The Group of Six

According to Buddhist tradition, there was a group of six monks who constantly behaved in ways that exasperated the Buddha, causing him to produce a series of monastic rules to regulate their conduct.

“Six bhikkhus wearing wooden sandals, and each ho…

For 2012, I Pledge to Gain Weight

This year will be different. I am going to oscillate through various diet and exercise programs until I am 20 pounds heavier. I am going to eat more salt, and wait longer to reply to emails and voicemail. I know these don’t sound like good goals, …

For 2012, I Pledge to Gain Weight

This year will be different. I am going to oscillate through various diet and exercise programs until I am 20 pounds heavier. I am going to eat more salt, and wait longer to reply to emails and voicemail. I know these don’t sound like good goals, …

Open Group Complements TOGAF with SABSA Integration

The Open Group announced last month the release of the TOGAF & SABSA Integration Whitepaper, a new guide developed in collaboration with The SABSA Institute to enable enterprise and security architects to integrate security and risk management approaches into enterprise-level…

Decision-making – linking intent and action [1]

How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, so that we do ‘keep to the plan’, at the individual level, and across the enterprise? And once again, what implications does […]

Relational-assets are not ‘possessions’

What happens when someone gets confused about the nature of different types of assets? Short answer: they try to treat everything as ‘possessions’ – and that’s when the lawyers have a field-day… A great example of this is described in a BBC article (pointed to by LinkedIn), ‘Man sued for keeping company Twitter followers‘ (27-dec-2011). […]

Customer 2.0 Strikes

For those folks who don’t normally track the events of the Gamer community, I’d like to share a lesson that every consumer facing business should heed.  Social Media has changed the consumer landscape in an irrevocable way.  This incident…

Luck, Serendipity, and the Contextual Strategist

Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that leaves us in awe of the randomness of life? In that context, strategy […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 13 – The use of architects

The mistake of the many Raising a host of all employees and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the Enterprise. The daily expenditure will easily surmount that which can ever be gained. There will be commotion in the organization and the network, and men […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 12 – The investigation by process

The six ways There are six ways of investigating by process. The first is to go by strategic intent; the second is to follow the business models; the third is to go by information need; the fourth is to trace through application usage; the fifth is to trace through the organizations; the sixth is to […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 11 – Situations

The art of architecture recognizes nine varieties of situations: When an architect is fighting within his own profession, it is a dispersive situation. When an architect has investigated a problem, but to no great depth, it is a facile situation. When an architect find no alignment on the nature of things, it is a contentious situation. […]