Inversion of Control

According to Wikipedia, inversion of control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice whereby the object coupling is bound at run time by an “assembler” object and are typically not knowable at compile time using static analysis. The binding process is achieved through dependency injection. In practice, Inversion of Control is a style of software construction […]

Sins of the Project Manager

The current economic and employment environments notwithstanding, things still look pretty good for project managers. They are being kept on, and are still getting hired, because organizations are still ultra-cautious about spending money and getting critical projects completed as near…

Sins of the Project Manager

The current economic and employment environments notwithstanding, things still look pretty good for project managers. They are being kept on, and are still getting hired, because organizations are still ultra-cautious about spending money and getting critical projects completed as near…

Failures in Communication – Don’t Tell Me! Engage Me!

For frequent readers, you know that I tend to look at issues through a humanistic lens.  Many of my client inquiries start with a request for the best way to represent “x”, or the way to describe something so that people will do “y”.  Instead, I like to think about “What are you trying to […]

Luck, Serendipity, and the Contextual Strategist

Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that leaves us in awe of the randomness of life? In that context, strategy […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 13 – The use of architects

The mistake of the many Raising a host of all employees and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the Enterprise. The daily expenditure will easily surmount that which can ever be gained. There will be commotion in the organization and the network, and men […]

The Art of Enterprise Architecture – Section 12 – The investigation by process

The six ways There are six ways of investigating by process. The first is to go by strategic intent; the second is to follow the business models; the third is to go by information need; the fourth is to trace through application usage; the fifth is to trace through the organizations; the sixth is to […]

Deciding “Yes” on EA

On the Forrester Enterprise Architecture Community site, Randy Heffner asked the question, “What should EA do for business agility?” In my two responses in the discussion, I emphasized that EA is all about decision support. Yes, you may create a future state roadmap, but what the organization winds up with is completely dependent on what […]

Insuperordination

In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way? Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and […]

How not to use IT in services

Several people picked up on this one after Gerold Kathan sent out a note about it, but perhaps David Sprott said it the best: davidsprott: RT @gkathan: John Seddon – a master class in how NOT to use IT in services. Optimize value, not cost. Brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/dygdcpg It’s a 40-minute video (split into three parts) […]

Dealing with Systemic Problems Through the Enterprise Architecture Program

There are many problems the chief architect, enterprise architects, CIOs, executives and decision-makers on all levels will be facing while handling the day to day operations. Quite a few problems that they will be dealing with are symptoms of larger more complex problems or what I have chosen to define as “systemic problems”. Systemic problems […]

This is what I talk about when I say capability

This post has been updated, and all updated text should be highlighted blue. I was asked the question I love to get the other day, “what do you mean by capability?”. I usually try to be brief when I explain my point of view and so I was this time to. However in this post […]