Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
There are three kinds of chaos. They’re fundamentally different from each other. Don’t mix them up… (For a quick overview of the themes in this post, see the video ‘Three kinds of chaos‘.) I was going to start this off …
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 411, features Tom’s essay on Servant Leadership (which I highly recommened), John Quigley on managing requirements as a part of product management, a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Organizations as Systems – ‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the […]
One of the benefits of having a (very) wide range of interests is that every so often a flash of insight gets dropped into my lap. In this case, it was a matter of “We must recognise that single events have multiple causes” showing up as a suggested read from Aeon on the same […]
Gregory Brown tweeted a great series on the problem of distance last week: It’s amazing how much information can be conveyed in nine tweets. It’s amazing how many aspects of a very complex socio-technical undertaking, software development, are affected by this concept of distance. I would argue that this concept of distance applies likewise to […]
There’s an old saying that if you put one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in a bucket of boiling water, on average you’re comfortable. Sometimes analyzing information in the aggregate obscures rather than enlightens. A statistician named Francis Anscombe pointed out this same principle in a more visual (though less colorful) […]
The most important thing to learn about management and governance is knowing when and how to manage or govern and more importantly, when not to. The story is told about a very new and modern penal facility, the very epitome of security and control. Each night, precisely at 11:00 PM, the televisions were shut off […]
What exactly is ‘the chaotic’ in enterprise-architectures? How do we work with it, design for it rather than ‘against’ it? Yeah, I know this is a theme I’ve visited often here, but to me it’s a challenge that’s right at the core of…
Just how restricting – 0r even dangerous – is our seeming ‘need’ for certainty? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring links between the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework and Cynthia Kurtz’s more socially-oriented Confluence sensemaking-framework. I still…
Following on from ‘Boundary of identity, boundary of control‘ and ’inside-out versus outside-in‘, perhaps the quickest way to understand the difference: the boundary-of-control delimits what the lawyers think the organisation is the boundary-of-identity delimits what everyone else thinks the organisation is…
What’s the boundary of the organisation? Boundary in what sense, and for whom? And how does this impact on enterprise-architecture and the like? These questions came up for me a short while ago when working on an article on enterprise-architecture…
An enterprise operates at several different tempi. For example
A retail chain has one tempo aligned to the customer visiting the store, a longer tempo for purchasing and logistics, and a longer one still for planning and establishing new stores
A mili…
Organisations always have an implicit architecture, but not always an explicit architecture. If they do have an explicit architecture, the chances are that it is an IT Architecture that has evolved over the course of hundreds of little decisions made by developers and project managers over the years. Perhaps these decisions have been made by […]