As many of you have already have known, Enterprise Architecture and Architecture within the context of sociotechnical organization is going through what I believe a renaissance period. The architecture field is moving to more of an interdisciplinary art and science. Also many architects, myself included...

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Open Group conference in Newport Beach, California. I find these conferences enlightening as I enjoyed the dialog with fellow professions who share similar point of views on the discipline of Enterprise Architecture. I have made the following...

The Enterprise is a complex system. I have accepted that fact. I think many of us in the enterprise architecture profession have also accepted this fact as well, or at least I hope we have. But then again there is natural response to things in which we do in order to address "complexity." There is a...

Unless you have been living in cave for the past five or so years, you may have noticed that technology is being democratized within your business. Perhaps right under your feet! The confluence of consumerization, cloud computing, ubiquitous connectivity, and the needs of a modern dynamic business will...

“TCP/IP and Ethernet will not be accepted as a valid network implementation as SNA and Token Ring are our preferred standards.” - circa 1993 by nameless corporate Information Systems expert. I was shocked when I had heard this, and images of ostriches with their heads in the sand immediately...

At the Open Group Conference in San Francisco earlier this month Dr. Jeanne Ross from MIT CISR made the statement, “One day the CIO will report to the Enterprise Architect.” As you can imagine this caused quite the stir within at the conference, and the LinkedIn and Twitterverse started to...

I have long considered the discipline of “architecture” as a problem solving technique that brings together art, philosophy, engineering, physics, culture, technology, etc. Producing a high quality architecture is to provide a platform for the enterprise to balance form, function, and elegance...

Recently many of my colleagues were engaged in a healthy debate of principles around enterprise architecture. As I was dwelling on this, there was a healthy discussion on what a principle should be and how should they be described, etc. There are various sources on the Web on how to develop good architecture...

Architecture Considerations around Fabric Computing The fabric concept has been around since 1998, and computing fabrics using commodity hardware and software are now starting to come into fruition. The fabric system provides a set of interconnected nodes and links (structures) and operations (behaviors...

Fitness of complex adaptive systems (CAS) is an area of research that I have been studying over the last few years, specifically how these systems are structured and how they behave. One of the characteristics of a CAS is that the rules that define its operation are relatively simple, elements can...

Over the years, we architects have been taught to design systems that maintain equilibrium. We designed for service levels, deployed security countermeasures, and built complicated solutions to meet 100% of our requirements. We strove for perfection. This mindset comes from the established manufacturing...