August 2007 - Posts
David Linthicum pointed out this gem from IBM's Bobby Wolfe that admits, openly, that you cannot buy a product and then, magically, get a SOA out of it. Hooray! Microsoft has been trying to tell people for years that SOA is not a product, it is a way
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Leadership is a funny thing. You cannot lead someone to where they are not ready to go. You have to lead them to where they are able to go next . Blanchard calls this "Situational Leadership." It is up to a leader to be able to evaluate where someone
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Alan Inglis has posted a second time about the need for an Enterprise Architect to be oriented more towards breadth than depth. I agree but I feel the squeeze. Enterprise architecture is there to bridge business and IT concerns. Therefore, they need to
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It is often said that if you are in a group of explorers hacking through a thick jungle, the manager is worried about cutting a straight and efficient path, while the leader is climbing the trees to make sure that you are goin in the right direction.
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This is my third post on Feedback loops and EA. At the Gartner EA Summit in the spring, I was chatting with some folks at lunch, and the question came up: what's the biggest criticism of EA in your organization... and the answer was nearly unanimous:
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I blogged a few days back about agility in EA: Deliver Early, Deliver Often, Take Feedback, Iterate. I've said often that this concept is just as applicable in business as it is in technology. Enterprise Architecture is supposed to be the bridge between
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My good friend Harry Pierson took a pass at my 'business case for integration' post the other day on his blog. He ended up shortening my list of integration benefits from four benefits to one. For the record: I agree that he picked the correct benefit
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For years, we've been living with Zachmann and now TOGAF as commercially available EA frameworks, but honestly, they don't address the problems faced by large organziations with respect to complexity. The Federal Enterprise Architecture does. That's because
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One of the things I've learned from Agile methods: Deliver Early, Deliver Often, Take Feedback, Iterate. When you do, your perception of value goes up, and you build trust with the customer, especially if they are not sure you are doing what they want
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I've been looking at the 'business case for integration.' How odd does that sound? If I'm going to be able to sell the idea that 'integration is a good thing to spend our time on,' then I need to know both WHY we would want integration, and IN WHAT SITUATIONS
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Special thanks to Loraine Lawson for pointing out this excellent article in DMReview titled "BI, Process, and Integration Trends." The article is clearly written with the audience of Business Intelligence (BI) specialists in mind. However, it has some
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I just hit the 'send' button on a rough draft of a 10-page document describing key elements of our SOA program. It is my attempt to describe, in terms that business people can understand, the reasoning and rationale for our Enterprise Architecture approach
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Special thanks to 'Jerman of the Board' for this blog post on a good book, "The Paradox of Choice." Just from the links on this page, I intend to go out and get the book right away. Quote: "The basic premise of the book is that TOO much choice leads to
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The goal of Application Portfolio Management is to reduce the cost of owning the portfolio. The fundamental premise is this: We own a lot of code. It costs a lot to maintain our code. (too much) Management wants to be able to make cuts in the maintenance
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My favorite posession in high school was my drafting board. Yep... I was geek, even then. I was going to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright (or at least, I wanted to die trying). I fell in love with Architecture in a high-school drafting class and was hooked.
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We had a really good discussion this afternoon between the 'agilists' in Microsoft on one of our discussion threads, and I wanted to share portions of the thread with the rest of the world. Note: many of these folks are not bloggers, so I edited down
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I've been having a really fun discussion these past few days with some folks on how (or what) to sell to the business when you want to build apps using SOA. Mike Kavis believes that there are three camps: (1) sell the technology, (2) sell the solution
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Aaron Hanks gets credit for coining this term. Ever heard the old saw that says that software reflects the organizational structure of the team that writes it? That begs the question: which came first? The Architecture of the app (to which the organization
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Integration is an odd thing. You have to make many people agree on common things in order for it to work. If you look at the things that people agree upon, you can see where you are in data integration, and where you still have to go. I'd like to lay
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There is an interesting logic argument in the SOA community that says: IT has lost the trust of the business, and in order to build SOA solutions, we need to discuss the value of SOA to get it back. Loraine Lawson eloquently stated the case in a recent
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A friend of mine, Harry Pierson, is a great thought-provoker. I'm a big fan of thought provokers. Pat Helland is another, as are David Chappell and Martin Fowler. Harry has been asking me to make sure we build a layer of indirection into our message addressing
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I wander the blogosphere on occasion looking for new articles on "selling SOA to executives" and I get the same-old story. Tell them about the benefits of composing applications. Then pray that they care. Personally, I think that is bunk. Briefly, before
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I had a good question from an architect the other day. He was looking at one of my models, where I had created an abstraction and then modeled some of the concrete entities under it. He didn't believe that the abstraction was necessary. He mentioned that
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If we want to decouple a SOA system, we must get away from the notion of the remote procedure call. In other words, our services need to have as few "command" messages as we can get away with. This is a design philosophy but it is easier said than done.
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SOA has more traction these days than BPM does. SOA tools are more mature, but they are also wildly technical. If you want to model a process in an EAI or ESB tool, don't expect to share that model with the business. BPMN is a visual language invented
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I ran across a really cool post from gianpaolo pertaining to his work on service delivery platforms. The model is clean and expressive. I wonder, though, if there is a variation between 'pure' SaaS companies and companies that use SaaS to extend their
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Gabriel Morgan knocks one out of the ballpark in this blog post that traces the connection from Business strategy through business process to applications, data, and hardware. Highly recommended for anyone who is an Enterprise Architect or aspires to
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