R&A IT Strategy & Architecture
Articles about IT, IT Strategy, and Enterprise Architecture
R&A is the vehicle for Gerben Wierda’s ‘extracurricular activities’ (what he does next to his day job and family life — or what’s left of that). Mostly writing and sometimes a bit of training or consultancy. R&A is also the publisher of Mastering ArchiMate and Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture.
This site combines the previous separate content of masteringarchimate.com and enterprisechess.com.
IT is notoriously hard to manage and it has been so for decades. As a result, the execution of new strategies is often exceedingly difficult. These 4 articles (2 serious, 2 a bit tongue-in-cheek) are meant to enlighten non-IT-savvy board members.
What is the information revolution doing to us humans? A very condensed journey from essences of digital technology and human intelligence to the role of talk, trust and the impact of IT on society.
(What I consider to be) my key articles on (governance and fundamentals of) IT and EA in general. Easily accessible from here.
If someone tries to get you to invest in some shiny new technology — like blockchain 5-8 years ago — beware. How do you judge these proposals? A realistic use case is key.
Cicero, an AI, performed in the top 10% against human performers in the game Diplomacy, which is about negotiating with others. chatGPT is making the rounds with its impressive output. Are these AI breakthroughs or at least signs of real progress? Or signs of trouble to come?
A useful addition to the original concept of Sunshine-Life Cycle Management to help managing it all.
Advisors need (a) to know what they are talking about and (b) be able to convince others. For architects, the first part is called ‘architecture’ and the second part could be called ‘the psychology of architecture’.
We tend to do that already, but most attention is paid to the role of the advisor. But it takes two to tango. The ‘receiving end’ (the one being advised) plays a key role and it is here that psychological and neurological research of the last few decades on ‘the architecture of psychology’ can be put to good use.
The Open Group has published a minor update to the ArchiMate® standard. It is now version 3.2. This short post explains the upgrade policy for the PDF version of the Mastering ArchiMate book.
Is layering — e.g. the classic BDAT (Business, data, Application, Technology) stack — really useful in Enterprise Architecture? An analysis with some side nodes about ArchiMate.
Warning: may contain traces of analytic EA geekery.
Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, has claimed the LaMDA language neural net chatbot is sentient, is alive. Nonsense on stilts, according to one critic.
A musing about the meaning of ‘life’. And abortion. And doubt. And the point Lemoine has but doesn’t make.
The NIST definition of Cloud Computing from 2011 has now become so much an oversimplification that it is more often than not unhelpful, e.g. when trying to base your policies on it. So, forget about ‘IAAS’ and ‘PAAS’, end your ‘cloud policies’ or cloud-specific procedures. Instead, concentrate on managing the key generic issue underlying it: the ever more complex mixes of owned and outsourced algorithms and data..
McKinsey seems to be the first ‘big consultancy’ that really frees itself from outdated, ineffective, orthodox enterprise architecture notions.
Je publie aujourd’hui une traduction française de mes fiches (PDF) de présentation ArchiMate, un guide visuel et concis de la grammaire ArchiMate. La première page contient le métamodèle du Cœur du framework ArchiMate. Il est représenté dans le jeu de…
Most IT exists to support other IT, not your business directly. A part of this is that stack/web of platforms on which your applications depend. How does that for instance affect #informationsecurity in your designs?
It is an old adagium of warfare: Amateurs talk Strategy, Professionals talk Logistics. Maybe surprisingly, this is true in IT as well. Maybe it is true in any complex and unpredictable situation, which ‘big IT’ is more and more turning out to be. Logistics considers Strategy a small snack.
R&A IT Strategy & Architecture 