Anyone, anywhere, and at anytime, can have an idea that could impact your enterprise’s architecture. They might be an enterprise architect, but are most probably not. Depending on the value …
A Great Work Culture Demands More than Fixing Bad Processes
I have found that the word “process” can have a very polarizing effect on people. There are those who like to follow a process and feel lost when one is …
Developing Your Capability Architecture: It’s All About Being Able to Get Things Done
In the first article of this series, I discussed the current interest in Business Architecture that has been brewing in the last little while and also discussed some of the …
Patterns of Strategy
Enterprise Architecture has always had a slightly unbalanced relationship with strategy. Often the line taken by EA is that its job is to follow strategy, to design, redesign or reconfigure …
Reinventing IT: How Strategic Enterprise Design Leads Digital Transformation
Enterprise IT is broken. Ask any person in “the business” – and to IT that means anyone else – what they think about IT, and you get a blank stare …
The Buried Treasure of Enterprise Architecture
Enterprises make architectural investments, whether or not they have an architecture team. Yet, executives can often find it hard to put a value on those investments, or even know which …
Architecting Change as a Core Competency
In a recent article for Forbes I wrote that enterprise architects (EAs) should be less agents of change as architects of change. In response, several EAs commented that what they …
Business Process Modelling Patterns
Reusable process model fragments for business users. The idea of a pattern language, which originates in a 1977 book about buildings and their architecture, translates easily to other kinds of …
Architecture Is Architecture Is Architecture
In 1980, we were having difficulty transforming the Enterprise Strategy into implemented systems, the instantiated Enterprise, because the strategies tended to be articulated in a somewhat abstract form like “Make …
Synthesizing your Architecture’s Strategic Guidance
Introduction In the first article of this series, I discussed the current interest in Business Architecture that has been brewing in the last little while and also discussed some of …
Twenty years on, and stakeholders still don’t speak architect…
Twenty years ago, the US Congress signed an Act known as The Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA). The Act made it a legal requirement for US Federal agencies to appoint a CIO …
Are you Suffering from EA Model Sickness?
Working within the field of enterprise architecture, my team and I sadly encounter the disease ‘model sickness’ or see evidence of being ‘model sick’ all too often! This serious, yet …
To Be, or Not To Be – Why EAs are also Scenario Planners
Enterprise Architects are valued for their impact on reality. To achieve that impact, they have to imagine some not-yet-real future, compare it with today, figure out how best to get …