Identifying meaning in context: VPECS and VPEC-T

Posted on 15 May 2013 by Tom G — 2 Comments ↓

In a multiple-stakeholder enterprise – which, in practice, is the case for every enterprise – how do we make sense of how each stakeholder views the context? What’s important to them? What’s not important to them? And why? And given…

On ‘T&C’

Posted on 15 May 2013 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

When presented with someone’s ‘terms and conditions’ dialog, how often do you read through the whole thing, and only then click the ‘I have read…’ checkbox, and move on? If you did actually read it, do you truly agree to…

Extreme cooperation

Posted on 14 May 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

If you were literally joined to someone else for life, how well would you cope? Over the past couple of days I’ve been watching one of the most inspiring television-documentaries I’ve ever seen: ‘Abby and Brittany: Joined for life‘. (The…

Tagged with: Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins, RBPEA, responsibility, Society
Posted in Power and responsibility, Society

A Modest Proposal

Posted on 12 May 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

After half a decade, the challenges and problems arising from the financial collapse of 2007-8 are still dragging on and on. With the economies of entire countries seemingly brought to their knees, and no apparent end in sight to any…

Tagged with: Business, enterprise, financial services, jonathan swift, joseph schumpeter, paradigm, RBPEA, Society
Posted in Business, Futures, Society

Costs of acquisition, retention, de-acquisition

Posted on 12 May 2013 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

How much does it cost to acquire a customer? To retain a customer? To lose a customer? And in what sense of ‘cost’? In part this one was triggered by reading through my relatively-new copy of Business Model You, and…

Everyday sexism of the subtler kind

Posted on 10 May 2013 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

How does sexism and suchlike become invisibly ingrained in our society? Answer: whenever said sexism is promoted as ‘progressive thinking’… To many people, the term ‘sexism’ applies only to gender-imbalance that directly affects women: yet a few moments thought should…

Anticlients are antibodies

Posted on 5 May 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

Over the past few months I’ve built up quite a nice collection of what I call ‘anticlient‘ tweets: small complaints – or sometimes not so small – about how someone feels about their interactions with some organisation. Most organisations still…

More on backbone and edge

Posted on 4 May 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

How do we build the right support in our architectures for the balance between certainty and uncertainty? How do we decide what needs to go into backbone, edge, or somewhere in between? This is a follow-on to the themes in…

Direction and governance flows in Enterprise Canvas

Posted on 3 May 2013 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

This one’s a quick item of technical detail about service-modelling with Enterprise Canvas, as requested by Oliver Baier: OliverBaier: Enterprise Canvas: Does the XG flow go down to the next *lower* layer? If not, how does it relate to eg…

Tagged with: direction, enterprise canvas, governance, service model
Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture

Enterprise Canvas and the Service Cycle

Posted on 29 April 2013 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

How do we make sense of a service, for service-review and service-design? How can we usefully partition the service-activities to help make sense of that service? And how do we link those activities to the various forms of value that…