Happy Whatever!

‘Tis the season for… something, probably? For many people, it’s ‘the ‘Holiday Season’, or Christmas, or New Year, or something like that. A calendrical marker-point, anyway. Something to celebrate, perhaps. The culture I come from is nominally Christian, hence ‘Christmas’ and suchlike, so that’s the label others around me tend to use. (Though it doesn’t […]

Making plans, sort-of

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.) Why? Simple reason, […]

Getting down to work in a different garden

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 […]

Time for this old toad to move on

Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]

Apologising for the apologies

What’s this? Not again? Yet another post – already?? Sorry… my fault… many apologies… Or should I be apologising for the apologies…? Over-apologising for everything seems a peculiarly English affliction… (Talking with a Polish guy in the post-office the other day, he said that the first three words he learnt when he first came to England […]

Why are the elite the elite?

An interesting follow-on this afternoon from the themes of the previous post, ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘. I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer […]

What I do and how I do it

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why? That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘: On a selfish note… It’s apparent that […]

Not quite bus-pass day…

…because the new day that starts in less than an hour’s time now is when I would stereotypically get that infamous bus-pass. (Except that in this country I don’t actually get it for another 17 months: the governments here play an ever-popular game called ‘move the goal-posts so that we don’t have to provide what […]

Anti-clients, kurtosis-risks and public riots

In quite a few of my posts on enterprise-architecture, you may have seen two unfamiliar terms: anti-client, and kurtosis-risk. To see these two concepts in real-world action, and to get some understanding of how important they are in enterprise-architecture practice, you need look no further than the rioting that’s been taking place in London and […]

To understand shared-enterprise, look for the tattoos

People seem to struggle so much with the word ‘enterprise’ in ‘enterprise-architecture’. So often they seem to think it’s about technology. Or money.
But if you want to understand ‘enterprise’, look for the story.
And if you want to see where and how people really commit themselves to an enterprise, look for the tattoos.
That’s commitment…
And […]