Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Gene Hughson While on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, an interesting graphic caught my eye. Titled “The Iceberg of Ignorance”, it referred to a 1989 study in which: …consultant Sidney Yoshida concluded: “Only 4% of an organization’s front line problems are known by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 74% by supervisors and 100% […]
Thanks to Volkswagen, we now have an idea of the cost of failing to maintain an ethical culture, roughly $18 billion US (emphasis added in the quoted text below by me): Volkswagen’s financial disclosure on Friday, in a preliminary earnings report, came a day after the company agreed on the outlines of a plan to […]
There’s an old saying that if you put one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in a bucket of boiling water, on average you’re comfortable. Sometimes analyzing information in the aggregate obscures rather than enlightens. A statistician named Francis Anscombe pointed out this same principle in a more visual (though less colorful) […]
I’ve made another guest appearance on Architecture Corner. In episode 39, “New and Obsolete”, Greger Wikstrand, Casimir Artmann and I discuss product lifetimes and the Internet of Things. How could Nest have better handled the end of life of the Revolv device?
There’s an old rhyme about what a bride should wear for luck on her wedding day: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…”. While reading an article on the origins of the US highway system, I thought about this rhyme in relation to the concept of innovation. Part of that article related the US […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 389, features Tom’s essay on Agile acceptance testing, Kim Pries talking about soft skills, and a Form Follows Function installment on sense-making and decision-making in the practice of software architecture. Tom and I discuss my post “OODA vs PDCA – What’s the […]
On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest. To be clear, they are not simply ceasing to support the product, […]
I had the pleasure of appearing on episode #367 of Architecture Corner, “Fail fast, learn fast”, with Greger Wikstrand and Casimir Artmann. In the episode, we discuss learning, experiments, and the idea of “fail fast” in relation to the recent incident with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot, @TayandYou. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much […]
The FBI, with the help of a third party, has managed to gain access to Syed Farook’s iPhone. In a court filing Monday, the FBI stated that they did not require Apple’s help any longer. Apple, on the other hand, now has a need to know what vulnerability was exploited to access the phone. Whether […]
Take a couple of seconds and watch the clip in the tweet below: While it would be incredibly difficult to predict that exact outcome, it is also incredibly easy to foresee that it’s a possibility. As the saying goes, “forewarned is forearmed”. Being forewarned and forearmed is an important part of what an architect does. […]
One of the big news items from last week was DropBox’s announcement that it had brought its file storage infrastructure in-house, moving (mostly) away from AWS: Years ago, we called Dropbox a “Magic Pocket” because it was designed to keep all your files in one convenient place. Dropbox has evolved from that simple beginning to […]
Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts about architecture, innovation, and organizations as systems (a list of previous posts can be found at the bottom of the page) for quite a while now. His latest, “Technology permeats innovation”, touches on an important point – the need for IT to add value and not just […]