Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
The word ‘value’ has too many meanings and sometimes it masks a real problem. I had a conversation with a very smart customer recently, where their IT division is going through a transformation to help their business compete. I asked …
Davos, Switzerland, becomes the temporary capital of the planet this time of the year as world leaders converge to tackle pressing global economic and policy questions at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). It is much more than a …
We are used to the idea of a Programme/Project Management Office (PMO) but often organisations fail to understand (or perhaps deliberately misunderstand) what the Enterprise Architecture function does. I propose that the Enterprise Architecture function is, in effect, an Office of the CEO, or an Office of the CEO and Strategic Change Management. The book […]
I am an Enterprise Architect. It is my job to look at things the way they are, and envision the things that should be. It is my role to describe specific actions that specific people can take to change things (systems, processes, corporate …
According to ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick’s coverage of the recent Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration summit, SOA governance and siloed thinking is top of mind. If this really is the case, how do we make our governance efforts more effective? The more I think about this, the more I come back to a recent post […]
I recently picked up a copy of Troux Enterprise Architecture Solutions by Richard Reese. I have worked with Troux in a variety of capacities in the past along with stacking them up with the other large Enterprise Architecture Tool vendors….
I’ve often heard “soft” metaphors used when discussing Enterprise Architects. Some compare EA to the grease in a machine… necessary for the machine to run but we don’t provide the energy for progress so much as we reduce the friction.&#…
There was a great discussion on Twitter today regarding influence, mandates, and leadership. My interest started with a tweet from Chris Venable, directed at Burton Group/Gartner EA analyst, Mike Rollings: If EA is so important, why must it do everything through influence? No one ever says that to the CIO… I thought this was a […]
A key to any Enterprise Architecture program is solution architecture. Solution architecture is where work gets done. If your EA team is disconnected from the solution architecture effort, you’ll probably hear the term “ivory tower” a lot. Unfortunately, it’s far more common than you may think. Looking the typical project, the first question is where […]
Adrian Grigoriu recently posted about the failure of EA frameworks to address real enterprise architecture, due to their focus on IT and lack of focus on business. He is right, of course, in pointing out that TOGAF does not cover Enterprise Archi…
I recommend you read Chris Curran’s excellent blog entry on 16 Enterprise Architecture Strategies Learned The Hard Way http://tinyurl.com/32hfj8s I’ve included his list below with my views and comments following that. 1. An exhaustive enterprise level blueprint is virtually impossible to build – it’s too big and no one will buy-in 2. The best strategy […]
There are a couple of avoidable behaviors that architects sometimes adopt that generally annoy project teams.
The first is “nick picking” – identifying an apparent issue and then drilling down into it to minute detail. It …