Strategy

Future State versus Vision – Where are you headed?

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Many business architects and strategists use the terms “vision” and “future state” synonymously. While similar in the sense that both are describing a future target, they are distinctly different concepts aiming at different types of change. Since creating a long range target is often the first step of major change initiatives, getting this wrong can […]

Creating a Powerful Vision

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Organizations with a strong inspiring vision of who they want to become have higher levels of performance than purely goal-based organizations. If you aren’t sure you need to create a vision statement for you organization, go back and read “Why Most Organizations Have Weak Visions.” A powerful vision statement clarifies management’s aspirations. It sets broad […]

Why Most Organizations Have Weak Visions

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We do a lot of strategy work with organizations big and small. It is very curious to me that few organizations create strong vision statements. A powerful vision statement clarifies management’s aspirations. It sets broad direction and inspires people to go beyond the norm. If you create a set of reasonable goals people will meet […]

Inside-in, inside-out, outside-in, outside-out

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I’ve been brewing how to describe some key distinctions about the way we view our architecture, about how we see its role, and its relationship with everything else in its context. Seems to me that there’s a simple two-axis matrix we can use for this: where we focus – inside (centred on our own internal context) […]

Requisite-variety and stormy weather

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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 […]

On strategy and design

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This one started a couple days ago, with a straightforward Tweet-query from Dave Gray: davegray: “Strategy is design.” Agree or disagree? Why? What followed was, for me, one of the best back-and-forth Twitter-conversations in recent weeks: nickmalik: @davegray design is a method.  Strategy is a result.  Fair to say good strategy may result from design, […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 13 – The use of architects

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The mistake of the many Raising a host of all employees and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the Enterprise. The daily expenditure will easily surmount that which can ever be gained. There will be commotion in the organization and the network, and men […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 12 – The investigation by process

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The six ways There are six ways of investigating by process. The first is to go by strategic intent; the second is to follow the business models; the third is to go by information need; the fourth is to trace through application usage; the fifth is to trace through the organizations; the sixth is to […]

Getting down to work in a different garden

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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 […]