01 Jan 2024 — Start with the assumption your stakeholders are smart people who configured their department the best way they knew how.

02 Jan 2024 — The structure of any organisation was developed using the combined experience and expertise of hundreds of people. You may be smarter than some of them but you are not smarter than all of them combined. That is why Enterprise Architecture is teamwork with your stakeholders.

03 Jan 2024 — When you first build a complete model of your organisation, you’ll see a lot of things that don’t add up. Most of them will be a problem with your addition. Most but not all.

04 Jan 2024 — Shamanism is a big problem in business, EA and IT literature. In business, we often see it in the stories created by people who played no real part in the success. Except they thought they made a difference. So now they tell everyone how to wiggle their hips to make the lightning come.

05 Jan 2024 — How does duplication of effort happen in an organisation? Your stakeholders are focussed on getting their department working correctly not on how other departments work. The bigger the organisation, the more likely it is you’ll find large amounts of duplication.

06 Jan 2024 — “I realized that I loved using computers to create something, but being an architect just wasn’t going to keep me interested. The idea of a life spent obsessing over bathroom details for an Upper East Side penthouse was pretty depressing.” — Joseph Kosinski

07 Jan 2024 — Most people are very attuned to fairness. This can cause some major problems during Change where employees might see things they think are unfair. It is part of your job as an architect to communicate why the decision was made. It’s also part of your job to listen. Maybe it was unfair.

08 Jan 2024 — Duplication of effort might be something you deliberately choose to avoid fixing or even to willingly implement. For instance, merging two teams because they both do the same thing might lead to the creation of a new bureaucratic monster. Or an old team might have been deliberately split in two to slay a monster.

09 Jan 2024 — Your stakeholders are smart people who configured their department the best way they knew how… so how did things end up in such a mess? Because that is the inherent nature of human endeavours. 

10 Jan 2024 — The most commonly overlooked variable is time. Despite it often being the most important. 

11 Jan 2024 — How fast should you fix duplication of effort? The faster you fix it, the more likely you’ll have to let people go. That is bad for morale. Work steadily towards it and find new roles those employees if you want morale to stay high.

12 Jan 2024 — Loyalty is one of the most important things you can cultivate in your team and in the wider employee base. 

13 Jan 2024 — “You get what you measure.” — Scott Adams

14 Jan 2024 — Despite what many will tell you, there is no One True Way of Enterprise Architecture. However, there is one true Enterprise Architecture — the architecture of the enterprise. Not just some corner of it, no matter how much you know and like about that corner. All of it. The architecture of the whole thing. The way you choose to architect it is something else.

15 Jan 2024 — When you find duplication of effort in an organisation, don’t be too quick to suggest fixing it. There are a lot of times your business will want or need to duplicate effort.

16 Jan 2024 — Systems Thinking is useful in some specific domains – like actual systems – but is useless in some domains and actively detrimental in others. 

17 Jan 2024 — When most people involved in Business Change try to understand Capability, their first thought is usually it is something to do with what goes on inside a thing. But it’s not. It’s about what goes on outside the thing with the Capability. 

18 Jan 2024 — If your answer to a question is A and an expert says it’s not A, it’s B, it’s no use offering up variations of A in your attempt to learn. You need to learn B. So when an expert says Function and Capability are two different things, it’s no use to keep offering variations of Function.

19 Jan 2024 — Artificial grass looks like real grass from a distance but not when you look at it closely. It’s not even a plant. So far, artificial intelligence follows that same pattern.

20 Jan 2024 — “Dont give up. Obstacles can be overcome through strategy and learning.” — Hidetaka Miyazaki

21 Jan 2024 — Design Thinking in architecture can only take you so far. Effectively, it can only find answers to small problems. It’s great if you have one product in one market. It’s great if you have ten products in the same market. If you have one hundred products in ten different markets, Design Thinking is useless at senior levels. If you have a group of companies each with one hundred products in ten different markets, Design Thinking is probably below your awareness level.

22 Jan 2024 — When you orient your architecture towards people… towards your fellow employees… towards your customers… towards making them happier and more productive… everything about your architecture will come into focus.

23 Jan 2024 — Which is more important, customers or profit? You cannot keep your customers happy if you don’t make a profit. Because sooner or later you’d go bust.

24 Jan 2024 — Next time you go to a different area of your organisation, stop and look at the employees around you. Every single one of them has concerns and interests at work. And bills to pay at home. They are not a system, they are people. They have relationships at work. Some of those relationships are called teams. Design your architecture accordingly.

25 Jan 2024 — Don’t get too hung up on words like Function or Process or Activity. It’s the concept behind them that’s important. What one firm calls Procedures, another firm calls Work Instruction. When you move jobs, the words will change but the concepts will remain the same.

26 Jan 2024 — One of the bigger problems with the Business Architecture Guild getting involved in TOGAF is BAG seemed to think what they call Business Architecture and what TOG calls Business Architecture are the same thing. And now they seem to be working on that assumption. Which is just going to mean TOGAF stays irrelevant for another decade.

27 Jan 2024 — “It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.” — Oscar Niemeyer

28 Jan 2024 — Every architect should learn Erlang. It teaches more about how good architecture works than any other programming language. Even if you only do it as a hobby and for fun, it changes your understanding of how architecture can and should be done for everything to work well.

29 Jan 2024 — One of the more ironic things in business is IT Security professionals claiming to be GRC experts. It’s ironic in two ways. First, it’s a form of identity theft because they’re pretending to be something they’re not. Second, it means they aren’t even professional enough to read the GRC Wikipedia page to realise it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance%2C_risk_management%2C_and_compliance

30 Jan 2024 — Q. What is the main Capability of an aircraft? A. It can fly.

31 Jan 2024 — It’s no coincidence when Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter’s staff, internal productivity went up. 

01 Feb 2024 — The best way to make a good profit is to offer your customers high value. They won’t care if you make more money than your competitors if your products also deliver more value. This can be woven into your architecture.

02 Feb 2024 — You know what an Enterprise Architecture metamodel looks like but what does a Business Architecture metamodel look like? They vary hugely from business to business. Below is a figure from the book Playing To Win and it would be a reasonable starting point for a Business Architecture metamodel.

03 Feb 2024 — “I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It’s about space and form and it’s something you can share with other people.” — Donna Karan

04 Feb 2024 — Back in the mid 90s, Function was essentially replaced as a concept because it had a detrimental effect on organisations. It led to silos, bureaucracy and middle-management bloat. The word stayed on because everyone knows what it means but it should now only be used to describe a particular View of the business: who does what?

05 Feb 2024 — It takes decades to learn to make good decisions in architecture. You often have to make several bad decisions before you get there. Surround yourself with good people to catch the bad decisions. Do the same for them.

06 Feb 2024 — There is little in Enterprise Architecture that causes more confusion than the English language. Almost every word has multiple meanings. Terrible for precision, lovely for poetry.

07 Feb 2024 — The more your organisation spends on IT middle management, the more likely it is your organisation doesn’t understand IT.

08 Feb 2024 — The main reason you should avoid BAG and TOG’s documentation about Capability is neither of them are about Capability. They reinvented Function and mislabelled it. Organisation Design experts stopped using Function in the 90s because it is actively detrimental to the design of the organisation.

09 Feb 2024 — Use singular concepts in your design work. Singular concepts are things like Process, Org. Unit and Application. Compound concepts like Function have unintended side effects and should only be used to explain the design.

10 Feb 2024 — “I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don’t come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.” — Bjarke Ingels

11 Feb 2024 — Blag (verb – UK – informal/slang) — to persuade someone in a clever or slightly dishonest way to allow you to do something or to give you something, e.g. somehow he managed to blag the job.
Businesses are full of blaggers… smart people who use guile to get what they want or hide what they’re doing. And they assume everyone else is doing it. A lot of them read the literature, don’t understand it but then use its buzzwords to carry on blagging.

12 Feb 2024 — If you don’t understand the business architecture or process architecture of your organisation, your IT architecture will be ludicrously more complex than it needs to be.

13 Feb 2024 — Every stakeholder is different. It means every stakeholder has a different reason to look at your architecture. There is often commonality which allows you to build standard Views which will satisfy several stakeholders at once. But it won’t always work because every stakeholder is different.

14 Feb 2024 — When hiring new architects for your team, it’s important to remember existing skills are good but ability to learn new skills is far more important. An architect who learns fast can often find answers fast too.

15 Feb 2024 — If you ask people who don’t understand the term Capability, what does a car do? They will open the doors and examine the engine and check if the seat can be adjusted. If you ask people who understand Capability, they’ll get in and drive somewhere they want to go. If you ask them, what does a company do?…

16 Feb 2024 — Architecture is one of the best professions because not only is it full of wonderful challenges but it is full of wonderful architects. Even bad architects are usually nice people with good intentions. 

17 Feb 2024 — “With a painter or a sculptor, one cannot begin to alter his works, but an architect has to put up with anything, because he makes utility objects — the building is there to be used, and times change.” — Arne Jacobsen

18 Feb 2024 — Remember, you’re a smart and capable architect. Even if you make an architectural mistake, it will probably still be better than what you had before and it will be replaced in a few years. Sometimes mistakes are worth keeping around just to remind you that you’re human. Especially if you’re the only one who will ever really know.

19 Feb 2024 — Every stakeholder is different. Some stakeholders need hardly any detail in the architecture. Others with exactly the same job title cannot work unless every detail is in there. 

20 Feb 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is not Enterprise IT Architecture. When you understand Enterprise Architecture, you discover Enterprise IT Architecture isn’t even a thing. There is no over all architecture to the IT systems in an enterprise.

21 Feb 2024 — Competence is the ability to execute. In other words, the skill to do something well. A person can have several competencies. So can an organisation.

22 Feb 2024 — There are highly skilled people with Imposter Syndrome. They look around them and assume everyone else is far more competent. There are also low skilled people who are actual imposters. They look around them and assume everyone else is faking it. 

23 Feb 2024 — Every stakeholder is different. Some stakeholders are happy with a glance at a complex View. Others with exactly the same job title will panic if you aren’t there to explain extremely simple Views.

24 Feb 2024 — “If the design is taking too long, the design is wrong.” — Elon Musk

25 Feb 2024 — After years of design and architecture of huge multi-user systems for enterprises, the idea of Enterprise Architecture was a puzzle. How was it any different? IT people kept telling me it was about architecting IT systems for the enterprise. Been there, done that, got entire wardrobe full of the t-shirts. Should be easy. But no, they were wrong. Just IT Solution Architects who wanted a grander sounding job title and didn’t understand the EA literature. Or had only seen dodgy EA literature written by other IT people. Enterprise Architecture is not about architecting IT systems or even about IT, it’s about the architecture of the enterprise.

26 Feb 2024 — The worst thing about Enterprise Architecture is you get to see how many employees do useless or even detrimental things. The most beautiful thing about EA is you can turn that around and make those employees useful and productive.

27 Feb 2024 — When IT people try to make Enterprise Architecture fit their understanding of the world, all it does is create ivory towers and bureaucracy in the IT department because EA is not EITA.

28 Feb 2024 — When you have multiple Solution Architectures in the works, you need someone to coordinate them. You also need someone to look to the future for proposed and possible Solution Architectures. That person is NOT an Enterprise Architect. That person is a Senior Solution Architect.

29 Feb 2024 — If you want to get to the top of the game in IT, you should probably avoid Enterprise Architecture. EA is not about IT, it’s about the enterprise. 

01 Mar 2024 — Every stakeholder is different. Some stakeholders like to see a graphic or a graph. Others with exactly the same job title cannot understand anything unless it’s in a written report.

02 Mar 2024 — “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus

03 Mar 2024 — There are some situations where you don’t have enough information to make a good decision. Or you have all the information but don’t have the skill to make sense of it. Yet you still have to make a decision. Sometimes you have to say, hang it. Get on, make the decision and accept the consequences. In architecture, some of those consequences can last for years so practice your charm. 

04 Mar 2024 — What is the difference between a Business Analyst and a Business Architect? It would be easier to state the one similarity: they have the word Business in the title. That’s it. There is no significant career path from the first to the second. One is a not even a management role and the other is an executive role — director-level or just below.

05 Mar 2024 — Enterprise Architecture has a set of tools you can use to architect an enterprise. Architect an enterprise in a similar way to architecting a building. Because all enterprises have an architecture but an enterprise with a deliberate architecture can achieve far greater things.

06 Mar 2024 — To be an Enterprise Architect, you have to be a people person. Two thirds of the role involves spending a lot of time with your stakeholders.

07 Mar 2024 — When your Strategy team is looking out to the markets to find opportunities and gaps, the mindset needed is the opposite of Analysis. That can mean you have to be careful about who works with the Strategy team.

08 Mar 2024 — Every stakeholder is different. A significant part of your job as an architect is to get to know them and what they need.

09 Mar 2024 — “Make the best use of what’s in your power and take the rest as it happens.” — Epictetus

10 Mar 2024 — An enterprise is not a computer program. It is not a system. If you remove essential lines of code from a computer program, it will crash. If you remove essential components from a system, it will stop working. An enterprise is not like those. If you have an essential component break, everything must carry on. If an essential employee leaves because they won the lottery, everything must carry on.

11 Mar 2024 — There are a thousand reasons why Enterprise Architecture should not be under the CIO. Under the CIO, the natural inclination will be to recruit and promote from within that office which means it will steadily turn into a IT architecture team.

12 Mar 2024 — Enterprise Architecture appears dangerous to non-essential or unproductive middle management. They instinctively understand it puts their gravy train under threat. And it really does. The correct approach is always to shift unproductive people into productive positions. Very few middle managers will oppose being made essential or more productive.

13 Mar 2024 — There is only one direct jump from Solution Architect to Enterprise Architect. They’re two different professions. To get there, a Solution Architect needs to be trained in and become a Process Architect. That role is heavily business-focussed and takes as much effort to learn as Solution Architecture. Once learned, the prospective EA must then become good enough at it to be put in charge of it.

14 Mar 2024 — People get confused because you can draw a diagram with multiple applications and how they communicate together for a purpose. Just because you can arrange notional things on a diagram to make it look pretty doesn’t make it architecture. Those are a compound View of multiple architectures and their communications.

15 Mar 2024 — Practice speaking with simple language. Like you’re explaining Enterprise Architecture to your children or parents… or to your stakeholders.

16 Mar 2024 — Economy denotes the proper management of materials and of site, as well as a thrifty balancing of cost and common sense in the construction of works. This will be observed if, in the first place, the architect does not demand things which cannot be found or make ready without great expense. — Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture

17 Mar 2024 — One of the problems with an MBA is you end up with everyone following the same patterns. When someone mid-level breaks those patterns, everyone seems to think that person is broken. Yet the greater the number of years you are from university, the more you realise the patterns you were taught were what they thought you could learn not what actually works. The patterns are designed to get you in to management. Look at the most successful business leaders and they rarely follow the patterns, they think hard and create new patterns.

18 Mar 2024 — There are a thousand reasons why Enterprise Architecture should not be under the CIO. There it is at high risk of being used as a promotion path for IT people who do not understand EA and misinterpret it as EITA. Which is usually the death of EA and the birth of a useless IT bureaucracy.

19 Mar 2024 — There can be a huge difference between knowing what your job title means in your organisation versus what it means to the rest of the world versus what it means to someone who genuinely understands the subject from first principles. This is doubly true in architecture.

20 Mar 2024 — Enterprise Architecture the subject is not difficult, it’s just big — there’s a lot of it. But an Enterprise Architecture — the thing you architect — can be incredibly complicated. And also big.

21 Mar 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is not like most subjects. It has a core set of rules and patterns. Once you learn them, you can extrapolate from them into almost any related area. It is like chemistry. You can know what will happen when certain elements or molecules are put together even if you have never seen them before.

22 Mar 2024 — Enterprise Architecture only works if you understand business. Not understand business from an IT perspective but understand business from a business perspective.

23 Mar 2024 — “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

24 Mar 2024 — A sticking point for many architects is they learned the TOGAF or BIZBoK version of Capability then realise it’s both fake and useless. But when they try to learn the real thing, it’s opaque to them. This might be because they try to relate it back to the fake version. But the two concepts are almost entirely different. To learn the real thing, you should be looking to papers by David Teece — generally recognised as the world’s foremost expert on the subject.

25 Mar 2024 — There are a thousand reasons why Enterprise Architecture should not be under the CIO. That office exists to solve problems using IT and EA is not about IT.

26 Mar 2024 — If your only contact with Enterprise Architecture is TOGAF, you will have no idea how badly it has led you astray. 

27 Mar 2024 — Most of the hierarchies in Enterprise Architecture are abstractions or groupings in the same way as the org chart has teams, departments and so on.

28 Mar 2024 — If you work in IT and want to become an Enterprise Architect, you need to recognise an important fact: the employees in your organisation are not there to operate IT systems, the IT systems are there to enable the employees. 

29 Mar 2024 — It can be argued Alignment is no longer a valid concept in Enterprise Architecture. The nature of EA means everything is aligned by default.

30 Mar 2024 — “Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.” — Adolf Loos

31 Mar 2024 — It’s easy to think the Internet has been with us long enough for the whole world to merge business concepts. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Cultural heritage and the experience of those who started their career before the Internet makes a huge difference. In Britain, US literature was rare before the late 90s. That means many business concepts are considerably different. The same is true for much of Europe where they often developed their own business concepts too. Because of its economic dominance, it can be easy to think the US is the best at everything business. But Europe far surpassed the US in Enterprise Architecture before the Internet really took off.

01 Apr 2024 — There are a thousand reasons why Enterprise Architecture should not be under the CIO. The CIO is accountable for the correct operation of IT within the organisation which means that would be the main pressure on the EA team. Which is the death of EA because its focus needs to be on the enterprise.

02 Apr 2024 — The people who practice Enterprise IT Architecture do hard work. But does any of that hard work deliver more than a small marginal improvement to the IT Systems Architecture? Does any of that hard work create a better outcome than the IT practices that came before?

03 Apr 2024 — If you want to understand how people can become obsessed with IT once they get good at it… to the point they cannot see anything except IT… consider the fact most IT architects look the TOGAF metamodel and think it’s about IT.

04 Apr 2024 — The thicker the layer of buzzwords, the more likely the speaker is mouthing shamanistic incantations rather than trying to impart anything of use.

05 Apr 2024 — Business Architecture is not some grandiose name for Business Analysis, it is the architecture of the organisation’s business model. It is the other side of the coin from Enterprise Architecture which is the architecture of the operating model.

06 Apr 2024 — “An architect ought to be an educated man so as to leave a more lasting remembrance in his treatises. Secondly, he must have a knowledge of drawing so that he can readily make sketches to show the appearance of the work which he proposes.” — Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture

07 Apr 2024 — If senior management plans to make changes to part of the organisation, how do they know those changes won’t hose some other part? Or turn out to already be done somewhere else in the organisation? Or use a standard another part of the organisation just dropped because it didn’t work? Or need expensive new IT when a small change to their plans would mean they can use existing IT? They can ask down the management hierarchy but will the responses match the questions or will they just paint the picture middle management wants them to see? The answer is senior management don’t know unless there is an Enterprise Architecture model in place.

08 Apr 2024 — There are a thousand reasons why Enterprise Architecture should not be under the CIO. The EA team has to be credible at improving the business not just improving its IT — there are already fantastic people in the IT department who can improve its IT.

09 Apr 2024 — A lot of organisations which claim to be using Enterprise Architecture are really just stuck in the 1990s.

10 Apr 2024 — The inherent flaws of EITA can be seen in the expensive failures to make EITA frameworks like FEAF and MoDAF work.

11 Apr 2024 — There is a trait in British people where they can be comfortable with massive contradictions in the theories as long as the outcome works. “Muddle through”, as it’s known. This can be very useful in architecture.

12 Apr 2024 — As you get closer to the top it gets more and more important give an honest appraisal of the talents of those around you. One way to do this is to ask, what will get me a bigger pay rise, if you get put in charge or if you help your nearest competitor to be put in charge? Because if they’re more talented than you and you’re honest about it, the business will do better if you help them get there. And if you help them, they’ll want you alongside them. So which gets you the bigger pay rise in the long run?

13 Apr 2024 — “Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.” — Louis Kahn

14 Apr 2024 — There are a lot of things you will only understand about Enterprise Architecture once you have a complete model of the organisation. For instance, in a large organisation, you can barely scratch the surface of the connections between two departments without the model. You would have to spend months and talk to almost every employee in both. With a model, you can do a single query and you know in seconds.

15 Apr 2024 — There are a thousand reasons why Enterprise Architecture should not be under the CIO. When IT people try to understand EA, they only understand the IT parts. The result is a large, expensive bureaucracy that does little to help the organisation but an awful lot to slow things to a crawl.

16 Apr 2024 — The firms that use AI to shrink their workforce will lose business to the firms that use AI to empower and grow their workforce.

17 Apr 2024 — It’s common to overthink Enterprise Architecture as a subject but the whole thing is much more effective if you keep it simple enough for your stakeholders to understand.

18 Apr 2024 —

19 Apr 2024 — Enterprise Architecture started out as an evolution — effectively it was EITA. It didn’t stay there. A set of top-level business consultants and IT experts in France and Germany pushed it further. By 1997 they created actual Enterprise Architecture — a way to describe the structure of the enterprise itself not just its IT. In doing so they made EITA obsolete.

20 Apr 2024 — “As for philosophy, it makes an architect high-minded and not self-assuming, but rather renders him courteous, just, and honest without avariciousness. This is very important, for no work can be rightly done without honesty and incorruptibility. Let him not be grasping nor have his mind preoccupied with the idea of receiving perquisites, but let him with dignity keep up his position by cherishing a good reputation.” — Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture

21 Apr 2024 — The more senior you get, the more you get to realise there are no hard lines for expertise. In theory, the Business Architect is an expert on the business model while an Enterprise Architect is an expert on the operating model. But the Business Architect might well defer to the Enterprise Architect on some business model decisions and the Enterprise Architect is very likely to defer to the Business Architect on some operating model decisions. Why? Because sometimes they understand the situation better and the only sane way to work is to defer to the people with the expertise for a specific decision. This applies in all architecture.

22 Apr 2024 — If you work in IT and want to become an Enterprise Architect, you effectively have to leave the IT way of thinking behind. You need to visit as many parts of your organisation as possible and see the people who make your organisation work. Get an idea of what makes your organisation tick. Hint: it’s not the IT.

23 Apr 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is fundamentally about the design of business operations. Only about a quarter of the subject is related to IT. Any team that tries to do just the IT parts will likely end up creating a useless bureaucracy that only slows things down and wastes expensive talent when they could do something productive instead.

24 Apr 2024 — AI means a small team can do things only a big team could do before. But it also means a big team can do things no one could do before.

25 Apr 2024 — TOGAF doesn’t show you how the phases of its ADM align with its metamodel so here’s some perspective on how small a part IT plays in Enterprise Architecture…

26 Apr 2024 — When you learn how to architect all of the routine operations within a business… when you learn how its entire architecture comes together… the need for old-fashioned EITA simply disappears. Because all of the complexity EITA was developed to solve is resolved in the business domain before it gets to the IT domains.

27 Apr 2024 — “Just be yourself… Worst advice ever. There’s no advice worse than, ‘just be yourself’. Here’s better advice: try to be a better version of yourself. Try to be better than yourself. Now that’s good advice. Try to continuously improve. Try to not accept where you are as good enough.” — Scott Adams

28 Apr 2024 — If an Enterprise Architect understands the big picture as the c-suite sees it and understands the detail as the most junior employees see it, does that mean an EA is the next CEO? Maybe but probably not. The person who can design a factory is not necessarily the best person to run it… just like they’re not necessarily the best person to be in charge of the Sales team or to persuade investors. But still maybe.

29 Apr 2024 — Can or will TOGAF ever be fixed? Probably not. It would take a dictator who understands every part of architecture to do it and that is antithetical to how TOGAF is maintained.

30 Apr 2024 — Always start with the assumption your organisation is operating correctly. Especially if it’s only theory that says otherwise. Because any theory needs to get past the fact your organisation is operating correctly enough to pay you at the end of the month. And maybe if you follow the theory instead, that ability will be gone.

01 May 2024 — The plans drawn up by an architect are temporary so don’t get too attached to them. The eventual implementation is what is important.

02 May 2024 — One of the most important things for an Enterprise Architecture team to achieve is to connect the top and bottom of the organisation. That is done using the Process Architecture.

03 May 2024 — If your Enterprise Architecture team has an underlying philosophy, its central tenet should be to make as many employees as possible productive.

04 May 2024 — “At our MIT lab, there are people from diverse backgrounds like architecture, psychology, and philosophy, giving a holistic touch to the creation of any technology we may have in mind.” — Pranav Mistry

05 May 2024 — In an organisation of ten thousand employees, you cannot know what all of them do. When a change is first proposed, you should perform a search of the Enterprise Architecture model to find out if there is anyone already doing it or something close. Very often there will be though sometimes you won’t know enough about the subject to find them. Yet you must try because you might save a fortune simply by doing a diligent search.

06 May 2024 — Be wary of consulting firms. Their job is not to tell you things that help you, their job is to tell you things that make you want to give them money. Sometimes those coincide and you both win but, if you had to call in a consulting firm, do you know when it’s mutually advantageous or are you just taking their word for it?

07 May 2024 — TOGAF is effectively pure shamanism. It’s not designed to help you understand or practice Enterprise Architecture, it’s designed to create a priestly class of bureaucrats within your IT department. That may or may not have been the conscious intent of the designers but that is what they designed.

08 May 2024 — Architecture must answer the questions, who are my stakeholders and what information do I need to produce for them so they can be sure to deliver the Vision?

09 May 2024 — The idea that the point of Enterprise Architecture is to deliver IT systems or manage information is obsolete and has been for the entirety of this millennium. Yet most IT architects and IT departments desperately cling to that old idea like ancient alchemists whose occasional expensive successes are despite their efforts rather than because of them.

10 May 2024 — If you want to solve a complex problem, it’s important to solve it in the right place. If you solve it in the wrong place, you will often create more complexity elsewhere. If you solve it in the right place, everything else will become much less complex.

11 May 2024 — “Europe is regulating its businesses to stop them from being successful. Name a gigantic new European business in the last twenty years. Go! It’s a new successful European business. Like big. Like Google… Like Facebook… Tesla… Name it. I can’t think of one. I think Europe might be done.” — Scott Adams

12 May 2024 — Why not just let managers plan their departments how they want and let old-fashioned EITA continue? Because that way is expensive and prone to failure. If you architect the business operations, you solve almost all of the problems EITA exists to fix and you end up with a far more efficient business into the bargain.

13 May 2024 — Occasionally, you will come across an old part of the business doing old things in an old way using old equipment but still making a modest profit and with every sign that it will carry on doing that until doomsday. And you should leave it alone. Put your effort in to parts of the business that aren’t making a profit yet instead.

14 May 2024 — People who only want to deliver IT systems should avoid TOGAF. That’s not what it’s for and you would just spend a long time creating an expensive mess if you try to use it for that.

15 May 2024 — If you cannot explain your opinion back to first principles, you should be prepared to change it when presented with better information. Even if you can explain it back to first principles, you must be prepared to discover those principles have been superseded. This is true of every aspect of architecture.

16 May 2024 — Process Architecture is not about flowcharts. Those happen at lower levels. If you have never been trained in Process Architecture and never developed a Process Architecture in an EA tool, the probability you will ever understand TOGAF is close to zero.

17 May 2024 — Business Architecture is a senior management approach and normally the role should be performed by someone with credibility with the C-suite. That usually means someone from the junior exec.

18 May 2024 — “The map is not the territory” — Alfred Korzybski

19 May 2024 — When you understand Enterprise Architecture and use it properly, there is no need for any IT architecture role higher than Senior Solution Architect. There are two reasons for this. First, EA is not an IT role. Second, When you use EA, your organisation stops creating the problems that more senior IT architecture roles were there to resolve.

20 May 2024 — A business needs IT but that doesn’t mean the business is IT. The IT is often the least interesting part of what goes on. This is shown by the fact so many key employees don’t need much more than email.

21 May 2024 — Should every MBA course teach the basics of architecture of the enterprise? They’ve taught business design from the beginning but maybe it’s time for them to get more formal about it.

22 May 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is not Enterprise IT Architecture. EITA as a concept does not even work in reality. This is because EITA attempts to manage complexity instead of the more sane approach: resolve the cause of the complexity. 

23 May 2024 — It can never be stated enough, your stakeholders are by far the most important part of architecture. They are why you are doing it.

24 May 2024 — Model, model and model again. While the model is only a description of the architecture, you will never truly understand the architecture until you are an expert at modelling it.

25 May 2024 — “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.” — Charles Eames

26 May 2024 — The turtles-all-the-way-down nature of architecture causes us to see things in a new light. Traditionally, the only people working on Strategy were at the very top of the organisation. Now it seems like every employee from the janitor upwards thinks they have a strategy. The mistake is to leave out the context. If you just say strategy, you deserve the ridicule you’ll get from the people at the top. If you say it’s the janitor’s strategy, everyone knows what you mean even though it’s not strategy. 

27 May 2024 — TOGAF is effectively just a big set of Buzzword Bingo. Worse, its buzzwords are often used by incompetent people to hide their incompetence from their boss. No one who understands Enterprise Architecture uses it except as an example.

28 May 2024 — Architecture is the merged intelligence of the stakeholders in the form of a design.

29 May 2024 — If you want to be a good Enterprise Architect, it helps to have a healthy dose of database training… maybe even to have been a Data Architect… because many of the fights you’ll have are not with the stakeholders but with the data in the EA tool.

30 May 2024 — Three of the keys to becoming an Enterprise Architect are curiosity, learning and being omnivorous about them. Learn how businesses work. Learn how markets work. Learn some Economics. Code a little. Find out what’s inside a TCP/IP packet. Tag along on a Sales meeting. Help someone in Finance get some numbers in order. Do everything.

31 May 2024 — Model, model and model again. Learn how to use your EA tool’s query engine to mine your model for information useful to your stakeholders. The model is only a description but it is how you communicate the architecture with your stakeholders.

01 Jun 2024 — “For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I’m not sure where I’m going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn’t do it.” — Frank Gehry

02 Jun 2024 — The more complex a formula, the more time people spend looking at the formula instead of looking at the problem it is meant to solve. You can see this a lot in architecture where people disappear into the complexities of business theory or a particular technology and it leads to the dry academic world where people argue over the placement of a comma. If you want to create good architecture, focus on the problem and the big picture.

03 Jun 2024 — Put two architects together talking about architecture and it will turn into an argument. Yet it will almost always be a good-natured argument. Even if it gets heated. For this we should be grateful.

04 Jun 2024 — If you only use the IT parts of Enterprise Architecture… if effectively you only do Enterprise IT Architecture, you will create a useless IT bureaucracy. This appears inevitable.

05 Jun 2024 — An architect cannot be an expert on everything about the organisation. There is far too much for any one person. That expertise resides in the stakeholders. An architect does need to be an expert on how to negotiate with the stakeholders, how to produce a design they will agree to build and how to communicate that design.

06 Jun 2024 — The life of an architect should be filled with a constant push to find new ways to produce better architecture.

07 Jun 2024 — Model, model and model again. If you cannot model your architecture, you cannot communicate it.

08 Jun 2024 — “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller

09 Jun 2024 — The turtles-all-the-way-down nature of architecture causes us to see things in a new light. Almost everything becomes a matter of context. An organisation has a process. A department has a process. A team has a process. An employee has a process. The context changes what we mean by the word “process”. This is the case for almost everything in Enterprise Architecture.

10 Jun 2024 — Take a keen interest in older architecture because the newer architectures mostly developed from it. Look at the arc of them over time and you can see the trajectory.

11 Jun 2024 — If you claim to be doing Enterprise Architecture but all you’re actually doing is IT work, it’s about time you were honest about it and called it Enterprise IT Architecture. Because actual Enterprise Architecture involves very little IT and that little can mostly be left to the IT architects in the IT department. IT Architecture is an incredibly important part to play, it’s just not EA.

12 Jun 2024 — Be wary of patterns that try to make decisions for you or set limits on what your organisation can do.

13 Jun 2024 — While architecture needs a process, it should not be overly prescriptive. If every time your stakeholders ask you for even small pieces of architecture work it triggers a massive round of paperwork and diagrams, they’ll stop asking you.

14 Jun 2024 — Model, model and model again. The purpose of the models is the same as the purpose of models in building architecture. One day our may be as pretty.

15 Jun 2024 — Should you read The Ten Books on Architecture? Is Vitruvius still relevant today? We’ve learned a lot since but the answer is still, yes. Especially as it’s completely free.
https://archive.org/details/vitruviustenbook00vitruoft/mode/2up

16 Jun 2024 — The organisation itself has an Enterprise Architecture. The organisation’s approach to its markets has a Business Architecture. What it intends to achieve is Strategy which has an architecture. What people inside the organisation do has a Process Architecture. The IT it uses has Systems Architecture. Depending on the organisation, there can be many more architectures.

17 Jun 2024 — What is the difference between an organisation with a true Enterprise Architecture team and one without? An architected enterprise can do far more and in a thoroughly focussed way. It is able to do things none of its non-architected competitors can achieve.

18 Jun 2024 — An Enterprise Architect is an agent of change… someone who can produce a vision of the future enterprise and describe its shape to others.

19 Jun 2024 — If you want to fill out templates and checkboxes, choose a career in a bureaucracy. Architecture is not a bureaucratic pursuit.

20 Jun 2024 — Capability does not reside within the system. Capability is something delivered by the system as part of its interaction with its environment.

21 Jun 2024 — Model, model and model again. In general, people shouldn’t need training to understand the models you make for them. 

22 Jun 2024 — “Architects can’t force people to connect, it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers and make the meeting places useful and attractive.” — Denise Scott

23 Jun 2024 — When you understand the architecture of an enterprise, you discover a very large number of old techniques not only don’t work but can’t even work in theory. Yet they have been in use and taken seriously for decades with people making entire careers from them.

24 Jun 2024 — If you want your organisation to create an insurmountable lead over the competition, build a genuine Enterprise Architecture team. Because an architected enterprise is not like other enterprises.

25 Jun 2024 — Should you take shortcuts when producing architecture? Yes, as long as the potential impacts are low and the potential rewards are high. The faster you can produce good architecture, the more people will want it.

26 Jun 2024 — If you want to understand metamodels, buy an EA tool that allows you to edit them. Just don’t edit them in production until you really know what you’re doing.

27 Jun 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is not the architecture of the enterprise’s IT systems, it’s the architecture of the enterprise. It is a form of organisation design. Look at the TOGAF metamodel and it clearly shows the importance of the business domain.

28 Jun 2024 — Model, model and model again. The more senior the stakeholder, the more effort you have to put in to make your models or views show things in a way they already understand.

29 Jun 2024 — “I think of architecture as a piece of clothing to wrap around human beings.” — Toyo Ito

30 Jun 2024 — In an ideal world, you’d be able to simply introduce an Enterprise Architecture practice and switch to immediate delivery of its value. But this isn’t an ideal world. Which means it might take you several years to get it adopted. Thankfully, EA has a strong relationship with Strategy so figuring out how to get it adopted should be entirely within your skillset.

01 Jul 2024 — The reason applications exist in an enterprise is to serve the organisation. If you try to map just the applications, your map will be nonsense. You need the map of the organisation for the applications to make sense.

02 Jul 2024 — Practice being able to see the big picture. Then practice being able to swap between the big picture and a small detail. Then practice assembling small details to make a new big picture. This is the nature of architecture.

03 Jul 2024 — Architecture only exists to interact with its environment.

04 Jul 2024 — Most of the time as an architect, it is not the job of your stakeholders to learn how to understand your architecture, it is your job to make the architecture something your stakeholders understand.

05 Jul 2024 — Model, model and model again. One of the main purposes of a model is to record the decisions of the key stakeholders in order to communicate them to others. The architect is one of those key stakeholders.

06 Jul 2024 — “I call architecture frozen music.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

07 Jul 2024 — Sometimes the world can be separated by a common language. Especially when you deal with concepts that were around before the Internet took off. By the early 90s in the UK, it was widely known that Functional Design of an organisation was a bad idea. It leads to silos, bureaucracy and middle management bloat. Yet that knowledge didn’t seem to make it across the pond and the US still makes the mistake of trying to use it even today. Only standards bodies like BAG and TOG mistakenly call it Capability — the name of a completely different concept.

08 Jul 2024 — Part of the job of an architect is to make less work for your stakeholders not more. At least in the long term. Because doing that means your stakeholders can take on new, improved or different work.

09 Jul 2024 — If you have to do it, only let the least amount of customer or personal data necessary off prem. Implement anonymising of data and do it by default. Even within your organisation.

10 Jul 2024 — You are often surrounded by weasels and it pays to be good at diverting them. Your architecture may not improve by you learning to navigate office politics but your architecture practice will benefit.

11 Jul 2024 — You cannot know Enterprise Architecture until you have seen, worked on, then produced a model of an enterprise. While you may never get to start with a clean sheet or design the whole thing for real, to design or redesign part of an enterprise you must have experience of the whole.

12 Jul 2024 — Model, model and model again. One of the best ways to get your thoughts in better order is to write them down in order to explain them. A model is a visual version of that.

13 Jul 2024 — “Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It’s based on wonder.” — Daniel Libeskind

14 Jul 2024 — Enterprise Architecture gives a systematic approach to the management of complexity. Where before an organisation had to throw more and more experts at a problem along with vast management structures to handle complexity, EA means an organisation can do more complex things with its existing experts and management.

15 Jul 2024 — In most organisations, the God of the Gaps is the rule rather than the exception. One of your jobs as an architect is to steadily eradicate the gaps.

16 Jul 2024 — The architecture only exists to interact with its environment. When an organisation or group within it loses sight of the environment, inefficiencies will grow. Possibly until there are large parts of the organisation doing nothing productive. This is especially visible in older organisations.

17 Jul 2024 — Compare the theory with the real world. If the real world does not match the theory, throw the theory away. (At least for now.) Base your architecture on reality.

18 Jul 2024 — Imagine you are driving a car. Capability is not something inside the car. Look up out of the windscreen into the world beyond. There is a dirt track. Can your car get up it? That is a Capability.

19 Jul 2024 — Remember, when you’re asked to produce an architectural design for something you’ve never done before, chances are your stakeholders have never done it before either. They expect you to go first. And you must be fearless in doing so.

20 Jul 2024 — “One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time it is like life starting all over again.” — Renzo Piano

21 Jul 2024 — There can be a huge difference between conceptual fragility and actual fragility. Conceptually, the Earth is fragile. In reality, it’s 5.97 billion trillion metric tons and almost unstoppable. The same can be true for your architecture. Despite some conceptual fragility, you can make your enterprise unstoppable.

22 Jul 2024 — A lot of people mistake the TOGAF ADM for something it’s not. Here is the basic idea. Everything except Phases A and B are optional for each iteration; an iteration happens rapidly, sometimes several times a day. If that’s not how you’re using it, you’re not following TOGAF.

23 Jul 2024 — Most major topics take years to learn then decades to master. Architecture is right at the top of that list. So be kind to yourself if you don’t learn it all at once. Be steadily diligent. Trust yourself. You’ll learn it over the years.

24 Jul 2024 — Markets move and you cannot know the future which means the longer it takes to deliver your architecture, the more likely it is to be out-of-date on completion. Work fast!

25 Jul 2024 — It can pay to be ambitious with your architecture. It can also pay to have very low ambition with your architecture — steady as she goes. But it pays most if you know when to use which one.

26 Jul 2024 — One of the fundamental points of Enterprise Architecture is not to reduce complexity but to manage it. Organisations are far more complex than ever and that complexity is only going to increase. By managing the complexity, an organisation can do more with its existing resources.

27 Jul 2024 — “As an architect you design for the present with an awareness of the past for a future which is essentially unknown.” — Norman Foster

28 Jul 2024 — It’s all very well learning this framework or that modelling language but you have to think for yourself if you want to be an architect. Only following patterns created by others will not cut it. You should think how to create your own framework or modelling language. Not some cheap knock-off of what’s already out there but something new. Even if you never publish it. Then make another one because you can.

29 Jul 2024 — How is it possible for all of the TOGAF ADM Phases to be happening at once? Because any Enterprise Architecture programme will have a lot of deliverables and they won’t all be delivered at the same speed. Those deliverables might be spread across the organisation. Which means you can have things being delivered for one part of the organisation even before the Vision is completed for another part.

30 Jul 2024 — Digital does not mean IT. Digital effectively means online. A digital transformation turns a set of physical products or services into online ones.

31 Jul 2024 — If you think metamodels are strange your mind will fry when you figure out that meta-frameworks are possible.

01 Aug 2024 — You cannot know the future and your architecture must respond to the world because the reverse is unlikely. Which means your architecture needs enough slack within it to allow for the future to change it.

02 Aug 2024 — One of the fundamental points of Enterprise Architecture is not to reduce complexity but to manage it. How do you manage it? The same way you would manage the complexity of a warehouse full of stock. You put it all in a database then you can use queries to find things.

03 Aug 2024 — “I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.” — Le Corbusier

04 Aug 2024 — In strategy, being the first-mover is often the best place to be. The reason for this is because your competition will have to go through all of the same decision-making you did to arrive at the strategy. Their only advantage is they know you thought it was a good idea. First-mover is usually difficult from an execution point of view rather than from a strategy point of view. From an architecture perspective, the big problem with being a first-mover is whether you have competitors who are faster/better at getting to execution. This is one of the reasons it’s important to practice delivering useful architecture as fast as you can.

05 Aug 2024 — Compare the theory with the real world. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of experts claim it is true if reality proves it is false. You can see this a lot in architecture. Group-think takes over and experts claim something works because other experts claimed it works and they don’t want to be the one who can’t do it.

06 Aug 2024 — The vast majority of IT people who claim to be doing some kind of Enterprise Architecture work are really just doing Solution Architecture work. But they don’t know the difference so they mistakenly use the grander sounding title. Broadly, it’s as though they’re claiming to be a management consultant.

07 Aug 2024 — People are expensive and that means your key stakeholders will often want to reduce headcount. While it’s not up to you as an architect to stop that, it is up to you as an architect to present an alternative vision where the key stakeholder will want to keep the people and put them to more productive work.

08 Aug 2024 — There are some things you can learn to do like a robot and reap the benefits. If you do something over and over, eventually your brain will switch off and the autopilot robot will switch on. Architecture is the opposite. In architecture you have to think.

09 Aug 2024 — How can you do stuff better and faster when everything is becoming more complex? The answer is to manage the complexity. Enterprise Architecture is currently the cutting edge for managing complexity and complex change in an organisation.

10 Aug 2024 — “Goals are not ends, but ideal processes by which the future can be created.” — Warren Bennis

11 Aug 2024 — Specialisation matters. In the 90s it was fashionable to say a top-level CEO could run any organisation. It was true for a while. But the world has become far more complex and now it’s essential to have a specialist CEO for your industry. Architecture is still at the point where a top-level Enterprise Architect can design any organisation. It won’t last forever so make hay while the sun shines.

12 Aug 2024 — What is Enterprise Architecture? It is the architecture of the enterprise. All of it. It can be described in enough detail that people can build the enterprise.

13 Aug 2024 — The most important thing in architecture — in any form — is to think. You cannot just robotically follow a few books and videos. You have to create your own patterns and observe reality so you can carve your own path. It’s hard. But it’s worth it.

14 Aug 2024 — Digital Transformation is the fundamental change of an entire organisation that takes its products from physical to online. It involves changing most of the company structure, hence Transformation.

15 Aug 2024 — While you cannot know the future, some things have high predictability. Markets move and change but bigger changes tend to take a long time. So although your architecture has to have some slack to allow for things to change, it can be well-optimised in some places.

16 Aug 2024 — The reason so many people think Enterprise Architecture is about IT is because so many IT people falsely claim it is about IT. But EA isn’t about IT, EA is the architecture of the enterprise. All of it.

17 Aug 2024 — “A company has no value in itself. It only has value to the degree that is [an] effective allocator of resources to create business services that are of a greater value than the costs of the inputs.” — Elon Musk

18 Aug 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is when you architect each of the domains. It’s easy to see which is by far the most important of those domains.

19 Aug 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is a participation sport. While you have to think and figure things out for yourself, you also have to seek knowledge from those around you.

20 Aug 2024 — In Neuro Linguistic Programming, there is a concept called Second Positioning. It probably has many other names. It’s when you try to imagine a thing as someone else would see it. This is an essential skill to develop as an architect. You must be able to see the architecture as your stakeholders see it.

21 Aug 2024 — Bureaucrats try to turn everything else into a bureaucracy and everyone else into bureaucrats. Your architecture work needs to take account of this.

22 Aug 2024 — People are not robots and do not run programs in their heads. Make sure your architecture treats humans as humans.

23 Aug 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is intended to allow better management of major changes to your organisation. Major changes means there will be upsets and some people will feel threatened. Part of your job as an architect is to make sure anyone who feels that has their fears calmed. You must present a positive vision of the future for everyone involved.

24 Aug 2024 — “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

25 Aug 2024 — Business-IT alignment isn’t just IT meeting the business requirements. That’s a given. Instead, Business-IT alignment is where either can change depending on which gives the greatest advantage. Suppose your dev team develops an algorithm none of your competitors have. Business-IT alignment means the business would adapt to take advantage of the algorithm. The greatest example of this is Google which started as a couple of algorithms and a trillion-dollar company was built around them.

26 Aug 2024 — To introduce a successful Enterprise Architecture practice in an organisation, it’s important to choose your battles. Don’t fight against existing mature Change processes, divert their energy so they fight for Enterprise Architecture.

27 Aug 2024 — Should you just accept what you’re told about Enterprise Architecture? No, you must think. There are two fundamentally different worlds from the perspective of an architect: what the subject itself claims and what you have to do to be successful in your job. Those can come into deep conflict. So be pragmatic and do what it takes to be successful in your job as a priority. In other words, treat the subject itself as theory and your job as the reality.

28 Aug 2024 — Most employees like to know where they stand. A complete Enterprise Architecture lets them know for sure.

29 Aug 2024 — Business Analysis and Business Architecture are two very different things. Even the misnamed Business Architecture in TOGAF — which should be called Service Architecture — is nothing like Business Analysis. 

30 Aug 2024 — The Process Architecture of an organisation is built from several levels. Only the bottom levels of the Process Architecture have IT.

31 Aug 2024 — “Each material has its specific characteristics which we must understand if we want to use it. This is no less true of steel and concrete.” — Mies van der Rohe

01 Sep 2024 — One of the easy ways to tell if a concept is any good for design work is whether it is singular versus compound. Compound concepts are mostly bad news. That’s when you take several different concepts and merge them. Whereas singular concepts tend to be good news. Singular concepts are things like Process and Org. Unit. Compound concepts are things like Function which is a compound of the previous two along with a few other things thrown in.

02 Sep 2024 — We are in a strange twilight zone in terms of our understanding of business. Much of the foundational literature for business approaches from around the world are long out of print. Much of what is published today is based on poor understanding of those foundations. It leaves us in a situation where Elon Musk can get rid of 75% of Twitter staff and have that result in increased productivity and a return to profitability — something those people actively hindered despite being top level “experts”.

03 Sep 2024 — The business model and the operating model are two sides of the same coin. When you change one, it does not necessarily change the other but that is normally the main intent. 

04 Sep 2024 — Make space for beauty in your architecture. When you do, it will change the way you communicate it and others will notice even if they cannot see the beauty.

05 Sep 2024 — It’s worth understanding that buzzword bingo is possibly the biggest killer of productivity. It helps to create silos and it hides incompetence. This becomes readily apparent when you genuinely understand each of the buzzwords. What it reveals is a number of very highly paid people string the buzzwords together in such a way it proves they don’t understand them. 

06 Sep 2024 — Enterprise IT Architecture is the structure of the data processing endeavour. Enterprise Architecture is the structure of the human endeavour.

07 Sep 2024 — A change from the usual Saturday “thought” showing the parallels with building architecture…
The Fountainhead — 1949 movie starring Gary Cooper
Superficially about architecture but really about individualism versus collectivism.

08 Sep 2024 — How does middle management bloat start? One way is when you try to design part of the business but don’t understand business design or basic human psychology. If you say the organisation needs something called Knowledge Management or Recruitment Management or Partner Management or whatever with the word Management after it, there is a high likelihood that will be interpreted as a need for a completely unnecessary Knowledge, Recruitment or Partner or whatever Manager.

09 Sep 2024 — More good architects means a better world. So help your fellow architects.

10 Sep 2024 — A lot of people get Capability and Competence mixed up. Competence is what your organisation is good at internally. Capability is the effect you can achieve with it externally.

11 Sep 2024 — Why is it wrong for the Enterprise Architecture team to be under the CIO? One of the many reasons is because of separation of concerns. Making changes to IT systems can be difficult, expensive and take a long time. That could easily lead to making changes to the business to suit the IT rather than changes to the IT to suit the business. 

12 Sep 2024 — The ability to process data in clever ways has changed the world and the world of business. But it is a mistake to think data processing is the most important part of a business. Data processing is a side-effect not the main show.

13 Sep 2024 — Why is management of complexity such an important part of Enterprise Architecture? Because the more complex a thing, the more difficult it is to make a decision about it. Not just a good decision, any decision. Enterprise Architecture manages the complexity in such a way that the stakeholders can almost always make good decisions.

14 Sep 2024 — “To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.” — Le Corbusier

15 Sep 2024 — One of the more surprising things is to watch otherwise-smart IT people try to understand Enterprise Architecture only to fail then reinvent 1960s IT Systems Architecture. This has happened so often that there are far more IT Systems Architects who claim to be an EA than actual Enterprise Architects. IT Systems Architecture is about how the IT systems in an organisation work together. Whereas EA is about how the enterprise works.

16 Sep 2024 — The hardest thing to find in Enterprise Architecture is good information about Enterprise Architecture.

17 Sep 2024 — Example of what the TOGAF metamodel tells you. A [Process] [is performed by] a [Role]. So far, so good. What it completely fails to mention is both Process and Role are hierarchical. They can have parents and children. As can almost everything else in the metamodel.

18 Sep 2024 — Capability is delivered by Competence. It’s important to understand that these are business concepts not just human concepts. Taken as a whole, a department has one or more Competencies. That department can deliver one or more Capabilities.

19 Sep 2024 — The main value of Enterprise Architecture does not reside in design-time or design-only approaches. We’ve always had those. The main value of Enterprise Architecture lies in everything it delivers before a design and the communication that comes after the design.

20 Sep 2024 — If you have ever been involved in a major change and sat in the interminable meetings as various managers try to figure out their part, Process Architecture — called Business Architecture in TOGAF — will seem like a godsend. The meetings stop being interminable. Instead they are fast and focussed.

21 Sep 2024 — “Consequently, since this study is so vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.” — Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture

22 Sep 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is not Solution Architect and the overlap is small.

23 Sep 2024 — In architecture, how you see yourself means very little. How the stakeholders see you is almost everything.

24 Sep 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is the architecture of the enterprise. That means the ability to design an organisation, how it operates, describe its purpose and how it is structured. 

25 Sep 2024 — What’s the problem with changes to the business to suit the IT rather than changes to the IT to suit the business? Sometime that’s the best way. But sometimes it’s a terrible idea. Part of the point of Enterprise Architecture is to help discover which one is right for the situation.

26 Sep 2024 — Loyalty breeds loyalty. If you want employees to love your architecture team, be loyal. Fight to keep everyone when there’s a major change. Figure out an architecture that puts them into new productive work. Be ruthless about the change but the opposite about the employees. They have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. Loyalty breeds loyalty.

27 Sep 2024 — Capability is the ability to create a desired effect outside of the organisation. It is the hand that reaches out into the markets. It is the key to understanding culture, strategy and everything underneath them. 

28 Sep 2024 — “It takes a lot of effort to make a building look effortless.” — Norman Foster

29 Sep 2024 — If you’re looking to use Enterprise Architecture to reduce headcount and shrink, you’re looking in the wrong direction. The right direction is to use Enterprise Architecture so you can make your people more productive and grow.

30 Sep 2024 — The business model and the operating model are two sides of the same coin. If you know what you’re doing, you can change one without changing the other. Or make a small change to one to make a massive change to the other. Or make a massive change to one that causes only a tiny change in the other.

01 Oct 2024 — There’s an argument that ERP is a response to the failure of organisations to understand how to architect themselves… that they chose EITA instead of EA and hence locked themselves into 20th Century thinking when they could and should have moved into the 21st Century.

02 Oct 2024 — You have to think. You have to ask yourself, what does it mean? You have to ask your colleagues the same question. Architecture is not something where you can just follow the same patterns as everyone else, you have to create your own patterns.

03 Oct 2024 — You’re only an Enterprise Architect when you can *architect* all of the EA domains including its biggest, most important one. 

04 Oct 2024 — Artificial Intelligence is like Artificial Sweetener. The latter isn’t sweet, it just fools your senses into thinking it’s sweet. Maybe people need to repeat the word ‘artificial’ until they get it?

05 Oct 2024 — “What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.” — Peter Zumthor

06 Oct 2024 — How to spot people who don’t understand Capability, part 83. If you need the Capability to pound nails, you need a hammer and the skill to swing it. People who don’t understand it will say the Capability is Hammer Management. Those people include The Open Group and the Business Architecture Guild. But you don’t need that, you need to pound nails.

07 Oct 2024 — If you want to help make business decisions, you must understand business concerns and how business people think. In architecture, you have to push that even further and at least try to understand how each of your stakeholders thinks.

08 Oct 2024 — Is Enterprise Architecture the only profession where people who don’t know what it is or how to do it try to claim they do it and dictate its meaning?

09 Oct 2024 — The answer to yesterday’s question is, no. Unfortunately, there are a lot of professions where people who know little or nothing about it claim to be experts and try to control the subject. Enterprise Architecture is far from alone. 

10 Oct 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is mostly concerned with business and the top level of the IT in an organisation. Usually only business applications are in scope. 

11 Oct 2024 — Once you have built a complete model of an organisation, everything changes about how you look at Enterprise Architecture. You see both the organisation and EA for what they are.

12 Oct 2024 — “Get out there on the god-damn front line and show them that you care, and that you’re not just in some plush office somewhere.” — Elon Musk

13 Oct 2024 — The purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to describe the structure of an enterprise so it can be built. 

14 Oct 2024 — Should you change the IT to suit the business or change the business to suit the IT? Yes. You should do both. It’s called Business-IT alignment.

15 Oct 2024 — It is possible to be hugely experienced in the architecture of IT systems across a vast enterprise yet know nothing about Enterprise Architecture because EA is not EITA.

16 Oct 2024 — Even after more than thirty years of use, Process-Oriented is still the best way to go for most organisation’s architecture. 

17 Oct 2024 — Compare an employee with a software system. They are fundamentally different. Each has advantages. Learn to emphasise those advantages.

18 Oct 2024 — You might think you’re above basic psychological tricks and the suggestion of simple words but that’s unlikely. Just giving a bad name to a conceptual part of the organisation can cause all kinds of problems down the line. Even though you know what it’s supposed to mean, a bad name will almost certainly influence you. Now imagine what it does for employees who don’t know what it’s supposed to mean.

19 Oct 2024 — “Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client’s needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.” — Rem Koolhaas

20 Oct 2024 — Organisations aren’t computer programs and the people in them aren’t robots. That means you should have at least a broad idea of how to design organisations that are desirable places to work. Even though the emphasis must be on the word “work”.

21 Oct 2024 — Organisations are psychology machines. That means it pays to be an optimistic architect and to spread your optimism.

22 Oct 2024 — If the Enterprise Architecture literature seems abstract and unrelated to the work they do, too many people don’t stop to realise the most likely reason is because they’re not doing EA work. Find the literature that matches the work.

23 Oct 2024 — By the late 80s, it was obvious Functional Design of an organisation was a bad idea. It led to silos and middle-management bloat. When the concept of Process and Business Process Reengineering turned up, everyone jumped on it because it promised freedom from those problems. It was better but it brought problems of its own. 

24 Oct 2024 — What are our objectives? What value do we need to deliver? What do we need to do to deliver that value? Who needs to do it? What resources do those people need? Can we reuse anything already in place? These are the fundamental questions of organisational design.

25 Oct 2024 — The majority of business literature is not architecture-aware. That means you can face a struggle to sift the relevant lessons from it. It can even be that an architectural approach invalidates entire books.

26 Oct 2024 — “The architect is not only the director, but he is the composer. And, as a composer, the architect brings a sense of creativity to each building.” — Santiago Calatrava

27 Oct 2024 — Why is it important to understand a concept and not just the word? Because concepts have consequences. Concepts can be things like inwards and outwards. If you only learn the words and not the concepts, you may do what you think is good work but looked inwards when you should have looked outwards. An example where many people only know the word and not the concept is Capability.

28 Oct 2024 — Enterprise Architecture owes more to Organisational Design, Business Process Reengineering and Business Process Management than anything else. That is why the business domain dominates the metamodels. The main point is to architect all of the domains as one.

29 Oct 2024 — Before Enterprise Architecture, the organisation was designed, then the design was analysed, then IT was found to suit it. Whereas in Enterprise Architecture, the organisation and IT are designed at the same time, each with the other in mind. That is what is meant by Holistic.

30 Oct 2024 — If Enterprise Architecture were about IT, the EA literature would make sense to IT architects. Instead, it seems abstract and obtuse to them. Which is because EA is not about IT.

31 Oct 2024 — Although the Process Architecture levels make it look like there are people in comfy offices sat above people at the coal face, that’s not how most business work. The Process Architecture is a way to connect the theory of what goes on with the practice.

01 Nov 2024 — Capability is a way to look at the world. If you have a bicycle, you need to be able to ride and maintain it. But those aren’t Capabilities. Why did you buy the bicycle? The answer to that question is where you’ll find the Capabilities of a bicycle.

02 Nov 2024 — “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

03 Nov 2024 — If you want to understand the ability of an organisation to change and manage those changes, check the terms it uses at the top for things like Process Groups, Process Categories, Competencies, Capabilities and Value Streams. It’s normal for an older organisation to have its own terms for them but they’re often missing completely which is a sign of an organisation that struggles with change.

04 Nov 2024 — One of the bigger problems in changing an organisation is Analysis Paralysis. That’s when the options are too complex to easily weigh and so you end up going deeper into the detail… which makes the decision even more complex. Enterprise Architecture can cut through that and make your choices clear.

05 Nov 2024 — The biggest and most common mistake people make with TOGAF is to confuse Business Architecture with Business Analysis. The two are not even remotely the same. Analysis of the business domain is what 90s and earlier IT departments did. If you only analyse the business domain, that is not Enterprise Architecture. For it to be Enterprise Architecture, the business domain must be architected.

06 Nov 2024 — IT people often think an Enterprise Architect is just another name for a Solution Architect or maybe a Senior Solution Architect. Why? Presumably because IT is the only thing that interests them. Which means they skip over the 75% of EA literature that’s about the business. An Enterprise Architect is responsible for the architecture of all the domains including the business domain.

07 Nov 2024 — While many business terms have their own special meaning within an organisation and two different organisations might use one term to mean two different things, Enterprise Architecture has some terms that are crucial to use in a way consistent with the outside world. 

08 Nov 2024 — Use your eyes and your brain. If the theory doesn’t match what you see in your organisation, that means one of three things is out of whack: the theory, the organisation or your understanding. It’s almost always the last.

09 Nov 2024 — “Even a brick wants to be something.” — Louis Kahn

10 Nov 2024 — The most important thing about any organisation is its ability to create desired effects in its markets. In architecture, this is known as Capability.

11 Nov 2024 — The Enterprise Architecture framework you use matters less than the stakeholders understanding of your description of the architecture. 

12 Nov 2024 — In Enterprise Architecture you help the decisions-makers make their decisions, give the decision-makers a design that can execute on their decisions and add enough detail to the design so the builders can understand then build it.

13 Nov 2024 —

14 Nov 2024 — It is easier to learn the 25% of Enterprise Architecture than it is to learn the 75% that makes it Enterprise Architecture.

15 Nov 2024 — It is common for everyone in a bureaucracy to be dedicated to the success of the organisation but for the bureaucracy itself to be killing the organisation.

16 Nov 2024 — “Be truthful. Nature only sides with truth.” — Adolf Loos

17 Nov 2024 — The paper that started it all was “A framework for information systems architecture”. And it was about IT. But that was just the beginning. It wasn’t the “information systems architecture” part that went on to become Enterprise Architecture, it was the framework. As Zachman himself put it years later, “[…] the Zachman Framework is the fundamental structure for Enterprise Architecture and thereby yields the total set of descriptive representations relevant for describing an Enterprise.”

18 Nov 2024 — It is better to make a modest change to the architecture that everyone understands than a spectacular but complex change that only a few understand.

19 Nov 2024 — One way of looking at things is there are two fundamental parts of an organisation: Core and Support. Core is the set of employees whose work to generates revenue. Support is the set of employees who do everything else. In an efficient organisation, Support must be as small as possible because it is always a cost. Architecture is in Support.

20 Nov 2024 — Good architecture controls the likelihood of a risk event. Better architecture inherently reduces the likelihood.

21 Nov 2024 — An architect never attributes to luck what can safely be attributed to hard work for enough time to create the right circumstances.

22 Nov 2024 — Capability is what the knight can do on a chessboard. A strategist does not saw the knight in half to see how it works.

23 Nov 2024 — “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” — Thomas Sowell

24 Nov 2024 — What should you do if you’re not senior enough to talk to the appropriate stakeholders so you can build an accurate model of the enterprise? Build an inaccurate one. Or rather, build one that is as accurate as you can make it then steadily improve it as you learn more. You will be surprised how close you can get, how much you will learn, how your understanding will change and how much others will start to notice.

25 Nov 2024 — If Information Systems Architecture stayed the same, how did a framework for it become Enterprise Architecture? Because the framework was for everything else too. The framework allowed you to describe the architecture of the enterprise.

26 Nov 2024 — If you got an Enterprise Architecture certification but never really used any of what you learned because it didn’t seem to apply to your work, have you considered it’s because you’re not doing Enterprise Architecture?

27 Nov 2024 — The reason every organisation exists is to do one or more things. That may be why process-orientation is still the default choice for architecture.

28 Nov 2024 — Around 75% of Enterprise Architecture is about the organisation and only 25% is about its IT systems. If you try to only use the IT parts of EA, you will end up in a worse mess than if you had simply ignored Enterprise Architecture. If you just want to deliver IT systems, use an IT framework.

29 Nov 2024 — You need to think of an organisation as exactly what it is: an organisation. If you think about it in terms of the people or the flow of finance or the flow of information or an assembly of competencies or whatever… that is not thinking about the organisation, that is thinking about a subset. Many people get seduced by one subset. A good architect can use them all to think of the whole.

30 Nov 2024 — “People can’t be knowledgeable about everything but they can be knowledgeable about the extent of their own ignorance.” — Thomas Sowell

01 Dec 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is not now and never has been about IT. Before EA existed, we already had ways to describe the architecture of the enterprise’s IT systems all the way back in the 1960s — Information Systems Architecture. It was a mature subject. Enterprise Architecture came about in the late 1980s with the invention of ways to describe architecture the organisation itself.

02 Dec 2024 — There will come a point when your model of the enterprise makes you the go-to person and you will be asked all kinds of questions by people at every level. Pay attention to the questions you cannot answer as they will give clues on how to improve the model. 

03 Dec 2024 — Zachman’s framework is one way to create architecture. Models built using a typical EA metamodel is another. The two are significantly different approaches and both need training to use correctly. Zachman is simpler but model-based architecture has better structural integrity.

04 Dec 2024 — People who don’t understand architecture tend to think everything is about the lowest level. When they hear Business Architecture or Process Architecture, they start talking about BPMN or UML or customer journeys. But those are all at the very lowest level. They’re what you develop after most of the architecture.

05 Dec 2024 — They are two different things 👇 

06 Dec 2024 — No amount of expertise in IT will make a person an Enterprise Architect because EA is primarily about the structure of the organisation. If you want to become an EA then you will need to learn how to architect an organisation.

07 Dec 2024 — “Whatever good things we build end up building us.” — Jim Rohn

08 Dec 2024 — Capability is a concept with two halves and most people only learn one of them. The half most people learn is a combination of people, process and resources. But the other half is what make them a Capability… to use that combination to achieve something external to itself. The first half is the skill to ride a bicycle. The second half is to use it to ride to work. Knowing only the first will lead to bad strategy. Knowing both is what leads to good strategy.

09 Dec 2024 — Enterprise Architecture is a team sport. The architecture work is not the work of one person but multiple teams. The Enterprise Architect heads those teams.

10 Dec 2024 — Enterprise Architecture allows executive management and senior management to clearly lay out how the organisation should operate. That makes for a far more balanced organisation where the many tails will still try to wag the dog but at least they’ll all do it in harmony.

11 Dec 2024 — Process Architecture is about making sure management gets to make all of the decisions… except the ones that impact other management. Those become shared decisions. So far, this sounds like typical Business Change. The big differences are that Process Architecture means everyone gets to see those impacts much earlier and many of the hidden impacts that often take months to find otherwise.

12 Dec 2024 — Technology has no company loyalty so put more effort in to the design of the human parts of the architecture.

13 Dec 2024 — Companies don’t get paid by customers to have Capabilities, they get paid by customers to do stuff. Which is why Process is still king.

14 Dec 2024 — “The physicists who work in these disciplines think they’re immune because the public doesn’t understand their maths, and that gives them protection. And, yes, that has worked for a long time. But you can only deceive people for so long. The more physicists try to convince the public that their useless papers should count as ‘progress,’ the more they demonstrate that they’re not producing anything of value. I may be wrong. But I think the writing is on the wall, crisp and clear. We’ll be seeing a massive defunding of academic research in the next decade or so. And this thesis about smell in the English literature, will make history as the thesis that broke academia.“ — Sabine Hossenfelder

15 Dec 2024 — People will ask you questions and your complete model of the enterprise will allow you to answer a huge number of them. However, some questions will be beyond the model. You will be tempted to improve the model to include the answers. But the bigger the model, the more time and effort it will take to maintain. You may be adding Drag. So make a good decision.

16 Dec 2024 — The Capabilities of an airliner are things like its range, its maximum load, its take-off/landing distance and so on. The Capabilities of an organisation are conceptually similar.

17 Dec 2024 — Analysing the business then planning its IT is… IT Planning. Whereas Enterprise Architecture is about the making changes to the design of the business.

18 Dec 2024 — A customer journey is just another process… with one big exception. The customer doesn’t work for you. Unless you want to lose customers, don’t try to make them do your work.

19 Dec 2024 — Many parts of the process hierarchy give zero value to the customer… but are very valuable internally. But the older the process gets, the more likely you will find things being done that give no value to anyone because the intended recipient has long since gone. 

20 Dec 2024 — The scale and scope of the Zachman Framework compared with Paris School architecture levels.

21 Dec 2024 — “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site” — Frank Lloyd Wright

22 Dec 2024 — People who don’t understand architecture tend to think everything is about the lowest levels. When they hear Enterprise Architecture, they start talking about IT. But IT is all at the very lowest levels. IT is what you decide after most of the architecture work is done. First you have to architect the organisation that will need the IT. Enterprise Architecture also defines the management structures.

23 Dec 2024 — Unless it’s structural, your model of the enterprise should rarely include information you can find elsewhere in a few seconds. Even if it would take days to find elsewhere, ask yourself if it belongs in the model. Or would it be better for the model to simply give ways to quickly find that elsewhere?

24 Dec 2024 — Father Christmas’ core competency is Delivery. Lots of other organisations can manufacture toys, only Santa can deliver so many so quickly and with such style!

26 Dec 2024 — It cannot be stated often enough, the only way to understand the architecture of an enterprise is to model one. The whole thing. A complete model of an enterprise.

27 Dec 2024 — Assembly line production was popularised by Henry Ford when he used it to mass produce the Model T. However, assembly line production is not just *for* cars. It can be used *for* almost anything that needs to be mass produced. This is how you should read the word *for* in the diagram below. Information Systems Architecture was the Model T *for* Enterprise Architecture. Two different things. EA can also be used *for* everything else that needs to be architected in an organisation.

28 Dec 2024 — “Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.” — Luis Barragan

29 Dec 2024 — One of the stranger things of late is to watch Information Systems Architecture experts pretend to be business experts. It’s leading them to recreate organisation design as it was all the way back in the 1980s. They use a fake version of Capability that’s really just a bad reinvention of the 1980s concept called Function. They try to use Value Streams at a low level when they are a high level concept. They do things that will destroy their organisation in its markets by focussing on Value to the organisation when Value to the customer is the thing that counts. It’s amazing some organisations stay solvent.

30 Dec 2024 — There are strong parallels between building architecture and enterprise architecture. Even to the point that Vitruvius’ firmitas, utilities et venustas usually apply. Though in both forms of architecture, one or more of those might be sacrificed in order to achieve some greater goal.

31 Dec 2024 — The fifth year of “thoughts” completed and laid out for all to see. Five!?! Who knew it would last this long?