Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What do we mean by the term ‘process’? What is a process? For that matter, what isn’t a process? This came up in a great Skype-conversation today with Kevin Smith, creator of PEAF (the Pragmatic EA Framework), about yet another LinkedIn somewhat-circular…
What’s the difference between a framework and a body-of-knowledge? A colleague asked me to write some notes on this, and it seems worthwhile doing so in more generally-available form – in other words, a blog-post. To me this is much…
What is a service? And what do services do? Seems like it’s time to re-explore some of the routine questions that come up almost every day in a service-oriented enterprise-architecture… not least because these questions are right at the core of the Enterprise Canvas model. And, in turn, the discipline and rigour about services that modelling […]
One of the more subtle problems in enterprise-architecture – in English-language, anyway – is the distinction between values (plural) and value (singular, but often used as plural). The Enterprise Canvas frame provides several useful methods via to disentangle an existing values-mess, and prevent getting into that kind of mess in the first place. In Enterprise Canvas, we […]
If it’s not a cycle, don’t call it a cycle. In the past few days I’ve had a fair bit of struggle to get clients to understand the difference between a linear-sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end, versus a true cycle where the end of one sequence links to or becomes the […]
The echoes of the ‘naming-problem‘ around business-architecture and the like continue to rumble on, this time via another happy Twitter-exchange with Ron Tolido: rtolido: @tetradian just show me the non-IT people that invented #entarch and / or #bizarch tetradian: @rtolido we’re in a circular-definition here: what you call #entarch or #bizarch is whatever was ‘invented’ […]
A kind of announcement, really: a knowledge-base wiki for whole-enterprise architecture is now available and ready for content and use. I’ve given it a temporary home on my Sidewise server: http://ea.sidewise.biz No doubt it should have a proper domain of its own, but that’ll do for now to get us started. [By the way, this […]
In what ways do ideology and experience inform decision-making in real-time practice? How do we bridge between the intentions we make before and after action, with the decisions we make at the point of action itself? And what implications does this have for our enterprise-architectures? This extends the previous post on real-time decision-making, ‘Belief and […]
In enterprise-architecture, in what sense are we using the word ‘enterprise’? As adjective, or as noun? This is another point of language that turns out to be surprisingly important… We can use ‘enterprise’ as adjective, to describe a scope for something else. That’s the sense that’s used in classic IT-oriented ‘enterprise-architecture’: the context or concern is IT-architecture, […]
Ends and means are not the same: everyone knows it’s not a good idea to mix them up. The same is true of ‘enterprise’ and ‘organisation’. The enterprise represents the ends of what we do; the organisation is part of the means. It’s really important not to mix them up. [Apologies, but this is another one where […]
In enterprise-architecture, how do we disentangle business-function, business-capability and business-service? This one’s for Adam Johnson, particularly as a follow-on to his comment to the previous post ‘More on EA and asset-types [Part 4]‘: I perceived your usage of function to be business function at a certain level of abstraction that could be perceived as a […]
What are the different types of assets that we need to deal with in an enterprise-architecture? What implications arise across the architecture from the differences between these types? In the first post in this series, we identified four distinct asset-dimensions: physical: physical ‘thing’ – independent, tangible, transferrable, alienable virtual: data, information, idea – independent, non-tangible, transferrable, non-alienable […]