Why the ‘why’ matters
In any real-world practice, why do we need to explain the ‘why’ as much as the ‘how’ and ‘with-what’? Here’s a first-hand answer to that question… Way back when (almost half a century ago: yikes…), I took a school-vacation job…
Sense Making
Selling EA – 4: Proving value, and pricing
How do we ‘sell’ enterprise-architecture? What’s it worth, in terms of value, and of price? What could or should we charge for our work? This series is a bit of ‘thinking aloud’ about our work, and how we apply our…
Selling EA – 3: What and how
How do we ‘sell’ enterprise-architecture? How do we explain what it is that we do – and why we do it? This series started as a bit of ‘thinking aloud’ about work, and how we apply our work, and how…
Selling EA – 2: The value-proposition
How do we ‘sell’ enterprise-architecture? What’s the story, the value-proposition? This series started as a bit of ‘thinking aloud’ about work, and how we apply our work, and how we could perhaps make our work a bit more immediately meaningful…
Selling EA – 1: What do EA clients want?
How do we ‘sell’ enterprise-architecture? To whom? For how much? And why? – where’s the value, for them, and for us? This started as just a bit of ‘thinking aloud’ about work, and my own place within it – though…
Quick SCAN examples
A really nice SCAN challenge from Luc Taesch, in four parts, via Twitter: I need a ‘SCAN in 2mins’ simple explanation, for my CognitiveBias meetup I’d like to story tell a kid, discovering a topic, and going in the N…
Not so wicked
Are we looking at wicked-problems in the wrong way? Does the term itself mislead us about how to work with them? Perhaps more to the point, should we be describing them as ‘wicked’ at all? Would another term be a…
How do you think?
How do I think? How do I think, really? How do you think, exactly? How does anyone think – and describe their thinking? Especially about ‘big-picture’, often-abstract themes such as enterprise-architecture? Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this one a long time – a very…
Two SCAN notes – 2: Causal Layered Analysis
Regular readers of this blog will know I refer quite often to one of the core techniques in futures-studies, Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). But as of a couple of weeks ago, you won’t find any reference to it on…
At Integrated-EA 2014
Always an interesting event, this one: Integrated-EA, the annual Defence-oriented enterprise-architecture conference in London that’s been a favourite part of my calendar for some years now. This time I was only able to go to the second day – I…
Knowable and discoverable
“Profound garbage” – that was how he described my work. Well, I can’t complain: at least he described it as ‘profound’… Over the past few days there’s been a fair amount that’s gone all kinda philosophical and ‘meta’ on me,…
Anthropomorphise your applications?
“Don’t anthropomorphise computers – they hate that!” – that was the text of a great graphic I found on Flickr, and that I’ve used in various slidedecks since. Yet might it actually be a good idea sometimes to do just…