What tools and toolsets do we need, to support our work in the architecture of the enterprise as a whole? The short and more cynical answer is “Not what we have right now”. To be blunt, maybe none of the …

Toolsets for enterprise-architecture – another try 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 »

Moving onward with this exploration of how I’m reframing the way I work, a key part is around identifying the constraints of that work: where and how the tools work, and – perhaps even more important – being clear about …

Declaring the assumptions 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 »

What’s the best metaphor we could use for the information collected in enterprise-architecture and related disciplines? The answer, I’d suggest, is a hologram. This is in part a follow-on to the post ‘What do we need from our EA tools?‘. What …

Enterprise-architecture as hologram Read more »

What do we actually need our enterprise-architecture tools to do? What are the ‘jobs to be done’ with which we need their help? And if our existing tools aren’t delivering that help, what can we do about it? [Update: While writing …

What do we need from our EA tools? Read more »

How do I think? How do I think, really? How do you think, exactly? How does anyone think – and describe their thinking? Especially about ‘big-picture’, often-abstract themes such as enterprise-architecture? Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this one a long time – a very …

How do you think? Read more »

How many layers are there in an enterprise-architecture? If we read any of the standard texts, you’ll see there are several popular answers. For example, Archimate says there are three: Business, Application and Technology. TOGAF says there are four: Business, Data, …

On layers in enterprise-architecture Read more »

Just how should we use models and frameworks in enterprise-architectures – particularly in the exploratory phases of architecture-development? What’s the best way to use them? And how do we prevent the frameworks from constraining our options in those processes? These …

Models and reasoning-processes in enterprise-architecture Read more »