Upcoming EA tour in Australia

Currently scrambling through a swathe of slidedecks and suchlike… – that’s me getting ready for my upcoming ‘Antipodean Tour’, with a wide range of sessions on enterprise-architecture and related themes currently booked for various dates and places in Melbourne, Sydney

Big-consultancies and getting it right

As with all small independents in just about any industry, my /our relationship with ‘the big boys’ in enterprise-architecture is, yeah, kinda ambivalent at best. It’s not just that they make the most noise, grabbing most of the attention and

Big-consultancies and bridging the chasm

Like all small independents in just about any industry, my relationship with ‘the big boys’ is ambivalent at best. All those big analyst-consultancies like Forrester or Gartner, the ratings-agencies like Moody’s or S&P, the big IT- or process-consultancies like IBM

Why a bad architecture is better than a consensus arrived one

First it is usually hard to to know if an architecture is good or bad  and often this is determined by current favourite thinking. Let’s just take integration with has run through a myriad of best practices and will continue to do so. So who is really to say if a message bus with endpoint … Continue reading Why a bad architecture is better than a consensus arrived one

Autumn Events 2015

Open Group Conference – Architecting the Boundaryless Organization

This conference ran from 19th to 22nd of October in Edinburgh.  My talk was on Boundaryless Customer Engagement, and took place on the Monday afternoon. The material was developed in collaboration with my colleague Andrew Forsyth.

The business value of customer analytics and big data is not just about what you can discover or infer about the customer, but how you can use this insight promptly and effectively across multiple touchpoints (including e-Commerce systems and CRM) to create a powerful and truly personalized customer experience.

For most organizations, mobilizing this kind of intelligence raises organizational challenges as well as technical ones. I talked about how some leading companies are starting to address these challenges, and described the vital role of enterprise architecture in supporting such initiatives.

Key takeaways:

  • A reference model for omnichannel consumer analytics and engagement.
  • An architectural approach for closed-loop integration across multiple customer touchpoints and diverse data platforms.
  • A template business case for building and extending your business and technical capabilities for customer engagement. 


    Unicom Data Analytics Forum – Exploring the Business Value of Predictive and Real-Time Analytics

    Was held at the Kensington Hilton in West London on 2nd December.

    My talk was on Real-Time Personalization – Exploring the Customer Genome. Retail and consumer organizations have started to develop more personalized interaction with customers, based on rapid analysis of a broad range of customer attributes and propensities, known metaphorically as “genes”. These may be used to target campaigns more accurately, or to generate the next best action in real-time for a specific customer.

    For more details and registration, please visit the Unicom website.


    Here are the two presentations. There are significant overlaps between the two.

    Autumn Events 2015

    Open Group Conference – Architecting the Boundaryless Organization

    This conference ran from 19th to 22nd of October in Edinburgh.  My talk was on Boundaryless Customer Engagement, and took place on the Monday afternoon. The material was developed in collaboration with my colleague Andrew Forsyth.

    The business value of customer analytics and big data is not just about what you can discover or infer about the customer, but how you can use this insight promptly and effectively across multiple touchpoints (including e-Commerce systems and CRM) to create a powerful and truly personalized customer experience.

    For most organizations, mobilizing this kind of intelligence raises organizational challenges as well as technical ones. I talked about how some leading companies are starting to address these challenges, and described the vital role of enterprise architecture in supporting such initiatives.

    Key takeaways:

    • A reference model for omnichannel consumer analytics and engagement.
    • An architectural approach for closed-loop integration across multiple customer touchpoints and diverse data platforms.
    • A template business case for building and extending your business and technical capabilities for customer engagement. 


      Unicom Data Analytics Forum – Exploring the Business Value of Predictive and Real-Time Analytics

      Was held at the Kensington Hilton in West London on 2nd December.

      My talk was on Real-Time Personalization – Exploring the Customer Genome. Retail and consumer organizations have started to develop more personalized interaction with customers, based on rapid analysis of a broad range of customer attributes and propensities, known metaphorically as “genes”. These may be used to target campaigns more accurately, or to generate the next best action in real-time for a specific customer.

      For more details and registration, please visit the Unicom website.


      Here are the two presentations. There are significant overlaps between the two.

      HP Software Mid-Atlantic Customer Forum

      Join your peers and Intact at the 2015 HP Software Mid-Atlantic Customer Forum.
      On September 16, Intact will be sponsoring the HP Software Customer Forum in Washington, DC.
      Event Location:
      W Washington DC
      515 15th St NW
      Washington, DC 20004
      Directions…

      Going Digital & Agile Architecture

      Recently, I’ve been reworking & tightening up some earlier ideas and putting them in a ‘Going Digital’ context. I’m posting them on LinkedIn to reach a slightly different audience.  
      Here are the posts so far:
      During the process, I’ve been reading/re-reading some great related articles that discuss agile architecture and the need recognise the business as a complex adaptive system. Here are the links with some favourite quotes:
      Is Agile killing EA #1?  By Charles Betz the EA team needs to match the cadence of the Agile teams. This is a central challenge”.
      Is Agile killing EA #2?  By Jason Bloomberg.
      ” …if some company’s EA means nothing more than a lot of paperwork that gets in the way of basic goals like working software that keeps customers happy, then we can only hope Agile drives a nail into that coffin. On the other hand, sometimes the paperwork is a good thing. Only an overly dogmatic reading of the Agile Manifesto would lead one to conclude that we don’t need no stinkin’ documentation”.
      “Frameworks are cocaine for executives – they give them a huge rush, and then they move to the next framework”.
      Enterprise Architecture Finally Crosses the Chasm by Jason Bloomberg including an interview with Adrian Cockcroft formally the Cloud Architect at Netflix. 
      “The goal of architecture was to create the right emergent behaviours”.
      “..it makes more sense for them to pay most attention to the real-world  ‘wiggliness’ of organisation: the hidden, messy and informal dynamics of everyday human interaction in which they and everyone else are continuously immersed”.
      With the ‘Going Digital’ series, my aim is talk about real-world experiences and emerging techniques for doing “agile architecture’, or business change design, or whatever it gets called in the future. All I know is that it isn’t framework-centric and that many who carry the title Enterprise Architect will have trouble giving up their particular drug of choice! I’m interested to hear what others are doing; what’s working for you – and what doesn’t.
      I guess like many of have lived with the ‘EA’ label, I’m tending to avoid the term, so as not to confuse what I do with the framework-centric, heavy modelling, and ‘certified’ practices stuff.
      Has anyone seen a good job description? 🙂 

      Update Feb 27th, 2017: To see where these thoughts now are going, please take a look at the Found In Design un-book and  the Horses and Unicorns story.