Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
I am still not done with exploring the great post from Ivo Velitchkov in which many gems are to be found. My posts so far:drEAmtime – CommunicationdrEAmtime – Bridging the SilodrEAmtime – Capability Cemetery drEAmtime – EPIC SCAN To quote Ivo: But…
In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)
In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year. By progress, the client meant that
In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)
In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year. By progress, the client meant that
Update: Native Apps Part II: A Hybrid App Every single web page out there, if you like, is like a computer. Tim Berners-Lee Modern web technologies (HTML5, CSS, Javascript) allow us to build advanced solutions. Although not that advanced, a service like EA Glossary is in fact just one single web page, i.e. one HTML5 document. …read more
Last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Open Group conference in Newport Beach, California. I find these conferences enlightening as I enjoyed the dialog with fellow professions who share similar point of views on the …
@danlockton is doing a survey How do actual designers use academic literature?What are the barriers you’ve experienced?What service would you like to see?What would be useful to you?Could academics make their work more easily applicable?Here’s my ans…
@danlockton is doing a survey How do actual designers use academic literature?What are the barriers you’ve experienced?What service would you like to see?What would be useful to you?Could academics make their work more easily applicable?Here’s my ans…
Last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Open Group conference in Newport Beach, California. I find these conferences enlightening as I enjoyed the dialog with fellow professions who share similar point of views on the discipline of Enterprise Architecture. I have made the following observations: We have a huge challenge in…
I continue to explore the great post from Ivo Velitchkov step-by-step, because his posts allow my thoughts to follow a red line. He pretty much eliminated a GLUE Disease in my very own head. Once again (and I will continue to say that till I reach the end of the red line) thank you for unplugging me.
So here again a quote from Ivo:
Big organizations in all sectors, especially in the service industries, tend to gather huge number of applications until they find themselves in a situation where there are far too many to manage. A good number of them are not used at all. Some other part is underutilized. Most of the critical applications have high maintenance or high replacement cost or both. Inevitably there are many which automate different parts of the same process but they don’t talk to each other. And this justifies new spending on building interfaces, or buying application integration packages first and then replacing them with BPMS and then probably with something better than BPMS. As a result – more spending and more applications to manage.
Ivo keeps continuing exploring that with some more statements, which all point to one specific problem: Unneeded complexity as the root cause of too high costs. Once again a great observation and a situation I have also faced more than once (and most likely will face each and every day as long as I stay in Enterprise Architecture drEAmland. So what am I doing? Actually I am applying the EPIC SCAN approach to analyze the past (GLUE Defence).
By analyzing the problem at hand with the EPIC SCAN approach I am able to create transparency and visibility on the root cause of the problem. And then it is (once again) all about communication and people to optimize the information flow and by that find the best fit-to-purpose solution.
It does help quite a lot, if you don’t panic and stop thinking to be an Enterprise Architect but start knowing that you are one. Remember, in the Enterprise Architecture Matrix you just have to let it all go, fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.
As always over to you for commenting to help me improving my thinking and share as much knowledge as possible.
I continue to explore the great post from Ivo Velitchkov step-by-step, because his posts allow my thoughts to follow a red line. He pretty much eliminated a GLUE Disease in my very own head. Once again (and I will continue to say that till I reach the end of the red line) thank you for unplugging me.
So here again a quote from Ivo:
Big organizations in all sectors, especially in the service industries, tend to gather huge number of applications until they find themselves in a situation where there are far too many to manage. A good number of them are not used at all. Some other part is underutilized. Most of the critical applications have high maintenance or high replacement cost or both. Inevitably there are many which automate different parts of the same process but they don’t talk to each other. And this justifies new spending on building interfaces, or buying application integration packages first and then replacing them with BPMS and then probably with something better than BPMS. As a result – more spending and more applications to manage.
Ivo keeps continuing exploring that with some more statements, which all point to one specific problem: Unneeded complexity as the root cause of too high costs. Once again a great observation and a situation I have also faced more than once (and most likely will face each and every day as long as I stay in Enterprise Architecture drEAmland. So what am I doing? Actually I am applying the EPIC SCAN approach to analyze the past (GLUE Defence).
By analyzing the problem at hand with the EPIC SCAN approach I am able to create transparency and visibility on the root cause of the problem. And then it is (once again) all about communication and people to optimize the information flow and by that find the best fit-to-purpose solution.
It does help quite a lot, if you don’t panic and stop thinking to be an Enterprise Architect but start knowing that you are one. Remember, in the Enterprise Architecture Matrix you just have to let it all go, fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.
As always over to you for commenting to help me improving my thinking and share as much knowledge as possible.
Thanks to a great post from Ivo Velitchkov which unplugged some thinking of mine I was able to put some words around a couple of ideas and approaches I use. One post about Communication rather than creating an aligned (meaningless) language and a second post about truly Bridging the Silos instead of creating a new Enterprise Architecture silo.
So here another quote from Ivo:
EA is often in the position to attract some serious budgets for reasons we’ll see in another dream, and this way the new island becomes a safe territory for people that have either failed or lost interest in the pure IT. This as a result further decreases the credibility of EA which slowly, in some organisations, gets the image of a place for people that are not good enough for IT and prefer to hide under EA labels where things are vague enough and much more difficult to measure. The lost credibility either undermines the work of the really good EA practitioners or pushes them out of the organisation or both.
This immediately reminded me of an Enterprise Modelling Anti Pattern from Scott Ambler the so called Enterprise Parking Lot. Here a quote from Scott:
Your enterprise modelling group is composed of a lot of very smart people who don’t fit in well anywhere else within IT but you don’t want to lose their knowledge.
I personally have often observed a combination of both and therefore I phrase it the Capability Cemetery. So how to fix or handle this? First of all I am typically looking at each individuals capability. It is fairly seldom the case that there is people who try to avoid working under all circumstances, even thought that happens now and then. In most cases there is a deficit or GLUE Disease somewhere, a conflict between the organization setup (be it structural, process, project or any other organization) and the way the individual person is willing to operate. Typically, via investing in the interesting to reveal the relevant, it is possible to dig out the real root cause of the problem. Knowing the root cause then allows to optimize the information flow through the circulatory GLUE Cube.
Thanks to a great post from Ivo Velitchkov which unplugged some thinking of mine I was able to put some words around a couple of ideas and approaches I use. One post about Communication rather than creating an aligned (meaningless) language and a second post about truly Bridging the Silos instead of creating a new Enterprise Architecture silo.
So here another quote from Ivo:
EA is often in the position to attract some serious budgets for reasons we’ll see in another dream, and this way the new island becomes a safe territory for people that have either failed or lost interest in the pure IT. This as a result further decreases the credibility of EA which slowly, in some organisations, gets the image of a place for people that are not good enough for IT and prefer to hide under EA labels where things are vague enough and much more difficult to measure. The lost credibility either undermines the work of the really good EA practitioners or pushes them out of the organisation or both.
This immediately reminded me of an Enterprise Modelling Anti Pattern from Scott Ambler the so called Enterprise Parking Lot. Here a quote from Scott:
Your enterprise modelling group is composed of a lot of very smart people who don’t fit in well anywhere else within IT but you don’t want to lose their knowledge.
I personally have often observed a combination of both and therefore I phrase it the Capability Cemetery. So how to fix or handle this? First of all I am typically looking at each individuals capability. It is fairly seldom the case that there is people who try to avoid working under all circumstances, even thought that happens now and then. In most cases there is a deficit or GLUE Disease somewhere, a conflict between the organization setup (be it structural, process, project or any other organization) and the way the individual person is willing to operate. Typically, via investing in the interesting to reveal the relevant, it is possible to dig out the real root cause of the problem. Knowing the root cause then allows to optimize the information flow through the circulatory GLUE Cube.
