Most of the major organizations that I work with have little idea of how fragile their IT architecture is. Most have large numbers of aging core applications that they lack the guts (or resources) to replace. Like the bridges that unexpectedly give way under loads tens of times more than they were designed to carry, these systems are subject to unpredictable behavior. Moreover, the thousands of applications in large organizations are networked in such ways that no one — absolutely no one — can understand the domino effect of any specific failure. But there is good news: The current depression we’re in means that IT groups in most large organizations are going to have limited …
Monthly Archives: March 2009
I told the story, recently, about a large architecture document I received to review. It’s a story that I think is worth retelling … After poring through a few hundred pages of text and drawings, I was impressed by how much work and thought had gone into it yet how utterly useless it was. Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s not that architecture is unimportant; quite the opposite. The classic, big architecture document is just the wrong way to deliver it. I had hoped that the industry had gotten past these kinds of deliverables; apparently I was wrong. Perhaps nothing is more drawn out and aggravating for an IT organization than what I call “death …
Funny how some days everything you look at seems related. This morning I was catching up on my Cutter reading list. I was sucked in by Steve Andriole’s recent Business-IT Strategies Advisor, “The Subtle, the Sublime, and the Nefarious: What We Don’t See Sometimes Tells Us.” It’s a short piece on reading between the lines. In his usual no-holds-barred style, Steve decodes the messages that are circulating around many organizations. Here’s what he wrote about training budgets being cut: Training to Obsolescence When management stops training the troops, we should step back and wonder why — really. Usually they say something about saving money, especially in these times: “We’d love to train everyone on the …


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