A Walk Down Memory Lane: The Troux Blog Hall of Fame

bg outline

hall of fame opt1 010315 (2)As you return from your holiday break, we certainly hope the New Year finds you happy, healthy and reenergized. It’s a fresh start — the point on the calendar at which many organizations really get rolling on selecting and implementing plans, IT tools and approaches, including those companies that will be starting out with or continuing to build on a foundation of enterprise intelligence.

While we were writing our 2014 year-in-review post in December, which recapped our most trafficked blog entries from last year, a thought occurred to us. Wouldn’t it be interesting to investigate what blog posts have seen the most sustained readership since we got this blog off the ground? And furthermore, do the ideas and predictions in those blogs still hold up in today’s market? Well without further ado, here’s a walk down memory lane, courtesy of the top five posts in the Troux blog “hall of fame,” dating all the way back to 2012:

The Top 5 Most-Read Troux Blogs of All Time

Doing the Right Thing vs Doing Things Right

How much time do we waste doing a lot of things right instead of making sure that we are doing the right thing for our business? It’s a fundamental question that underpins the value of enterprise intelligence. In this post, we charted how the Enterprise Portfolio Management approach helps steer business leaders and decision makers toward doing those one or two things particularly right, one end of a spectrum that still challenges leaders today.

Black Swans Are More Common Than You Think

This post examined the IT ramifications of ‘black swan projects’ and how EPM offers viable solutions to avoid those high impact events that are seemingly rare and unpredictable, but in retrospect not so improbable. Preventative measures and being out ahead of black swans is crucial, as they can be catastrophic for IT and can even result in a complete corporate meltdown.

6 Conditions for Success

A post that came out after our successful 2013 Troux Worldwide Conference. (Side note: We’re gearing up for this year’s edition of TWC, so mark your calendars!) At the event we presented a list of characteristics that are common in our most successful customers. It ended up being so popular with our attendees that we turned it into a blog that still has valuable insights for customers today.

The New Normal

Wow, was our 2013 conference fruitful. Here’s another post stemming from the event, looking at how EPM can support the shift from a ‘built to last’ technology-centric philosophy to a ‘designed to change’ approach needed in modern, diverse, rapidly-evolving IT environments.

EA is Free

This August 2012 post was a ‘look how far we’ve come’ retrospective, while also weighing how far there was to go in enterprise architecture at the time. It asked the question: Who owns EA – business or IT? As we’ve written time and time again since then, the answer is everyone.

Looking back at these moments in time are fun and satisfying, because they’re true benchmarks that allow us to understand how much progress we’ve made over the years.

And there you have it, the five blog posts that have gotten the most attention since we started the Troux Blog. As for the second question we asked at the outset – whether these blog topics and insights have withstood the test of time – why don’t you tell us? Did you find yourself looking in the [rearview] mirror, seeing the same opportunities or issues your business is facing today? Did we miss the mark back then, but change our tune since?

If you haven’t gotten your fill of reading material already, download our whitepaper, The Power of Enterprise Intelligence, to learn more about how our solutions help decision-makers take a step back to see the big picture to understand exactly where they should be investing in their business.



New Call-to-action

Categories Uncategorized

The Capability Canvas

Designing businesses is not a trivial activity. Having a simple structure that one can use to design and / or understand a capability makes designing business architecture so much easier. More to come on this topic during 2015. The Capability Canvas License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Open FAIR Certification for People Program

By Jim Hietala, VP Security, and Andrew Josey, Director of Standards, The Open Group In this, the final installment of this Open FAIR blog series, we will look at the Open FAIR Certification for People program. In early 2012, The … Continue reading

Enterprise Architecture for decision makers: seven tips

Enterprise architecture is relevant for a member of the board! At least, that is what architect believe (or hope?). But CxO’s often do not agree. They do not experience the true value of architecture. What can an architect doe to improve this? Recently, BiZZdesign organized a very successful seminar on Enterprise Architecture in Healthcare. We discussed this topic with attendees and the conclusion are presented in this blog post. An overview of  the tips from this meeting:

Understanding Agile Adoption Failure

The most common concern our customers voiced in 2014 was the unexpected outcomes of Agile projects. They don’t talk about failure as such. But they do talk about loss of consistency; inability to govern; lack of coordination AND THE INCREASING TIME TO MARKET caused by these precise issues.

I was struck by the results of the Agile Adoption Experiences Survey 2014 published by Scott Ambler. The really significant result to me is that 40% of respondents rates their organizations adoption of Agile as neither a success or a failure. Add to this the categories of Failure, Great Failure and Too early to tell and you have 58% that are not successful! This synchs with my customer feedback referred to above.

The advice my colleagues and I give when customers approach us looking for answers to these questions, is to look at how architecture is integrated into Agile projects. And there are some key areas that we look for in our assessments:
1. Is there a good reference architecture and associated contextual patterns?
2. Are there clear policies attached to work products together with the rationale?
3. Are developers and architects working as a community of interest to evolve the reference architecture, patterns and policies?
4. Are the reference architecture, patterns and policies integrated into the tooling and the architecture runway?
5. Is the architecture runway model based – allowing it to provide a reusable design time platform to be evolved by projects?

Agile projects can be successful in an enterprise situation. But architecture and governance need to be coordinated for consistency and mechanisms (automation) enforced to ensure consistency.

I wonder why the Agile Adoption survey didn’t ask any questions along these lines?

Understanding Agile Adoption Failure

The most common concern our customers voiced in 2014 was the unexpected outcomes of Agile projects. They don’t talk about failure as such. But they do talk about loss of consistency; inability to govern; lack of coordination AND THE INCREASING TIME TO MARKET caused by these precise issues.

I was struck by the results of the Agile Adoption Experiences Survey 2014 published by Scott Ambler. The really significant result to me is that 40% of respondents rates their organizations adoption of Agile as neither a success or a failure. Add to this the categories of Failure, Great Failure and Too early to tell and you have 58% that are not successful! This synchs with my customer feedback referred to above.

The advice my colleagues and I give when customers approach us looking for answers to these questions, is to look at how architecture is integrated into Agile projects. And there are some key areas that we look for in our assessments:
1. Is there a good reference architecture and associated contextual patterns?
2. Are there clear policies attached to work products together with the rationale?
3. Are developers and architects working as a community of interest to evolve the reference architecture, patterns and policies?
4. Are the reference architecture, patterns and policies integrated into the tooling and the architecture runway?
5. Is the architecture runway model based – allowing it to provide a reusable design time platform to be evolved by projects?

Agile projects can be successful in an enterprise situation. But architecture and governance need to be coordinated for consistency and mechanisms (automation) enforced to ensure consistency.

I wonder why the Agile Adoption survey didn’t ask any questions along these lines?

The Brand Canvas

Designing and understanding brands and how the behave as figments of their own is hard enough. Having a simple structure that one can use to design and / or understand a brand makes designing businesses so much easier. More details to come on this topic… The Brand Canvas License This work is licensed under a Creative […]

Exploring a new world – Raspberry PI

It has been quite a while since I last posted here and I am very sorry for that. There is so much I want to do and share with the Enterprise Archtecture community which just piles up on a long (very long, indeed) list of things. Among quite some posts …