October 26, 2014

Enterprise Architecture: Single-org versus Multi-org Strategy
One of the most important decisions throughout your Salesforce journey is to decide your “org strategy.” What this really means is: “How many instances of Salesforce will you have in your company?” As a Certified Technical Architect I mostly deal with Fortune 500 companies. The larger the company the more complex this question becomes. It is one of the most foundational and architecturally significant choices that must be made – this decision will impact all future Salesforce initiatives and designs. Here are the 12 questions that I ask my clients in order to make a recommendation regarding the most appropriate org strategy:


Bridging enterprise-architecture and systems-thinking
Presentation at Open Day on Enterprise-Architecture and Systems-Thinking, London, 21 October 2104, for SCiO (Systems and Cybernetics in Organisations). This used my development-work on the Enterprise Canvas framework as a worked-example of how we might create tools to bridge the gaps between enterprise-architecture and systems-thinking, in support of organisations' needs. This slidedeck also provides a useful overview and primer for Enterprise Canvas itself.


Tutorial – NUnit and Sequence Diagram Recording in Enterprise Architect 9.3
Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems can be a real Swiss army knife for .net developers! Most of the stuff shown will also work with a Java environment. I did already a series of blog posts around this type of topics. All of them are based around EA 8. As a lot of stuff changed since EA 8, the release of EA 9.3 motivated to rework the tutorial to reflect the changes. We regularly use these techniques to find issues in large IOC (Inversion of Control) architectures. Where many modules are loaded dynamically and simple test beds like console runners and unit tests are your only chance to isolate the problematic parts in the source code.


Business Capability Planning in the Enterprise Intelligence Age
Business capabilities can be the best starting point for your business architecture program. In the report “Business Capabilities provide the Rosetta Stone of Business-IT Alignment”, Forrester dubs business capabilities as the map to business and IT translation. Getting business and IT on the same page by adopting a common business capabilities nomenclature enables fact-based conversations about the portfolios and their alignment to the business roadmap. ... The adoption of a common language supports the use of business capability maps across the enterprise.


DevOps in the middle: what enterprise architects can learn from the English Channel
It should be no surprise that enterprise architecture has come to include application development, and many enterprise architects now find themselves struggling to understand something called DevOps. But that’s easier said than done. DevOps, after all, is an emerging discipline. Many don’t even know what DevOps is, and some think it’s nothing but hype. Others believe it simply isn’t significant to their organizations. From my perspective, I think it is something to which every enterprise architect should be paying close attention.


How to Become a Cloud Architect
Should you decide to go after a Master's degree, I'd recommend waiting until you've made your job switch into a cloud computing role, and then look around to see what kinds of programs are available to help you advance in this arena. A return to school also argues for moving to either Austin or Raleigh as well, because you will find many top-notch colleges and universities in both areas, many of which offer directly relevant Master's degrees in computer science or similar fields to help you pursue your chosen subject matter.


eBook: Enterprise Architecture a Professional Practice Guide
Over the last several years, we’ve seen more and more organizations consider enterprise architecture as a means to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and agility of the enterprise. As a result, there has been greater calls for many of the things that are common place in more mature disciplines such as, (1) standardization in areas such as education, certifications, and practices; (2) greater research and understanding in areas such as the value proposition of enterprise architecture, implementation practices, and value measurement and management; and in (3) more cooperation and consolidation of activities and thought across the different enterprise architecture related professional associations and perspectives.


Evolution Toward Enterprise and System Architectures Emphasizing Embedded Security
The imposition of externally-defined cybersecurity methodologies and solutions on both government and critical infrastructure programs hasn’t proven effective. Fortunately, the political and technical winds are shifting, and there is new emphasis on the integration of security requirements and functionality from the beginning of the technology development life cycle. ... Programmatic frictions arise when critical functional elements of an emerging or upgraded capability are defined and/or dictated by an external entity that, for all intents and purposes, is not a stakeholder with respect to the capability’s intended use.


Open Group launches IT4IT, vendor-neutral reference architecture for IT management
IT standards organisation Open Group has announced the launch of IT4IT, a forum composed enterprises... The reference architecture provides a set of standard approaches and prescriptive guidelines for the delivery of IT services with a view towards making IT faster, cheaper, and less risky. The forum is composed of Capgemini, AT&T, BP, Shell, PwC, Logicalis, Umbrio, Atos, IBM, HP, Architecting For Enterprise and Microsoft among others, with each member organisation feeding their own experience into the forum to help develop a model for how IT can manage the service life cycle and broker services to the enterprise.


Design Thinking in Education
The world is filled with people looking for solutions (users) and people looking to solve problems (solution makers), and ideally, the two are fully aware of each other’s needs and desires. In other words, students can realize that it is in the best interests of the businesses, institutions and organizations they interact with on a daily basis to best serve their end-users, and that accordingly, end-users have both the right and power to influence and shape the products and services they receive. Like the students, businesses (as solution makers) also benefit from this co-creative dialogue: a population that, through an exposure to design thinking and its emphasis on collaboration, is more aware, engaged and ready to interact is ultimately beneficial to them.



Quote for the day:

“Finish Well; Anyone Can Start Well” -- Miles Anthony Smith

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