Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!? I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it? And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? […]
When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture. Am I giving up? No, not at all. Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll […]
Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes… My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an […]
How can we ensure that the ideas and models that we use are appropriate to the context? What methods can we use to evaluate new ideas? Perhaps more to the point, how do we protect ourselves from ideas that won’t fit in our architecture-ecosystem? This extends the previous post on ‘Coping with the toad-in-the-road‘, where […]
Okay, let’s go back to something that’s perhaps a bit less controversial than the past few posts… This one starts with a ‘rant’ (as he put it) by Anders Jensen, about the ongoing hype over (gosh!) ‘the Cloud’: aojensen: As phk of FreeBSD says: #cloud is no different to the IBM mainframe. // It puzzles […]
Oh well. The past couple of posts on a ‘thought-experiment‘ in using enterprise-architecture methods to guide a fundamental rethink of economics both seem to have gone down like the proverbial lead-balloon. Fair enough. But I guess I’ll do one more try before going back to more conventional enterprise-architecture themes. (If anyone is interested in this, we can […]
In the October 2011 Wired, Steven Levy writes about how the scroll bar has disappeared in Apple’s latest desktop operating system, code-named Lion. Instead of using a mouse to point and drag to move the page up and down, Lion changes the metaphor into a two-fingered multi-touch movement, similar to the move used on your smartphone or tablet. Is this the beginning of a fundamental change in the way we interact with office based computers? […]
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The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded […]
I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise […]
Eric Stephens, my friend, and fellow Oracle Enterprise Architect, recently blogged on the subject of “Tools of the Trade” of Enterprise Architecture. I was invited to the same podcast as he was, but could not attend. So, in abs…
Eric Stephens, my friend, and fellow Oracle Enterprise Architect, recently blogged on the subject of “Tools of the Trade” of Enterprise Architecture. I was invited to the same podcast as he was, but could not attend. So, in absentia, I thought I’d add my two cents to his sage post:
(http://blogs.oracle.com/enterprisearchitecture/entry/tools_of_the_trade)
There are several very good EA tools on the market, but each come with their own learning curve and, as Eric mentioned, there can be variance in usage across companies – ranging from no standardized EA-specific tools to adoption of one such as Troux.
Having said that, here are the tools that I think are basic / fundamental in an Enterprise Architect’s tool box and how they can be used (or at least how I use them). Idea is to embrace, but extend what Eric said.
|
Tool |
Use |
|
Spreadsheet (such as, but not limited to Excel) |
Capturing everything about the project such as organization structure, divisions, current costs, etc…). Once it is in the spreadsheet, it can be sliced and diced and, importantly, imported into the presentation software to make clear the facts that went into the current/future state positioning. Also key to making a business case for any initiatives to be undertaken. |
|
Presentation Software (such as, but not limited to Power Point) |
Communication, communication, communication! Getting everyone on the same page through information roll-ups, diagrams and architectures is really at the heart of what we do. Yes? |
|
Oracle JDeveloper / BPM |
This is great for sketching out a business process in BPMN notation which (unless you NEED a L0 – L2 model) is a pragmatic way to flesh out current and future state business flows. The added benefit is that, with Oracle BPM 11g, Business Analysts and Developers can begin to collaborate on fleshing out your model once a business process automation project gets the go-ahead. Sure, you have to download a development environment but, hey, it’s free and relatively easy to use tool. |
|
Whiteboard Markers (such as, but not limited to Expo markers) |
Nothing works better than getting people in a room and working through a particular topic in a collaborative fashion. Hint from personal experience: make sure they are dry erase and not permanent. |
|
Well organized file system (such as, well…you get the idea) |
The more you do this stuff, the more you have a library of tried and true materials that are battle tested. Try to organize them well on your disk (or do what I do and catalog things in a spreadsheet with hyperlinks to the files – one of my secret tricks) |
So, that is my story. But, I may likely not stick to it….
“What would be the smallest service? Did anyone ever look for the/a boundary condition of a service?” – an important pair of questions from Jan van Til in an earlier comment here. The first question is a bit difficult, because the only correct answer would be that ultimately it’s right down at the sub-cellular level – […]