Rebalancing top-down management-architectures

One of the points that came up in the previous posts on the management-architecture theme is that most management-structures are top-down, which doesn’t fit well with the ‘everything is just another service’ nature of most service-architectures – especially at a whole-of-enterprise scope. Yet if so, how can we create a better balance in the overall management-architecture? […]

Management as ‘just another service’

What do I mean when I say that, in a service-oriented architecture of the enterprise, we need to view management and the like as ‘just another service’? This came up in a comment to the previous post ‘Why are the elite the elite?‘ The notion of ‘just another service’ is worth exploring more – especially […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Responsibility versus anti-possession as response to disaster

If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with huge problems arising from a massive earthquake and tsunami all down its north-east coast, and […]

An architecture of responsibility

Following on from the previous post on ‘Possessed by possession‘, if it’s true that there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable, then it seems worthwhile to take a look at some of the implications.
First, though, a story, and a warning, from history.
I’ll admit I’m no true scholar of Australian Aboriginal history or […]

Possessed by possession?

In case you hadn’t noticed, there are some big changes happening right now in the wider world… Lots and lots of them, at every scale and in just about every major context, from political to social, environmental to technological, and much else besides.
Myself, I look at all of these things with an enterprise-architect’s eye – […]

Yes and no: a question of commitment

This one’s a return to the themes from that previous post on Power, people and responsibility in enterprise-architecture, and the dichotomy between power as ‘the ability to do work’ versus a supposed ‘power’ as ‘the ability to avoid work’.
We can also see this as the difference between yes and no; between for and against. In […]

Power, people and enterprise-architecture

We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power.
In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to do work. Wherever there’s work to be done – in whatever form that that ‘work’ might […]

People, assets, relationships and responsibility

A great meetup yesterday with Shawn Callahan (@unorder) and Kevin Bishop (@kevinbishop) of Australian consultancy Anecdote, and their upcoming launch of Zahmoo – a new web-based tool to manage stories and narrative-knowledge, for organisations, communities and families.
Over lunch the conversation wandered onto my work on enterprise-architecture and the Enterprise Canvas, and my latest book Mapping […]

The Power and the Glory

#entarch A debate on Twitter about the power of enterprise architects (enhancing? enabling? influencing?), and another debate about the relationship between architecture and knowledge (does architecture count as a form of knowledge?) led to a question …