#eavoices

The stories behind VPEC-T and other tools

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More stories about #vpect and other tools will be covered in #foundindesign in the coming weeks. I’ll be telling the story of how VPEC-T came about. It started back in the 90’s when at DHL I worked with a team of around 30 people globally on something we called Business Service Specifications. I’ll explain how the “P-E-C” evolved from that, and then how that led Carl Bate and I  went on to add the “V and T” lenses when working in Criminal Justice in 2006. By telling such stories, I hope to make the tools I use more useful to others. Some of these tools I helped create (like VPEC-T), but many of which I simply adopted, so no claim of invention, or “my IP”! Many smart people have adopted, created and refined some great thinking and designing tools – I’ll be explaining why & how I’ve used them, along with, a few of my own.
Here’s a link to a recent post on LinkedIn that gives a feel for where I’m headed: VPEC-T: A Ten Minute How To Guide and here’s the new blog: The Found In Design Unbook.  


Thanks to Nick Gall (@ironick) for prompting this post.

Twiter hash: #foundindesign

The stories behind VPEC-T and other tools

by
 
More stories about #vpect and other tools will be covered in #foundindesign in the coming weeks. I’ll be telling the story of how VPEC-T came about. It started back in the 90’s when at DHL I worked with a team of around 30 people globally on something we called Business Service Specifications. I’ll explain how the “P-E-C” evolved from that, and then how that led Carl Bate and I  went on to add the “V and T” lenses when working in Criminal Justice in 2006. By telling such stories, I hope to make the tools I use more useful to others. Some of these tools I helped create (like VPEC-T), but many of which I simply adopted, so no claim of invention, or “my IP”! Many smart people have adopted, created and refined some great thinking and designing tools – I’ll be explaining why & how I’ve used them, along with, a few of my own.
Here’s a link to a recent post on LinkedIn that gives a feel for where I’m headed: VPEC-T: A Ten Minute How To Guide and here’s the new blog: The Found In Design Unbook.  


Thanks to Nick Gall (@ironick) for prompting this post.

Twiter hash: #foundindesign

Startups created as virtual cloud Enterprises today

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According to Gartner
“By 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today, Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that dominated many large providers in recent years. Toda…

April 2017 – Investigative Architecture Training

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We are pleased to announce our next Investigative Architecture Training which will be held in Lincoln, RI on April 13 & 14, 2017. It is an intensive, interactive two day training for architects, developers and other IT roles who want to take their architectural and diagramming skills to the next level. Practicing architects already understand […]

Organizations as Systems and Innovation

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Over the last year or so, the concept of looking at organizations as systems has been a major theme for me. Enterprises, organizations and their ecosystems (context) are social systems composed of a fractal set of social and software systems. As such, enterprises have an architecture. Another long-term theme for this site has been my […]

Patterns

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In addition to story narratvies, I’m planning to use ‘pattern’ format for describing the Change Design tools: Here’s an example that describes the Business Service Specification tool (BSS). I would also then go on to describe how it’s been used in two …

I Don’t Call Myself An Enterprise Architect

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… anymore.


A few people have asked why I call myself a Change Designer rather than an Enterprise Architect. The reason is simple: the EA label misrepresents what I do.


The popular understanding of  Enterprise Architect is:
  • attached to an I.T. view of the world – I’m not only focused on I.T.
  • often synonymous with large arcane frameworks like TOGAF – I dislike them
  • regarded as slow, top-down, big modelling up front etc – I prefer Dan Ward’s F.I.R.E. approach.


I use the title Change Designer because:
  • They are two simple words, that together, explain what I do – I Design Change (transformational or otherwise).
  • They don’t t limit me to only focus on I.T. – but, at the same time, they don’t exclude I.T.
  • Much of my thinking and toolset come from the world of “Design Thinking” (and Systems Thinking, Complexity Science etc.).


I guess I’m lucky in the sense I’m unemployable now, partly due to age but mostly due to temperament! 🙂 I’m more choosy about the things I work on where and when. All this means I don’t need to splash “Enterprise Architecture” and TOGAF all over my CV to find the next gig – and if I did, I’d probably not meet the client’s expectations!

Follow #foundindesign on Twitter to see what I’m up to these days.