Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What is an enterprise, really? It’s a question that always seems to invoke a lot of discussion amongst enterprise-architects – perhaps not least because the answer is so essential to any description of whatever it is that we actually do! Anyway,…
What is business? For that matter, what is – or is not – ‘a business’? Seems a kinda important question for business-architecture, doesn’t it? And yet no-one seems to ask it… So let’s just do some proper enterprise-architecture thinking around this one –…
Is a market an organisation, or an enterprise? Seems to me the only valid short-answer is ‘Yes’… Can we design a market? We’d probably say ‘Yes’ there too, though perhaps with a fair few ’It depends…‘ riders attached to that answer. And…
(A brief note on enterprise-architecture and the like that came up over the Christmas break.) Emotions are facts. Feelings are facts. (Subjective facts, it’s true, yet facts nonetheless.) Assertions about emotions and feelings – in particular, about what Self or…
What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or…
What is enterprise-architecture? That’s, uh, one of the more awkward questions of the trade… (Quick summary: if you ask a dozen enterprise-architects, you’ll probably get at least a hundred different definitions… or just ‘It depends…’ ) In the continuing spirit of ‘Ending…
Architecture-by-definition is an anti-pattern.
The goal of a definition is to remove noise.
You add another layer of noise when your definitions are model-specific sub-definitions for commonly understood terms. For example: service, product, capability, or system.
Special definitions introduce an additional cognitive load that easily outweighs the benefits of a more sophisticated model.
What happens when people get too fixated on the ‘boxes’ in our models and frameworks? And what can we do about it in enterprise-architecture? This one’s actually a follow-on to the previous post about ‘It depends…‘, but it starts with…
Just how much is enterprise-architecture about the balance between same and different? Quite a lot, it seems to me… (In part this is a follow-on to ‘The theory of enterprise-architecture‘, about exploring the theoretical base that underpins a whole-enterprise approach…
How can we clarify the confusion over service, capability and function in enterprise-architecture models? Andrew Marosy made a comment to my previous post on this that really needs to be brought out here in full: You can also visualise a…
How can we distinguish between service, capability and function in enterprise-architecture models? This is one of those perennial questions that keeps returning time and time again, and it’s one of the key confusions that Enterprise Canvas aims to resolve. But…
That previous post on process was, yes, I’ll admit it, a bit long: but the key point is that the term ‘process’ is necessarily a bit blurred, and that we get into trouble if we try too hard to sharpen up…