Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What’s the difference between a framework and a body-of-knowledge? A colleague asked me to write some notes on this, and it seems worthwhile doing so in more generally-available form – in other words, a blog-post. To me this is much…
Following on from the previous post ‘Rules, principles and the Inverse-Einstein Test‘, there’s an important corollary about real-time sensemaking and and decision-making – it was in my notes for the post, but I forgot to include it, so I’ll do…
Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty (or lack of it), complexity, disruption and much, much more. Okay, first, the […]
The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough. Just Enough Detail. To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much detail is ‘Just Enough Detail’?”. And I’ll have to admit that there isn’t […]
At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my own business. How does that sound to you?” Uh, no. Not a good […]
Still going round my all-too-usual loop: what the heck am I doing here? (In a business sense, of course… ) This is a follow-on to my previous post ‘Don’t start with How‘ – about how I’ve been needing an urgent rethink of all my websites and other stuff, and how I ended up going round […]
I have had the opportunity to read several documents containing estimations on what the chief architects and CIOs should expect of the concept of Enterprise Architecture in 2012. As a result I have made some thoughts of my own, and my thoughts have been delimited to what could happen in Scandinavia. There are reasons for […]
This was such a good question from Paul Beckford, in one of his comments on the previous post, that I thought it was worthwhile bringing it out into more accessible form here: “I don’t understand the recursion you speak of and the real time nature of decision making and how that is different from ‘considered’ […]
Seems that that Twitter-conversation about principles and decision-making just keeps on rollin’ on. Stijn Viaene kicked the ball rolling again with the following Tweet: destivia: @ebuise @tetradian @richardveryard Never forget a ‘model’ is always only a preliminary version of how we see or want to see reality. After which, yes, the whole happy ‘passel o’ […]
Not quite sure where this one started: probably from this Tweet a few days back by Anna Mar (@simplicableanna): simplicableanna: 7 Reasons You Need Architecture Principles http://bit.ly/xqzDkl #entarch Gerold Kathan retweeted it, and I passed it on again as what I thought of as a useful summary. Nothing unusual there. But then one of my […]
Yes, I know I’ve gone a bit quiet in the past couple weeks, and no, I haven’t abandoned those ideas about SCAN sensemaking and real-time decision-making and the like. Reality is that those ideas are very much in the ‘work in progress’ stage at the moment, and as yet still quite some way from a […]
What is it that drives decisions at the exact moment of choice and action? – even in the most mundane, everyday action? If the choice-point itself is a true moment of chaos – a point where literally anything is possible – then what is it that guides us through each of those infinitesimal yet ubiquitous […]