Four principles – 2: There are no rights

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What rights do we need to design for in enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? This is the third in a series of posts on principles for a sane society: Four principles for a sane society: Introduction Four principles: #1: There are no rules…

drEAmtime – Archetypes

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I am still not done with exploring the great post from Ivo Velitchkov in which many gems are to be found. My posts so far:drEAmtime – CommunicationdrEAmtime – Bridging the SilodrEAmtime – Capability Cemetery drEAmtime – EPIC SCAN To quote Ivo: But…

drEAmtime – Archetypes

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I am still not done with exploring the great post from Ivo Velitchkov in which many gems are to be found. My posts so far:drEAmtime – CommunicationdrEAmtime – Bridging the SilodrEAmtime – Capability Cemetery drEAmtime – EPIC SCAN To quote Ivo: But…

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Are we making progress?

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In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)

In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year.  By progress, the client meant that

  • people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do

  • there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”

  • mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved

  • they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose

  • the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

Read more »

Are we making progress?

by

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)

In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year.  By progress, the client meant that

  • people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do

  • there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”

  • mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved

  • they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose

  • the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

Read more »

Native EA Apps

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Update: Native Apps Part II: A Hybrid App Every single web page out there, if you like, is like a computer. Tim Berners-Lee Modern web technologies (HTML5, CSS, Javascript) allow us to build advanced solutions. Although not that advanced, a service like EA Glossary is in fact just one single web page, i.e. one HTML5 document. …read more

Addressing the Multi-Dimensionality Challenge on Thinking of The Enterprise as a System

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Last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Open Group conference in Newport Beach, California.  I find these conferences enlightening as I enjoyed the dialog with fellow professions who share similar point of views on the&nbsp…

From research to practice

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@danlockton is doing a survey How do actual designers use academic literature?What are the barriers you’ve experienced?What service would you like to see?What would be useful to you?Could academics make their work more easily applicable?Here’s my ans…

From research to practice

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@danlockton is doing a survey How do actual designers use academic literature?What are the barriers you’ve experienced?What service would you like to see?What would be useful to you?Could academics make their work more easily applicable?Here’s my ans…

Addressing the Multi-Dimensionality Challenge on Thinking of The Enterprise as a System

by

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Open Group conference in Newport Beach, California.  I find these conferences enlightening as I enjoyed the dialog with fellow professions who share similar point of views on the discipline of Enterprise Architecture.   I have made the following observations: We have a huge challenge in…

drEAmtime – EPIC SCAN

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I continue to explore the great post from Ivo Velitchkov step-by-step, because his posts allow my thoughts to follow a red line. He pretty much eliminated a GLUE Disease in my very own head. Once again (and I will continue to say that till I reach the end of the red line) thank you for unplugging me.

So here again a quote from Ivo:

Big organizations in all sectors, especially in the service industries, tend to gather huge number of applications until they find themselves in a situation where there are far too many to manage. A good number of them are not used at all. Some other part is underutilized. Most of the critical applications have high maintenance or high replacement cost or both. Inevitably there are many which automate different parts of the same process but they don’t talk to each other. And this justifies new spending on building interfaces, or buying application integration packages first and then replacing them with BPMS and then probably with something better than BPMS. As a result – more spending and more applications to manage.

Ivo keeps continuing exploring that with some more statements, which all point to one specific problem: Unneeded complexity as the root cause of too high costs. Once again  a great observation and a situation I have also faced more than once (and most likely will face each and every day as long as I stay in Enterprise Architecture drEAmland. So what am I doing? Actually I am applying the EPIC SCAN approach to analyze the past (GLUE Defence).

  • Emergent Complexity – consequence of many small and unrelated decisions. (Ivo: “Inevitably there are many which automate different parts of the same process but don’t talk to each other”)
  • Perverse Complexity – consequence of clumsy attempts to reduce complexity. (Ivo: “And this justifies new spending on building interfaces, or buying application integration packages first and then replacing them with BPMS and then probably with something better than BPMS.”)
  • Irreducible Complexity – consequence of the real complexity of the demand environment. (Ivo touches this only between the lines: “Big organizations in all sectors […] tend to gather huge number of applications […]”)
  • Contrived Complexity – consequence of deliberately creation to benefit some stakeholders. (Ivo: “But as they rarely get to the cause of the inefficiencies or are in the position to influence the bigger system that produces these inefficiencies, the overall result is an oscillation or even increase in overall IT spending.”)

By analyzing the problem at hand with the EPIC SCAN approach I am able to create transparency and visibility on the root cause of the problem. And then it is (once again) all about communication and people to optimize the information flow and by that find the best fit-to-purpose solution.

It does help quite a lot, if you don’t panic and stop thinking to be an Enterprise Architect but start knowing that you are one. Remember, in the Enterprise Architecture Matrix you just have to let it all go, fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.

As always over to you for commenting to help me improving my thinking and share as much knowledge as possible.

drEAmtime – EPIC SCAN

by

I continue to explore the great post from Ivo Velitchkov step-by-step, because his posts allow my thoughts to follow a red line. He pretty much eliminated a GLUE Disease in my very own head. Once again (and I will continue to say that till I reach the end of the red line) thank you for unplugging me.

So here again a quote from Ivo:

Big organizations in all sectors, especially in the service industries, tend to gather huge number of applications until they find themselves in a situation where there are far too many to manage. A good number of them are not used at all. Some other part is underutilized. Most of the critical applications have high maintenance or high replacement cost or both. Inevitably there are many which automate different parts of the same process but they don’t talk to each other. And this justifies new spending on building interfaces, or buying application integration packages first and then replacing them with BPMS and then probably with something better than BPMS. As a result – more spending and more applications to manage.

Ivo keeps continuing exploring that with some more statements, which all point to one specific problem: Unneeded complexity as the root cause of too high costs. Once again  a great observation and a situation I have also faced more than once (and most likely will face each and every day as long as I stay in Enterprise Architecture drEAmland. So what am I doing? Actually I am applying the EPIC SCAN approach to analyze the past (GLUE Defence).

  • Emergent Complexity – consequence of many small and unrelated decisions. (Ivo: “Inevitably there are many which automate different parts of the same process but don’t talk to each other”)
  • Perverse Complexity – consequence of clumsy attempts to reduce complexity. (Ivo: “And this justifies new spending on building interfaces, or buying application integration packages first and then replacing them with BPMS and then probably with something better than BPMS.”)
  • Irreducible Complexity – consequence of the real complexity of the demand environment. (Ivo touches this only between the lines: “Big organizations in all sectors […] tend to gather huge number of applications […]”)
  • Contrived Complexity – consequence of deliberately creation to benefit some stakeholders. (Ivo: “But as they rarely get to the cause of the inefficiencies or are in the position to influence the bigger system that produces these inefficiencies, the overall result is an oscillation or even increase in overall IT spending.”)

By analyzing the problem at hand with the EPIC SCAN approach I am able to create transparency and visibility on the root cause of the problem. And then it is (once again) all about communication and people to optimize the information flow and by that find the best fit-to-purpose solution.

It does help quite a lot, if you don’t panic and stop thinking to be an Enterprise Architect but start knowing that you are one. Remember, in the Enterprise Architecture Matrix you just have to let it all go, fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.

As always over to you for commenting to help me improving my thinking and share as much knowledge as possible.