Martin Sykes

One of the drivers for me to develop the content in my book “Stories that Move Mountains” was the development of many different ‘marketectures’ to help market the ideas in a new architecture. This idea resurfaced in a recent posting from Cutter.

http://blog.cutter.com/2013/04/09/marketects-delivering-good-enterprise-architecture/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=marketects-delivering-good-enterprise-architecture​

I have a few new conference dates coming up. I will be presenting on Visual Stories at the Gartner EA Summit in London on May 14/15, and hosting a roundtable after the presentation.

Find out more and book your space at the conference website.

http://agendabuilder.gartner.com/EPAEU13/webpages/SessionDetail.aspx?EventSessionId=824

I will also be delivering a one day workshop on the use of CAST and visual storytelling at a workshop that preceeds the Enterprise Architect Europe conference and the Business Process Management conference in London on June 11th 2013.

Sign up on the conference website.

http://www.irmuk.co.uk/eac2013/workshops.cfm#w2

If you’ve got Windows 8 then there’s now a free app you can download to help create the Visual Story Map, which is the core model in the visual storytelling approach from my book Stories That Move Mountains. Qool (http://qool.598studiosinc.com/) allows…

I just heard that Alec Sharp will be back in London to run his “Working With Business Processes” class for IRMUK on Feb 28 / Mar 01.

If you are interested or know anyone who would be interested take a look at : http://www.irmuk.co.uk/events/92.cfm 

Alec is the world expert on the topic and very worth a look.

Martin

The last year has been a very busy one, and for everyone who subscribed to this feed a rather poor one in terms of entries. The reason for the lack of postings is very simply down to the effort required to write a book!.

This was released in the UK a few weeks ago and will be released in the US later in November. We have a website for the book with its own blog that provides background to the ideas of storytelling and visual design:

http://storiesthatmovemountains.com/

We also have a Facebook page where we hope to build more of a community around the CAST model and gather feedback.

http://www.facebook.com/StoriesThatMoveMountains

In the last few days a good selection of pages from the book have been uploaded to Amazon to allow you to click inside and see the very visual style we used.

You can also go to ComputerWeekly.com research library and read chapter 2 in full (although a registration is required).

If you download the chapter and scroll right to the end you will find out how to buy the book with a 30% discount.

I’ll get back to blogging about IT, Enterprise Architecture and IT Strategy on this blog, so if you’re interested in the content for storytelling, visual design and improving your presentations please take a look at the facebook page and my other blog.

In mid-2010 I held a series of training courses to cover many of the key techniques I’ve previously discussed on this blog. One attendee, Nick Malik, was in for his second time, the first being three years earlier. Another, Mark West, had been working with me as a contractor on a project. After the sessions Nick and I talked for a while and he suggested that I should write a book about the way I put the techniques together.

I’ve known various people over the years that have written books and it seemed like a lot of hard work, which with a day job I was not sure I wanted to take on. Move forward a month, Nick and Mark are now co-authors and we sat down to a few weekends of planning.

By October we had a plan, a chapter structure, even a name. By February we are well behind in the writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that writing a book is easy.

We have moved a long way though and I can certainly see we will be able to pull it all together. To help with the final miles of this marathon we have developed a web site where we can make a lot of the content available and also get feedback.

http://storiesthatmovemountains.com

All of the relevant blog posts from this site have been moved over and a lot more will now start to appear. This blog will now just focus on Enterprise Architect and IT topics.