Although mobile computing is not new, there has been a lot of discussion lately about it, and about having an effective mobile/social strategy. The first question we need to ask is: what should your mobile strategy be? Of course, this ought to be related to your business strategy, but we still have to dig into a lot of details and answer a lot of questions to properly formulate the strategy, perform a cost/benefit analysis, and create a roadmap and plan. So how can we go about investigating this? It should come as no surprise that I would suggest business architecture as an approach. The first step would be to identify the stakeholders that you are …
Author
Mike Rosen
Nov 292012
For years I’ve been writing about and implementing a multi-channel, multi-device, n-tier architecture and often would say “I don’t know what the next device is going to be, but I’m sure there’s going to be one, and this architecture will allow us to be prepared”. Well, I think that era is upon us now and I’m ready to predict what the next device will be: It’s your car. New cars these days are equipped with multiple computers, multifunction touch screens, voice recognition, GPS, and much more. So where are we prepared for this, and where will we need to think differently? Architecturally (if we have done things right in the past) we should be ready …
Global competition, increasing customer power, and quantum advances in technology have combined to demand a new and more adaptive approach to managing the business. In spite of significant advances in methods to improve business performance, such as TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR, ERP, CRM, SaaS, and the cloud, many organizations continue to struggle in executing improvements to business performance. In many cases, the culprit is a traditional functional view of the business, where organizations develop plans, budgets, and even reward systems mainly in a functional or departmental context, paying little attention to the “critical few” measures of performance that matter to customers and failing to gain clarity on the type of cross-departmental collaboration needed to …
The 2012 Summer Olympics, officially “The Games of the XXX Olympiad” (I don’t want the IOC branding police after me), have finally concluded, but the buzz about NBC’s coverage in the US still goes on. It all started during the opening ceremonies when the Twitterverse went crazy over the fact that the Games were not being broadcast live here in the US, but rather were delayed at least five hours. Now, I think there is plenty of room for dissatisfaction with NBC’s coverage. The inane blabber from the announcers comes immediately to mind. And if you wanted to see something other than gymnastics, swimming, track, or volleyball, you were pretty much out of luck. (There …
Last week I wrote an Advisor for our Business & Enterprise Architecture practice about the role of the solution architect. I thought I’d share my overview of how that role compares to the enterprise architect’s. Is this how the roles are delineated in your company? Topic Solution Architecture Enterprise Architecture Scope Single solution or set of related solutions All current and future solutions and COTS Primary Goals Ensure that the solution fits within the enterprise context Define the enterprise context including business, information, application, and technology Responsibility Translates nonfunctional and functional requirements into design, within enterprise context Translates strategies into target architectures and roadmaps Tradeoffs Enterprisestrategy and goals vs. solution tactical and delivery requirements Prioritization and rationalization …
Welcome to the seventh-anniversary edition of my enterprise architect’s New Year’s resolutions. I hope it will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2012. Understand business analytics. The past few years have seen dramatic increases in the capabilities of business intelligence systems, accompanied by decreases in costs, to the point where most organizations can easily afford to take advantage of business analytics. The problem is that the information that these systems need to analyze is not readily available. While this is not a trivial problem to solve, it does present a major opportunity for enterprise architecture. When we provide management or decision makers with information that they don’t currently have …
Over the past few years, the field of Business Architecture (BA) has been evolving rapidly. It used to be the exception that an EA program had business architects, but now it is the rule. A consensus is emerging about what BA is, what it produces, who practices it, and how. Professional organizations such as the Business Architecture Guild are creating communities of architects and developing best practices. Now, BA is delivering results that are impacting the business and getting attention for doing so. And finally, the critical mass of successful results, best practices, skilled professionals, resources, tools, has reached the point where Business Architecture is a mainstream capability within most advanced organizations. What is the …
Sometimes my favorite thing about the cloud is that it is garnishing all of the media hype these days, in place of SOA. Finally, I can stop trying to meet overblown expectations about when SOA will deliver benefits, and get down to the business of implementing valuable SOA solutions. Don’t worry, the cloud will get to this point too, but it has a few years of growing pains to go through. This year, it will pass through the inevitable “Trough of Disillusionment” part of its lifecycle. Now don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty to like about the cloud, and over time it will become a standard part of enterprise platforms, but for now it has …
Apr 152011
Last week, I was visiting Paris and got the chance to marvel at the Tour Eiffel, one of the world’s most well-known and instantly recognizable structures. I also took the opportunity to learn a bit more about its fascinating history. For example, I learned that the Eiffel Tower is the world’s most visited paid tourist attraction, reaching its 200,000,000th visitor in 2002, and having more than 2.6 million visitors in 2010 alone. Built between 23 January 1887 and 31 March 1889, the tower was constructed for the 1889 Universal Exhibition that was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. The exhibition committee solicited designs for a “grand tower” and chose Eiffel’s …
Agile software development and agile project management have shown considerable success in helping organizations develop better software and better manage development projects in the face of changing requirements and evolving technologies. In one sense, agile is about managing rapidly changing project factors and requirements. But enterprises face many other factors that must also be accounted for in project management and development. For example, enterprises need to manage quality, reduce technical debt, and control the total cost of ownership for each individual project. In addition, they need to manage overall IT costs, complexity, and consistency across all projects. These are factors that architecture is in place to address but, unfortunately, these aspects of software engineering and …
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