On the Psychology of Architecture and the Architecture of Psychology

Advisors need (a) to know what they are talking about and (b) be able to convince others. For architects, the first part is called 'architecture' and the second part could be called 'the psychology of architecture'. We tend to do that already, but most attention is paid to the role of the advisor. But it takes two to tango. The 'receiving end' (the one being advised) plays a key role and it is here that psychological and neurological research of the last few decades on 'the architecture of psychology' can be put to good use.

Should you derive your IT Strategy from your Business Strategy? Probably not too much.

It is generally accepted that IT Strategy must follow Business Strategy. It seems a no-brainer. But is it? There are reasons to look at it differently, reasons that become more pressing as organisations become more digital.

Something is (still) rotten in the kingdom of artificial intelligence

Nobody can deny that artificial intelligence (or machine learning, deep learning, or cognitive computing) is booming these days. And — as before, as this is in fact the second (or third, depending on how you count) round for AI —…

Is ArchiMate® an Open Standard? Not really.

ArchiMate, the enterprise architecture modelling language, is a standard from The Open Group (TOG). Most people infer from this that ArchiMate is an open standard (I did once) and often assume The Open Group is some sort of a not-for-profit…

The Great Escape: “EA is not about IT!”

As soon as you, as an enterprise architect, want to address the problem of the complex Business-IT landscape, and you actually acknowledge in a discussion that Enterprise Architecture has come into existence because of the complexity of modern IT-laden landscapes,…

Losing a Limpet – What happens when we don’t have Enterprise Architecture?

Recently, I had a conversation with someone about how to do enterprise architecture. I prepared that conversation by trying to condense my basic argument for the`enterprise chess' approach to the absolute minimum. I started out with the question: "Suppose we don't…

“I, Robot” – there is no such thing as ‘Customer Self-Service’

Recently, Samuel Holcman published the short Outside-In vs. Inside-Out in Enterprise Architecture document and announced it on LinkedIn. The issue he raises is that the clients of organisations more and more seem to become the ones that perform the organisation's processes (e.g. self-service),…