Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Nick Malik In the May 15th issue of CIO magazine, there is a rather interesting article, especially for Enterprise Architecture practitioners. The article, written by Stephanie Overby (a freelance writer), is titled “RIP I.T. Value” and opens with the f…
I was just privy to a conversation about the value of creating a specific kind of metamodel, and it made me wonder… if I had to explain the concept of a metamodel to someone, how would I do it? First, let’s start by defining the term “met…
The notion of an Enterprise Architect in a Segment (aka “Segment Architect”) has been fairly well described in for the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework. (FSAM reference). It is not always well understood, and there are …
From time to time, I hear interesting anecdotes from colleagues or friends outside Microsoft, telling me a story about what it’s like to work at Microsoft. Often these stories are placed into a comparative context, as in: our culture is dif…
Just reading through a LinkedIn thread on “the biggest problem facing Enterprise Architecture,” and I noticed one response that struck a chord. Charles Wade stated the biggest problem as: “Practicality! We spend allot[sic] of time in the Iv…
A co-worker and I spent an hour doing something innovative… and no, it was not part of a “Google 20% strategy.” We spent an hour discussing PKI, personal identity, and trust of both “passive content” (like documents) and “active conte…
I cannot take credit for that aphorism… credit goes to Jan Van Til. He coined the term after reading Tom Graves’ excellent post on the architecture of responsibility. Tom’s post details the philosophical challenges of a responsibility…
The word ‘value’ has too many meanings and sometimes it masks a real problem. I had a conversation with a very smart customer recently, where their IT division is going through a transformation to help their business compete. I asked …
Through a discussion on LinkedIn, I ran across a rather goofy blog post titled (“EA does not matter”), an obvious riff on Nick Carr’s famous HBR article. Unfortunately, while Nick Carr is a well established business and IT contributor, the …
I was speaking with a software architect, yesterday, after Martin Sykes, Mark West, and myself presented our ideas around Visual Stories to about 150 consultants. He asked me about my role and when I explained that I am an Enterprise Architect, h…
In order to solve a problem, you have to know the problem you are solving. In a growing number of organizations, Enterprise Architecture is responsible for insuring the alignment of business change programs (including but not limited to programs …
Twenty five years ago, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lift off, killing seven astronauts. But for me, that explosion over Cape Canaveral took away Captain Kirk, Spock, Bones, and all the other denizens of the United Federatio…