Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Late last month Gartner published their annual Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013. Based on the view that Gartner paints it looks to me as a evelotuionary year ahead rather than revelotionary. This is no way is a bad…
You can’t go wrong if you follow the rules, right? But what happens when you come across something where the ‘rules’ don’t make sense – and yet you still try to hold on to the certainty of ‘the rules’? Or,…
Gartner has released yet another great resource for Enterprise Architects with their EA Tools Magic Quadrant. The full report can be found here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CVXD3X&ct=121119&utm_content=c26292b9-8692-4afe-9fec-28e9315d6a34 For those that have already selected an EA tool and are looking to find out how…
Whilst I spent most of my working hours in Windows 7 and Outlook, I still return to my favourite operating system OpenBSD when I need to do serious technical work. It is simple, elegant, and secure.Installing OpenBSD/i386 5.2 in VirtualBox under Window…
Zig Ziglar died today. The title may make instant sense to his followers or to those of you that have heard me tell his story about baked ham. It’s about his wife sawing the end off of a roast before baking because she thinks it creates a better roast. But when they call the originator […]
The post Goodbye Baked Ham appeared first on Mike Rollings.
Zig Ziglar died today. The title may make instant sense to his followers or to those of you that have heard me tell his story about baked ham. It’s about his wife sawing the end off of a roast before baking because she thinks it creates a better roast. But when they call the originator […]
A business service represents an agreed delivery of some parcel of capability from one agent to another agent.
Understanding services properly requires a combination of all six of the viewpoints I have defined for business architecture.
The capabilit…
What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or…
The Open Group Framework for Secure Collaboration Oriented Architectures (O-SCOA) Guide provides system and security architects and designers with a blueprint specifying the requirements for secure design of enterprise architectures that support safe and secure operation, globally, over any unsecured network. Continue reading →
We have kicked off a project to build a Core Services Catalogue last week. This is part of our journey to introduce IT Service Management (ITSM) to our AUS IT and Academic Computing teams. I am looking forward to see what our IT teams come up with as a list of services. We will be able […]
The post Introducing IT Service Management Using a Core Service Catalogue appeared first on Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education.
What is collaboration? Why do people collaborate? Perhaps more to the point, why don’t they collaborate? How do we end up so often with what we’d have to call anticollaboration – the exact antithesis of collaboration? So I’m standing there in…
I have read an interesting Blog Post from Paul Wallis about Asset failure and flow wich focusses on the physical elements. I really enjoyed reading the post and I can only encourage you to also read it with care. It furthermore triggered me to think and write again about the flow of events through an Enterprise. I will pick up quotes from the mentioned blog post and reflect on them by creating a collision of ideas to my social EA thinking.
When key flows – water, electricity, natural gas or sewage – are interrupted in an urban area, our lives become very difficult, very quickly. Interruptions to these critical flows will often cause knock-on interruptions to dependent secondary flows, impacting things like flows of people, flows of vehicles, or flows of goods through supply chains. Flows of data are no less vulnerable to interruption caused by unexpected interactions with other types of flow.
As I have written in GLUE Disease one of my main approaches is to look at the key flow (of knowledge) and especially into dysfunctions of that flow. If I find a dysfunctions I try to optimize the flow of knowledge direct or indirect depending on the given situation. If I am successful the achieved better flow of knowledge through the Enterprise will lead to better decisions.
But in today’s digital world, risk lies not only in the failure of IT assets that directly enable data to flow, but also in the failure of other less obvious business assets: a leaky door, a de-pressurised cable, a failed valve or a broken pump.
As I have written in People in GLUE what really matters are the people. They make the difference and they in the end form the real flow of events. Processes and Methods do help, but what really makes the difference are the people.
If the people fail there is no process and method available (at least for EA not) to secure the success and an optimal information flow. Therefore I personally focus on the people first. Of course there is a certain amount of processes and methods needed (to help the people working better), but as written in the agile manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Of all the assets available, people are the biggest and therefore should be threated according to that.
