01 Jan 2025 — When people, process and resources turn inputs into outputs, that is a Function. Whereas a Capability is the desired effect of deploying those outputs. Build spaceships and launch spaceships are both Functions. Put boots on Mars is a potential Capability from those Functions.

02 Jan 2025 — Architecture is not any one thing. Even though the output of architecture is one thing. Even though that one thing has an architecture. This is why Vitruvius wrote Ten Books on Architecture.

03 Jan 2025 — There are people in this world who can architect enterprises — they are the only people who should be called Enterprise Architects.

04 Jan 2025 — “The desire to reach for the sky runs very deep in the human psyche.” — César Pelli

05 Jan 2025 — If you are one person working by yourself, you might think you have created a significant alternative or improvement to the Paris School of Enterprise Architecture but the probability is vanishingly small. EA was steadily developed by thousands of architects working together over decades in the same few companies. When you think you have created something new, it is far more likely you will discover it has existed in one of the Paris School metamodels since the 1990s.
(Paris School is the approach taught to me. It didn’t have a name so I gave it one.)

06 Jan 2025 — Bureaucracy is a necessary evil. The difficultly is balancing the necessary with the evil because the bureaucracy will always try to create more bureaucracy. And that’s not necessary.

07 Jan 2025 — At a high level of abstraction, the employees in an organisation change more often than its processes.

08 Jan 2025 — People who pretend Enterprise Architecture is about information systems are full of IT.

09 Jan 2025 — The measure of a model comes in how well it can be queried and how successfully it communicates the intention of the architect.

10 Jan 2025 — Ask not what you can do to make the customer follow your process, ask what your process can do to help the customer.

11 Jan 2025 — “Life is not about maximizing everything, it’s about giving something back – like light, space, form, serenity, joy. You have to give something back.” — Glenn Murcutt

12 Jan 2025 — Humanity forgets lessons. People forget lessons. Businesses forget lessons. Hundreds of years ago, Capability was well-understood. Now its common-language interchangeable use with Ability has left most of humanity with a large hole in its collective memory. Ability and Capability are not the same. They don’t even come from the same etymological root.

13 Jan 2025 — Architects need to focus more time on Outcomes than almost anything else. Bad architecture with good Outcomes is infinitely better than good architecture with bad Outcomes.

14 Jan 2025 — If you think IT is important to your organisation, why don’t your organisation’s most important people work in IT? And why do they spend more of their time in meetings than in front of a computer screen? IT is important. But it’s not the most important thing.

15 Jan 2025 — When people, process and resources turn inputs into outputs, that is a Function. Whereas a Capability is the desired effect of deploying those outputs. Build spaceships and launch spaceships are both Functions. Put boots on Mars is a potential Capability from those Functions.

16 Jan 2025 — Could you architect a building if you had never seen a building or even a drawing of one? Obviously not. In fact, you must study many of them first. Could you architect an enterprise if you had never seen an enterprise or even a model of one?

17 Jan 2025 — All models are wrong but some are useful. This is true for Enterprise Architecture models and it’s true for the drawings produced by building architects — the drawings are also a form of model.

18 Jan 2025 — “My architecture is easy to understand and enjoy, I hope it also is hard to forget.” — Oscar Niemeyer

19 Jan 2025 — What is Talent-Centric architecture? It’s architecture that is focussed on the talent of your stakeholders. If Elon Musk is your key stakeholder, your architecture should change to take advantage of it. If Linus Torvalds is heading your software development team, your architecture should change to take advantage of it. And so on. Your own stakeholders may not be as famous but they have talent. Shape your architecture to take advantage of it.

20 Jan 2025 — The core of Enterprise Architecture is modelling in the same way that the core of building architecture is drawing. Not because models or drawings are architecture but because they are how we communicate the architecture to others.

21 Jan 2025 — Business Analysis + Information Systems Architecture =/= Enterprise Architecture
Process Architecture + Business Analysis + Information Systems Architecture == Enterprise Architecture

22 Jan 2025 — You don’t know everything your stakeholders know. Your stakeholders don’t know everything you know. Communication is critical.

23 Jan 2025 — It’s important to understand that a customer journey is not about what value you get from the customer, it’s about what value the customer gets for their time and money.

24 Jan 2025 — The patterns of success for an organisation can be built into its architecture. Those patterns are different in almost every case. What works in one organisation can be an anti-pattern in another.

25 Jan 2025 — “Architecture begins where engineering ends” — Walter Gropius

26 Jan 2025 — TOGAF contains no details on how to do Data Architecture. It contains no details on how to do Applications Architecture. It contains no details on how to do Technology/Infrastructure Architecture. Every organisation already knows how to do those and no combination of them adds up to Enterprise Architecture. Whereas TOGAF is packed with details on how to do what it calls Business Architecture. This is because the addition of what TOGAF calls Business Architecture is what makes it Enterprise Architecture. Very few know how to do it. Even most TOGAF trainers teach those sections as Business Analysis because that’s all most people understand.

27 Jan 2025 — Whenever you scope a change, make sure to ask your key stakeholders about pain-points, other changes and their pie-in-the-sky wishes. A surprising amount of the time, what is painful to them is has a cheap, obvious fix to you… what seems pie-in-the-sky to them is something you can implement easily. Not always. But it’s always worth asking.

28 Jan 2025 — A last-second piece of information that will mean a major change to the design may seem like a curse but is often a blessing. Especially if it saves a large fraction of the budget. 

29 Jan 2025 — Building models of a complete enterprises is the key to understanding Enterprise Architecture. There will come a point when a lightbulb goes on. When your disparate ideas about enterprises converge and become a single, coherent whole. This can only happen if you model complete enterprises.

30 Jan 2025 — Cutting costs is a dangerous game because it’s the easiest thing in the world to make things worse by cutting costs. A good architect finds ways to improve things. Sometimes that can be done at a lower cost.

31 Jan 2025 —

01 Feb 2025 — “I don’t see any difference between architecture and engineering. It’s the same profession.” — Santiago Calatrava

02 Feb 2025 — Information Systems Architecture is still essentially the same today as it was in the 90s. Servers are still servers. Networks are still networks. Perhaps the biggest change to it was virtualisation. It wasn’t Enterprise Architecture in the 90s and it isn’t EA today. For EA, you have to have Process Architect — TOGAF calls it Business Architecture — which means being able to architect the routine business operations. Once your organisation has adapted to use it, Process Architecture and Information Systems Architecture can merge to become Enterprise Architecture.

03 Feb 2025 — Both functions and processes turns inputs into outputs. Whereas a Capability is what those outputs allow you to achieve.

04 Feb 2025 — When a business expert says an approach or a framework is to help business take better advantage of IT, they are not talking about IT, they are a business expert talking about business.

05 Feb 2025 — The people in your organisation are not there to operate the IT. The IT is there to help the people.

06 Feb 2025 — Every enterprise has an architecture and it can be described. This was not the case until the late 80s and it took until the late 90s for the early Enterprise Architects to develop the ability to describe any enterprise. We can use that ability to describe an architecture that does not yet exist.

07 Feb 2025 — When business leaders talk about Process, they don’t mean BPMN diagrams or UML or flowcharts. The business leaders usually mean something like one word for the work of an entire department like the Sales Process or the Marketing Process.

08 Feb 2025 — “A building is no good if someone’s got to explain to you why it’s good. You can’t say you don’t know enough about architecture — that’s ridiculous. It’s got to work on many levels.” — David Chipperfield

09 Feb 2025 — To be a good Enterprise Architect means being a professional who could work at a high level in either business or IT but has chosen both.

10 Feb 2025 — Enterprise Architecture is the architecture of the enterprise. It is not the architecture of the enterprise’s information systems. (Which is Information Systems Architecture.) To claim otherwise puts people in a mental position where misnaming things is accepted and can become the norm. Which opens them to charlatans who use buzzword bingo to gain unearned advantage.

11 Feb 2025 — Projects are how you turn the As-Is into the To-Be. When the projects are complete, the To-Be has become the new As-Is. Tomorrow never comes.

12 Feb 2025 — Architecture is a visual thing. You can talk about it and come up with all kinds of narratives but architecture needs to be drawn to be truly understood.

13 Feb 2025 — Both the architecture and the architect should look appropriate for their purpose.

14 Feb 2025 — Strange as it may seem, a simple solution for a complex problem will often be treated with a level of suspicion that a complex solution will sail straight past.

15 Feb 2025 — “Even a brick wants to be something.” — Louis Kahn

16 Feb 2025 — The first person to tell me about Enterprise Architecture said it was the structure of all the IT in the organisation. My thought was instantly, “is that it? We already know all about that, how is that new?” The answer was, of course, that wasn’t it. The person who told me was an IT guy who knew nothing about EA. Enterprise Architecture is the architecture of the enterprise and IT is only a small part.

17 Feb 2025 — In architecture, abstraction is inherent to what we do. Abstract concepts help make sense of reality.. But those concepts are glue not structure. Do not try to build structures using just glue, use them to connect structures.

18 Feb 2025 — When you have created enough metamodels of your own, it becomes very easy to see the level of architecture experience of other metamodel authors.

19 Feb 2025 — If you go to a typical TOGAF trainer, you will not learn Enterprise Architecture, you will only learn TOGAF. Enterprise Architecture in TOGAF terms is primarily about what it calls Business Architecture. Most trainers do not teach that either, they just teach how to do Business Analysis using the TOGAF terminology. Which is not only wrong but detrimental.

20 Feb 2025 — It is often cheaper to throw people at a problem rather than technology. This is especially true for one-off pieces of work.

21 Feb 2025 — Elon Musk demonstrated his natural talent at Enterprise Architecture with Twitter. He took it from a $4bn annual loss to profitability within 2 years. The product is still largely the same. He did it by changing the architecture of the enterprise.

22 Feb 2025 — “Be truthful. Nature only sides with truth.” — Adolf Loos

23 Feb 2025 — There is no architectural problem so hard to understand and difficult to communicate that Archimate cannot make far, far worse.

24 Feb 2025 — Companies that adopt Enterprise Architecture will inevitably outperform those that misuse the term.

25 Feb 2025 — In Enterprise Architecture, concepts link to other concepts. You can see this in metamodels. The greater the number of hops to get from one core concept to another in your chosen metamodel, the slower your architecture work will be. 

26 Feb 2025 — When it comes to the design of an organisation, there is no one truth. There is what is true today to the best of our understanding but tomorrow it may not be true. Architecture is a constant journey to find new truth.

27 Feb 2025 — If all you want to do is architect information systems, Enterprise Architecture is the wrong choice. If you want to architect an enterprise, Enterprise Architecture is the right choice.

28 Feb 2025 — Bureaucracy is a necessary evil. Though it’s difficult to find evidence for the “necessary” part.

01 Mar 2025 — “People can’t be knowledgeable about everything but they can be knowledgeable about the extent of their own ignorance.” — Thomas Sowell

02 Mar 2025 — If you want your organisation to win in its markets, you need to understand those markets well enough to plausibly look for gaps in them. You are unlikely to beat the professionals at it but your insight into their work will let you explain architectural problems to them which will improve their ability to find gaps.

03 Mar 2025 — The approach you use for architecture changes not only your output but your thinking.

04 Mar 2025 — Persuading executive management to adopt Enterprise Architecture is hard. Not because EA is difficult to understand but because so many people who don’t understand EA have spent years shouting that they are experts in it. Which has understandably left most executive teams unwilling to step in until the dust has settled.

05 Mar 2025 — Archimate is an example of shamanism. Like UML before it, only a shaman truly understands it. It is not meant for others to understand or to deliver useful work, it is meant to keep the shaman in employment.

06 Mar 2025 — An enterprise can be thought of as a system. But it is not a system, it is an enterprise. In the same way an explosion can be expressed in a mathematical formula but the explosion is not a formula, it is an explosion. In both cases, you’ll be in deep trouble if you confuse the two. Think of the enterprise as an enterprise.

07 Mar 2025 — Shamanism is a waste of talent. A person who can learn the shamanistic incantations could equally have learned to be useful instead.

08 Mar 2025 — “Whatever good things we build end up building us.” — Jim Rohn

09 Mar 2025 — Architecture is all about the outcome. The role of an architect is to describe a possible way to achieve that outcome.

10 Mar 2025 — If you ask people who cannot architect an enterprise about Enterprise Architecture, their answers will be nonsense. If you take an average of those answers, you still get nonsense.

11 Mar 2025 — Just because something is important to you as an architect does not mean it is important to your stakeholders. But what’s important to your stakeholder is crucial to you as an architect.

12 Mar 2025 — Archimate tries to standardise the associations between concepts. This reduces the ability of stakeholders to understand and risks two teams in the same organisation producing incompatible architecture models. Do not make the same mistake in your own metamodels.

13 Mar 2025 — Enterprise Architecture is not a form of Information Systems Architecture, it is a form of Organisational Design. Hence it’s not called Enterprise IT Architecture, it’s called Enterprise Architecture.

14 Mar 2025 — People who complain Enterprise Architecture is too abstract probably should not be using it. Most likely, they are trying to design a component rather than an enterprise. EA is real rather than abstract if you use it to design an enterprise.

15 Mar 2025 — “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site” — Frank Lloyd Wright

16 Mar 2025 — The ultimate aim for your architecture should be to leave your stakeholders asking, “is that it? I thought it would be more complicated.”

17 Mar 2025 — If you have to explain your architecture diagram to your stakeholders, do you need to improve your diagramming skills or change your diagramming tool?

18 Mar 2025 — Processes are not programs and employees are not robots. Doing a loose design of a process lets employees to use their expertise, allows for exceptions and lets them optimise over time.

19 Mar 2025 — There is no architecture so simple that Archimate cannot make it incomprehensible to ordinary stakeholders.

20 Mar 2025 — “But it’s management’s job to design the business” “But IT is the only really important thing” “IT systems have an architecture and I am very smart and don’t know how to architect a business therefore businesses cannot be architected” — Variations of these have been spoken by many people who claim to be Enterprise Architects. They are not Enterprise Architects.

21 Mar 2025 — The idea that Enterprise Architecture is about IT is entirely a fiction created by people who only understand IT. They cannot architect an enterprise so they are not Enterprise Architects. It might be forgiveable if there weren’t people who really can architect an enterprise.

22 Mar 2025 — “Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistakes.” — Luis Barragan

23 Mar 2025 — Lots and lots of separate architectures is what we had before Enterprise Architecture. A single coherent architecture was one part of the innovation.

24 Mar 2025 — The markets are the reason for the architecture.

25 Mar 2025 — The majority of Enterprise Architecture was not only formed in the 1980s but was mature by the late 1990s and has barely changed since. That is because the fundamentals of the design of an organisation have not changed. Which mostly leaves improvement to technique.

26 Mar 2025 — Enterprise Architecture has three value stages:
Negotiation >> Design >> Communication
Architecture notation should be able to help in all three.

27 Mar 2025 — An architect in a commercial organisation should have a grasp of basic economics.

28 Mar 2025 — Enterprise Architecture often involves only changes to the business. Whether the motivation comes through optimisation or strategy, it is often most effective to reuse existing resources.

29 Mar 2025 — “The desire to reach for the sky runs very deep in the human psyche.” — César Pelli

30 Mar 2025 — Responsibility for the architecture is not the same as accountability for the architecture. While an Enterprise Architect is responsible for the architecture, the accountability is usually shared with those who will own or operate the eventual enterprise.

31 Mar 2025 — Playful architecture tends to create playful employees. Humorous can get old fast but playful can be forever.

01 Apr 2025 — If a person cannot architect an enterprise, there is no point asking them about Enterprise Architecture. If you want to learn about Enterprise Architecture, you must ask people who can architect enterprises.

02 Apr 2025 — Should Archimate really be called Engineerimate?

03 Apr 2025 — Beware of managers and experts who rely on reputation. If the choice is to tell you a pack of lies that will destroy your career or to admit they got something wrong and thereby tarnish their reputation, they will choose to tell you the lies. Some of them will destroy entire organisations or professions rather than admit they were wrong. 

04 Apr 2025 — One of the reasons every architect should learn Erlang is to instil the idea of message-passing. That in turn gives deep understanding of parallelism. Which in turn will utterly change the way you see Enterprise Architecture.

05 Apr 2025 — “Life is not about maximizing everything, it’s about giving something back – like light, space, form, serenity, joy. You have to give something back.” — Glenn Murcutt

06 Apr 2025 — The metamodel you use decides the structures you can architect.

07 Apr 2025 — Enterprise Architecture can be used to find wasteful design within the organisation. The older the organisation, the more waste it will find. It can also find ways to repurpose those employees into useful work.

08 Apr 2025 — IT is not the way you improve your business. Business is the way you improve your business. IT is just an enabler.

09 Apr 2025 — Capability is what you can achieve external to the thing delivering the Capability. 

10 Apr 2025 — The creation of a new department might need extensive work from the Enterprise Architecture team but zero work from the IT department.

11 Apr 2025 — Just because a task is easy to a specific stakeholder does not mean it will be easy to you. Nor vice versa. Be sure to develop processes that use your stakeholders’ skills even if you have to leave most of the design to them.

12 Apr 2025 — “My architecture is easy to understand and enjoy, I hope it also is hard to forget.” — Oscar Niemeyer

13 Apr 2025 — Did your company post a profit? If it did, that means it is operating correctly. (Though maybe not perfectly.) That means you can treat your company as an example of good Enterprise Architecture. Its structure and its operations contain a million lessons in architecture.

14 Apr 2025 — The Capability of artillery is not loading shells or aiming or supplying ammunition. The Capability of artillery is to create big explosions 10KM away.

15 Apr 2025 — One of the keys to management of complexity is to only look at small chunks. Then, when there are so many small chunks that they too become complex, produce groups of them and treat the groups the same as the small chunks.

16 Apr 2025 — If you want to design buildings for a living, you start by drawing buildings. If you want to design enterprises for a living, you start by modelling enterprises.

17 Apr 2025 — An architect must be able to look outwards from the enterprise and into the broad planes of its markets. 

18 Apr 2025 — The core of Enterprise Architecture is modelling because, although a modeller is not necessarily an architect, every architect must be a modeller in order to communicate the architecture.

19 Apr 2025 — “Architecture begins where engineering ends” — Walter Gropius

20 Apr 2025 — It is the job of project management to deliver its projects on time, on budget and on spec. It is the job of the architect to make sure the design lets them do it.

21 Apr 2025 — One of the main outputs of Enterprise Architecture is a solid set of designs for the Business Change team.

22 Apr 2025 — Even in the largest organisation, the big decisions are made by a small group of people who all know each other well.