Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Jeff Kennedy Holding the balanced view and perspective “I keep trying to teach the business about enterprise architecture but they just don’t get it!“ A former colleague from a nearby university would periodically invite me to coffee for a lengthy discussion about the frustrations of working as an enterprise architect in higher education. Each time, she’d end […]
The Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology1, “CAUDIT”, provides valuable support and governance to several communities of practice operating across more than sixty member organisations. The CAUDIT Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice is the longest-running of those communities, and is holding is thirteenth annual in-person symposium meeting in November 2018 at Curtin University […]
1991 i did not keep a television for the twelve years i spent living alone, preferring books and music to the ghastly and limited broadcast offerings of the 1990s. 2003 When we first started living together, my wife-to-be produced her elderly SONY Trinitron television, a cubic-metre of black plastic shrouding a buzzy, hot, squealing cathode-ray […]
Unsettled, the haplessly-institutionalised incumbents huddled together for warmth, two to a cubicle, cruel flickering artificial light obliterating any capacity they once might have harbored for self-actualisation or for problem-solving, casting an especially-stark relief upon their miserable, wasteful, angsty souls. They were unsettled by the juggernaut paperweight reputation of the new shepherd coming to guide them, […]
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 of the series was chillingly clear and startlingly decisive1,2. Together, the coach, captain, […]
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 is such a success that they circulate it to the usual suspects for […]
“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: A chandelier hangs over an alleyway. At first it symbolises luxury and hope […]
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 several fundamental anti-patterns. Needing to deliver some new information from one ERP system […]
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 from this misunderstanding and misuse. Under the banner of collaboration are in fact […]
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 with challenges like these, project managers will often retreat into their defensive belief […]
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 are noteworthy, or thought-provoking, or self-evident: Whole-of-Government enterprise architecture has been cancelled due […]
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 closed/secret The nature of these exchanges has led to the creation of an […]