It was the smell that caught my attention first, I guess – the smell of chemicals as I walked through through the front door of their supposedly upmarket offices. But it’s something I’ve come to recognise, to watch for, as …

The stench of systemic decay Read more »

Another month, another enterprise-architecture conference? This time it was Open Group London, billed as “Business Transformation in Finance, Government and Healthcare”. Of which it did cover some – according to the programme and the Twitterstream, anyway. (See the Open Group’s ‘highlights’ …

At Open Group London 2013 – and certification again Read more »

Which way forward for enterprise-architecture? It’s common to think of enterprise-architecture (EA) as a discipline that’s mainly about getting the best use of the organisation’s IT. Yet whilst, yes, most job-descriptions for EA these days will still revolve around some …

Enterprise-architecture – which way forward? Read more »

If – as we’re often told – business-design is about the relationships between people, process and technology, what is it that links all of themes together? Answer: a story. Okay, yes, this is a theme I’ve explored a lot here on …

NOTES – an alternative approach for EA Read more »

How should we respond to inherent-uncertainty in qualitative-requirements, for enterprise-architecture and the like? Yes, we can reduce every qualitative-requirement to some sort of metric, but is that always a wise thing to do? And if not, how can we tell whether …

Requisite-fuzziness Read more »

Just how should we handle qualitative requirements in system-design and enterprise-architecture? Should we, for example, reframe them into quantitative terms, as metrics – because it’s a lot easier to keep track of ‘measurable things’? Over the past couple of days …

Metrics for qualitative requirements Read more »

What is business-architecture? What is its relationship with enterprise-architecture? And what is the business-value of either, or both? The Open Group ran a very useful ‘TweetJam’ – a ‘twitter-conversation – on these themes yesterday, using the hashtag #ogChat. I pulled …

Open Group TweetJam on business-architecture Read more »

What do enterprise-architects actually do? What unique contribution do they bring to the enterprise? What triggered this was one paragraph in Len Fehskens’ item on current and future enterprise-architecture, in the Open Group blog ‘2013 Open Group Predictions, Vol.1‘. Here’s the …

The unique contribution of enterprise-architecture Read more »

In enterprise-architecture, how should we model a human-based ‘application’ such as a customer-service line or reCaptcha or Amazon‘s ‘Mechanical Turk‘? [Note: on a first glance, this all looks really simple. As soon as we delve anywhere beneath the surface, though, it’s …

On human ‘applications’ in EA models Read more »