Making plans, sort-of

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, […]

Women’s rights? – just say No!

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? […]

Getting down to work in a different garden

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 […]

Time for this old toad to move on

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 […]

More on ‘the toad in the road’

How can we ensure that the ideas and models that we use are appropriate to the context? What methods can we use to evaluate new ideas? Perhaps more to the point, how do we protect ourselves from ideas that won’t fit in our architecture-ecosystem? This extends the previous post on ‘Coping with the toad-in-the-road‘, where […]

A week in Tweets: 02-08 October 2011

Another week’s worth of Tweets and links, for once almost on time. Usual categories, of course, with a few extra bits and pieces as usual. Over to you? Enterprise-architecture, business architecture and that kind of stuff: practicingEA: At an engagement yesterday client kept using the word ‘enterprise’ 2 mean big company IT…hmmm. Not what #entarch […]

A human view of Simple, Complicated and Complex

What is simple, complex, complicated, or chaotic? And from whose perspective? For a long time now I’ve been using those context-categories – often referred to as the ‘Cynefin-categorization’ – with a straightforward cross-map to levels of repeatability, somewhat analogous to the states or phases of matter: Although we do need to be wary of misusing […]

One more try…

Oh well. The past couple of posts on a ‘thought-experiment‘ in using enterprise-architecture methods to guide a fundamental rethink of economics both seem to have gone down like the proverbial lead-balloon. Fair enough. But I guess I’ll do one more try before going back to more conventional enterprise-architecture themes. (If anyone is interested in this, we can […]

A simpler version of the ‘EA-governance thought-experiment’

The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded […]

A week in Tweets: 25 September – 01 October 2011

Another week’s collection of Tweets and links – somewhat oversized this time, don’t quite know why. Usual categories, anyway, after the usual break: Enterprise-architecture and the other ‘business big-picture’ stuff: SAlhir: RT @Jabaldaia Network analysis in innovation may surprise us http://bit.ly/nDy4eA ArtBourbon: RT @pbmobi: (high-level) Enterprise Backbone of Nespresso   http://bit.ly/mOJTuL #entarch #bizarch >>plus comment […]

Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture

I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise […]

A week in Tweets: 18-24 September 2011

It’s back again, by popular (lack of?) demand: another week’s collection of Tweets and links. All the usual categories, confusions and all-too-necessary break before we start: Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and the ‘business big-picture’: SAlhir: RT @complexified “Secrets of the Six Principles” – great primer on #complexity in orgs, and case studies. [PDF] http://bit.ly/q6JPcR thoughttrans: Can roadmaps […]