Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way? Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and […]
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 […]
In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ranting about those apparently-abstract ideas about ‘Possessed by possession‘ and the like… What I’ve been calling ‘Really-Big-Picture enterprise-architecture‘ is about looking at how we can apply enterprise-architecture ideas at a much larger scale, right up to a fully global scope. The simplest way to describe this is as […]
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, […]
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? […]
When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture. Am I giving up? No, not at all. Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll […]
Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]
Why is management the way that it is? Does it work well that way? And what part does the architecture of management play in determining how well it does or doesn’t work? (This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… ) In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four […]
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 […]
As all-too-usual, the previous ‘how-to’ post ‘Upwards sideways from business-model‘ – to complement the earlier post on transforming from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, to plan and verify the implementation – has turned out to be huge, because it included all of the explanation and context. Here’s a stripped-down version without any of the explanation […]
The past few posts in this series have focussed on moving ‘downward’ from the business-model, towards implementation, such as might be modelled in Archimate notation. That’s an aspect of the business-architecture / enterprise-architecture interface that makes immediate and practical sense to most people.
Yet to complete and verify the business-model and its proposed implementation, we also […]
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 […]