When does a fair question about business become unfair? One answer: when the questioner expects to make money from an answer that they won’t pay for… I hate the money-economy with a passion, and I try to help others as …

Not playing this game any more Read more »

How do architectures fail? One way is that we make arbitrary and untested assumptions about constraints – so how do we avoid that trap? My recent webinar ‘How architecture fails, and what to do about it‘ (see slidedeck on Slideshare, and full …

How architectures fail – 3: Constraints Read more »

How do architectures fail? One way is that we start architecture too late or finish too early on the realisation-stack – so how do we avoid that trap? My recent webinar ‘How architecture fails, and what to do about it‘ …

How architectures fail – 2: Scope of action Read more »

How do architectures fail? One way is that key distinctions between architecture and design can get blurred – so how do we avoid that trap? My recent webinar ‘How architecture fails, and what to do about it‘ (see slidedeck on …

How architectures fail – 1: Architecture vs design Read more »

Those who denigrate architecture as ‘only theory’ are seriously missing the point, because the role of architecture is theory – theory to guide the practice of design. Without theory to guide practice, all that we’d have is design that’s built on untested …

Architecture is theory Read more »

What’s the structure of a task? What do we need in a task to make sure that we do the right things right? It’s worth thinking about this in architectural terms – in terms of that tagline for enterprise effectiveness, …

Architecture basics: The structure of a task Read more »

Probably everyone knows the RACI responsibility-matrix – Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. But what does it mean, in practice? For some years now I’ve been using a simple organisation-relative way to describe the organisation’s relationships with the broader shared-enterprise: organisation: the organisation itself, …

Rethinking RACI Read more »

“What do you believe?” “How do you know that you believe? “How can you prove that you believe that?”  What…? Okay, yes, I probably made a mistake, being so foolish as to publish a video in the Tetradian on Change series on …

Questions on belief Read more »

There are three kinds of chaos. They’re fundamentally different from each other. Don’t mix them up… (For a quick overview of the themes in this post, see the video ‘Three kinds of chaos‘.) I was going to start this off …

Three kinds of chaos Read more »

How do we describe ‘service’ and ‘product’ in the same way for every scope and scale, every type of context and content? That’s the theme for this series of posts. In ‘Service, product, service, simplified‘, I aimed to simplify the relationship …

Service, product, service – summary and checklists Read more »