What is architecture? Not of cities or buildings, but the organisational version: enterprise architecture, solution architecture, application architecture, software architecture, business architecture, infrastructure architecture? My neck hairs generally rise a little when we architects turn to this particularly vexing and…
Architecture principles are a very popular tool in the enterprise architect's tool box. The underlying concept of 'comply or explain', however, makes them particularly toxic. [This article originally appeared on InfoWorld in 2015. It has been reproduced here to have…
Moving IT support for your business to the cloud means 'our' IT being hosted in a fragmented landscape of data centers. That only looks like a silver bullet if you are short sighted. [This article originally appeared on InfoWorld in…
June 22, I posted another ArchiMate quiz question: ArchiMate Quiz: A Common Cause. It's been a while, but here is the discussion of the 'solution'. The quiz started with the following two ArchiMate snippets (in Mastering ArchiMate colours, where ‘deep’ is…
It's been a while (busy, busy) but I though this one would be a good candidate for another ArchiMate quiz. This time not "What is wrong with this picture', but more, "This is grammatically correct, but why? And what does…
New Terms of Service I received communication from WhatsApp. I need to agree with the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Statement. I use WhatsApp to communicate with the colleagues in my department (e.g. we use it in our fire…
Nobody can deny that artificial intelligence (or machine learning, deep learning, or cognitive computing) is booming these days. And — as before, as this is in fact the second round for AI — the hype is almost unlimited. But there…
Agile and DevOps are on the rise. Hardly anyone these days defends up-front design approaches or project-based over product-based change. It seems to many that 'agile' is seen as a free pass for unlimited change. This is an illusion. Working…
Recently, I visited a few conferences and I noticed a somewhat hidden theme. While a lot of attention was being paid to moving to a (hybrid) cloud-based architecture and what you need for that (such as cloud management platforms), a…
In the world of real enterprises, enterprise architecture is a weak discipline. It doesn't play a role of any real substance in most medium-large enterprises, which are exactly the enterprises that can profit most from its goals: the management of…
