As I’m about to complete my share of a longer engagement on using Lean principles to improve the processes at an online services firm, it occurred to me that the efforts we undertook to properly embed Architecture practices into their Scrum process…
A question on LinkedIn recently reminded me that, as the team leader for Segment Architecture in my former EA team, I was accountable for identifying a core set of deliverables for the team. The idea was that we could focus on defining…
In the world of Enterprise Architecture, we are still creating “shared” understanding of how to tell our stakeholders what we do. There is no consistency in our diagrams or our descriptions just yet. This post will discuss the different ways we present…
I have, on occasion, been asked to spend time with an Enterprise Architecture team to help that team improve their maturity. It’s a great opportunity for me to learn, and share, and work with some of the smartest people on earth: Enterprise…
One thing that happens when you work to develop change across an organization: you detect the “cultural” elements of an organization that often go unnoticed by the people involved. Just as a “Fish discovers water last,” people working in a cultural context…
There is a contradiction that shows up in many books and articles on agile software development. . And I’m going to rant a little on one of them: the “developer” bias in Agile software practices. Before I begin my rant, I’d like…
In Enterprise Architecture, one of the most important aspects of the job is not only to communicate, but to lead change. In other words, it is great to have the data to point to a problem in an enterprise. It is better…
As an architect involved in an agile implementation (my current gig), you can imagine how interested I was to see that there’s a new book on Agile Architecture, and perhaps how disappointed I was to see that it focused on SOA and…
As a lot, Enterprise Architects are not terribly humble people. We name frameworks after ourselves, and sometimes go to great lengths to correct the “misinterpretations” of others who describe our work in a way that we don’t agree with. Yet, recognizing that…
In the Open Group conference at Newport Beach, I listened to a series of presentations on business architecture. In one of them, the presenter described his practice of using Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas to create a model of his program’s environment after…
I heard some very interesting talks today from Len Fehskens and Jeff Scott at the Open Group conference. One thing that I picked up in a meeting yesterday was the notion that TOGAF 9.1 is built on “best practices.” Today, as Jeff…
I explained to one of my clients recently that there is a perception of animosity between the Enterprise Architecture community and the Agile community. Both sides make assumptions about the other, often assumptions that are simply unfair. For example, many in the…