Complexity / Structure – Page 3 – Tom Graves / Tetradian

Category: Complexity / Structure

Structure, operation and modelling of large organisations

Open Group, HERA and healthcare

Posted on 6 June 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — 9 Comments ↓

The Open Group’s Healthcare Forum recently published (free, but registration required) their version 0.1 ‘snapshot’ for HERA, their proposed ‘Healthcare Enterprise Reference Architecture’. What follows is a quick(ish) review, together with some practical recommendations. I’ll try to be nice –…

Fractality in Five Elements method

Posted on 20 May 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — No Comments ↓

This is another of the sort-of status-reports about the ‘hammer it out in practice’ work that designer Joseph Chittenden and I have been doing on Five Elements, to make it more accessible and usable for a more general audience. In…

Documenting the Not-known

Posted on 6 May 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge — No Comments ↓

In our work on simplifying the ‘inventory’ of tools and techniques I’d developed for whole-enterprise architecture and the like, one of the challenges we keep hitting up against is how to capture ideas, information and insights, as they appear during…

The relationship is the asset

Posted on 19 April 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — 3 Comments ↓

“Our people are our greatest asset!” How often have you heard that phrase? How often have you used that phrase yourself? But how often have you stopped to think about what it means? – and what it implies in real…

Sensemaking and the flocking of Boyds

Posted on 11 April 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures — 5 Comments ↓

It began with an octopus; wandered into an accidental remark about “a flocking of Boyds”; and then drifted off somewhat sideways from there. But seems that this crabwise shuffle may be leading somewhere useful – for my current explorations of…

Service, product and architecture terminology

Posted on 4 April 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — No Comments ↓

This one’s a follow-on to the ‘Service, product, service‘ post, but with an emphasis on the role of architecture-terminology itself, rather than any specific item referred to by that terminology. This starts with a private LinkedIn-message that a colleague sent…

Service, product, service

Posted on 3 April 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — 7 Comments ↓

What’s the relationship between product and service? And if, as in the Enterprise Canvas model, we assert that ‘everything is or represents a service’, what then is a product? The short-answer is that a product is a ‘frozen’ service – a…

Sensemaking: Down in the dungeons

Posted on 28 March 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures — 2 Comments ↓

Following on from the previous post ‘Sensemaking: Into the void‘, what’s a good everyday analogy or example on how to develop our skills in sensemaking and strategy? In particular, how to understand, apply and use the ‘sense, make-sense, decide, act‘…

Sensemaking: Into the void

Posted on 14 March 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures — No Comments ↓

How do we make sense when we don’t know what’s going on? What happens when we find ourselves diving into ‘the void’ of the unknown and uncertain? And what can we do there, to make enough sense of ‘the unknown’ to make useful…

Insights on SCAN: The dangers of belief

Posted on 6 March 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — No Comments ↓

And now, the last part in this brief series on insights about the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework that arose whilst working on our clean-up, for more general use, of the tools in the inventory. This time it’s about how…