Wardley Maps in Enterprise Architecture

Wardley Maps offer a powerful way to analyse a business's competitive landscape, value chain, and the evolution of its components — but most Enterprise Architecture frameworks have not formally incorporated them. This paper examines how Wardley Mapping complements EA methods, proposes a meta model integration using the Inspired Holistic Architecture Language (HAL), and demonstrates practical benefits including reduced effort, improved model fidelity, and richer strategic insight. A useful read for enterprise architects and business architects looking to bring greater contextual awareness into their architecture practice.

Managing Information Technology Projects

Most project management texts focus on either general methodology or system development — very few address the full range of IT project types a practising manager actually faces. Co-authored with Derek Smith and drawing on 45 years of combined industry experience, this book equips IT and information systems project managers with the knowledge to handle everything from systems development and package implementation to hardware installation and business process reengineering. It covers planning, scope and change control, risk management, quality, and the people skills that determine whether projects succeed or fail.

Beyond UML: A Practical Method for Delivering Commercial Software Systems

UML brought valuable standardisation to object-oriented analysis and design, but leaves critical gaps: no standard process, weak dynamic modelling, and little architectural guidance for building flexible, maintainable systems. This book presents the Inspired Method — developed and refined over decades of commercial practice — as a comprehensive alternative covering the full lifecycle from business analysis through design, architecture, and delivery. It is aimed at developers and analysts building multi-user, database-backed commercial applications who need a rigorous yet accessible approach that actually works in practice.

Beyond Use Cases: A Better Approach to Business Process Modelling

UML's Use Cases are widely used for requirements capture, but they encourage a system-centric view too early and lack the semantics to properly model complete business processes — including flow, costs, timing, organisational responsibility, and manual activities. This paper proposes a richer process modelling notation that forms a superset of Use Cases and Activity Diagrams, and transitions seamlessly from high-level stakeholder models all the way to rigorous design specifications. The approach, developed and refined through teaching and consulting, addresses a persistent gap in object-oriented analysis and enterprise engineering.

Managing Large-Scale Collaborative Modelling: Meta Model Extensions for Enterprise Architecture Tools

As enterprise architecture initiatives grow to span multiple teams, geographies, and time zones, the repositories and tools supporting them face real challenges: information overload, ownership conflicts, version management, and the need to present different views to different user communities. This paper formalises a set of meta model and meta-meta model extensions — including context, domains, filters, versioning, and scenarios — developed through real-world deployment of a collaborative EA modelling platform. The result is a more manageable, flexible, and scalable foundation for large-scale collaborative architecture work.

The Difference Between Process Architecture and Process Modeling (and why you should care)

Process modelling initiatives frequently consume months of effort without producing meaningful results — often because teams dive into detailed models before anyone understands the big picture. This paper argues for a clear separation between process architecture (a rapid, high-level view of what processes exist, who they serve, and how they connect) and detailed process modelling and design, while keeping both perspectives fully integrated. Drawing on case studies from financial services organisations, it shows how this approach can cut project time dramatically and produce models that business stakeholders actually engage with.

Cooking up a MEAL: Creating a Meta Enterprise Architecture Language

Enterprise architecture tools struggle to interoperate, and existing exchange standards like XMI are notoriously unreliable in practice. This paper proposes MEAL — a Meta Enterprise Architecture Language — a human-readable, domain-specific language designed to define, populate, query, and analyse EA models and repositories, and to serve as a high-level API between tools. It presents the requirements, a prototype implementation in Smalltalk, and example syntax demonstrating the concept's practical promise.

An Inspired Approach to Business Architecture

Most enterprise architecture frameworks treat business architecture as little more than context for IT decisions — leaving out competitors, markets, culture, partners, products, ethics, and organisational design. This white paper sets out Inspired's broader definition: the design of a desirable future state of the enterprise, informed by all its relevant dimensions and underpinned by a comprehensive, integrative meta model. It covers scope, techniques, method tailoring, the Holistic Architecture Language (HAL), and the tools and training that bring the approach to life.

GLOSS - A Graphical Language Server on the Smalltalk Platform

The Graphical Language Server Protocol (GLSP) is emerging as a standard for communication between web-based graphical modelling clients and model servers, with existing implementations in Java and TypeScript — but none in Smalltalk. This paper describes the design and implementation of GLOSS, a GLSP-compliant model server built in Pharo Smalltalk, and compares it to the authors' existing EVA graphical modelling environment. The result reveals both the advantages of Smalltalk's dynamic, object-oriented approach and a set of concrete limitations in the GLSP protocol itself.

An Integrated Meta Model for Strategy, Business Architecture, Risk and Change

Popular enterprise architecture frameworks like TOGAF and ArchiMate each provide meta models, but none are broad enough to fully support strategic planning, contextual analysis, and business architecture alongside risk, change, and programme management in an integrated way. This paper describes the development of HAL2023 — an updated version of the Inspired Holistic Architecture Language — synthesising concepts from TOGAF 10, ArchiMate 3.2, BizBOK 11, SABSA, MEMO, and the Inspired consulting practice into a single, coherent meta model validated across multiple industries. It addresses not only what the model contains, but how it can be practically applied without overwhelming practitioners.

An Advanced Meta-Meta Model for Visual Language Design and Tooling

Most enterprise modelling tools hard-code their notations and meta models, making adaptation slow, expensive, and technically demanding. This paper presents an advanced meta-meta model — the foundational layer that governs how modelling languages and tools are defined — designed to support arbitrary meta models, multiple visual representations, multi-level modelling, and runtime adaptation without specialist programming skills. Targeting a property graph implementation, it draws on two decades of experience with the EVA toolset and a systematic review of leading platforms including Eclipse, MetaEdit+, and XModeler.

Extending and Automating Maturity Models for More Value

Maturity models are widely used for organisational self-assessment, but their value is often limited to producing a score. This paper argues that far greater value is achievable by extending models to include prioritised recommendations and action planning — and by automating the whole process to remove the friction that discourages use. Drawing on the development of a generic domain model implemented in the EVA platform, it demonstrates how a range of maturity models can be rapidly deployed, assessed, scored, and translated into actionable improvement plans with minimal custom code.

Function Modelling Explained: From Mission to Capabilities via Goals, Processes and Services

Function modelling is one of the most versatile and underused techniques in enterprise architecture — a hierarchical decomposition from mission to activities that brings clarity to scope, responsibility, and design. This white paper introduces function modelling and shows how it connects to goal modelling, process analysis, service design, and capability definition, providing a unified picture of how these paradigms relate and reinforce each other. It is a practical guide for architects, analysts, and anyone trying to make sense of what an organisation does and how to design what it should do next.

A Method Engineering Workbench on the EVA Platform

Most organisations document their development methods in wikis and Word documents — producing sprawling, inconsistent, and poorly connected artefacts that practitioners ignore or work around. This paper describes a goal-driven method engineering workbench built on the EVA platform, developed in response to exactly this problem at a large financial services organisation. By grounding methods in agreed goals rather than prescribed tasks, and delivering them through a single-page interactive portal, the approach makes method content genuinely accessible, maintainable, and tailorable to project type and practitioner role.

Why Modelling Notations Fail — and How to Design Visual Languages That Actually Work

Graphical models are central to enterprise architecture and information systems work, yet they frequently fail to deliver value — not because the underlying analysis is wrong, but because the notations are poorly designed, mismatched to their audience, or unable to highlight what matters. This doctoral research paper sets out a programme of design science research aimed at improving visual language design and tooling, drawing on insights from human cognition, perception, semiotics, and graphic design. It introduces polymetric diagramming as a technique for making models more expressive and proposes a meta-meta model and tool architecture to support more effective visual language design and use.

?Agility is a Stable Requirement

Change in technology, business and society is ever present and accelerating. It is very unlikely to slow down, thus it is a stable requirement. Our methods of doing strategy, devising future architectures and delivering systems capabilities in support of business processes, capabilities and delivery of services and products therefor need to address this.

A great deal of effort has been applied in Agile Methods over the past two decades to accelerate the system development process, i.e. doing things faster. No matter how quickly they deliver, however, these methods often produce something inflexible. This paper argues for a broader approach, which looks at: the context (much of the change required is outside the system delivery space; the focus (what should we be changing and why?); and three approaches to achieving the change with respect to system deliver: doing less things (de-scope, use packages, libraries, components, frameworks); do things faster (agile methods, automation, generation) and make more flexible things (runtime adaptable or domain model driven systems). The last of these is an unconventional approach that holds promise, even if you currently don’t practice, or succeed with, agile methods.

Finally, we also address the dilemma of accelerated delivery while dealing with large legacy application landscapes.

Published?

Keywords?

View

A Business and Solution Building Block Approach to EA Project Planning

Many EA groups battle to establish an overall programme plan in a way that is integrated, achievable and understandable to the stakeholder and sponsor community as well as the downstream implementation groups, including: IT, Process Management, Human Resources and Product Management. This paper presents an approach that achieves these objectives in a simple way. The approach is currently being implemented in a fairly new enterprise architecture function within an aggressively expanding Telco with promising results. The problem is introduced and a solution including meta model and visual representations is discussed. Early findings are made to the effect that the technique is simple to apply as well as being effective in establishing shared understanding between the EA function, project sponsors, project stakeholders and IT personnel. The technique is explicated with an example that should make it easy for others to replicate in their own setting.

Published in

Proceedings of Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM), Riga, Latvia

View