Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” This maxim, attributed to Albert Einstein, bears particular relevance to how problems should be approached. There is not a simple solution to every problem. Simple problems can be solv…
For quite some time now I’d promised to make some of my blog-posts here available in ebook format, as a more focussed and accessible means to help people make use of my material on enterprise-architecture and the like. So, as…
Just what are the deliverables of whole-enterprise architecture? In part this is a follow-on to the previous post ‘Ending the shoot-out at the EA Corral‘, about finding ways to end the seemingly ceaseless battles between those enterprise-architects who focus only on…
Americans Think Cloud Computing Comes From Actual Clouds | WebProNews
“To get the embarrassing statistics out of the way first, the survey found that 51 percent of respondents believe that stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing. A plurality of respondents (29 percent) also think that the cloud is an actual cloud. A paltry 16 percent actually knew what the cloud was.
“This survey clearly shows that the cloud phenomenon is taking root in our mainstream culture, yet there is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing,” said Kim DeCarlis, vice president of corporate marketing at Citrix.”
tags: cloud computing
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There is a curious ambiguity about the word “iteration”. Sometimes it means doing exactly the same thing, over and over again; sometimes it means doing something slightly different each time.
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#entarch In my post Where were the architects at RBS? (June 2012), I quoted a banking sofware expert comparing banking systems to the game of Jenga. I now want to expand upon the Jenga analogy.
Casual observers looking at a large and complex human activity system can easily convince themselves that there is a lot of inefficiency and waste.
So it looks as if we can save huge amounts of money simply by taking out all the unnecessary pieces.
But this is a bit like a game of Jenga. If you try to remove pieces without understanding the overall structure, you are likely to cause the whole thing to collapse in a heap. This seems like a pretty good reason for doing some kind of business or systems architecture.
However, complex human activity systems generally don’t just stop working. The people in the systems usually find a way to keep things running, although with a lot of hidden costs, including personal stress.
This has a lot of bad implications. Firstly, it is bad for the people and the working environment; among other things, excessive stress is damaging for people and their working relationships. It is bad for the architecture, because it results in a lot of additional structure (props and supports and workarounds) to keep the systems up and running. These props and supports and workarounds often end up costing far more than the original system, so it can be pretty counter-productive in terms of the cost-saving objectives. And finally, it is bad for the decision-makers, because the full consequences of their decisions are often unclear, and they may go on to repeat the same pattern.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t eliminate inefficiency and waste – but in order to do it properly and safely, it helps if we have a proper understanding of the overall structure and behaviour of the system – in other words, an architectural view.
In this post, I will show how architecture visualisation methods used by architects for centuries (see Drew Skau’s post Visualization Architect at Visual.ly) are relevant to an EA. I’ll exemplify the procedures on the FFLV-GODS, a full EA f…