The Power of Knowing Where You Are Going

; So, you might ask, what do Bruce Lee and EA have in common? Well, as a long-time martial artist and Bruce Lee fan, the connection should have been clear to me. But it wasn’t. That was until a friend emailed me a link to a blog called “Letters of…

PODCAST: Examining the current state of Enterprise Architecture with The Open Group’s Steve Nunn

Listen to our recorded podcast on the current state of EA, or read the transcript. The podcast was recorded by Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions at The Open Group Conference, San Diego 2011. Continue reading →

The Power of Knowing Where You Are Going

; So, you might ask, what do Bruce Lee and EA have in common? Well, as a long-time martial artist and Bruce Lee fan, the connection should have been clear to me. But it wasn’t. That was until a friend emailed me a link to a blog called “Letters of…

Unprincipled Architecture

Anything IT does should be seen as consistent. Using words like “Principle” with the definition most people have for it is a sure-fire way to disappoint folks. It turns out that instead of a iron clad ‘always-will-do’ thing, our Principles are merely s…

Intellectual Honesty, Ivory Towers, pragmatism and other emotive phrases

This isn’t just enterprise architecture. It’s about architecture at lots of levels.

Like many posts, this all started with an innocent (hah, likely!) tweet and then became richer as people joined in. Here’s the original. RT @SLSingh Bad Science by @BenGoldacre asks “Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?”  originally posted by @frodedanielsen (someone I have never met). At which point the irrepressible Alkes Buterman and Doug Newdick chimed in.
aleksb6Aleks Buterman


RT @seabird20 RT @SLSingh Bad Science by @BenGoldacre asks “Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?” http://bit.ly/hkcuY4 >>+1 < +42
Doug Newdick
dougnewdickDoug Newdick


@aleksb6 @seabird20 how many #entarch are @SLSingh and @BenGoldacre fans?
19 MarFavoriteRetweetReply

But then Aleks posed the hard question… @seabird20 @dougnewdick I’m a big fan of intellectual honesty (#popper) but isn’t that easily confused for “academic” #entarch?

That’s what got me to this point – and it made me reflect on framing – using language that manages to demean an “opponent” while at the same time boosting your own value. “academic” is just one such word. Often used by teams that are under great pressure to meet a deadline and seeing that deep analysis could extend the time to delivery, demolish some closely held beliefs, make them look stupid because they forgot something. Use in context, “oh you are architects are so academic, that isn’t a concern”. While others will be thinking (“yet but it will become one…”). Of course the opposite word, used by those not wishing to do deep analysis is “pragmatic”. We have a pragmatic solution…. Thus cutting off possible debate/discussion.
Architects can (and should) find themselves in a difficult position here. They (we) must be seen to be taking the side of pragmatism, and yet ensure that the teams are not taking on excessive technical debt. We need to be asking the important questions around operability of the system, its performance and availability envelope, its need for flex when it is used in unanticpated ways. remembering of course that solutions get used in unexpected ways and in unanticipated quantities.
Make sure we use data and data values to describe the system envelope. How many users? How many transactions? How many transactions per second? What is the reliability/bandwidth of the communication path? What does it cost per transaction to use an external service? What if that service is not available? Can the system be unavailable for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 1 hour…? What does it cost to use a “pet” technology? and so on. Otherwise known as the -ilities. Sometimes called non-functional requirements, but I would argue that they are quivalent to functional requirements. If these are not met you don’t have a functional system.

In VPEC-T terms this is a classic conflict of values. The EAs are charged with the rather nebulous protection of the future. The project teams are charged with getting value out there fast. Those value systems are fundamentally at odds. So as architects we have the responsibility to be scrupulous in our questioning, demand the data that supports the project’s assertions of cost/risk/time to market. Finally those that write the checks have to decide.
What we architects must not do is put up wooly, ivory towered thinking to prove how clever we are, how stupid everyone else is, how the world will come to an end if the solutions are not developed the way we dictate. We must not be sowers of fud, but analysts of relevant data.

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BPMN vs. EPC revisited, part 1

There were several posts and discussions on the topic of “BPMN vs. EPC”. One of them is quite comprehensive and its discussion thread very interesting. But there are still many important points untouched and I’d like to share some of them for those facing a choice of business process notation. That doesn’t mean that there […]

Link Collection (weekly)

Cloud Connect Roundup Podcast : elemental cloud computing Saturday [the 12th] morning, I joined Dave Linthicum on his cloud computing podcast to discuss our impressions and findings from Cloud Connect. Learn what Kung Fu Panda is doing in th…

On being and becoming

Just one of those too-early-in-the-morning ideas that arise between getting up and getting moving for the day.
Been thinking back to my (too-many) years of programming, and the various ways we described the process of change, right down at the level of code.
As a language, English fits quite well with the ideas we express in software. […]