6 years, 7 months ago

Emergence: Babies and Bathwater, Plans and Planning

  “Emergent” is a word that I run into from time to time. When I do run into it, I’m reminded of an exchange from the movie Gallipoli: Archy Hamilton: I’ll see you when I see you. Frank Dunne: Yeah. Not if I see you first. The reason for my ambivalent relationship with the word […]

6 years, 9 months ago

Managing Fast and Slow

People have a complicated relationship with the concept of cause and effect. In spite of the old saying about the insanity of doing the same old thing looking for a different result, we hope against hope that this time it will work. Sometimes we inject unnecessary complexity into what should be very simple tasks, other […]

6 years, 9 months ago

Situational Awareness – Where does it begin? Where does it end?

Situational awareness, according to Wikipedia, is defined as “…the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable has changed, such as time, or some other variable, such as a predetermined event”. In other words, it’s having a […]

6 years, 10 months ago

Capability Now, Capability Later

In my post “Strategic Tunnel Vision”, I touched on the concept of capability. I discussed how focusing on new capabilities can crowd out existing capabilities and the detrimental effects of that when those existing capabilities are still necessary. I also spoke to how choices about strategic capabilities can trickle down to effect tactical capabilities. What […]

6 years, 10 months ago

Strategic Tunnel Vision

  Change and innovation are topics that have been prominent on this blog over the last year. In fact, Greger Wikstrand and I have traded a total of twenty-six posts (twenty-seven counting this one) on the subject. Greger’s last post, “Successful digitization requires focus on the entire customer experience – not just a neat app” […]

8 years, 2 months ago

Auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl

Two words: auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl. To an English speaker, they might look kinda weird, but they’re key to getting an enterprise to work well… The terms originate from the German military, from around the early-19thC and mid-20thC respectively. They would translate approximately

8 years, 3 months ago

Simplifying SCORE, again

How can we simplify the SCORE framework – Strengths, Challenges, Options, Responses, Effectiveness – to make it more accessible as a practical, more strategy-oriented replacement for SWOT? As summarised in the post ‘More on simplifying SCORE‘, the way to use SCORE is sort-of

10 years, 10 months ago

Publishing The Art of Enterprise Architecture

As some of you may be aware of I with the help of a wonderful set of people has been reviewing the final script for the book The Art of enterprise Architecture (working title). The plan is to have the book ready to be delivered in time for Christmas, just so you may all either […]

11 years, 9 months ago

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

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 […]