Service-Patterns
Large organisations design the same service interactions from scratch, with no shared vocabulary and no institutional memory resulting in inconsistency. Service patterns can changes this.
Business Architecture
Business architecture keeps failing in the same place. Not because the model is wrong, but because it was built to ignore the code the organisation actually runs on. This is the fifth and final article in The Missing Domain series — and the one that says what to do about it.
Business Architecture
There is a version of this story I have told at conference tables in which the lesson is about stakeholder management. The engagement succeeded. The client was satisfied. That version is true. It is also incomplete in a way that matters.
Business Architecture
The profession's standard defence is that culture is too soft to map. That defence is wrong. Not subtly wrong. Empirical frameworks for characterising organisational culture have existed for decades. Business architecture has simply chosen not to look at them.
Business Architecture
Every organisation has three cultures. The one in the mission statement. The one in the policy documents. And the one that shows up when the stakes are real. Most transformation programmes design for the first two. The third one is the one that decides whether your programme lives or dies.
Business Architecture
In 2016, a textbook-correct transformation at a Channel Islands wealth firm collapsed two weeks after go-live. The reason was not in any of the frameworks we had used. It was in the one component business architecture refuses to map.
Operating Model
The target operating model is one of the most widely used artefacts in business architecture. It is also an artefact that the world no longer respects. What if the problem is not the TOM itself, but the five-year cadence and mega-programme delivery we keep wrapping around it?
Business Architecture
There is a moment I have encountered in almost every transformation programme I have worked on. It happens in a workshop, or a design review, or sometimes in a corridor conversation that nobody planned. Someone asks a question that stops the room. Not a hostile question. Not a political one.
AI & Automation
Ask a senior executive whether their organisation has an AI operating model and the answer will almost certainly be: “We’re working on it.” They are wrong. The model already exists. It is just not the one anyone designed. Over the past two years, most organisations have accumulated a sprawling,
Business Architecture
Value networks have sat in our discipline for decades. We walked right past them. Business Architecture has a problem with its own toolkit. We have spent two decades convincing organisations that capability maps are the answer. When that didn’t stick, we rebranded to value streams. When that felt too
Operating Model
Here is a thought experiment. Take your organisation's most complex delivery challenge last year — a regulatory programme, a product launch, a major incident. Now look at the org chart. How many of the people who actually solved it report to the same box? Very few, I would wager.
Business Architecture
In my article published here in September 2025, I asked whether Business Architecture had become the new PMO — an expensive governance layer that slows delivery rather than shaping it. The response was striking. Hundreds of comments, most of them variations of the same frustration: executives don’t get it, they