What I do and how I do it

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why? That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘: On a selfish note… It’s apparent that […]

Cloud in a Box

There is much to recommend about changing how we create, deploy and offer our services and products to customers. Yet there is an entire consulting industry built around avoiding the pitfalls of cloud.

What is the enterprise in ‘the enterprise’?

When we talk about enterprise-architecture, what is ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, what is ‘enterprise’? Seems they’d be fairly foundational questions, yet most of the answers we see seem, well, kinda thin… If we hunt around on the net, we’ll find plenty of definitions for ‘enterprise’: “a business venture”, “a project or undertaking, typically one […]

Using Business Model Canvas for non-profits

How do we use Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas for the business of a not-for-profit organisation? Or, for that matter, the non-monetary aspects of a commercial organisation?
Over the past while have been asked by quite a few folks – Shawn Callahan, Alan Rodriguez, Robert Phipps and others – about how to use the Business Model Canvas in […]

Where marketing meets enterprise-architecture

Rethinking the enterprise from a customer-centric perspective was another theme that came up in that conversation with Robert Phipps last week, in this case with a bit of virtual help from Chris Potts.
The ‘conventional’ way of viewing an enterprise is that of the stock-market – and, apparently, US commercial law – which seems to regard the […]

Respect as an architectural issue (IRM-EAC 2011)

I had an excellent time at the IRM-EAC 2011 conference in London this past week. Part of that was because Sally Bean and Roger Burlton had had the courage to bring their previously-separate EA (architecture) and BPM (process) conferences together, creating an immensely valuable mix across the whole business-change space. For me, the conference started […]

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 […]

Nogility

Large technology organizations don’t simply become agile. They’re either agile or not. If they’re not, the path to being so is via change, often radical change at that.

Unprincipled Architecture

Anything IT does should be seen as consistent. Using words like “Principle” with the definition most people have for it is a sure-fire way to disappoint folks. It turns out that instead of a iron clad ‘always-will-do’ thing, our Principles are merely s…

Belonging

A great conversation yesterday with Australian facilitator Helena Read, around the word ‘belonging’, and how it links with vision and enterprise-vision.
In the enterprise, vision is the anchor for everything: the quality-system, the business-purpose, the enterprise itself. It’s a very human focus, literally emotive: “that which gets me out of bed in the morning”, and so […]