Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Two words: auftragstaktik and fingerspitzengefühl. To an English speaker, they might look kinda weird, but they’re key to getting an enterprise to work well… The terms originate from the German military, from around the early-19thC and mid-20thC respectively. They would translate approximately…
By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, The Open Group The Open Group Baltimore 2015, Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow™, July 20-23, was held at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Inner Harbor. Over 300 attendees from 16 countries, including China, Japan, … Continue reading →
Enterprise architects, are you mired in a tangled web of data marts while your business pursues customer engagement without you? If you think a Hadoop-centric architecture is going to save the day, you may need to rethink. Your customers expect you to create systems of insight to deliver win-win engagement in real time. I’m seeing a new class of digital predators leverage the cloud to do just this. For example, Netflix designs cover graphics for its series based on subscriber viewing habits. They know their customers that well.
I call their technology approach an Elastic Analytics Platform in my recently published report. I formally define it as:
“A combination of data storage and middleware technology that allows the creation and dissolution of analytics components on demand, while provisioning these with data from one, or a few, distributed, virtualized data sources.”
That’s a mouthful. So here’s a rough picture:
Firms like Netflix, Stitch Fix (who? read the linked KDnuggets blog post), and LinkedIn are sourcing all their data, and I mean everything, into a few data stores in the cloud. Next, they are exploiting cloud to create analytic workloads on demand. This gives them elasticity two ways. First, they get scale-out storage; second, they get on-demand analytics components. For example, Netflix can spin up Hadoop, Spark, or Kafka clusters as they need them and provision these from Kafka or S3. They also have Teradata on Amazon. This gives them enormous flexibility to create as much of what they need when they need it.
How do we keep on track to enterprise purpose? Perhaps more to the point, how can we know when we’re falling off-track, in time to recover? To me, one of the keys here is the perhaps least-known part of the…
Forrester’s survey for ECM decision-makers is open, and we’re looking for your participation! Take this opportunity to provide your perspectives on the key vendors, the challenges, and the opportunities you see in this technology market. This survey is intended for ECM decision-makers or influencers in end user organizations. This is not for ECM vendors or systems integrators . . . but vendors and consultants — we would love it if you could share this survey invitation with your customers. The survey will remain open until end of day Friday, July 31, 2015.
Why is your input important? Forrester uses this data to:
Please take this survey if you are a practitioner inside the private or public sector and make or influence decisions around ECM and/or archiving platforms. Survey participants will be provided with the survey results summary slide deck, if desired.
Forrester’s survey for ECM decision-makers is open, and we’re looking for your participation! Take this opportunity to provide your perspectives on the key vendors, the challenges, and the opportunities you see in this technology market. This survey is intended for ECM decision-makers or influencers in end user organizations. This is not for ECM vendors or systems integrators . . . but vendors and consultants — we would love it if you could share this survey invitation with your customers. The survey will remain open until end of day Friday, July 31, 2015.
Why is your input important? Forrester uses this data to:
Please take this survey if you are a practitioner inside the private or public sector and make or influence decisions around ECM and/or archiving platforms. Survey participants will be provided with the survey results summary slide deck, if desired.
“What is our mandate?” – I cannot count the number of times an architect (both enterprise, solution, integration and other) asked me that question. Mostly in the sense ‘can we dictate the solution?’ and then expected me to provide a clear answer. Perhaps I am slow-witted, but the question just baffles me. I mean, unless […]
European Interoperability Reference Architecture The European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA) is an architecture content metamodel defining the most salient architectural building blocks (ABBs) needed to build interoperable e-Government systems. On 8 June 2015, release 0.9.0 beta of the EIRA entered an eight-week public review period. Stakeholders working for public administrations in the field of architecture […]
Services serve the needs of someone. Disservices purport to serve the needs of someone, but don’t – they either don’t work at all, or they serve someone else’s needs. Or desires. Or something of that kind, anyway. And therein lie a huge range of…
Another week, another divestiture in the content management and collaboration market. A new – or more accurately, a re-newed – player enters the Enterprise Content Management market this week as iManage and HP make an apparently amicable split. Executives with longstanding roots in the iManage and Interwoven businesses, including Neil Araujo and Dan Carmel, have executed a management buyout to spin a revitalized iManage business out of HP’s Software division. iManage’s press release is here.
Customers and partners still have a strong brand recognition of “iManage,” despite being covered under layers of rebranding through multiple acquisitions over the past decade. Loyal clients, particularly the legal, accounting/audit, and consulting industries have stuck with the document management platform despite the turmoil of the Interwoven-Autonomy-HP eras and the encroachment of competitors such as Microsoft SharePoint, perennial nemesis OpenText eDocs, and alternatives such as NetDocuments and Worldox.
The new iManage will launch with an established installed base of approximately 3,000 customers, including 80% of the top US law firms, and 400 corporate legal departments, according to its July 21 press release.
What does this mean for customers and partners of the new iManage?
Another week, another divestiture in the content management and collaboration market. A new – or more accurately, a re-newed – player enters the Enterprise Content Management market this week as iManage and HP make an apparently amicable split. Executives with longstanding roots in the iManage and Interwoven businesses, including Neil Araujo and Dan Carmel, have executed a management buyout to spin a revitalized iManage business out of HP’s Software division. iManage’s press release is here.
Customers and partners still have a strong brand recognition of “iManage,” despite being covered under layers of rebranding through multiple acquisitions over the past decade. Loyal clients, particularly the legal, accounting/audit, and consulting industries have stuck with the document management platform despite the turmoil of the Interwoven-Autonomy-HP eras and the encroachment of competitors such as Microsoft SharePoint, perennial nemesis OpenText eDocs, and alternatives such as NetDocuments and Worldox.
The new iManage will launch with an established installed base of approximately 3,000 customers, including 80% of the top US law firms, and 400 corporate legal departments, according to its July 21 press release.
What does this mean for customers and partners of the new iManage?
When I think about data, I can’t help but think about hockey. As a passionate hockey mom, it’s hard to separate my conversations about data all week with clients from the practices and games I sit through, screaming encouragement to my son and his team (sometimes to the embarrassment of my husband!). So when I recently saw a documentary on the building of the Russian hockey team that our miracle US hockey team beat at the 1980 Olympics, the story of Anatoli Tarsov stuck with me.
Before the 1960s, Russia didn’t have a hockey team. Then the Communist party determined that it was critical that Russia build one — and compete on the world stage. They selected Anatoli Tarsov to build the team and coach. He couldn’t see films on hockey. He couldn’t watch teams play. There was no reference on how to play the game. And yet, he built a world-class hockey club that not only beat the great Nordic teams but went on to crush the Canadian teams that were the standard for hockey excellence.
This is a lesson for us all when it comes to data. Do we stick with our standards and recipes from Inmon and Kimball? Do we follow check-box assessments from CMMI, DM-BOK, or TOGAF’s information architecture framework? Do we rely on governance compliance to police our data?
Or do we break the rules and create our own that are based on outcomes and results? This might be the scarier path. This might be the riskier path. But do you want data to be where your business needs it, or do you want to predefine, constrain, and bias the insight?