Strategy & Enterprise
Models for enterprise-level choices: what to build, buy, or rent, where differentiation lives, and how platforms and ecosystems create compounding value.
- No. 079
Wardley Mapping
Map components by the value they provide and how evolved they are, from genesis to commodity.
- No. 080
Core vs Context
Invest in what differentiates you; standardise or outsource everything else.
- No. 081
Capability Mapping
Describe what the business does, independent of how, by whom, or with which system.
- No. 082
Platforms and Network Effects
A platform's value grows with each participant — design for adoption, not just function.
- No. 083
Build, Buy, or Partner
Choose the sourcing model by differentiation, market maturity, and your ability to operate it.
- No. 084
Ecosystems
Your architecture lives in a wider habitat of partners, vendors, regulators, and standards — design for the whole of it.
- No. 085
Optionality
Prefer positions that give you the right, but not the obligation, to act in the future.
- No. 086
Operating Model (Standardisation and Integration)
Decide how standardised your business processes must be and how tightly units must share data; the architecture follows from that choice.
- No. 087
TIME Portfolio Triage
Sort each application by business value and technical quality into Tolerate, Invest, Migrate or Eliminate, and fund it accordingly.
- No. 088
Three Horizons
Manage the core, the emerging and the future at the same time, with different goals, measures and funding for each.
- No. 089
Guardrails, Not Gates
Govern by setting clear, ideally automated, boundaries and paved roads, and review only what crosses them, instead of making every change queue for approval.
- No. 090
Data as a Product (Data Mesh)
Domains own and publish their data as products, discoverable, addressable, trustworthy and self-describing, instead of a central team piping everything into a lake.
- No. 091
Exit Strategy (Lock-in as a Design Input)
Decide how you would leave a vendor or platform before you commit, and trade the switching cost consciously against the value the dependency brings.
- No. 092
The Nature of the Firm (Transaction Costs)
Firms exist because using the market has costs; an activity belongs inside when organising it there is cheaper than buying it, so when those costs change, the boundaries should too.