Blog Archives

Dotting the joins (the JEA version)

Posted on 22 August 2013 by Tom G — 3 Comments ↓

[The new editor of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, Len Fehskens, asked me to expand my previous post 'Dotting the joins' into a formal paper for the Journal. Which I did, and it was duly published in the August 2013…

Tagged with: Business, business architecture, chaos, complexity, effectiveness, enterprise, Enterprise architecture, JEA, Journal of Enterprise Architecture, paradigm, RBPEA, SCAN, Society
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture

Dotting the joins

Posted on 2 July 2013 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

Have we gone dotty? – all the way out to the level of the entire economy? And if we have, what can we usefully do about it? It’s a metaphorical question, of course – but perhaps not quite in the…

Tagged with: Business, business architecture, chaos, complexity, effectiveness, enterprise, Enterprise architecture, paradigm, RBPEA, SCAN, Society
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture

NOTES – actors, agents and extras in the enterprise

Posted on 10 June 2013 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

If the enterprise is a story, who are the actors in that story? What are their drivers and needs? How do we model and manage the relationships between those actors in the story? (This is part of an overview and…

Tagged with: Business, business architecture, chaos, complexity, enterprise, Enterprise architecture, how-to, Knowledge, narrative, narrative knowledge, NOTES, paradigm, power, responsibility, sense-making, story
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge, Power and responsibility

Some notes on NOTES

Posted on 24 May 2013 by Tom G — 2 Comments ↓

What is a narrative-oriented approach to enterprise-transformation? Why use it, and where, and how? And where did all this NOTES stuff come from, anyway? NOTES is, I admit, a somewhat-forced acronym for a way to look at business-change: Narrative-Oriented Transformation of Enterprise…

NOTES – putting it into practice

Posted on 22 May 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

How do we use an narrative approach in enterprise-transformation? What’s different about it, in real-world practice? How does it work? In the first post in this series, I introduced the core ideas for NOTES – Narrative-Oriented Transformation of Enterprise (and)…

NOTES – an alternative approach for EA

Posted on 21 May 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

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…

Tagged with: Business, business architecture, business-IT divide, chaos, complexity, enterprise, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge, narrative, narrative knowledge, NOTES, paradigm, power, responsibility, sense-making, story
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge, Power and responsibility

Scalability and uniqueness

Posted on 24 April 2013 by Tom G — 3 Comments ↓

What actually do we mean by ‘scalability’ in enterprise-architecture? What can and can’t we scale within the architecture, or the process of architecture itself? These questions came up for me in thinking about a comment by Dave Duggal to the previous…

Tagged with: chaos, complexity, decision-making, Enterprise architecture, paradigm, scalability, SCAN, sense-making, social business, uniqueness
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture

“Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?”

Posted on 16 April 2013 by Tom G — 2 Comments ↓

“The world still reels from the fallout from the crisis of 2008 :: Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?” Those are the frame-captions for a cartoon-style advert that’s currently running on the Forbes website, for an upcoming conference…

Tagged with: Business, chaos, complexity, conference, economics, London Business School, politics, uncertainty
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Society

The craft of knowledge-work, the role of theory and the challenge of scale

Posted on 29 March 2013 by Tom G — 17 Comments ↓

If enterprise-architecture is a kind of craft – part art, part science – then how do we get it to scale? Is it even possible to get it to scale? – because if not, the whole enterprise of enterprise-architecture itself…

Tagged with: chaos, complexity, decision-making, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge, paradigm, sense-making, skills, social business
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge

Control, complex, chaotic

Posted on 28 March 2013 by Tom G — 8 Comments ↓

What exactly is ‘the chaotic’ in enterprise-architectures? How do we work with it, design for it rather than ‘against’ it? Yeah, I know this is a theme I’ve visited often here, but to me it’s a challenge that’s right at the core of…