Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Ric Phillips I can’t escape the feeling that today’s IT decision makers are passionately committed to building the best IT infrastructure the 1990′s have to offer. I have a very clear memory from the early eighties. I was standing on St Kilda Rd. It was a beautiful Melbourne weekday. Sun shining through the plane trees. A soft […]
No seriously – the iPad is a great productivity tool. And this is why… I have left the dump-and-pick-up ETL point-to-point days of personal computing that the “desktop” forced on me, and started to enjoy the productivity-goodness of the iOS Personal Service Bus. I do like my iPad. But not for it’s specification – over […]
I am frequently in the front row of the bah-humbug choir when it comes to singing the praises of IT-Business alignment in enterprise architecture. However, to be fair to all those who advocate ‘alignment’, the concern motivating that advoc…
This one’s from the let’s-all-have-a-nice-cup-tea-and-a-nap file. I believe in measurement. I believe that if you can’t measure something you are going to have a devil of a time managing it. I believe in making decisions based on sound evidence. I am a huge fan of the scientific method – in fact I think most of […]
Today I was reading an op-ed piece in MIS titled “Maintain or Modernise“. This is a one-pager that summarises some received wisdom on the need for organisations to effectively manage the pressure to adopt new technologies and mitigate the risks they entail. Here is the passage that sets up the thesis of the article…. Businesses […]
If you are an Enterprise Architect and want to be successful, you will need to escape the straight jacket of technology. It is imperative that you get out of IT, establish relationships with the business leaders in your organisation, and start to apply your energies and skills where the real decisions are made. To do […]
My country, Australia, is at war. In Afghanistan of course. Something has been changing as a result of that engagement, and our past engagement in Iraq. The politicians – who decide the strategy – have begun dissimulating by distancing themselves from strategic decisions. The mechanism is simple. If there is criticism, or questions over our current strategic […]
In a previous post I made some claims about complexity in organisational systems: Complexity is neither good or bad. There is no such thing as a complex system. No rule can express the relationship between the operational cost of a system and its compl…
Managers do not need enterprise architects to talk like them, they need us to talk to them. Recently I received a link to a challenge on LinkedIn, posted by Kevin Smith, to describe the purpose of enterprise architecture in the 160 characters allowed …
Here are some definitions of Enterprise Architecture provided by organisations with direct involvement in the development of EA: JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee – UK): Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an enterprise-wide approach for alig…
Technology that asserts itself over the purpose for which it was designed, … and needs to be configured, managed, and optimised will be its own anti-pattern. We want … ‘invisible’ technology and … immediate and direct exp…