“Are you the guy who writes books?”, asks the young woman behind me in the cafe. Well, yes, I am – but much as for her, it’s taken me a moment or two to recognise her, and then remember the …

What I do, and why Read more »

Meta-this-that-and-the-other – metamodels, metaframeworks, metamethodology, metatheory, even metatools? What is all this stuff about ‘meta-‘? And what is ‘meta-‘, anyway? One answer is that it’s about a kind of recursion that we often need in our work, in which something is applied to …

Tools and metatools Read more »

“Yes, we need theory in enterprise-architecture”, people will often say to me, “but which theory should it be? Should it be quantitative, everything defined in terms of metrics? Or should it be qualitative, and forget about metrics entirely? Which one …

More on theory and metatheory in EA Read more »

What’s the role of theory in enterprise-architecture? Could there be such as thing as ‘the theory of enterprise-architecture’? Can we use that theory, for example, to separate useful EA models from useless ones? It seems that Nick Malik thinks so, as per …

Theory and metatheory in enterprise-architecture Read more »

Back on the ‘no more arguments‘ theme, there were a couple of responses I received that, although nominally private, were so apposite and to-the-point that I really do need to reprise them here. (Because the messages were private, I’ll paraphrase them …

On (not) changing the world Read more »

It’s time to make an end to the arguments that have plagued my professional-life and more for at least the past decade. And the simplest way to do that – to make that ending possible – is to reframe what …

Reframing the way I work Read more »

It’s sometimes said that the real collective-noun for architects is an argument – ‘an argument of architects’. We see that often enough on LinkedIn, to be sure… Yet we’ve also seen it way too often on these pages here, or in …

An end to the arguments Read more »

In what ways can we use explorations at the RBPEA (Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture) scope and scale to create insights for practical use in everyday-level enterprise-architectures? For example – in the specific case of this blog-series – what can we learn from …

RBPEA: Wrapping up on gender Read more »

How does someone become an anticlient – a person who’s committed to the same aims of the same shared-enterprise, but vehemently disagrees with how you or your organisation are acting within it? And, since anticlient-actions can actually kill the entire …

RBPEA: An anticlient’s tale Read more »