Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Carrying on from the previous post, with a bit of an explanation about why I’m becoming so much of ‘a grumpy old guy’… Here’s the blunt fact: I’m not a good thinker. I know that. Too many gaps in my knowledge,…
Okay, I admit it: I’m at real risk right now of becoming a grumpy old guy: Getting snappy at people on LinkedIn and all that. More than a fair bit of that phrase about “Will not suffer fools gladly”. Patience strained…
This one’s a follow-on to the ‘Service, product, service‘ post, but with an emphasis on the role of architecture-terminology itself, rather than any specific item referred to by that terminology. This starts with a private LinkedIn-message that a colleague sent…
This is an attempt to get back towards ‘Normal Service Will Be Resumed…‘ – I don’t know how coherent it will be, but it’s a start, anyway… Over the past few weeks I’ve had a stream of very good questions from Eric…
One of the huge challenges of trying to make things simple in a complex context is that often it can make at first make things seem more complicated. For a while, anyway, until things settle down a bit, and the…
“What’s the theory of enterprise-architecture?”, a colleague asked the other day. “Is there any kind of coherent and consistent theory behind it that holds it all together?” Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: yes. Or sort-of, rather. Both no and yes…
Ah definitions, definitions – so many to choose from! But somehow, only a limited number of labels to go around, to share out amongst all those definitions? Which means that people end up using the same labels for different things,…
A couple evenings ago the BCS (British Computer Society) held a open question-and-answer session with John Zachman at the EAC-BPM conference in London. How much has the Zachman Framework for enterprise-architecture changed over the past decades – and particularly over the…
Moving onward with this exploration of how I’m reframing the way I work, a key part is around identifying the constraints of that work: where and how the tools work, and – perhaps even more important – being clear about…
What’s the relationship between organisation and enterprise? In particular, how would we work with that relationship in enterprise-architecture? This one’s a follow-on from both ‘Fractals, naming and enterprise-architecture‘ and ‘Organisation and enterprise‘, and, more specifically, is a response to Len…
What naming do we need, when we’re doing architectures for every part of the enterprise? Yeah, I know this is another one that I go on and on about, but it’s just too bad: we need to resolve this one –…
What is an enterprise? Perhaps more specifically, what is ‘the enterprise’ in enterprise-architecture? (Quick TL;DR summary: in enterprise-architecture, ‘the enterprise’ is not the same as ‘the organisation’, and is always larger in scope than just ‘the organisation’. Confusing those two terms, or treating…