October 2006 - Posts
Change agents break the rules. They think on the outside. They point out the stuff that is fundamentally broken. Administrators follow the rules. They make more rules. They believe that order equals simplicity. Is it possible for a change agent to become
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In many organizations, EA is a sidelined process or a last thought. It is hard to be effective in that case. In other organizations, EA is a core part of IT planning and delivery. It is difficult to imagine EA having anything less than a pivotal role
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Sometimes, the architect is not really relevant. For architectural purists, this is a shocking thing to say. To them, I'd say that teams can choose to ignore their architect. In fact, in some situations, they are REQUIRED to ignore their architect. (case
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Udi Dahan posted an interesting reply to a recent posting of mine . In my post, I go into detail to present a scenario where two services are coupled because the business itself is coupled. He disagreed with my design and offered an alternative. I will
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What do you do if two enterprise services share the same database? I am running into this all the time. As we work to break apart legacy applications, we need to recognize that 'stovepipe' applications are written from the perspective of 'put everything
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Recently, I blogged that two coupled services should have declared, visible, and open coupling. I was promptly asked how. First off, when you have two services, why would they be coupled? Isn't the POINT that your services are decoupled? Sure. That's
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I was called on, today, to justify a technical decision that was 'smelly' that resulted from one of my goals. I'm not particularly surprised. If I were to see a really odd implementation, I would first question the design, and then the requirements that
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EricGu has a great post on something he calls scrumbut. It rings very true. One of the teams I was in formerly did exactly this: Train everyone on Scrum Used "Scrum, but" with all the changes that work against agile principles like no customer on the
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For most folks, a UML sequence diagram is something that is either (a) unnecessary, (b) clearly required and essential. There is rarely a middle ground. So when you create a diagram (whether by force or by choice) I'd like you to consider the audience,
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One thing that I get to consider: what is the right way to govern large IT projects? I'm in the fortunate postion of asking that question because I'm trying to figure out the correct and most useful role for Enterprise Architecture in providing input,
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About ten years ago, a salesman used an old trick on me. He asked a series of questions designed to elicit a 'yes' response. He did this in front of a room of carefully selected prospects. Gradually, one or two folks started responding to his questions,
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