Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Enterprise-architecture, strategy, or just about everything, really: they all depend on discipline and rigour – disciplined thinking, disciplined sensemaking and decision-making. But what happens when that discipline is lost? What are the ‘sins’ that can cause that discipline to be…
Enterprise-architecture, strategy, or just about everything, really: they all depend on discipline and rigour – disciplined thinking, disciplined sensemaking and decision-making. But what happens when that discipline is lost? What are the ‘sins’ that can cause that discipline to be…
The business model (BM) concept is not defined and represented as a business flow that generates value/profit, as it should. But how better can you discover the BM and calculate the value/profit returned unless it means a business flow?
Enterprise-architecture, strategy, or just about everything, really: they all depend on discipline and rigour – disciplined thinking, disciplined sensemaking and decision-making. But what happens when that discipline is lost? What are the ‘sins’ that can cause that discipline to be…
Enterprise-architecture, strategy, or just about everything, really: they all depend on discipline and rigour – disciplined thinking, disciplined sensemaking and decision-making. But what happens when that discipline is lost? What are the ‘sins’ that can cause that discipline to be…
Enterprise-architecture, strategy, or just about everything, really – they all depend on disciplined thinking, disciplined sensemaking and decision-making. But what happens when that discipline is lost? What are the ‘sins’ that can cause that discipline to be lost? And how…
How do people learn new skills? And what can be done to make it quicker and easier to learn those needed skills? One answer is to explore the patterns in the skills-learning process… On the surface, each skill is different,…
TechTarget has published another one of my “Ask the Expert” columns. In this one, I offer up my thoughts on the differences between a Microservices Architecture and a SOA. In a nutshell, I think the microservices trend has moved things in the right direction, a direction that many of the SOA pundits were espousing back […]
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…