ArchiMate Modeling in Practice – Defining the application landscape

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The team is in full swing now, very much aware of the fact that ‘the pressure is on’. The reference models are in a “good enough” form at the moment, and some of the grumbling from management seems to be fading away. Through informal channels, the team has learned that part of the frustration seems to come from the fact that an audit (“quick scan”) by an external party has resulted in advise to management to “speed things up a notch”. So much for careful planning!

The Open Group Edinburgh—The State of Boundaryless Information Flow™ Today

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By The Open Group This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first version of TOGAF®, an Open Group standard, and the publication of “The Boundaryless Organization,” a book that defined how companies should think about creating more open, flexible … Continue reading →

Agile Development And Data Management Do Coexist

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A frequent question I get from data management and governance teams is how to stay ahead of or on top of the Agile development process that app dev pros swear by. New capabilities are spinning out faster and faster, with little adherence to ensuring compliance with data standards and policies.

Well, if you can’t beat them, join them . . . and that’s what your data management pros are doing, jumping into Agile development for data.

Forrester’s survey of 118 organizations shows that just a little over half of organizations have implemented Agile development in some manner, shape, or form to deliver on data capabilities. While they lag about one to two years behind app dev’s adoption, the results are already beginning to show in terms of getting a better handle on their design and architectural decisions, improved data management collaboration, and better alignment of developer skills to tasks at hand.

But we have a long way to go. The first reason to adopt Agile development is to speed up the release of data capabilities. And the problem is, Agile development is adopted to speed up the release of data capabilities. In the interest of speed, the key value of Agile development is quality. So, while data management is getting it done, they may be sacrificing the value new capabilities are bringing to the business.

Let’s take an example. Where Agile makes sense to start is where teams can quickly spin up data models and integration points in support of analytics. Unfortunately, this capability delivery may be restricted to a small group of analysts that need access to data. Score “1” for moving a request off the list, score “0” for scaling insights widely to where action will be taking quickly.

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Agile Development And Data Management Do Coexist

by

A frequent question I get from data management and governance teams is how to stay ahead of or on top of the Agile development process that app dev pros swear by. New capabilities are spinning out faster and faster, with little adherence to ensuring compliance with data standards and policies.

Well, if you can’t beat them, join them . . . and that’s what your data management pros are doing, jumping into Agile development for data.

Forrester’s survey of 118 organizations shows that just a little over half of organizations have implemented Agile development in some manner, shape, or form to deliver on data capabilities. While they lag about one to two years behind app dev’s adoption, the results are already beginning to show in terms of getting a better handle on their design and architectural decisions, improved data management collaboration, and better alignment of developer skills to tasks at hand.

But we have a long way to go. The first reason to adopt Agile development is to speed up the release of data capabilities. And the problem is, Agile development is adopted to speed up the release of data capabilities. In the interest of speed, the key value of Agile development is quality. So, while data management is getting it done, they may be sacrificing the value new capabilities are bringing to the business.

Let’s take an example. Where Agile makes sense to start is where teams can quickly spin up data models and integration points in support of analytics. Unfortunately, this capability delivery may be restricted to a small group of analysts that need access to data. Score “1” for moving a request off the list, score “0” for scaling insights widely to where action will be taking quickly.

Read more

Full Stack Enterprises (Who Needs Architects?)

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In my last post, “Locking Down the Prisoners: Control, Conflict and Compliance for Organizations”, I returned to a topic that I’ve been touching on periodically over the last year, organizations as systems, which overlaps significantly with the topic of enterprise architecture (not to be confused with enterprise IT architecture of which EA is a superset). […]

Savings

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Some architects may be familiar with Amdahl’s law that looks at the maximum improvement when only a part of the system can be optimised, as it is often used in parallel computing processing. The important part here of Amdahl’s law is to see that savings in part of a system usually will show that to … Continue reading Savings →

Healthcare Interoperability, Standards and Data Science

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Srinidhi Boray | Ingine, Inc | Bioingine.com Introducing, Ingine, Inc. it is a startup in its incipient stages of developing BioIngine platform, which brings advancement in data science around Interoperability. Particularly with healthcare data mining and analytics dealing with medical knowledge extraction. Below are some of the lessons learned discussed while dealing with the healthcare […]

Business Patterns and EA

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I’ve just finished writing a fascinating Report for Cutter Consortium about Business Patterns and EA. For some time now I’ve been working with EA practitioners who are taking advantage of information that has already been gathered by people from backgrounds other than EA. The EA role then becomes one of converting or translating this information…

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The Business of Fun!

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I wrote in an email to a colleague today that the work we had just completed had been fun. I meant it, yet as i wrote the words i felt a jarring semi-cringe that this isn’t the sort of word i should use when communicating about er grown up stuff, like, you know, strategy and transformation and other grown up words.

But i ignored the semi-cringe of dissonant colloquialism and sent the email anyway. However, it did make me think. 

We spend 90,000 hours at work. Why is our work not more fun? Why did i feel for a split-second that the use of the word may not be appropriate.

For me, if myself and the people i work with have found the work we are doing fun, then surely there can be no greater plaudit. The Business of Fun for me is about thinking the following things at the end of a project:

  • I have enjoyed working with the team
  • its been hard work
  • We worked on something that we thought was worthwhile
  • We had some challenges but overcame them
  • We feel like we’ve learnt something
  • We’ve been really engaged in the work
  • We feel please with what i’ve produced

None of the above is frivolous, all the bullet points above are aspects of doing good work!

So Fun = Good work.

My aim is to continue having fun at work and to make sure those that i work with have fun to. because i know if its fun then its good work.

The next question is, how can you put in place an environment to increase the ratio of Fun:Not fun work? I’ll probably explore this in future posts. 

Enterprise Architecture – the Eight Fundamental Factors

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New updated edition now in book The second edition of our book is now published and available. Here is a brief summary of what you can expect: A new title: Enterprise Architecture – the Eight Fundamental Factors. A major rewrite and rearrangement of the content, new content, and additional diagrams and charts. Practical advice, examples and case…

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  1. Top Intriguing Business & Enterprise Architecture Articles for 2013 Every year Cutter compile a list of the five most intriguing…
  2. 101 Lessons From Enterprise Architecture Short observations about the practice of enterprise architecture“101 Lessons From…
  3. Multiple Integrated Architecture Frameworks (MIAF) Increasingly I’m hearing architects talking about their frustration with the…