12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting

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Photo of a compass. The heuristics that I present in this articles will be like a compass for my future enterprise architecture exercises, guiding me in what to focus on.
photo credits: i k o

Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise.   In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.

Each lesson is captured as a heuristic, a rule of thumb that I want to remember so that I can use it to guide me for future projects.  They are not truths, and will get refined with more experience and insight.  I definitely hope to hear your experiences that relate to these heuristics, regardless of whether they support or invalidate a heuristic.

What made this EA exercise interesting is that, though it is not my first EA exercise, it is the first one I took a lead role in.  Also, this exercise made use of a methodology new to me, from MIT course “Enterprise Architecting” taught by Professor Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Donna Rhodes. In addition, ideas from the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” also crept into the EA exercise, as I was concurrently attending a class by the book’s co-author Dr. Jeanne Ross. 

12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting

by
Photo of a compass. The heuristics that I present in this articles will be like a compass for my future enterprise architecture exercises, guiding me in what to focus on.
photo credits: i k o

Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise.   In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.

Each lesson is captured as a heuristic, a rule of thumb that I want to remember so that I can use it to guide me for future projects.  They are not truths, and will get refined with more experience and insight.  I definitely hope to hear your experiences that relate to these heuristics, regardless of whether they support or invalidate a heuristic.

What made this EA exercise interesting is that, though it is not my first EA exercise, it is the first one I took a lead role in.  Also, this exercise made use of a methodology new to me, from MIT course “Enterprise Architecting” taught by Professor Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Donna Rhodes. In addition, ideas from the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” also crept into the EA exercise, as I was concurrently attending a class by the book’s co-author Dr. Jeanne Ross. 

AGILE & CMM : The Marilyn Monroe Connection (Part 1) : The Misfits

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If you have begun reading this, you probably have drawn two correct conclusions already. One, that I am a fan of Norma Jeane Mortensen Baker, professionally recognized as Marilyn Monroe. And two, having worked with both, Agile and CMM, I … Continue reading →

Forrester: Forcing A New Role For CIOs & Dragging IT Out Of The Backrooms

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John Brand of Forrester writes on the inevitable shift of CIOs and IT. I strongly agree with the following two points. We are in a systems-of-systems world. Organizations fighting this shift are swimming against the digital tide.

“There is no “big suite” solution. Over the past 30+ years, IT has thrived on the ideals of consolidation and centralisation. One system. One repository. One place to put stuff. If only I had a penny for every time I heard the phrase “we need a single repository”. For years Ive been saying that users dont care about where something lives. They care about how to access it. Its not about a single repository. Its about a seamless repository. Google doesnt hold the worlds information sources. Its merely appears to users like it does. Forget the big suites. The one system. The strategic vendor. Focus on the right tool for the right job. Focus on the fact that the job will change — and so should the tools. The building industry hasnt rested on its laurels because it thinks its found the one perfect set of materials, construction methods and tools to do every job. Why do we think in IT that theres only one vendor, one platform or one language that we need to deal with? Embrace diversity, but still maintain a focus on management. Continuous design will be a capability that every organization will need to learn. Its not about doing it “right” the first time. Its about continually doing it better and better.   

Systems are no longer isolated — and neither are we. Over the last decade and a half, the world has connected — and interconnected — an amazing array of technologies. We are now all completely dependent on each other. And so are our systems. Our newer systems are not built on batch uploaded data sets that we can control and cleanse — but on masses of big data that we need to extract meaning and structure from. We cant have the luxury of first defining a structure and populating data into it. We must work with what we have or what we can get. Fast.”

via The Empowered BT Era Will Force Yes, Force A New Role For CIOs – And Drag IT Out Of The Backrooms | Forrester Blogs.

I’m attending Forrester’s co-located CIO and EA Forums next week in Vegas. Will blog and tweet what I hear. Look me up if you are there.
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Cannes Conference Day 1: Communication Key for Business Transformation, According to Open Group Speakers

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The Open Group Cannes Conference Day 1 recap, highlighting plenary sessions by Dr. Alex Osterwalder, well-known innovator; Eric Boulay, CEO of Arismore; Hervé Gouezel, Advisor to the CEO of BNP Paribas; and Len Fehskens, VP of skills and capabilities …

High-Velocity BPM Comes to the Cloud

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For years, we have been known for our ability to rapidly deliver BPM solutions to our clients. It is also known that as a result of our intuitive user experience, many of our customers have quickly become self-sufficient in building a large portfolio of automated processes across their businesses.  Many customers have over hundreds processes […]

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Enterprise Transformation and Open Group

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Enterprise-architecture is dead – long live enterprise-transformation! Or so it would seem, from the description of the current Open Group conference at Cannes. Yet is all as it seems? I’d have to admit that the conference-programme does worry me a bit. Despite the presence of a fair few people with a broader view than just IT – […]

Architecture of my life

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Photo Credit: Giampaolo MacorigI finally got started on something that I had wanted to do for a long time: apply Enterprise Architecture know-how to help me plan my life.  I have used EA techniques to help organisations and projects better underst…

Link Collection — April 22, 2012

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  • Stealing Computer Code Isn’t Theft, Court Rules – Input Output

    “The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets because the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law because it was not physical “goods” or “wares” or “merchandise.” He had taken high-frequency trading computer code from Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank where he worked, as he was about to start a new job at Teza Technologies, a startup in the same business, according to the Chicago Tribune.
    In particular, the code did not “become” stolen property even when Aleynikov saved it to a flash drive, a tangible device, noted Waters Technology.
    In addition, because the software was used internally rather than sold to other people, that meant it could not be subject to laws regarding interstate commerce, noted the New York Times.”

    tags: legal code goldmansachs

  • Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge | Techdirt

    “We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment.

    It wasn’t just that the improvement was marginal, but that Netflix’s business had shifted and the way customers used its product, and the kinds of recommendations the company had done, had shifted too. Suddenly, the prize winning solution just wasn’t that useful — in part because many people were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs — and it turns out that the recommendation for streaming videos is different than for rental viewing a few days later.”

    tags: bigdata kaggle contest

  • Amazon launches cloud app store (and eats ecosystem?) — Cloud Computing News

    “From Amazon’s perspective it’s easy to see why the marketplace idea was so appealing. Letting users launch fully configured versions of popular products in a single click is a compelling feature, especially for complex software that isn’t easily deployed in the cloud (or at all). For its software-vendor partners, AWS Marketplace represents an opportunity to do SaaS without having to build a SaaS business or infrastructure.”

    tags: cloud computing amazon

  • Ingineering.IT — DevOps, Technical Debt, and Adaptive Organizations

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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