The Chief Process Office of an Agile Organization

The IDEF0 Pattern and the Organization’s Value EngineIn my book, Organizational Economics: the Formation of Wealth, I use the IDEF0 pattern to model the organization.  This pattern has three internal components, Control, Process, and Mechanisms (t…

The no-plan Plan: people in architecture

Okay, time for the final theme in that ‘no-plan Plan‘ – which somehow seems to be turning into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’ or something like that, for some reason. Oh well. Anyway, this part’s about what is perhaps the most-serious ‘the Forgotten’ in almost all current ‘enterprise’-architectures, namely people. I’ll keep this one […]

The no-plan Plan: architecture-dynamics

And the next part of that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘ (or ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’, or whatever it is): this time on the dynamics of architecture. In other words, it’s a focus on how we handle changes to the architecture itself, rather than mainly about changes that that architecture needs to address. Most of this […]

The no-plan Plan: architecture for change

And more on that expansion on my ‘no-plan Plan‘, which does seem to be morphing somewhat into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’… Anyway, this part is about that theme of ‘architecture as change’ – though perhaps ‘architecture for change’ might be a better way to put it.. [Obviously this is related to the next […]

10 Key Success Factors for dealing with Enterprise Architecture

Secure the entire management commitment Secure scope(s) (partition) Customize methodologies to fit your intentions Use tools to support implementation Use training and coaching to secure knowledge and commitment is within specified limits. Use metrics to monitor the effects of Enterprise Architecture Create a set oriented fractal meta-model (yeah I know this sound weird) Use as few languages ​​as possible Manage materials, methods and resource Use […]

The no-plan Plan: the ‘why’ of architecture

A bit more detail on what I see coming up in my ‘no-plan Plan‘, starting with the theme about ‘the ‘why’ of architecture’. One thing I’ve always found worrying in most current ‘enterprise’-architecture is that there’s been almost no attention given to the ‘why’. It’s seemed that ‘why’ was just a given: ‘orders from above’, […]

Women’s rights? – just say No!

You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!? I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it?  And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? […]

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 […]

More on ‘the toad in the road’

How can we ensure that the ideas and models that we use are appropriate to the context? What methods can we use to evaluate new ideas? Perhaps more to the point, how do we protect ourselves from ideas that won’t fit in our architecture-ecosystem? This extends the previous post on ‘Coping with the toad-in-the-road‘, where […]

Enterprise-architecture and the Cloud

Okay, let’s go back to something that’s perhaps a bit less controversial than the past few posts… This one starts with a ‘rant’ (as he put it) by Anders Jensen, about the ongoing hype over (gosh!) ‘the Cloud’: aojensen: As phk of FreeBSD says: #cloud is no different to the IBM mainframe. // It puzzles […]

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 […]