Two words: auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl. To an English speaker, they might look kinda weird, but they’re key to getting an enterprise to work well… The terms originate from the German military, from around the early-19thC and mid-20thC respectively. They would translate approximately …

Auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl Read more »

Services serve the needs of someone. Disservices purport to serve the needs of someone, but don’t – they either don’t work at all, or they serve someone else’s needs. Or desires. Or something of that kind, anyway. And therein lie a huge range of …

Services and disservices – 6: Assessment and actions Read more »

Services serve the needs of someone. Disservices purport to serve the needs of someone, but don’t – sometimes through incompetence or failure in operation, sometimes through incompetence in service-design, and sometimes even by intent. And therein lie a huge range of problems …

Services and disservices – 2: Education example Read more »

As you may have noticed, I’ve been kinda struggling somewhat to fully explain the ‘Why’ behind all of this talk of ‘new toolsets for enterprise-architecture‘ and related disciplines. And then, out of the blue, via a reTweet from Phil Beauvoir …

More on the ‘Why’ for new toolsets 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 »

What’s the point of specialism? Or, perhaps more to the point, why do we so much argue about ‘the point’? – is it a side-effect of specialism itself? After the farrago around the last couple of posts here, this is perhaps best described …

The point of specialism Read more »

In any real-world practice, why do we need to explain the ‘why’ as much as the ‘how’ and ‘with-what’? Here’s a first-hand answer to that question… Way back when (almost half a century ago: yikes…), I took a school-vacation job …

Why the ‘why’ matters Read more »

How do we ‘sell’ enterprise-architecture? What’s it worth, in terms of value, and of price? What could or should we charge for our work? This series is a bit of ‘thinking aloud’ about our work, and how we apply our …

Selling EA – 4: Proving value, and pricing Read more »

How do we ‘sell’ enterprise-architecture? How do we explain what it is that we do – and why we do it? This series started as a bit of ‘thinking aloud’ about work, and how we apply our work, and how …

Selling EA – 3: What and how Read more »