Next to the perennial favorite "What Enterprise Architecture is and/or is not," I'm inclined to believe debates over frameworks are the hottest debates going right now. Why is that?
There are many challenges that CIO's are facing in today's cloudy, jargony, swirling maelstrom of Information Technology. But isn't there something missing in the conversation that totally supersedes these challenges?
An architecture that is merely a PDF with a couple of generic line-box-arrow diagrams coupled with a few colorful "pancake" pictures isn't really an architecture. It's a marketing glossy. A white paper is too generic to be passed off as a real…
There is much to recommend about changing how we create, deploy and offer our services and products to customers. Yet there is an entire consulting industry built around avoiding the pitfalls of cloud.
As technology architecture professionals, we can only be successful and valuable to those who pay us if we frame our work in terms of capabilities at the outset. If we start with details, we'll ultimately fail.
An architecture for a solution requires understanding the problem at hand well enough that solving it can be described in terms that everyone understands. The architect speaks in terms of capabilities, not products.
What would it take for your business to view IT as a valuable, essential partner instead of an annoying cost-center that they're forced to deal with? Wouldn't that be better for you and better for them?
Large technology organizations don't simply become agile. They're either agile or not. If they're not, the path to being so is via change, often radical change at that.
The purpose of a company is to make money and to make that money while somehow imparting a positive effect to its customers. Can IT enable the business without a clearly laid out Vision? Without that sense of purpose, doesn't IT typically…
Architecture is about holistically describing the system of people, process and technology. It can be abstract and conceptual, or it can be concrete and detailed. But it is never merely a specific product set from a specific vendor.
Anything IT does should be seen as consistent. Using words like "Principle" with the definition most people have for it is a sure-fire way to disappoint folks. It turns out that instead of a iron clad 'always-will-do' thing, our Principles are merely…