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 […]

One more try…

Oh well. The past couple of posts on a ‘thought-experiment‘ in using enterprise-architecture methods to guide a fundamental rethink of economics both seem to have gone down like the proverbial lead-balloon. Fair enough. But I guess I’ll do one more try before going back to more conventional enterprise-architecture themes. (If anyone is interested in this, we can […]

A simpler version of the ‘EA-governance thought-experiment’

The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded […]

Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture

I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise […]

Responses to ‘EA economics challenge’

There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it. (This gets long again: sorry…) Most of the responses pose good questions, which I’ll come on to in a moment. But first, one response was so […]

An economics challenge for enterprise-architects

As usual, the previous post ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘ ended up way too long and involved and ‘wordy’. Sorry… So let’s do a shorter version, in some ways going a bit deeper, but concentrating only on the issues and suggested actions. Here’s the problem: there is no way to make a possession-based economy […]

The architecture of a no-money economy

A couple of days ago I wrote an intentionally-controversial post on my Sidewise blog, saying that ‘The future of money is that it has no future‘. Was I being serious? Yes. Very serious: I really do mean it when I say that the only feasible future for money and the money-based economy is that it has […]

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 […]

What is the enterprise in ‘the enterprise’?

When we talk about enterprise-architecture, what is ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, what is ‘enterprise’? Seems they’d be fairly foundational questions, yet most of the answers we see seem, well, kinda thin… If we hunt around on the net, we’ll find plenty of definitions for ‘enterprise’: “a business venture”, “a project or undertaking, typically one […]

Two kinds of Why

What is ‘Why?’ And why, anyway? “Oh no, not again“, do I hear you cry? Actually, it’s not as bad as that: it’s not going to be yet another of those long tedious technical posts – honest! (It is a sort-of technical question, I’ll admit. And, in the event, quite long. But interesting to just […]

Two points of view on (enterprise) architecture

Was showing a colleague one of my favourite small books yesterday: Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School. Briefly flicking through the two-page spreads, one caught my eye. Seems so apposite to enterprise-architecture and the like that it’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:
Two points of view on architecture
ARCHITECTURE IS AN EXERCISE IN […]