Enterprise Architecture

Management as ‘just another service’

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What do I mean when I say that, in a service-oriented architecture of the enterprise, we need to view management and the like as ‘just another service’? This came up in a comment to the previous post ‘Why are the elite the elite?‘ The notion of ‘just another service’ is worth exploring more – especially […]

Why are the elite the elite?

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An interesting follow-on this afternoon from the themes of the previous post, ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘. I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer […]

Rethinking the architecture of management

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Why is management the way that it is? Does it work well that way? And what part does the architecture of management play in determining how well it does or doesn’t work? (This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… ) In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four […]

Five Things to do in order to deal with KPIs for Enterprise Architecture Processes

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Measuring Enterprise Architecture Processes In most enterprises that applies Enterprise Architecture will there be a need to measure how the enterprise is progressing from adapting the Enterprise Architecture Program and there will be some stakeholders who would like to know … Continue reading →

Backbone and business-rules

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What would be the ‘backbone’ of an enterprise-architecture? And where would business-rules fit into that picture? This is a perhaps somewhat tangled follow-on from four different threads: my previous ‘backbone’ posts ‘Agility needs a backbone‘ and ‘Architecting the enterprise backbone‘ Peter Bakker‘s exploration ‘The Enterprise Backbone‘ Carole-Ann Matignon‘s post ‘Visual Logic: A picture is worth […]

Dependency and resilience in enterprise-architecture models

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This one’s back on the metamodel theme again, and is a follow-up to a query by Peter Bakker in his post ‘Thinking about Graeme Burnett’s questions‘, in reply to my previous post ‘EA metamodel: two questions‘. Peter wrote: I think that the most important question of all is still missing, namely: – What do you rely […]

Unicom EA Forum

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Here is my presentation from the Unicom Enterprise Architecture Forum in London on Thursday September 29th.

Next Generation Enterprise Architecture
View more presentations from Richard Veryard.

And here is Philip Boxer’s presentation, which outline…

The New CIO Leader’s Top Priorities

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“The New CIO Leader: setting the agenda and delivering results”  (Harvard Business Press, 2005) by Marianne Broadbent (Associate Dean, Melbourne Business School & Gartner Fellow) and Ellen Kitzis (Group Vice President, Gartner Executive Programs) remains one of my favourite modern IT management books. This was one of the early books to challenge conventional IT management wisdom and proposes principles, maxim and rules of modern CIO engagement with business. 

Ever a ready reference in my library, I was browsing through this over the weekend and could not resist listing “Ten New Priorities for the new CIO Leader”, here in my blog. Hopefully serves the purpose of ready reference for people in my network and my blog readers. 

Lead, don’t just manage – Leadership and management are not the same; they are complementary. A modern CIO needs to both manage and lead with personal vision and a point of view about how information and IT can make your enterprise more effective.

Understand the fundamentals of your environment – The new CIO leader knows the industry and competitive environment. 

Create a vision for how IT will build your organisation’s success – Ability to envision how to better IT-enable the business. 

Shape and inform expectations for an IT-enabled enterprise – Heart of the modern CIO role; work closely with business colleagues to identify key business needs, strategies, and drivers then articulate the IT guidelines. 

Create clear and appropriate IT governance – Effective governance enables the modern CIO to weave together business and IT strategies.

Weave business and IT strategy together – IT strategy means developing and actively managing IT portfolio to deliver success as measured by business colleagues.

Build a new IS organisation, one that is leaner and more focussed than its more traditional predecessor.  

Develop and nurture a high-performing team in your IS organisation – Know the competencies required for the new IS organisation, one that relies much more on internal and external relationships and to recruit and train for effectiveness. 

Manage the new enterprise and IT risks – A modern CIO is expected to proactively address and lead efforts to tackle ever-evolving threats such as cyber-terrorism, data privacy, and information security
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Communicate IS performance in business-relevant language – The new CIO leader must know and communicate how IT is contributing to shareholder value and the IT value indicators that are directly linked to business value measures.

I will certainly recommend securing a copy and reading through chapters relevant to your area of priority, focus, responsibility or interest in strategic IT management. You won’t be disappointed unlike some other similar work. 

Responses to ‘EA economics challenge’

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There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it. (This gets long again: sorry…) Most of the responses pose good questions, which I’ll come on to in a moment. But first, one response was so […]