Implementing Effective Governance

According to ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick’s coverage of the recent Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration summit, SOA governance and siloed thinking is top of mind. If this really is the case, how do we make our governance efforts more effective? The more I think about this, the more I come back to a recent post […]

Book Review: Troux Enterprise Architecture Solutions

I recently completed reading the book Troux Enterprise Architecture Solutions by Richard Reese. First, the disclosure: this book was provided to me by Packt Publishing for the explicit purpose of this review. In addition, Packt is also the publisher of my own book, SOA Governance. I have no relationship with Troux, however, I have had […]

Architecture by Influence: Leadership

There was a great discussion on Twitter today regarding influence, mandates, and leadership. My interest started with a tweet from Chris Venable, directed at Burton Group/Gartner EA analyst, Mike Rollings: If EA is so important, why must it do everything through influence? No one ever says that to the CIO… I thought this was a […]

Architecture by Influence: Solution Architecture

A key to any Enterprise Architecture program is solution architecture. Solution architecture is where work gets done. If your EA team is disconnected from the solution architecture effort, you’ll probably hear the term “ivory tower” a lot. Unfortunately, it’s far more common than you may think. Looking the typical project, the first question is where […]

Apps on TV? Ho hum.

Twitter was a buzz with Google TV yesterday, and of course, people were making comparisons to Apple TV, talking about apps the whole time. I watched the video on YouTube, and frankly, I didn’t see anything revolutionary. I saw a bunch of features that may cater to the tech crowd, but will largely go unused […]

Making Good Decisions

This is a first in what I hope will be a few blogs around the subject of architecture by influence. There are no shortage of people who are writing that enterprise architects can’t be successful unless they have some teeth, i.e. the ability to stop activities in their tracks that aren’t compliant with the architectural […]

Maintaining a Service Mentailty

On Twitter, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links started a conversation with the question: Do #entarch frameworks enable or constrain practice of (value from) enterprise architecture? In my comments back to Brenda, it became clear to me that there’s a trap that many teams fall into, not just Enterprise Architecture, and that’s falling into an inward […]

Behold! The Gonkulator!

Pardon the Phineas and Ferb reference, but when I read this post from Chris Lockhart, I couldn’t help but think of Professor Doofenschmirtz and his inventions. I really liked this post from Chris and how it emphasizes understanding the nature of the problem at hand. I’ve had first hand experience at more than one company […]

Intelligent Workload Distribution

While I’m not doing much these days in the BPM space, I did recently have lunch with a friend of mine who works for Genesys Lab. I don’t normally talk about vendor products by name, but the iWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) product had a different enough approach from things I’ve seen that I thought I’d […]

Be an Enterprise Activist, not Archivist

Yesterday afternoon, I was involved with a discussion around EA 201x. The conversation began at a lunch meeting I had with Mike Rollings (@mikerollings) of Burton Group/Gartner, and continued on with Brenda Michelson (@bmichelson) of Elemental Links and fellow EA Chris Bird (@seabird20), among others. Near the end of the conversation, Chris asked the question, […]