Recovering from TOGAF, and a Cynefin meetup

It’s taken me about three days to wind down after the flat-out networking / talk-fest that was the TOGAF conference. Today I’ve had to plough my way through something like 45 presentations and half a dozen complete books on various aspects of enterprise architecture just to be able to write all of my ‘thank you it was great talking with you’ emails… 🙂

But yes, reviewing all those presentations has reinforced that sense of a quantum shift in understanding as to what enterprise architecture actually is – namely the architecture of the enterprise as a whole, not just its IT. The big driver for the change seems to be SOA (service oriented architecture) – seems the IT types are discovering that they can’t get it to work without extensive business involvement. Hmm…

Was not wonderfully amused to discover that a fair bit of what I said last year, which at that time they pretty much dismissed out of hand, is now all but word-for-word in their ‘new’ description of ‘business architecture’. Humph. At least it is getting through, though.

Felt bizarrely jetlagged for at least a couple of days after coming back – odd because it’s only an hour’s flight and it doesn’t cross any time-zones, but it still feels like jetlag. Didn’t help that the flight was an hour and half late getting in to Stansted, which meant I was decidedly late for meetup in London with Dave Snowden and the Cynefin / Cognitive Edge crew. Glad I did, though, because I had some great conversations about organisational complexity which dovetailed really nicely with the enterprise architecture ideas from earlier in the week.

A real sense of movement happening in both spaces, and worthwhile movement at that. Good.