Just how much damage is the cult of specialisation doing to enterprise-architecture? We’ve struggled for years with the problem that the domain-specific specialisation of enterprise-wide IT architecture has portrayed itself ‘as’ enterprise-architecture – causing serious difficulties for anyone who does …

Does specialisation lead to bad architecture? Read more »

Architects are designers too. Application-architecture designs link across an array of applications, process-architects design ways to link processes together, business-architects design business-models and their linkage into the everyday practices of the organisation. That much should be obvious, I would presume. …

Enabling enterprise-architecture conversations Read more »

In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides. And don’t worry, …

From rights to responsibilities Read more »

Any competent observer of economics would acknowledge that the money-based model on which most current economics is based is in deep trouble right now: somewhere between seriously-dysfunctional and completely broken. Many of the purported key-metrics such as GDP and GNP …

Economics, currency and time Read more »

Been having a fairly intense (but good 🙂 ) discussion on the LinkedIn Enterprise Architecture group, about standard economics and its impact on enterprise architecture. This is one of the many side-threads popping up off Kevin Smith’s now long-running discussion …

Why Economics 101 is bad for enterprise-architecture Read more »

One of the comments on the previous post on the unacknowledged risks of  ‘cooperative IT’ triggered off an essay-length response that really deserves its own post. So here it is. 🙂 The comment that started it off was from Ric …

Architecture disaster? – we have an app for that! Read more »

Twitter-correspondent Craig Hepburn posted a Tweet this morning pointing to Dion Hinchcliffe‘s excellent ZDNet article, ‘CoIT: how an accidental future is becoming reality‘, about the current rise and rise of ‘consumer IT’ or ‘cooperative IT’: It’s a story as old …

CoIT: another architectural disaster unfolds? Read more »

This one’s about uniqueness and serendipity and ‘chaos’, and I’d better say straight away that it’s a lot more tentative and exploratory than many of my posts of late. I’m seeing a theme in enterprise-architecture and the like that’s always …

Uniqueness and serendipity in enterprise-architecture Read more »

History seems to be all in vogue in Cynefin circles at present. On one side, for example, there’s Cynthia Kurtz – the too-often-unacknowledged co-creator of Cynefin, and originator of some of its key concepts such as the crucial distinctions between …

Context-space mapping: a bit of history Read more »

There’s a core theme that reaches right to the heart of every enterprise-architecture: what is the appropriate tradeoff between sameness versus uniqueness? The classic Taylorist solution has been to emphasise extreme sameness: to force everything – and everyone – to be …

Tackling uniqueness in enterprise-architectures Read more »