Interoperability and interresponsibility

(This one’s somewhat exploratory, so perhaps pardon me if I ramble a bit more even than usual here?) Reading Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent post ‘Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards‘ left me pondering on the whole thorny issue of interoperability, and

I don’t know

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 […]

On ‘stupid’ organisations

To link up with a discussion on ‘Possible examples of stupidity (or brilliance)‘, on  the LnkedIn ‘Organizational Intelligence’ group, Richard Veryard and Geoff Elliott asked me to post this diagram, from my book Everyday Enterprise Architecture: I believe Richard and Geoff want to use this diagram to comment on the current JP Morgan bank-losses case, […]

Competence, non-competence and incompetence

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 […]

Efficiency, effectiveness and co-creativity

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. […]

Cycles within cycles

It’s customary at this time of year to do some kind of review: what’s happened in the past annual cycle, hopes and intentions for the next. [Sometimes these reviews can be a bit too predictable in their over-focus on prediction? As Forrester enterprise-architect Brian Hopkins put it in a nicely ironic Tweet this morning, “I predict […]