6 years, 4 months ago

What Makes a Monolith Monolithic?

  It seems like everybody throws around the term “monolith”, but what do we mean by that? Sam Newman started the ball rolling yesterday with this tweet: My first response was a (semi) joke: I say semi joke because, in truth, semantics (i.e. meaning) is critical. The English language has a horrible tendency to overload […]

6 years, 7 months ago

Microservices, Monoliths, and Modularity

  There are very valid reasons for considering a microservice architecture (MSA) when building/evolving an application. In my opinion, however, forcing modularity isn’t one of those very valid reasons. Just the other day, I saw tweet from Simon Brown saying this same thing: I still like his comment from two years back: “I’ll keep saying […]

7 years, 29 days ago

Monolithic Applications and Enterprise Gravel

It’s been almost a year since I’ve written anything about microservices, and while a lot has been said on that subject, it’s one I still monitor to see what new pops up. The opening of a blog post that I read last week caught my attention: Coined by Melvin Conway in 1968, Conway’s Law states: […]

7 years, 1 month ago

EAdirections Tenth Anniversary Observations

Through ten years of working with dozens of companies, we have seen a lot of good and some not so good developments related to Enterprise Architecture. In recognition of those 10 years, those dozens of companies, and continued success, we would like t…

7 years, 1 month ago

EAdirections Tenth Anniversary Observations

Through ten years of working with dozens of companies, we have seen a lot of good and some not so good developments related to Enterprise Architecture. In recognition of those 10 years, those dozens of companies, and continued success, we would like t…

8 years, 3 months ago

You May Not Need A CDO — But Wouldn’t You Want To Improve Your Odds Of Success?

Jennifer Belissent and I just published a report on the role of the Chief Data Officer that we’re hearing so much about these days Top Performers Appoint Chief Data Officers. To introduce the report, we sat down with our press team at Forrester to talk about the findings and about the implications for our clients.

Forrester PR: There’s a ton of fantastic data in the report around the CDO. If you had to call out the most surprising finding, what would top your list?

Gene: No question, it’s the high correlation between high-performing companies and those with CDOs. Jennifer and I both feel that strong data capabilities are critical for organizations today and that the data agenda is quite complex and in need of strong leadership. That all means that it’s quite logical to expect a correlation between strong data leadership and company performance — but given the relative newness of the CDO role, it was surprising to see firm performance so closely linked to the role.

Of course, you can’t infer cause and effect from correlation — the data could mean that execs in high-performing companies think having a CDO role is a good idea as much as it could mean CDOs are materially contributing to high performance. Either way, that single statistic should make one take a serious look at the role in organizations without clear data leadership.

And you’re right, there’s a ton of fantastic data in this report; the next most surprising finding is just the rapid adoption of the role. Forty-five percent of organizations globally is a lot, and this was a particularly broad-based survey, with more than 3,000 respondents.

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11 years, 6 months ago

Measure What Really Matters

I ran across a very interesting op-ed by Tim Jackson on productivity today in the New York Times. The gist of his well-articulated argument is that due to our relentless drive for increased output, certain professions and their attendant tasks…