Enterprise Architecture

Thoughts on developing a strategic plan for implementing EA programs, how to provide your teams with the technical skills needed to implement a service-oriented architecture, understanding what’s involved in creating a business architecture, and more.

Development Environment for Specific Architectural Styles

Oliver Sims | Dec 4, 2010 No Responses

Dec 042010

This year, rather than predicting what the future will bring, I’m making a wish. Here’s what I’d dearly love to see happen: Today’s major development environments address a wide variety of architectural styles. However, because they don’t address any specific style, developers face a considerable amount of software architecture and technology work in order to design and build to the required architectural style. 2011, however, will see the first development environment equipped to address one or more specific architectural styles. Thus, much of the software technology work required to address the “ilities” (scalability, flexibility, usability, configurability, and so forth) will be pre-packaged, making it hugely more productive for application developers. Such a tool will not …

White Space, Dark Matter, and Enterprise Architecture

Ken Orr | Nov 30, 2010 4 Responses

Nov 302010

For years now, I have made a good living by exploiting Geary Rummler and Alan Brache’s famous subtitle, “How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart” (Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart, Jossey-Bass, 1995). What Rummler and Brache meant by white space in this case was all the activities for which no one was explicitly responsible. My experience, which mirrors theirs, is that those things that fall between the cracks often get overlooked and undermanaged. Much like “white space” is the physics notion of “dark matter.” Dark matter is that unobservable “stuff” that physicists have computed exists in the universe that causes known celestial bodies to behave …

Cutter Summit 2010 — The Elevator Summary

Claude Baudoin | Nov 12, 2010 No Responses

Nov 122010

The cloud exposes the fact that IT’s strategic value is no longer in servers or applications, but in data. Therefore, data governance is becoming critical, and data risk is a key issue in the cloud.

The Journey to Successful Application Modernization and Rationalization

Christine Generali | Sep 29, 2010 No Responses

Sep 292010

Legacy modernization — seemed like a good idea at the time. So why do so many modernization projects end in failure? How can we properly measure the complexity of the task and plan the project accordingly? What are the best ways to modernize and extract value from a legacy application while at the same time preserving business knowledge? The upcoming issue of Cutter IT Journal seeks to tackle these tough questions and provide insight into the strategies and approaches that can lead to successful legacy modernization initiatives. Join the debate in the December 2010 Cutter IT Journal — with Guest Editor Don Estes. To share your perspective with us, send us a short article abstract …

A New Kind of Software Attack, A Whole New Ballgame

Ken Orr | Sep 24, 2010 No Responses

Sep 242010

Early this year, fellow Cutter Consultants Mitch Ummel, Mike Rosen, and I wrote an Executive Report on the Smart Grid. In that report, we talked about all the potential that the Smart Grid offers, how it would be designed, and also about the serious problems that such an ambitious undertaking faces — especially problems related to reliability and security. We expressed fears that since the next generation of Smart Grid electrical utilities is based on current standards taken from the Internet and the current generation of operating systems, it would be subject to serious attacks by more and more sophisticated hackers which, in turn, could seriously jeopardize the reliability and security of our most critical …

Managing the Portfolio in a Mature EA Organization

Claude Baudoin | Aug 10, 2010 1 Response

Aug 102010

When EA originally emerged, it was a thin layer of technology and methodology sandwiched between two large buns: business applications on the top and infrastructure on the bottom. The bulk of the headcount and budget of an IT department would be devoted to the acquisition or development and support of applications and to the investments in data centers, user PCs, network connections, and security.

Taking an Enterprise Approach to Going Green

Mike Rosen | Jun 1, 2010 No Responses

Jun 012010

Is your organization going green, whatever that means? Well, that turns out to be a lot more than just server virtualization at the data center. Is the enterprise architecture (EA) team involved? Well, it should be. Let’s take a look. To start, you might ask whether your organization has defined what it means to be green and/or sustainable, and more important, whether it has articulated why it is doing it and how it fits with other enterprise strategies or initiatives. If your enterprise is anything like most, the answer to these questions is probably “No.” This is a perfect opportunity to apply some business architecture to the problem. How about formalizing the goals and strategies …

Politics, culture, convergent evolution and the iPad

Vince Kellen, Ph.D. | Apr 26, 2010 3 Responses

Apr 262010

Here is a question to get your mind going. Has the evolution of computing been shaped by Western 20th century politics and culture or have our designs been more indebted to unchanging human psychology? While this sounds like an abstract debate in which only academics would revel, it started with me tweaking Apple’s iPad in a tweet for what I believe to be ambivalence within the iPad’s file system design. The iPhone and iPad file designs do not exactly follow conventional and hierarchical folder/directory designs of yore. The reason is obvious. Most everyday users of ubiquitous devices have no need for the extra complexity. Many casual users of smart phones and now pads and slates …

Building a Business Empire? Follow the Romans

Ken Orr | Apr 6, 2010 No Responses

Apr 062010

Occasionally, I will ask my students, “Why is the Roman Coliseum still standing?” The answer that I’m fishing for is, “Because the folks who tried to tear it down in the Middle Ages for building material were not as good engineers as the folks who put it up hundreds of years earlier.” All this was recently brought to mind because I’ve been reading a series of historical novels set in 9th century England based around the struggles between the Saxons and the Danes. In a number of places in these novels, the central character comments about the Roman ruins and how no one in his time could understand how the ancient Romans built the bridges, …

A Hunger for Meaning

Ken Orr | Jan 14, 2010 2 Responses

Jan 142010

The other day, Ron Blitstein posted here about the term “SOA”: The term “SOA” has become very confusing and possesses all the clarity of Web 2.0 (another term that drives me to distraction). There are a number of words and phrases that I believe confuse those of us in enterprise architecture and/or systems development. The phrases that have most bothered me for the past few years are use cases, nonfunctional requirements, and lights on applications. Let me start with use cases. My old friend James Robertson, one of the deans of requirements engineering, says that he has found nearly 40 different definitions of use case in modern systems literature. I can’t say that I have …

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