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The Survivor's Guide to Enterprise Architecture
book

The Survivor's Guide to Enterprise Architecture

by Chloë Gray, Martin Sykes, Paul Homan
February 2025
Intermediate to advanced
224 pages
6h 35m
English
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
Content preview from The Survivor's Guide to Enterprise Architecture

25 THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

In 2012 Donald Rumsfeld (US Secretary of Defense) was being interviewed about the evidence linking Iraq’s government to weapons of mass destruction. He famously used the phrase: ‘There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’

There are plenty of unknowns in enterprise architecture work. We have to work with uncertainty, ambiguity, perceptions, estimates, and allow ourselves selective ignorance to manage the complexity and details of a modern organisation.

IMPOSTER SYNDROME

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781780176970