Jeff Kennedy

1 year, 6 months ago

A decadesworth of consumer technology.

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 […]

2 years, 10 months ago

All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray

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, […]

4 years, 4 months ago

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 of the series was chillingly clear and startlingly decisive1,2. Together, the coach, captain, […]

4 years, 5 months ago

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 is such a success that they circulate it to the usual suspects for […]

4 years, 5 months ago

“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: A chandelier hangs over an alleyway. At first it symbolises luxury and hope […]

4 years, 7 months ago

“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 several fundamental anti-patterns.  Needing to deliver some new information from one ERP system […]

4 years, 8 months ago

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 from this misunderstanding and misuse.  Under the banner of collaboration are in fact […]

4 years, 9 months ago

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 with challenges like these, project managers will often retreat into their defensive belief […]

4 years, 9 months ago

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 are noteworthy, or thought-provoking, or self-evident: Whole-of-Government enterprise architecture has been cancelled due […]

4 years, 9 months ago

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 closed/secret The nature of these exchanges has led to the creation of an […]

4 years, 9 months ago

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.  Perfectly-clear criteria define what cloud computing is, and therefore what it is not. […]

4 years, 10 months ago

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 dealing with compliance requirements and bringing together disconnected versions of identity from across […]