March 2007 - Posts
I had a great chat with an experienced IT software development leader in IT this afternoon. He was telling me of a business customer that he had once worked with. His customer had the habit of coming to IT with not only the problem to be solved, but the
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Have I got an architecture for you! It's cool. We have a set of services that underlie the user interface and collaboration infrastructure. The U/I can be built entirely on services, and the services are independent of one another. On paper, we are isolated
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Michael Platt posted a set of observations recently that offered up some troubling conclusions. In his post , which you should read, he noted that most of the folks interested in creating Web 2.0 sites were not talking to their IT departments to make
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Just came back from an all-day offsite with the EA team in Microsoft IT. It occurs to me, in speaking with my collegues and in side conversations, that we have a good idea of what Enterprise Architecture is, and how it benefits the company, but many of
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I'm working on a single task, part of a much larger project. It is on the critical path, and I know it is important, but darn it, it has consumed my life. I hate it when one single decision, one single thread of effort, becomes so time consuming that
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If you do what is needed, but not what you are told, are you a hero, or a rebel? In software, as in life, there are situations where you have to choose. Literature is filled with stories where the daring young man is told to "stay put" and he rushes into
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Microsoft is an odd bird. It is a dynamic place, with different business units moving at their own rate, not hindered by much of a 'central authority.' It's an approach designed to foster innovation, and it works pretty well. Where this doesn't work is
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Not that it's fun to count to 1000, but kids will not believe you until you show them not only that you CAN count to 1000 on your fingers, but how to do it. (I suspect some of the adults reading this aren't convinced either). I taught this to my 11 year
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A pattern is a solution that occurs many times. You recognize it and describe it and others use it. The Sharepoint Business Data Catalog is an example of a pattern that I'm looking for in other places, the system adapter pattern. In any enterprise system,
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In IT, for years now, we've been debating and arguing for changes in the way in which we write software. Clearly, models where all requirements come before all design, and all design comes before all code, is just not realistic. That model doesn't reflect
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I watched on the sidelines, not long ago, as a team of architects carefully inspected and examined different technologies for managing a rules engine. I found it interesting, but not terribly pertinent, because...well... to be honest... rules engines
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