#eavoices

When Will We Learn?

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We’ve all heard the sayings about history repeating. Did we pay attention? Did we actually hear what was said, or were we just in the room when it was mentioned? Did we learn anything? Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts on innovation for more than seven months. His last post, “Black hat innovation”, […]

ArchiMate® 3.0 – Internet of Things

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In a previous blog on the ‘Digital Customer Intimacy’ strategy of our example insurance company ArchiSurance, we outlined that they intend to use more detailed customer data to improve customer interaction and satisfaction, and to determine customized insurance premiums. To this end, they want to use the Internet of Things, acquiring data from smart, connected devices such as personal fitness trackers, black boxes in vehicles, home automation gateways, fleet management systems, in-store RFID devices, or smart building sensors.

The Open Group Austin Event to Take Place July 18-21, 2016

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The Open Group, the vendor-neutral IT consortium, is hosting its latest event in Austin, TX, USA July 18—21, 2016. The event, taking place at Austin’s Four Seasons Hotel, will focus on open standards, open source and how to enable Boundaryless … Continue reading →

We need Enterprise Modelling and, for that, a reliable framework, cnt’d

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continuing
 
Perhaps, we should cease blaming the enterprise architect who, allegedly, lives in solitary confinement in an ivory tower. As if by choice.
But true, the architect, like Sissif, has to push the EA development uphill every single day&n…

VPEC-T: My Favourite Quotes

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“VPEC-T is based on a profoundly radical philosophy of plurality. Instead of a single centralized value system (as found in top-down command-and-control organizations), we expect to find a range of different (overlapping, conflicting) value systems. Instead of a single coherent set of policies, we expect to find the complex interaction between different kinds of policies (commercial, security, safety, corporate responsibility, and so on). Instead of a simple set of routine events, the post-modern organization is faced with a dynamic set of emerging events. Instead of a rigid set of database records, systems content is rich and evolving. And finally, the whole human activity system is underpinned by a complex set of trust relationships between people and organizations”.

– Richard Veryard.

“There is original and very useful thinking underneath the name [VPEC-T] that I think will change the way information systems are developed over time.”

“And just one final point about that name.  It’s actually very useful.  “VPEC-T” turns out to be a compressed mental checklist that can quickly be played back in your mind in meetings, as you write up the findings of a study or as you discuss the information system ‘to be’”.

– Roy Grub.

“This is a genuinely different way of looking at information systems. Much of architecture and requirements analysis is focussed on the “how” rather than the “what”. This book redresses the balance and provides a novel way of understanding how people and organisations interact and what information systems need to do”.

– Simon Tait.

“A simple and elegant approach to allow people who happen to be building IT architectures, to talk meaningfully with the business people who are paying for it. It’s a new way to (begin to) fix an old problem. An IT architecture that ignores people will be both complex and unworkable. VPECT encourages people to type discussions around trust and values in a way that architecture frameworks ignore. An excellent tool, whose application is underestimated by its authors in areas way outside of IT architectures”.

– Peter Drivers.

“I’ve used VPEC-T as an internal approach to driving questions and conversations as opposed to ‘throwing it on the table’ – my thoughts are that asking people to think hard about their business problems etc is enough to ask without the cognitive burden of a framework (no matter how simple!). But then being an employee as opposed to a consultant means that the discussions tend to be looser, shorter and less formal than it might be as an outside consultant”.

– Mike Burke.

“Overall it was a great way of describing the business context we were operating in and gave us a solid foundation to start requirements analysis and architecture from. Certainly, we were better served by the output of this analysis than we would have been with a list of affected IT systems, or current state processes”.

– Doug Newdick.

“The most important part for me was the VT. It allowed for better conversations with clients and other stakeholders through refining my understanding of the context, relevance, responsiveness, timeliness and other business level ilities. This allowed distilling a better architecture once lensing through PEC which I see very much as technology level concerns.

It’s a very useful thinking framework to focus on actual value. It is very effective at nurturing sustainable productivity and works very effectively when combined with data-driven analysis”.

– Darach Ennis.

“Trust is the cornerstone of all relationships and must be firmly established in order to ensure any exchange of dialogue. It is the most difficult element to obtain, yet it is the single most important element in the [VPEC-T] model. Trust is best established by keeping one’s word and completing the actions for which you have committed (‘doing what you say you will do’). Often, participants in a project will have a positive/negative trust reputation that must be understood as part of the communications process. Ways to establish and maintain credibility (trust) with other parties include transparency of purpose and full disclosure of goals and expectations (no ‘hidden’ agendas)”.

– James Kuhn.




Twitter tag: #vpect

Please take a look at the work-in-progress VPEC-T Metro Map.

BREXIT – A story of unintended consequences

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On Cameron’s performance: 

“Referenda are the nuclear weapons of democracy. In parliamentary systems they are redundant. Seeking a simplistic binary yes/no answer to complex questions, they succumb to emotion and run amok. Their destructive aftermath lasts for generations”

“In any referendum over separation, the “independence” side appeals to the patriotic heart. The thinking of the Leave side is magical. It plucks at a dimly remembered but glorified past (that was never as good as nostalgia makes it), and offers a future that is imaginary. The Brexiteers are the dog that caught the bus: they hadn’t thought what to do next. Coping with impending difficulties is for another day”.

“You needed to be candid that Britain would be at a disadvantage in a negotiation to leave the EU because the EU has the trump of being less dependent on the UK than vice-versa. You avoided saying so, perhaps because it could sound wimpy or “defeatist” about British stature and weight. You let the Leave side get away with claiming that the EU would negotiate as an equal partner with equal stakes as the UK because the volume of trade was roughly equal. The reality is that respective stakes are starkly unequal. On trade, the UK is dependent on the EU market for 45 percent of its exports. The EU is dependent on the UK for only 8 percent of EU exports. Foreign investment into the UK has stopped because of uncertainty that UK exports will still get to the EU market. The Confederation of British Industries therefore judged that Brexit will cost 4-5 percent of GDP. The Economist Intelligence Unit is even more harsh”.


Please read the whole article here:

https://www.opencanada.org/features/brexit-post-mortem-17-takeaways-fallen-david-cameron/

ArchiMate® 3.0 – Capability Realization

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As we have seen in the previous blog, ArchiSurance wants to establish several new capabilities to support its ‘Digital Customer Intimacy’ strategy, such as Digital Customer Management, Data-Driven Insurance, Data Acquisition, and Data Analysis. Positioning these in the context of its current capabilities leads to the following figure, using the ‘highlight’ function of BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio to emphasize these new elements.

The Cloud: What’s UNIX® Got to Do With It?

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By The Open Group Cloud computing has come of age and is the solution of choice for CIOs looking to maximize use of resources while minimizing capital spend.[1] Cloud solutions, whether it is infrastructure, platform or service, have the appeal … Continue reading →