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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31 Jan 2025 —

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

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

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

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