John Zachman is often called 'the father of Enterprise Architecture'. Some will characterise his work as irrelevant and John a dinosaur. But he is surprisingly agile, in more ways than one.
Category: Enterprise Architecture
Lifecycle Management – Let the Sunshine in
Standardisation/rationalisation is a tool and a wish of many enterprise and it architects, focused as they are on simplification of the complex. But while superficially you can be very standardised, lifecycle events of all the parts can still turn the landscape into a 'hard problem'. Managing lifecycles is something organisations wrestle with because of the complexities. A model to manage lifecycles of items in your landscape — called Sunshine Lifecycle Management — is described.
“Architecture in an Age of Agile” is online
I've (finally!) posted the narrated presentation of a slightly adapted version of my keynote at the Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2018: "Architecture in an Age of Agile". Both Architecture and Agile are important aspects of maximising your success in digital…
To be and not to be — is that the answer?
If you believe much of the reporting done on quantum computing, it is around the corner. We look at how quantum computing works and how realistic it is that it will be available any time soon. With a small appendix on the continuum hypothesis.
Prioritising Architecture and Debt with “Dado’s Diagram”
The previous blog post introduced a way to use WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) in Architecture prioritisation settings. That approach does have something missing which my colleague Henk Dado's approach to prioritising the fixing of debt has: a way to…
Read More Prioritising Architecture and Debt with “Dado’s Diagram”
Agile, Dirt, and Technical Debt
Our discipline has long been working with the concept of 'technical debt'. Generally, technical debt is a (often hidden, but not always) defect of some substantial scale. There is substantial effort involved in repairing the debt, otherwise wel will classify…
Prioritising Architecture under Agile
In the previous story, Agile teaches us the true meaning of Architecture, I introduced a 'new' definition of Architecture: the design decisions that are hard to completely remove from implementations (or in short: that what is hard to change). And I…
Agile teaches us the true meaning of Architecture
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 considered harmful
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…
Data center myopia creates cloud illusions
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…
