3 takeaways to boost your enterprise architect career in 2023
Many people confuse business architecture and IT systems architecture, but they
are different practices. Business architects transform business ideas and
potential projects that align with an organization's strategies and influence a
company's performance as a leader in their market, says Renee Biggs. IT
architects contribute to the technology components of business architecture or
enterprise architecture. ... Finding the right balance between documentation and
implementation is part of an architect's job. But what do you do if your culture
values performance a little too much, asks Evan Stoner, a senior specialist
solutions architect. His advice is to "deliver what is needed." This means
uncovering the current needs and designing for them. Change doesn't happen
overnight. The future is uncertain, so architectures are constantly
evolving. Software development is a key example, say Neal Fishman and Paul
Homan; you must continually redevelop business applications to address new
opportunities. But constant change can produce substandard solutions that
require frequent revision.
Risk and resilience: compliance in 2023
By starting to prepare early, David Tattam, Chief Research & Content Officer
and co-founder of Protecht expects that “businesses will start to realise the
tangible benefits a holistic actionable view of risk provides. Smart businesses
will track a measurable baseline of risk efficiencies over time, in line with
their profit and returns strategy, to demonstrate the ROI of their risk
management program”. Some legislation may have complicated and far-reaching
impacts. Lee Biggenden, COO and Co-Founder of Nephos Technologies has noticed
that “there are ongoing discussions in the European Union about open data
platforms which, if passed, could revolutionise how data is used, shared and
owned. Anticipated to come into force in 2023, it will have a huge impact on
businesses who will need to put the controls and visibility in place over their
data regardless of what industry they're in. Although on paper this may seem
like a step in the right direction, it does raise concerns about personal
privacy as third-party data sharing is a key part of the proposed act. We are
all guilty of clicking privacy boxes without reading the full terms and
conditions”.
The Metaverse Doesn’t Have a Leg to Stand On
Zuckerberg’s not the only mark here. Microsoft also placed a bet on the
metaverse (the avatars in its iteration, Mesh, also lack legs). In the past few
years, a comically wide variety of companies have hired their own “chief
metaverse officer,” from Disney and Procter & Gamble to the Creative Artists
Agency and the accounting firm Prager Metis. Meta placed its bet on the
metaverse in the flashiest way, changing its name, spending all that dough, et
cetera, but it’s not alone in its conviction that these virtual worlds are the
inevitable future. Even writer Neal Stephenson, who coined the word metaverse in
his 1992 novel Snow Crash, founded an actual metaverse company in 2022. In the
past few years, metaverse startups like Decentraland and the Sandbox grabbed
venture capital interest by hyping themselves as hubs for a new NFT-fueled
economy. Despite these companies’ hefty valuations, they have remained decidedly
niche. (Refuting a third-party report that it had only 38 active users one day,
Decentraland said it had an average of 8,000 daily active users—which is still
tiny.) Why did Zuckerberg gamble his business on something so wobbly, so
literally legless?
The year 2022 for Women in Tech
The results of the Toptal survey are not able to clearly indicate that certain
progress has been made in the last year. These facts reveal that a bigger change
still needs to be achieved. There are certain steps and actions that should be
taken by everyone involved in the ecosystem, in order to overcome the existing
gender inequality in the world and in the domain of technology and STEM
specifically. The first step is to break the stereotypes. The stereotypical
thinking is at the root of the problem of misconception of the role of women in
society, the jobs and activities that are ‘appropriate’ for them. The second
step is bridging the gender gap and it presents the next big challenging shift
that must be called for. The gender gap exists notably in career opportunities
and this is easily noticed when comparing the number of women studying and
graduating in the STEM field and the number of women who manage to land jobs in
the tech field and achieve real-life professional realization in the tech area.
A significant part of the existing gender gap is the pay gap. Still, the gender
pay gap provenly exists even in the most advanced countries.
The Tech:Forward recipe for a successful technology transformation
Having an approach that is both this comprehensive and detailed was instrumental
in aligning one large OEM’s tech-transformation goals. Previous efforts had
stalled, often because of competing priorities across various business units,
which frequently led to a narrow focus on each unit’s needs. One might want to
push hard for cloud, for example, while another wanted to cut costs. Each unit
would develop its own KPIs and system diagnostics, which made it virtually
impossible to make thoughtful decisions across units, and technical dependencies
between units would often grind progress to a halt. The company was determined
to avoid making that mistake again. So it invested the time to educate
stakeholders on the Tech:Forward framework, detail the dependencies within each
part of the framework, and review exactly how different sequencing models would
impact outcomes. In this way, each function developed confidence that the
approach was both comprehensive and responsive to its needs. Meetings with the
CFO
3 cloud architecture best practices for industry clouds
Make no assumptions about the security of industry-specific clouds. Those sold
by the larger cloud providers may be secure as stand-alone services; however,
they could become a security vulnerability when integrated and operated directly
within your solution. The best practice here is to build and design security
into your custom applications that leverage industry clouds. Also, do so with
integration in mind so no new vulnerabilities are opened. You can take two
things that are assumed to be secure independently, and then add dependencies
that entirely change the security profile. ... However, you’ll often find the
best-of-breed option is on another cloud or perhaps from an independent industry
cloud provider that decided to go it alone. The best practice here is to not
limit the industry-specific services under consideration. As time goes on, there
will be dozens of services to do tasks such as risk analytics for investment
banking, for example. Picking the less optimized choice means you’ll lower the
value that’s returned to the business. In other words, you make less ROI when
you make less optimized decisions.
Benefits of A Technology-Enabled Risk Assessment Process
Organizations need effective risk assessments to manage resources and make
informed business decisions that enable growth. Performing an effective risk
assessment means going beyond an annual, check-the-box activity by implementing
a risk assessment process that can yield actionable results and findings and
serve as a business intelligence tool to inform risk management strategies. In
today’s rapidly evolving market, banks, financial services companies, payment
services providers, and fintechs are focused on improving their processes to
create dynamic and efficient digital experiences for their customers. But the
improvements do not extend just to customers. ... Technology-enabled solutions –
which support the automated or semi-automated collection of data, scoring of
inherent risk, mapping of controls, and scoring of residual risk – can help
organizations streamline and add efficiencies to their risk assessments and
provide a better understanding of real-time risk than the frequently outdated,
once-a-year process can. Organizations then can use the valuable business
intelligence obtained through the risk assessment process to increase revenue
and identify new business opportunities for further growth.
Making the case for an Enterprise Architect in Digital Transformation programs
Large transformation work need to be addressed in 3 buckets – Plan, Build &
Run. While “Build” is the largest portion of investments in any transformation
program, it is obvious that organizations are required to safeguard whatever has
been built with minimal “Run” budgets. “Build” and “Run” are cyclical in nature.
For example, you build, then you maintain (run), then you either build more or
something new and then maintain (run) that more or something new. So it is
pretty obvious that leaders responsible for large transformations think of Build
as the starting point and transition to Run as the end. It is senior leaders
however that need to see things being built (and run) as building blocks of a
vision or the journey. This is the Planning function (which is strategic). The
“Plan” function needs to be executed by someone who understands business vision
and maps the journey to that vision. S/he does that by identifying business
capabilities and value chain (not business process), and then developing the
strategy as building blocks. The skill required to do this is called “Enterprise
Architecture”.
EU Cyber Resilience Act: Good for Software Supply Chain Security, Bad for Open Source?
With all of the good that the CRA brings in evolving the regulatory
conversations past SBOMs, the current draft has some problematic language that
could actually hurt the future of open source. But first, what it gets right
about open source. Page 15, Paragraph 10 attempts to exempt, or carve out, open
source software (OSS) from the regulations, saying: In order not to hamper
innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied
outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this
Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including
its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely
accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable. This is good, even great.
OSS and project maintainers should be exempt from these regulations that apply
liability, as this will have the effect of quashing innovation and sharing of
ideas via code. However, in the same paragraph, the CRA attempts to draw a line
between commercial and non-commercial use of open source software:
Finding the Right Data Governance Model
It is critical to distinguish the term “governance” from the term “management”
in the context of Data Governance. It should be noted that the principal
difference between “governance” and “management” is that governance refers to
the decisions that must be made and who must make them. This is to ensure
effective resource allocation and management of data operations. On the other
hand, Data Management involves implementing those decisions that arise from
assessing and monitoring either existing controls or the environment that
includes advancements in technology and the market. The activities required
for Data Governance can, therefore, be distinguished from those needed for
Data Management since management is influenced by governance. Data Governance
is oversight of Data Management activities to ensure that policy and ownership
of data are enforced in the organization. The emphasis is on formalizing the
Data Management function and associated data ownership roles and
responsibilities.
Quote for the day:
"Give whatever you are doing and
whoever you are with the gift of your attention." -- Jim Rohn
