Is Archimate too IT-centric for enterprise-architecture?

Archimate aims to be the standard notation for enterprise-architectures. But has it become too IT-centric to be usable for that purpose? And is there any way we can get it to break out of the IT-centric box?
These questions came up for me whilst exploring the architectural processes we could use in expanding a business-model developed […]

Trust and the enterprise

Trust is the core of the enterprise in action. So why do so many businesses and other organisations seem to go out of their way to destroy that trust? And what can we as enterprise-architects do to make it work better?
This came up in a tweet yesterday from the Open Group Brazil’s Isabela Abreu, pointing a […]

Enterprise Debt and the Shirky Principle

Just how much are organisations themselves ‘their own worst enemy’ for the enterprise?
Have been thinking about this one for quite a while, following up on some great conversations with Kevin Smith (of PEAF fame) and Nigel Green (of VPEC-T fame) about Kevin’s concept of Enterprise Debt – an expansion into the whole-enterprise scope of Ward […]

Yabbies – a novel

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!
(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)
At present you […]

Week 22 Enterprise Architecture Summer Camp

This blog post deals with first day at the summer camp for Enterprise Architecture in Week 22 that was held in Denmark at the IT University of Copenhagen. The participants were mostly students. The tagline for this event is “Scandinavian … Continue reading

RBP-EA: There’s gonna be a revolution…

This is part of a series of posts that I’ll be doing about ‘The Really Big Picture‘ at a societal/economic level, in relation to enterprise-architecture.
This post sets out some of the scope and scale of the changes that are or are likely to be coming up on the horizon over the next few years and/or […]

RBP-EA: From ‘Really Big Picture’ into real-world practice

This continues the themes of the previous posts, ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘ and RBP-EA: The dangers of business-centric ‘enterprise’-architecture.
Much like strategy, enterprise-architecture is one of the few business-disciplines that explicitly focusses on the mid- to longer-term future. As such, one of the unfortunate side-effects is that much of what we do is at risk […]

RBP-EA: The dangers of business-centric ‘enterprise’-architecture

This is in part a follow-on to ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘.
As a discipline, enterprise-architecture is still in the throes of a multi-year struggle against IT-centrism – in our context, the dangerous delusion that enterprise-scope IT-architecture somehow ‘is’ enterprise-architecture. There are signs now that that struggle is at last beginning to be won: a […]

The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture

The ‘Really Big Picture’ for enterprise-architecture is a sustainable world that works well for everyone.
Okay, that’s a bit of a bald statement. Let’s step back a bit.
To me, every enterprise-architecture is anchored in a vision of some kind – a descriptor for the aims of the overall enterprise. (One classic example of an enterprise-vision is […]

Notes on architecture versus design

Several people, including Nigel Green, Doug Newdick and Kris Meukens, picked up on my comments about architecture versus design in my earlier post ‘Great conversations on enterprise-architecture‘. Nigel kindly wrote a follow-up post on his Posterous blog, and Kris pointed to an earlier blog-post of his own, whilst Doug also added useful comments to both of those […]

Strategy, tactics, operations and emotion

This one’s been brewing for a while, but the final trigger to get it down in writing was a tweet from yesterday evening:
RT @vernaallee: RT @timkastelle: Good post & important point by @jorgebarba – It matters how you play the game. Not just being first http://bit.ly/lbAi6q
Will recommend Jorge’s post – it makes some very good […]

Great conversations on enterprise-architecture

A busy week this has been. The Gartner EA Summit and the Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners conference were both on in London at the same time, little more than a few hundred yards apart. And a lot of other things starting to happen in the enterprise scene as well: more good news on the […]