Strategy Planning and Enterprise Architecture – dealing with the devil in the detail

Enterprise Architecture is all about supporting strategic planning and business transformation activities, although many organisations seem to almost wilfully forget that this is one of the main purposes of Enterprise Architecture if not the most important one. A business strategy is a long-term plan of changes for the whole enterprise which will address things like offering new products an […]

This is what I talk about when I say capability

This post has been updated, and all updated text should be highlighted blue. I was asked the question I love to get the other day, “what do you mean by capability?”. I usually try to be brief when I explain my point of view and so I was this time to. However in this post […]

The ‘This’ game and EA toolsets

Continuing on the theme of the ‘This’ game for engaging people in enterprise-architecture exploration and development, as described in the two previous posts ‘This: an exploratory game for service-oriented EA‘ and ‘More on the ‘This’ game for enterprise-architecture‘. The final note in that last post was about EA toolsets, and the need for appropriate support […]

This: an exploratory game for service-oriented EA

For a while now I’ve been brewing a kind of ‘exploratory game’ for enterprise-architecture, with the somewhat uninventive title of This. It’s based on the same service-oriented view of the enterprise as Enterprise Canvas – in fact we would typically use the game as part of modelling some aspect of the enterprise with Enterprise Canvas, […]

Using Cynefin in enterprise-architecture

This is in part an addendum to the previous post. The main aim here, though, is simply to provide some practical guidance on how and where the Cynefin framework should and should not be used in enterprise-architectures and the like. This advice draws on my own practical experience with use of Cynefin since 2003, and […]

Standing up for the value of our work

How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping […]

More on the ‘no-plan Plan’

Okay. Seems there are indeed times when I have to accept that, yes, it is 3am, and I have indeed been woken up by an idea that isn’t going to let me sleep until I’ve written it down. Oh well. So best just get on with it, I guess. In a comment to my earlier […]

The Service Oriented Enterprise

It’s now fourteen years since CBDI was formed. In the early days our mission was, as a think tank, to evangelize new ideas of modularity, separation, contract based and service orientation. We had a vision then; it was the enterprise, every enterpr…