Acknowledgements & Influences

Much of what I know comes from people I've worked with, worked for, managed and occasionally disagreed with. They have all contributed something, whether through their knowledge, experience, patience or willingness to challenge an idea.

I've also been fortunate to work across different industries, technologies and disciplines. One thing that has become increasingly clear is that no single profession has a monopoly on good thinking.

This page acknowledges those influences, including the books that have shaped my approach to understanding problems, designing solutions and getting things to work in practice.

Some of the references are rather old, at least by the standards of an industry that reinvents itself every five minutes.

I make no apology for that. Tools change. The underlying problems are often surprisingly familiar.

People Who Have Shaped My Thinking

This website draws upon years of practical experience, formal study, conversations and the occasional painful lesson.

I owe a considerable debt to colleagues, clients, managers, teams and fellow practitioners. Some taught me particular skills. Others showed me how to approach a problem, challenge an assumption or recognise when the apparently obvious answer was probably wrong.

There have also been people whose contributions were less immediately apparent. Those who questioned an approach, pointed out an omission or simply demonstrated a better way of doing something.

It is remarkable how much can be learned from somebody who understands their work and is willing to explain it.

I am grateful to them all.

Primo Levi, Faussone and The Wrench

My favourite book is The Wrench by Primo Levi, originally published in Italian as La chiave a stella in 1978.

Levi was a chemist, writer and survivor of Auschwitz. A quietly remarkable human being with an extraordinary ability to recognise dignity, intelligence and meaning in ordinary work.

I'd have loved to share a coffee, or perhaps a spanner, with him.

Meet Faussone

The central character, Libertino Faussone, is a travelling rigger who spends his life assembling complicated machinery in difficult places.

He works with cranes, cables, steel structures and equipment that must be made to work, often in circumstances that would make most project managers reach nervously for their risk registers.

Faussone is not particularly interested in fashionable terminology or grand theories. He knows his materials, understands his tools, recognises when something is wrong and takes considerable pride in doing the job properly.

What appeals to me is the relationship between thinking and doing.

He doesn't need a grand methodology to explain his competence. He understands the problem, considers what needs to be done, applies his experience and takes responsibility for the result.

There is an important distinction between knowing how something ought to work and having the practical understanding to make it work.

Ideally, of course, you need both.

Why This Matters to Me

My career has taken me across business processes, data, systems architecture, technology and programme delivery.

I've deliberately developed an ability to work across these different layers rather than becoming confined to one of them.

This matters because a business problem doesn't conveniently stop at the boundary of somebody's technical specialism.

A requirement may begin with a customer, become a business process, acquire policies and controls, turn into a data model and eventually find its way into software and operational systems.

Each layer has its own specialists, language and preferred tools. All entirely reasonable. The difficulty arises when nobody is looking at the relationships between them.

Faussone would recognise the problem. A structure is not made sound simply because each component looks impressive when viewed in isolation.

The connections matter.

Understanding the Consequences

In technology, there is often considerable pressure to get something delivered. Sometimes the sensible thing is to take a shortcut.

I have no objection to that, provided the reasoning and consequences are understood.

What causes difficulty is pretending that the shortcut wasn't taken, or failing to record the architectural and technical debt left behind.

Something that works today may become tomorrow's expensive mystery.

This is where I see the practical value of architecture. Not as an exercise in producing impressive diagrams, but as a way of understanding how things fit together, making decisions visible and keeping future options open.

A beautifully documented system that doesn't work is of little use. Equally, a working system that nobody understands may be storing up problems for somebody else.

Levi doesn't turn Faussone into a management consultant. Thankfully.

He simply allows an experienced craftsman to explain his work, his judgement and what it means to do something well.

If your project is wobbling, your system is going off-spec or the team is waiting for another slide deck, you could do worse than find yourself a Faussone.

He might not give you a presentation. He would probably want to have a look at what's actually going on.

Books, Ideas and Intellectual Influences

The following books have influenced my thinking in different ways.

Some deal with technology and architecture, others with philosophy, systems thinking, management or the peculiarities of human behaviour.

They are not presented as a definitive reading list. They are simply books I've found useful, interesting or worth returning to.

Several come from my own well-worn bookshelf. A few have survived several generations of supposedly revolutionary technology.

There is a lesson in that somewhere.

The references are grouped by subject. Select a heading to expand the relevant books.

Literature, Philosophy & Craft

Levi, P. (1990). The Wrench. Translated by W. Weaver. London: Abacus. Originally published in 1978 as La chiave a stella. My favourite. Practical competence, dignity and a wonderful appreciation of work done properly.
Forstater, M. (2000). The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius. London: HarperCollins. A useful reminder that sound judgement, responsibility and self-discipline are hardly new ideas.
Hemingway, E. (1952). The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner. Persistence, dignity and the ability to keep going when circumstances are less than helpful.
Norman, D.A. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Subsequently published as The Design of Everyday Things. Particularly useful when wondering whether the user or the designer is responsible for a badly designed door.

Systems Thinking & Practice

Checkland, P. (1999). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. An important influence on my approach to understanding problems before selecting solutions.
Senge, P.M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday/Currency. Organisations are systems of relationships, not simply collections of departments. Systems don't pay much attention to organisational charts.
Open University (2003). Systems Thinking and Practice. Milton Keynes: Open University. A practical foundation for exploring complexity and the consequences of decisions across connected systems.
Rich, B.R. and Janos, L. (1996). Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of Years at Lockheed. London: Little, Brown and Company. Small teams, technical competence, autonomy and the importance of knowing what really matters.

Architecture, Design & Modelling

Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R. and Vlissides, J. (1994). Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley. Reusable ideas that have survived rather longer than many of the technologies used to implement them.
Fowler, M. et al. (2003). Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Addison-Wesley. Still valuable for understanding recurring architectural problems, irrespective of current tooling.
Fowler, M. (2004). UML Distilled. 3rd edition. Addison-Wesley. A useful antidote to the belief that every diagram needs to become a major undertaking.
Britton, C. (2001). IT Architectures and Middleware. Addison-Wesley. Integration challenges existed long before everything acquired the word cloud.
Downes, E., Clare, P. and Coe, I. (1992). SSADM: Application and Context. 2nd edition. Addison-Wesley. Yes, SSADM. Old methods can still explain why structure, analysis and traceability matter.
Rock-Evans, R. (1983). A Simple Introduction to Data and Activity Analysis. Prentice Hall. Sometimes the fundamentals are explained better in a slim older volume than a modern technical manual.
Lankhorst, M. et al. (2009). Enterprise Architecture at Work: Modelling, Communication and Analysis. 2nd edition. Springer. Architecture as a means of communication, analysis and joining things together. Not simply drawing boxes.

Modelling & Diagramming Tools

Three concise Open University texts that have proved useful in teaching, coaching and explaining ideas.

Open University (2003). Modelling. ISBN: 0749241691.
Open University (2003). Diagramming. ISBN: 0749241675.
Open University (2003). A Primer. ISBN: 0749255811.

Data, Information & Enterprise Systems

Kimball, R. and Ross, M. (2016). The Kimball Group Reader. 2nd edition. Wiley. I've lost count of how many dimensional models this has helped explain or justify.
Baum, D. (2020). Cloud Data Science for Dummies. Wiley. More useful than the title might suggest.
Müller, T. (2020). SAP S/4HANA: An Introduction. 2nd edition. SAP Press. A useful starting point when the SAP landscape begins to resemble a language of its own.
Walsh, C. (2010). Key Management Ratios. 4th edition. Financial Times/Prentice Hall. Helpful when governance meetings become more concerned with the colour of the RAG status than what the numbers actually mean.

Programme & Project Management

Reiss, G. (2007). Project Management Demystified. 3rd edition. Routledge. A clear, practical treatment of project management without unnecessary ceremony.
Parkes, P. (2011). NLP for Project Managers. Kogan Page. A reminder that delivery involves people, communication and persuasion, not simply plans and milestones. I regard NLP claims critically, rather than as established science.

Artificial Intelligence & Ethics

Barrat, J. (2013). Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. Thomas Dunne Books. An early and provocative examination of advanced AI risks. Worth reading critically, particularly when considering accountability and consequences.

Consulting, Organisations & Humour

Ashford, M. (1998). Con Tricks: The World of Management Consultancy and How to Make It Work for You. Simon & Schuster. A useful reminder that professional advice should deliver something more valuable than another invoice.
Lloyd, J. and Mitchinson, J. (2008). Advanced Banter: The QI Book of Quotations. Faber & Faber. Humour and insight often make uncomfortable truths easier to recognise.
Adams, S. (1996). The Dilbert Principle. HarperBusiness. Corporate absurdity explained through satire. Some of it remains uncomfortably familiar.
Shore, D. (Creator). House, M.D. (2004–2012). Television series. Question the evidence, challenge assumptions and remember that the obvious diagnosis may be wrong. Preferably with rather better interpersonal skills than House.

Illustrations, Diagrams & Website Tools

Some of the illustrations and diagrams on this website were produced with assistance from ChatGPT, working from my original concepts, sketches and specifications.

The ideas, reasoning and interpretation are mine. AI has helped with aspects of visual presentation, editing and production.

I regard these tools much as I regard other technologies. They can be extremely useful when applied to a reasonably well-understood problem. They don't remove the need to know what you're trying to achieve.

Responsibility for the published content, including its errors and omissions, remains with me.

A Word for the Website Builders

Thanks also to Webador for providing the tools used to construct and maintain this website.

It is rather satisfying that a collection of ideas, sketches, diagrams and occasional bits of HTML can become a functioning website without requiring an entire development team.

Faussone might have appreciated that. Although I suspect he would still have wanted to inspect the joins.

Copyright, Attribution & Use

Unless otherwise stated, the original text, diagrams, models and other material on this website are my work.

External ideas, published works and other sources are acknowledged where appropriate.

You are welcome to reference or link to material on this site, with appropriate attribution to Iain Toolin and www.iaintoolin.com .

Downloadable templates, examples and working artefacts may be used in accordance with any terms accompanying the individual material.

Please do not reproduce substantial portions of the original content, redistribute it commercially or present it as your own without permission.

If you would like to reuse material beyond ordinary quotation and referencing, please get in touch .

Nothing in this statement restricts uses permitted by applicable copyright law or overrides the rights of third-party copyright holders.

Good thinking rarely develops in isolation. It comes from curiosity, experience, the willingness to listen and the occasional realisation that somebody else has already solved much of the problem.

The trick is recognising when to learn from them rather than inventing another methodology.