Four principles – 3: Money doesn’t matter

What’s the real role of money within design for an enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? [Apologies, folks: this one’s turned out to be really long, even by my usual standards – but unfortunately this theme is so darn controversial that it really does need the

Four principles – 2: There are no rights

What rights do we need to design for in enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? This is the third in a series of posts on principles for a sane society: Four principles for a sane society: Introduction Four principles: #1: There are no rules

Four principles – 1: There are no rules

What rules do we need in enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? This is the second in a series of posts on principles for a sane society: Four principles for a sane society: Introduction Four principles: #1: There are no rules – only

Four principles for a sane society

How do we make sense of the big-picture in enterprise-architecture? The really big-picture? Yep, it’s that time of year again: the lead-up to the annual Integrated EA conference, where they allow me to go somewhat off-the-wall and present the current ‘big-idea’

Power-issues in EA – tread carefully…

Continuing with the series on power and politics in enterprise-architecture, a brief summary-so-far, some practical suggestions on modelling of power-issues, and a very important warning… The quick summary is as follows: the practice of enterprise-architecture is often ‘relentlessly political’ one

Power and politics in enterprise-architecture

Anyone who’s involved in any form of enterprise-architecture would know that it’s best described as ‘relentlessly political’: seems almost everything we deal with turns out to be some kind of tortuously-intransigent wicked-problem. Which in turn seem so often to be rooted

Efficiency, effectiveness and co-creativity

This one is a pick-up from a Tweet by Bert van Lamoen: transarchitect: The priority shift we make is from efficiency to effectiveness to co-creativity. #complexity Of course. Yes. That’s obvious, the moment I look at it. Except that I’d completely missed before now. Oops… I’ve long since drawn a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. […]

Insuperordination

In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way? Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and […]

Work-in-progress – two more books

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects. The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years […]

Competition-against or competition-with?

What’s the point of competition, in a business-context? Perhaps more to the point, what is competition in a business-context? And why? Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are very important in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and business-model design: not least because if we get it […]

Making plans, sort-of

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan? Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point? (Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.) Why? Simple reason, […]