Once more, from the top…?

Still going round my all-too-usual loop: what the heck am I doing here?

(In a business sense, of course… 🙂 )

This is a follow-on to my previous post ‘Don’t start with How‘ – about how I’ve been needing an urgent rethink of all my websites and other stuff, and how I ended up going round and round in circles in that rethink by starting from the How. What I need to do instead is follow Simon Sinek’s advice – and my own advice too – and start with Why.

So okay, let’s start this dance again. From the top, please, folks?

So what is that ‘Why’? What the heck am I on about? Nearest I can find is a summary I’ve used often for enterprise-architecture, and which fits well with everything else too: that things work better when they work together, efficiently, reliably, with elegance, on purpose.

That tag-line is actually about the four-and-a-bit dimensions of effectiveness, hence I could rework it into something quite a bit shorter, and closer to a proper enterprise-vision:

• making things more effective, for everyone

Okay, so I don’t make many things as such – more I mostly think things… (Well, someone has to do that, I guess?) And phrasing needs to be much better, tighter, too. But it’s adequate as a start for now.

So how well does that tie in with my existing business-tag-line, “the futures of business“? The short-answer is ‘sort-of’ (if only somewhat ‘sort-of’…). For example, it gets to be a problem if I have to explain what ‘futures’ is, before I can even start…

(But it’s not as hard as the endless struggle with trying to explain what ‘enterprise-architecture’ is and does… 🙁 )

The business-focus of what I do is business-transformation.

(Which is about futures, and change – yet also conveniently avoids the no-no word ‘change’ itself… 🙂 )

This focus on transformation can go all the way from very-big-picture to fine-detail.

(Hence tools such as Enterprise Canvas and the ‘This’-game.)

…and all the processes of doing / thinking / relations / purpose that guide that business-transformation.

(Hence context-space mapping, the tetradian, SCAN, SCORE, the ‘This’-game and so on.)

…to bridge between strategy and execution.

(Including the big-picture scope that comes ‘above’ or before strategy, and the unchangeable-past that comes after execution.)

…it’s about how it works as a whole, for everyone.

(Which, again, is about the really-big-picture, and concerns such as whole-enterprise scope, ‘anti-clients’ and the human aspects of enterprise.)

 …a focus on responsibility and ‘response-ability’.

(Hence the SEMPER diagnostic, and tools such as RACI-maps – and also, at the really-big-picture level, ideas around responsibility-based economics.)

…and, in parallel with that, an emphasis on the human side of systems.

(Hence the book and ‘manifesto‘ on the human side of business-architectures.)

…which links to the role of story in business-transformation and the various architectures of the enterprise.

(Hence a whole swathe of posts and other explorations here, various presentations and the like, and, of course, another book.)

… there’s the notion of service, and the architecture of the ‘service-oriented enterprise’.

(Hence that book too, and all of the work around Enterprise Canvas and the like.)

…about different players’ roles within the enterprise, and responsibilities to the enterprise that go with that role

(Hence the work on the complex tradeoffs between control and agility, and on the respective responsibilities of backbone versus edge.)

…about what’s needed to keep on-track to purpose.

(Hence frameworks such as ‘Vision, role, mission, goal‘, and themes such as governance and service-viability.)

…the need for tools, toolsets and methods that can support the whole of this scope.

(Hence revised-ADM, extended-Zachman, extended-VSM, Enterprise Canvas and yet more books, and many posts on tools and toolsets, methods, metamodels and the like.)

…and a focus on value and values as core to the whole enterprise.

(Hence many posts on values and related topics, and on kurtosis-risk (‘long-tail’ risk) and the like.)

All of which is, yes, a lot. Yet all of it does come back to effectiveness – and effectiveness for everyone, rather than solely for a self-chosen few.

So that’s it: start from the top, working downward each step of the way towards something practical, something we can use.

And that’s me, I guess; that’s ‘my’ enterprise, the enterprise to which I seem to belong. The enterprise I need to express in everything that I do.

Comments, anyone? Anything that I’ve missed?

Over to you, anyway.

(And thanks also for being here with me on this often-strange journey of mine… 🙂 )