Architecture

Why We Need Cloud Integration Architecture

February 3, 2011

A few years ago, a consumer products company I’m familiar with committed to outsourcing its infrastructure and as much of its application portfolio as possible. Its strategic application decisions were heavily influenced by outsourced and SaaS offering, placing its CRM and several customer community sites in the cloud. With a stable set of hosted, cloud and SaaS apps, they were shocked to find that they didn’t talk to one another to provide a single view ...

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How to Assess Your Technical Architecture

September 4, 2010

Guest Post by Russ Trpkovki When a new project begins, I am often overwhelmed with the amount of information and number of decisions requiring my attention. I need to identify gaps in the current state architecture as well as think about future state technical capabilities. My analysis and decision making is usually done at a fast pace under high stress and lots of scrutiny from the program leadership. Given the fluid nature of an early ...

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Who Needs a Current State Technology Architecture?

August 23, 2010

Guest Post by Zach Sachen, Sridhar Karimanal and Rima Safari Collecting information about your current technology architecture is a major pain, so why bother? Is it just a waste of time or is it another enterprise architecture myth? A quick calculation shows that building skills and processes to produce, maintain, and use current state architecture information can save a company a lot of time and money, as well as realize additional benefits along the way. ...

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How To Deliver Enterprise Architecture Value Early

July 13, 2010

Co-authored with David Baker How to demonstrate the value of enterprise architecture is a constant question we get from our clients. In fact, a more basic question might be “what is the business value of EA?” We strongly believe that EA should be the way that a business connects its strategy to its technology investment plan – through the use of business capabilities. As good as that might sound in concept, the hard work is ...

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16 Enterprise Architecture Strategies Learned The Hard Way

June 30, 2010

Co-authored with David Baker We’ve been spending time thinking through the differences in implementing new or improving existing EA capabilities for smaller, say a few billion in revenue and larger firms in the Fortune 100 or thereabouts. Because the larger firms tend to have many complex, often unrelated business units, the role of centralized IT functions can also be quite complex, even unclear. Furthermore, centralized enterprise functions have many challenges in driving standards throughout diverse, ...

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Busting 5 Enterprise Architecture Myths

June 8, 2010

First Group CIO Chris Boult and I are speaking today at the CIO Executive Summit in Cincinnati about enterprise architecture. As its adoption continues to challenge many, Chris and I decided to discuss and bust these 5 myths: EA is what IT uses to plan its technology You can’t measure it Architects only pontificate, they don’t work EA doesn’t work with an SDLC If you subscribe to SOA, you don’t need EA Enterprise Architecture is ...

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Shared Services
Diamond’s 2010 Business Design Survey

March 23, 2010

This is the first of a 3-part series on shared services co-authored with Paul Blase Ayn Rand Would Have Shared More Services, Why Doesn’t Your Company? We all learned that it’s good to share – so why don’t companies share more, when there is more value to be had? Imagine if the architects of the last plane you flew used 20 different blueprints for each section of the plane – each not integrating with the ...

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Public Cloud Adoption – Where Are You?

October 7, 2009

by Chris Curran, Nalneesh Gaur and Rob Warren In distilling perspectives from our clients for two upcoming events on cloud computing (Diamond Exchange, InfoWorld), we have developed an informal categorization that captures where companies are in adopting public cloud computing offerings. “Not Interested/Not Applicable” could have been an option for our list but we don’t know anyone not at least looking into applying the cloud. Our clients fall into one of six categories in their ...

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Is the Open Source Conversation Dead?

May 15, 2009

One of my partners was asked by the Chief Information Officer of a major financial services organization for some help thinking through his open source strategy. Honestly, the open source conversation has not come up much lately. Is open source in the enterprise a dead issue? Have companies already tapped into the open source apps and tools and exhausted the options? Or, maybe consideration of open source software is fully integrated into companies’ software selection ...

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Stop the Web 2.0 Flood

April 30, 2009

I recently spent a few days with several CIOs and IT leaders at an MIT Center for Information Systems Research briefing. Prof. Wanda Orlikowski led a discussion around some early work exploring the uses and value of Web 2.o technologies in the enterprise. For purposes of our conversation, we defined Web 2.0 technologies as those that enrich connections between people (a much simpler, but consistent take on Tim O’Reilly’s version). Specifically, we discussed the use ...

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