entarch

Re-purposing the Technical Debt Metaphor

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Recently, I had cause to re-visit the ‘Technical Debt’ metaphor coined by Ward  Cunningham when referring to agile software development:
I am finding, however, it applies to a much broader set of circumstances such as: unmanaged introduction of Consumer-grade I.T., Line-of-Business ‘Credit -Card-Cloud’ consumption and ‘technology-solution-without-a-requirement-and/or-architecture’ implementations. So I’ve had a go a rewriting Ward’s original words:-

“Technical debt is a metaphor an incremental, get-something-started approach with the easy acquisition of money through fast loans.



A monetary loan, of course, has to be paid back with interest. In terms of software development & technology selection &  deployment, payback requires the technicians to re-work the solution as they learn more about how it interacts with other technologies and which features are being used, or not, or are now needed. Just as monetary debt can easily spiral out of control if not managed properly, so can technical debt.



In business, the metaphor is often used to illustrate the concept that an organization will end up spending more in the future by not having sufficient understanding the complete requirements before selecting a solution. The assumption is that if an organization chooses to ignore a course of action it knows should be taken, the organization will risk paying for it in terms of time, money or damage to the organization’s reputation in the future. As time goes by, efforts to go back and address the missing requirements may become more complicated and, otherwise, messy. Eventually the problem may reach a tipping point and the organization must then decide whether or not to honour its original debt and continue investing time and effort to fix the problem. This decision can be made more difficult by something called ‘the sunk cost effect’, which is the emotional tendency of humans to want to continue investing in something that clearly isn’t working (e.g. can’t scale or missing features)”.


Anything you’d add/change/delete?

#INFOARCH – INFORMATION OWNERSHIP

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While I am preparing to publish my next article on Information Management and taking the opportunity of a email discussion with Jean Evelette – the author of the very interesting website MARS – Metadata And Repository System – I realized that a clarification regarding information ownership was needed. Here is the famous question: Who is owning the information? I […]

The Most Important EA Deliverable

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Originally posted on Alec Blair:
So, you’re busy working away at your models.  The team is busy discussing the nitty, gritty things around taxonomies and ontologies.  Others are creating detailed elaborations of different aspects of one of the dimensions of your enterprise architecture.  You look at the work and say, “Damn this is good stuff!”…

Gordian knot, butterfly effect:Organizations are a study in complexity

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Business is complex.  Gone are the years of simplicity in business operations.  Exponential growth and change in regulations, globalization, distributed operations, changing processes, competitive velocity, business relationships, disruptive technology, legacy technology, and business data encumbers organizations of all sizes. Business … Continue reading →

What Happened to the Fine Art of Business Analysis? – Revisited 2013

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Link: http://taotwits-too-big-to-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-happened-to-fine-art-of-business.html

From Taotwit's Too-Big-To-Tweet

Back in 2008, I wrote a paper on Business Analysis. Recently, I’ve been revisiting this subject in my day-job and this made me realise how little things had changed and inspired me to write this post, which is, basically, the original article re-written, with additional thoughts (in italics).

The role of the Business Analyst has never been more important but needs refocus on Information Systems not the technical solution. Many of us can recall a time when a distinction was made between the hardware and software supporting the business and the information used by the business – there was a clear difference between IT, to describe the former, and IS to describe the latter. 
IS stood for Information Systems: 
IS: The landscape  of business  information used by people within an organisation 
and how they use information to deliver business outcomes. 

IT, in contrast, meant: 
IT:  The  hardware  and  software  technology  that  automates  or  otherwise  supports 
information processing. 

This distinction between these two concepts is all but lost, and the disciplines associated with Information Systems (such as Business Analysis and IS Architecture), are have become too obsessed with IT. 

Read more

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What Happened to the Fine Art of Business Analysis? – Revisited 2013

by

Link: http://taotwits-too-big-to-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-happened-to-fine-art-of-business.html

From Taotwit's Too-Big-To-Tweet

Back in 2008, I wrote a paper on Business Analysis. Recently, I’ve been revisiting this subject in my day-job and this made me realise how little things had changed and inspired me to write this post, which is, basically, the original article re-written, with additional thoughts (in italics).

The role of the Business Analyst has never been more important but needs refocus on Information Systems not the technical solution. Many of us can recall a time when a distinction was made between the hardware and software supporting the business and the information used by the business – there was a clear difference between IT, to describe the former, and IS to describe the latter. 
IS stood for Information Systems: 
IS: The landscape  of business  information used by people within an organisation 
and how they use information to deliver business outcomes. 

IT, in contrast, meant: 
IT:  The  hardware  and  software  technology  that  automates  or  otherwise  supports 
information processing. 

This distinction between these two concepts is all but lost, and the disciplines associated with Information Systems (such as Business Analysis and IS Architecture), are have become too obsessed with IT. 

Read more

0