InfoWorld Honors Troux Customers Bayer Healthcare and USAA

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Seeing our customers succeed is truly rewarding – as is seeing them be recognized for their efforts. That’s why we’re pleased and honored to announce that two of our customers — Bayer HealthCare (BHC) and United Services Automobile A…

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Notes on Interface

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At an architecture workshop in Vienna last week, I put together a few slides to address some questions about interfaces. I promised to post an expanded and cleaned-up version, and here it is. Some of this material was developed with my former colleague…

The New CIO Leader’s Top Priorities

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“The New CIO Leader: setting the agenda and delivering results”  (Harvard Business Press, 2005) by Marianne Broadbent (Associate Dean, Melbourne Business School & Gartner Fellow) and Ellen Kitzis (Group Vice President, Gartner Executive Programs) remains one of my favourite modern IT management books. This was one of the early books to challenge conventional IT management wisdom and proposes principles, maxim and rules of modern CIO engagement with business. 

Ever a ready reference in my library, I was browsing through this over the weekend and could not resist listing “Ten New Priorities for the new CIO Leader”, here in my blog. Hopefully serves the purpose of ready reference for people in my network and my blog readers. 

Lead, don’t just manage – Leadership and management are not the same; they are complementary. A modern CIO needs to both manage and lead with personal vision and a point of view about how information and IT can make your enterprise more effective.

Understand the fundamentals of your environment – The new CIO leader knows the industry and competitive environment. 

Create a vision for how IT will build your organisation’s success – Ability to envision how to better IT-enable the business. 

Shape and inform expectations for an IT-enabled enterprise – Heart of the modern CIO role; work closely with business colleagues to identify key business needs, strategies, and drivers then articulate the IT guidelines. 

Create clear and appropriate IT governance – Effective governance enables the modern CIO to weave together business and IT strategies.

Weave business and IT strategy together – IT strategy means developing and actively managing IT portfolio to deliver success as measured by business colleagues.

Build a new IS organisation, one that is leaner and more focussed than its more traditional predecessor.  

Develop and nurture a high-performing team in your IS organisation – Know the competencies required for the new IS organisation, one that relies much more on internal and external relationships and to recruit and train for effectiveness. 

Manage the new enterprise and IT risks – A modern CIO is expected to proactively address and lead efforts to tackle ever-evolving threats such as cyber-terrorism, data privacy, and information security
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Communicate IS performance in business-relevant language – The new CIO leader must know and communicate how IT is contributing to shareholder value and the IT value indicators that are directly linked to business value measures.

I will certainly recommend securing a copy and reading through chapters relevant to your area of priority, focus, responsibility or interest in strategic IT management. You won’t be disappointed unlike some other similar work. 

Must See Guide to Forrester Business Process Forum 2011

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The Forrester Business Process Forum in Boston, Mass. is just three days away, and they’ve put together two jam-packed days of keynote addresses, cutting-edge sessions and networking designed to help attendees better understand the new trends in customer engagement. Taking a look at the agenda, which is available online, we’ve put together a short list of […]

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Responses to ‘EA economics challenge’

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There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it. (This gets long again: sorry…) Most of the responses pose good questions, which I’ll come on to in a moment. But first, one response was so […]

Tools of the Trade

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So recently my buddy over at OTN Bob Rhubart asked, “What tool or tools are indispensable in your role as an architect? When faced with a new project what’s the first thing you reach for? Why?”. I instantly protested regarding the brevity of the a…

Tools of the Trade

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So recently my buddy over at OTN Bob Rhubart asked, “What tool or tools are indispensable in your role as an architect? When faced with a new project what’s the first thing you reach for? Why?”. I instantly protested regarding the brevity of the answers. He suggested I blog about it. So here goes.

So the Miss America answer is I “reach” for my eyes and ears. Listening to the customer’s needs and pain points is vital to ensuring a resultant architecture is in alignment with their business objectives and is attainable within their cultural milieu. I need to approach each engagement or initiative with a fresh, clean slate and record everything I hear or see. I can’t help but liken the job to that of an archeologist or crime scene investigator – especially when focusing on current state architecture.

For practical tools I look to a metamodel to determine what type of information am I trying to collect. It depends on the corporation or framework I might be working with, but the metamodel provides me a sense of completeness in what I’m looking for. Its a great way to catalog current state observations and look for trends, redundancies, and sub-optimizations. When creating a set of future state renderings, it allows me to parse out future capabilities and map them to goals, drivers, and other objectives.

So how do I track this information? I use Excel to track catalogs and matrices of the information in the metamodel. Optimally I would pump this information into a repository-based EA modeling tool like Troux, or MEGA. But not all EA programs have made the leap to these tools – many are still relying on PowerPoint/Visio (or OmniGraffle for us Mac folk). If I really need to do some extensive analysis – and its happened at least once – I’m able to export to CSV files and put them in a database and use my SQL-fu to come to an answer.

As digital as I have become with an iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, I still rely on a bound notebook for taking notes – especially during customer conversations. The linearity of (spectacular) programs like Evernote, OmniOutliner, or even MindMap Pro just doesn’t work for me during discovery sessions. The information is not in a linear outline. I need to draw arrows all over the place. I need to instantaneously switch back-and-forth between writing text notes and drawing pictures. And batteries will eventually die or the flight attendant will bust me during takeoffs and landings…

So there you go. A metamodel, Excel, and a good notebook. That’s my answer, Bob, and I’m sticking to it.