Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
You may encounter people who say: “I’m an architect.” I usually respond with: “Everyone’s an architect.” Why? An architect is not a label for a specific kind of person. Well in practice it is, but it should not be. What kind of person is associated with “architect”? Well, it depends. Usually it is “expensive”, or […]
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole. – children’s song, Bergliederbüchlein (c 1700) In my prior article, I introduced the concept of a scope bucket to explain the concept of project scope to your stakeholders. In this article, I continue the theme with some […]
Companies usually have installed an executive hierarchy. This hierarchy is one that has been evolved and tested over a long period of time. We have reasonably clear ideas about what it should establish. People have one boss, who more or less decides about their roles, assesses their performance, and decides what to do when the […]
With the growing popularity of Agile, mainly in applying Scrum for IT development, issues need to be tackled relating to scaling up the development effort. Scrum came to birth in small teams that had a lot of mandate, typically 3 to 10 person teams. Now we see Scrum used for major efforts, involving hundreds of […]
We are happy to announce that we will be presenting again at the Open Group Conference, this year in Beantown, July 21-22. We will be presenting in the Health Care track with a colleague, Al Zannini, Director of Architecture and Design at Blue Cross Blue Shield of RI. Al and I will be sharing our […]
An architect relies on a clear understanding of scope. In prior articles we have discussed the business context diagram, a great tool for establishing solution scope. We also provided a technique for setting expectations regarding the scope of architecture activities. In this article, I intend to expand on the importance of understanding (or establishing, if […]
A Systems Flow consultant has skills that tend to fall in the triangle of technical, business and organizational excellence. One common and repetitive case of project dysfunction where this overlap brings real benefits is that of the “Operational Business Stakeholders Missing from Business Requirements.” Here’s how it usually goes: Architect is engaged to design project’s solution architecture […]
I recently had the opportunity to work on a project where we were bringing in a vendor product that required data integration with a number of our client’s in house transaction applications. We needed to determine how the internal applications would integrate with the new product. I figured the timing was right to build on […]
First of all: UML is not about modelling object-oriented software. But maybe we should go back to what object-orientation is. OO (shorthand for object-orientation) is invented around 1970. Xerox had a group called the Software Research Group which was part of a think tank created to do research into the possible threats of the modern […]
This is the final article in in the series for implementing “Custom Off The Shelf” (COTS) solutions; a follow up to our Buy vs. Build Your Software and “Off the Shelf” Implementation Pitfalls articles. In this we want to address requirement approaches that are sometimes proposed, but rarely successful in such an implementation. In an […]
(Americans often refer to a method with the term “methodology”, which is not entirely correct semantically, as it would mean “the science of methods”) Examples of methods are ORM, RUP, and one could argue Scrum or agile approaches like DAD. Inspired by the book by Ian Graham et.al. The OPEN Process Specification, I share the […]
This blog is the third in a series of posts designed to help technical leads get over the hurdles that inevitably pop up during any complex implementation; a series that was started by Understanding the Problem and continued in Determining a Solution. With the course set and the implementation of the recommended solution underway, it’s […]