What are the different types of assets that we need to deal with in an enterprise-architecture? What implications arise across the architecture from the differences between these types? [I know I usually write too long, so as a kind of …

More on EA and asset-types [1] Read more »

Have been struggling hard for the past few days with a truly brilliant challenge from Bulgarian enterprise-architect Ivo Velitchkov, when he dropped by for a visit near here over the weekend. And I’d have to admit I’m no nearer solving …

Helping others make sense of my work Read more »

How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-‘unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. …

Standing up for the value of our work Read more »

How can we ensure that the ideas and models that we use are appropriate to the context? What methods can we use to evaluate new ideas? Perhaps more to the point, how do we protect ourselves from ideas that won’t …

More on ‘the toad in the road’ Read more »

Folks, we have an important issue on terminology that we need to address. In two comments to my previous post, Dave Snowden has made it clear that he objects to any reference to the term ‘Cynefin‘ that does not conform …

SCCC: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic Read more »

What is simple, complex, complicated, or chaotic? And from whose perspective? For a long time now I’ve been using those context-categories – often referred to as the ‘Cynefin-categorization’ – with a straightforward cross-map to levels of repeatability, somewhat analogous to …

A human view of Simple, Complicated and Complex Read more »

“What would be the smallest service? Did anyone ever look for the/a boundary condition of a service?” – an important pair of questions from Jan van Til in an earlier comment here. The first question is a bit difficult, because the …

What is the boundary of a service? Read more »

Following on from the previous work on EA metamodels, I keep coming back to those two questions from Graeme Burnett: for everything in a context, we need to be able to ask “tell me about yourself?” and “tell me what …

EA metamodel: two questions Read more »

I’ve been writing a lot recently about metamodels for enterprise-architecture and the like: but what’s the point? Why bother? Why all this fuss about something that’s way too technical to be of interest to almost anyone in the real workaday world? …

What’s the point of this ‘EA metamodel’? Read more »

In the various previous posts about EA metamodels, we’ve been exploring some of the detailed structures for toolsets and the like at a very, very low-level. But what’s the big-picture here? What’s the point? So let’s step back for a …

EA metamodel – the big picture (and the small picture too) Read more »