R&A IT Strategy & Architecture
Insights on all things 'digital', both technical and non-technical
Short update. For those who would like to discuss Enterprise Architecture with me in person: I will be presenting at the Gartner EA Summit London 2015 on May 20th 2015 in London UK and I will be giving the closing…
Read More Two appearances: Gartner EA Summit (UK) and MBT Conference (NL)
Large, complex landscapes are a pain. With hundreds of servers, hundreds of applications, thousands of users (and thus usage patterns) and a constant flux of small and large changes, few organisations are really in full control of what they actually…
The direction of arrow of the Used-By relation is a constant source of entertainment and/or frustration, see for instance this (started by Sol Kahn, 37 comments) and this LinkedIn discussion (started by Michiel Perdeck, 40 comments). As the latter discussion shows,…
Did you ever wonder what a strange beast the Grouping Relation in the ArchiMate zoo of elements and relations is? According to the standard it is a 'relation'. It is, however, one of the weirdest elements of ArchiMate. Officially it…
Architects generally wrestle with the problem of communicating their complex world of dependencies to stakeholders. Those that created the ArchiMate language hoped that making a better language would enable clearer communication. While ArchiMate does enable more precise communication than your average…
Read More ArchiMate doesn’t make communication to management easier
A while back, I wrote in the blog post ArchiMate is overrated (and underrated) that using ArchiMate doesn't really have that much added value for communicating simple, high-level views to stakeholders (users, management), but its structure does bring advantages that enables us to…
Recently, I had a conversation with someone about how to do enterprise architecture. I prepared that conversation by trying to condense my basic argument for the`enterprise chess' approach to the absolute minimum. I started out with the question: "Suppose we don't…
Read More Losing a Limpet – What happens when we don’t have Enterprise Architecture?
Short post today: my new column on the Enterprise Architecture Professional Journal, titled "The (Forgotten) Other Half of SOA" has been published. A somewhat technical subject: service oriented architectures and performance issues. With a few ArchiMate views added to the…
Read More New ‘On Slippery Ice’ column at EAPJ: “The (Forgotten) Other Half of SOA”
I wrote a post on Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture about ways to look at self-service from an architectural perspective: "I, Robot" – there is no such thing as 'Customer Self-Service'. In it, I argue that saying that…
Recently, Samuel Holcman published the short Outside-In vs. Inside-Out in Enterprise Architecture document and announced it on LinkedIn. The issue he raises is that the clients of organisations more and more seem to become the ones that perform the organisation's processes (e.g. self-service),…
Read More “I, Robot” – there is no such thing as ‘Customer Self-Service’
R&A IT Strategy & Architecture 