If we’re trying to make sense of systems, our greatest enemy is fragmentation. Or, to be more precise, the type of fragmentation that arises from misuse of analysis. Specialise, says analysis. Specialise again! And specialise the specialisms! Hyperspecialise! Cut it …

Against fragmentation Read more »

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 – …

Open Group, HERA and healthcare Read more »

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 …

Fractality in Five Elements method Read more »

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 …

Documenting the Not-known Read more »

“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 …

The relationship is the asset Read more »

For future reference, here’s the current schedule for videos in my weekly ‘Tetradian on Architecture‘ series on YouTube, for the next few months: Episode 10: ‘Always start from a business-question‘ (published 05 April 2018) Episode 11: ‘Where does EA fit …

Architecture-videos schedule – April-June 2018 Read more »

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 …

Sensemaking and the flocking of Boyds Read more »

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 and architecture terminology Read more »

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 …

Service, product, service Read more »

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: Down in the dungeons Read more »