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 but that would help them make better decisions, it accomplishes several things. First, it sparks their interest in what architecture has to offer and, second, Read more …

I have three related predictions for Enterprise Architects in 2012. Actually they are more like ongoing trends, but they are the ones that I think will be most relevant when making architectural decisions next year. All three could be summarized as a need to focus on environment as context, rather than enterprise.

Enterprise Architecture puts IT systems in the context of how IT supports business and management needs, and it places business processes and products in the context of the organizational structure, its strategies and capabilities. But enterprises don’t operate in isolation, and increasingly their architectures need to be defined in the context of the broader environment. I see three reasons for organizations to start architecting the enterprise in its environmental context in 2012:

To evolve architectures that can weather extreme financial and economic crises. This will require architectures that Read more …

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 from among the 107 submissions. Eiffel’s design was based on an American design that was never built and Read more …

Architects face many challenges in their jobs. Among them are creating architecture and applying architecture. I’ve said many times that creating architecture alone does not create value. Rather, the value from architecture comes when it is applied. In other words, value is delivered when architecture is used to influence the outcome of decision making, analysis, design, or implementation. Yet another challenge is that architects are often not the people who are responsible for doing the applying. So we face a conundrum: we don’t create value until someone else uses the architecture. That begs the obvious question of how to get other people to use the architecture.

The equation itself is really quite simple: if you make it easier for someone to do their job using architecture, they’ll use it. Although in concept this seems almost obvious, achieving it is really Read more …

I was saddened to hear that computer industry pioneer Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died on Sunday, a few weeks shy of his 85th birthday.

Under his 35-year leadership as CEO, Ken Olsen built Digital from US $70,000 in seed money in 1957 to become the world’s second-largest computer company with upwards of $14B in sales and 120,000 employees in more than 95 countries. In 1986, Fortune magazine named Ken “America’s most successful entrepreneur.”

Following Ken’s vision, starting with the PDP-1 in the 1960s, Digital created an entirely new segment of the computer industry with its small, powerful, and high-quality “minicomputers.” The minicomputer quickly became an alternative to the multimillion-dollar mainframe and gained favor in laboratories, academia, engineering, and other industries.

Beyond the size and price differential of the mini, DEC pioneered the concepts behind interactive computing Read more …

Welcome to the sixth anniversary edition of my Enterprise Architect’s “New Year’s Resolutions.” I hope this article will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2011.

Learn About Business Architecture

Many advances in architecture have occurred over the past few years, but one of the most rapidly advancing aspects has been business architecture. This has come from several areas. EA teams have expanded their capabilities in business architecture. Business organizations have experienced the value of an architectural approach to defining the business (analytic, focused, formal, specific, unambiguous). Finally, business architects have been pushing the envelope, illustrated by the growth in business architecture working groups and industry organizations. Business architecture is much more than just BPM, and one of the most promising aspects is the area of business capabilities, which enterprise architects will want to use as Read more …

Too often IT projects are initiated on the basis of the “who shouts loudest” syndrome, dominated by the biggest egos in the business management arena. Another form of this malaise arises when internal politics, with business unit managers jockeying for position, sidelines the needs of the organization as a whole. If demand management is to be applied effectively to help align IT with business needs, then a certain objectivity must be achieved.

Older readers may recall the idea of egoless programming advocated by Gerald Weinberg nearly 40 years ago [1]. Simply put, the concept of egoless programming advocates that a programmer should review the code of another programmer in an objective way such that personal feelings are put aside. That way programs develop and progress much more productively in line with the needs of the organization as a whole.

We Read more …

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 the way they behave with respect to our most fundamental physical laws.

In both white space and dark matter, there is Read more …

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 by October 8. For the full Call for Papers, visit here.

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.