Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or…
Why doesn’t ‘best-practice’ work as best-practice everywhere? And what is it that makes a skill a skill? For me, this one goes way back to work I did for my Masters degree, nigh on forty years ago. And to me,…
When everything is changing all around us, what is the role of purpose? And what is purpose, anyway? The starting-point for this one is a Tweet by someone I deeply respect, quoting someone I deeply don’t: RT @DavidGurteen: Obliquity and serendipity…
How do we avoid the dreaded ‘framework-wars’ in enterprise-architecture and elsewhere? If there’s no ‘Single Unified Framework For Everything™’, how do we ‘smoosh frameworks together’ to get the best fit for each current context? The answer: metaframeworks. And, perhaps even more, the…
How do we make sense of story – the stories and narratives and anecdotes that people tell each other and themselves about their world? How can we link between the layers of story to help us make sense of some…
For quite some time now I’d promised to make some of my blog-posts here available in ebook format, as a more focussed and accessible means to help people make use of my material on enterprise-architecture and the like. So, as…
Current mainstream enterprise-architecture [EA] is broken, more broken and yet more broken, and has real problems with wickedness. But what can we do about this? How can we mend EA, make it unbroken? As in those posts linked-to above, I’d…
How do we cope with the wickedness of enterprise-architecture? I don’t mean here the implicit wickedness of people promoting term-hijacks and other half-baked notions as ‘the truth’ of enterprise-architecture – though heaven-knows there’s enough of that wickedness around. I also…
How do we make sense of a context? How can we make sense in a disciplined way, without the discipline itself getting in the way? This is a follow-up to the previous post ‘Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor‘, to provide a bit…
One of the core tasks in enterprise-architecture is sensemaking – making sense of what’s going on within some context. And one of the key methods we can use for this is to make some kind of mental-map of what seems to…
A quick follow-on from the previous post on ‘Complex, complicated and Einstein’s dice‘, in relation to effectiveness in enterprise-architecture. There’s a common phrasing in business and elsewhere that places efficiency and effectiveness as kind-of opposites: efficiency, we’re told, is doing things…
What’s the real source of that infamous ‘business/IT divide’? And is there a way to bridge it? The answers would seem to be both complicated and complex – and might involve Einstein’s dice… At which point I probably ought to…