Posts by: Jeff Kennedy

Line-In-The-Sand Leadership

We know that attitude, culture, and engagement underpin the performance of a team.  Despite knowing this, the announcement yesterday that four key players in the Austalian cricket squad currently touring India will be excluded from selection to play in the third test-match…

Attack of the Vegan Zombie Business Cases

The Business Analyst and the Project Manager have yet another impossible timeframe forced upon them, which they accept.  Faced with the prospect of losing the confidence of their Project Sponsor, they somehow manage to squeeze out their Business Case.  The Business Case…

“Fairy Bright Eyes”, Projects, and Decay

“Fairy Bright Eyes” is an installation by Ryan Monro, one of a dozen artworks in Auckland’s Learning Precinct Micro Sites initiative1.  A unexpected curiousity in an unusual location on a university campus, this piece represents beautiful aspirations and their subsequent inevitable decay:…

“What value will a Solution Architect add to this?”

After some prompting, the technical requirements arrived for architectural review.  They had been prepared from a well-intentioned place and under the pressure of project timelines.  Scanning through them revealed serious problems: these requirements were much too far progressed, and were based upon…

busoto is collaboration

In 2011, and again in 2012, while preparing to cofacilitate with Ric Phillips1 a workshop about collaboration across an enterprise-architecture community of practice, we were reminded with jarringly clarity that the word collaboration is misunderstood and misused, and that unhelpful behaviours result…

The Architecture For This Project Is Out Of Scope

It is fair to say that the project in question has not started well. A lengthy incubation period executed in isolation from business and delivery partners has seen resources consumed in exchange for very little demonstrable progress, and high-level commitment waning. Faced…

Ideal Circumstances for EA Frameworks

Significant touchstones, at least for some people, some of the time, the series of hype cycle devices published annually by Gartner inform and guide industry behaviours, lead and shape the formulation of strategy. Three features of the current enterprise architecture hype cycle1…

Heal the Eternal Disconnect Between Project Managers and Enterprise Architects!

Typical exchanges between project managers and enterprise architects have historically, anecdotally, and sterotypically been predictable, unconstructive, and unsatisfactory affairs that juggle and irritate tensions across dimensions such as: enterprise context vs project scope change-friendly capability delivery2 vs project delivery methodological and framework differences open/collaborative vs…

Define Cloud Computing and Abolish Cloud Confusion!

The Understanding Problem While presenting a keynote address to an audience of information-technology people from the higher-education sector, a senior representative of a super-vendor smiled handsomely and said: “The cloud means different things to different people.“ That is a very unhelpful statement. …

Identity Registries and Reconciliation Posture

A vendor recently asked me a question, and not for the first time, that amounted to “why won’t you buy these delicious software licenses for our amazing identity-management suite, which provides comprehensive solutions to the challenges faced by North American corporations in…

Anti-Collaboration and the Hungry-Hippo Secret-Society

Trapped inside their plastic bubble-land, committed forever to competing for access to worthless inedible coloured plastic baubles that represent to them a measure of status, members of the hungry-hippo secret-society collaborate in isolation from the world around them, waiting for their plastic…

Service-Mediation Scenarios

Enterprise Service Bus and Espresso One of the few really-good boutique coffee-roasters and espresso specialists in Auckland labels its beans “esb”, for “ethically-sourced beans”. It’s something of a stretch, but espresso is important and beneficial in fundamental, foundational ways not dissimilar to…
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