What can we do about the NHS – the UK’s National Health Service? Costs are spiralling, its IT failures are internationally infamous, and after several horrendous scandals, morale is at an all-time low. The British government knows exactly what to …

Pay, performance and the NHS Read more »

Continuing on from ‘Framework versus body-of-knowledge‘, the same colleague asked me for some notes on how we could apply quality-systems concepts to enterprise-architecture itself. Background to this is that perhaps a dozen years back, I was working at an engineering …

Quality-systems and enterprise-architecture Read more »

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why? That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment …

What I do and how I do it Read more »

We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power. In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to …

Power, people and enterprise-architecture Read more »

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the key characteristics of ‘crossing the chasm’ to a viable whole-of-enterprise architecture is the explicit inclusion of people. In short, we need to be able to model and map where people fit …

Modelling people in enterprise-architecture Read more »

A great discussion yesterday with Mike Turner reminded me that there are two radically different roles for enterprise-architects: the internal enterprise-architect the external enterprise-architect They’re both focused on ‘the architecture of the enterprise’, but it’s important not to mix them …

Two roles for enterprise-architects 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 »

Yup, I screwed up badly over that last post on IBM’s definitely not ‘new’ Component Business Model. Within a matter of minutes I’d received a whole stream of Tweets warning me I’d been mistaken about the age of the model: …

How to screw up in one easy lesson… Read more »