Todd Biske

In discussing how enterprise architecture supports merger, acquisition, partnership, and other evaluation opportunities with some attendees at the Troux 2011 conference this morning, I used two terms: fit and fitness. Fit is how well things align between the two companies/products. for example, what do the capability maps look like? Did things get sliced up in […]

Moderator: George Paras, A&G Editor-in-chief Panelists: Mike J. Walker, Principal Architect with Microsoft Aleks Buterman, Founder, SenseAgility Tim Westbrock, Managing Director EAdirections Paul Preiss, CEO, IASA This was a certainly a lively panel, and I don’t envy George’s task of trying to keep it on track. Here’s what I captured. Q: What does top performing […]

This was a panel discussion with representatives from Forrester (I believe), Troux, HP, and CA. The text below is my attempt to capture the points made by the speakers, and do not necessarily constitute my own opinions on these subjects. I didn’t capture the first couple of questions, but here’s a couple important points that […]

Tannia Dobbins, IT Relationship Manager from Advanced Micro Devices, gave this presentation. She walked through some of the key drivers behind enterprise architecture over the past 5 years at AMD, initially focused on supporting acquisitions and divestitures, moving into reducing complexity and risk when the economy downturn occurred, then to process efficiencies and business enablement, […]

In this session, David Hood, CEO of Troux, talked about Troux’s approach to the market. He began by presenting “Zucca’s Equations”: W2A: Where we are W3TG: Where we want to go HW(GT)2: How are we going to get there He called out that the need for EA is increasing at a rate much higher than […]

Imran Qayyum, an EA for Cisco, was the presenter for this session. They used the Proact BOST framework (Business Operations Systems and Technology) to get started, providing an industry specific reference model. Imran’s team is responsible for development services, which covers all sorts of software development technologies necessary for the Cisco Engineering teams to design […]

Sandra McCoy, Executive Director for Enterprise Architecture with Kaiser Permanente, gave this talk, subtitled as “Architecting Standardization in a Complex Healthcare Organization.” She mentioned that the challenges her team faces are that architects would like to work in a nice orderly fashion, but the environment never allows for that. It’s an uphill battle, with blind […]

Warren Ritchie, CIO for Volkswagen Group of America, presented this session and told us about his personal journey with EA, its utility in a globalization concept, and how the EA program at VW Group of America provided initial benefits. He believes that EA is the missing piece in strategy management. In his PhD dissertation (he […]

The first session I’m in is one of the few sessions by Troux staff at the conference, being given by Bill Cason, CTO of Troux. Always nice to see a CTO doing these things. Bill went over the IT strategy planning process, involving the business, the office of the CIO, and enterprise architecture. There was […]

Alex Cullen of Forrester posted an interesting blog regarding the “inevitable trend” of business empowerment. At the recent Forrester EA Forum, they invited attendees to rate on a 1-5 scale, whether or not “the EA function has close ties with business management” and whether or not the “technology strategy and standards allow for rapidly changing […]

On Twitter, Scott Ambler (@scottwambler) posted: Effective IT governance is based on motivation and enablement, not command and control. At first glance, it would be hard to argue with this statement. In general, most people don’t like command and control, and who wouldn’t prefer the carrot over the stick? Having thought a lot about governance […]