IASA: making architecture work

Last week I spent three days in Manhattan, attending the International Association of Software Architects (IASA)’s IT Architecture Regional Conference (ITARC) in NY. That’s a long time for me to be anywhere – so why did I do it?
The first answer is the speaker lineup – there were keynotes from Len Bass of Carnegie-Mellon’s SEI; [...]

 

Posted by admin on October 19, 2009

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The role of architecture, again

The other day I read a post from David Norfolk (”The MDM tarpit“) which generated some lively comment. You can read the post yourself, but to briefly summarise, David highlighted a view that Master Data Management (MDM) should really be redundant – the need for MDM is really a reflection of poor architecture or poor [...]

 

Posted by admin on August 26, 2009

Software AG does it again with IDS Scheer

So (as usual) I’m far from being the first BPM market/tech commentator to write something on Software AG’s bid for IDS-Scheer; however there’s a few points I’d like to drop into the mix.
I have to say I was a little surprised at the acquisition. As I tweeted at the time, I kind of expected IDS [...]

 

Posted by admin on July 15, 2009

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Businesses aren't machines, and enterprise architecture can't make them so

Via Service Oriented Enterprise, I recently picked up an Infoworld blog post by SOA journeyman David Linthicum, where he makes a couple of very strange points about SOA and ESBs. It may be, of course, that the post is pure link bait: certainly, David appears to have said some relatively sane things in the past, [...]

 

Posted by admin on July 23, 2008

Which comes first: process or service? Part 2

The question of how to combine BPM and SOA came up a lot here at TIBCO’s TUCON user event – and, a little disappointingly, the standard response seems to typically revolve around reinventing the three-tier architecture of the 1990s, just with more scope and scale.
I pointed out in the previous part of this post a [...]

 

Posted by admin on May 2, 2008

Which comes first: process or service? Part 1

Over the years I’ve been helping to run MWD I’ve been to quite a few events, talked to many enterprise IT folks and talked to many tech vendors, too – and one of the topics that comes up most often is the relationship between BPM and SOA. There’s been a bit of a run on [...]

 

Posted by admin on April 18, 2008

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IBM to buy Telelogic: Rational, but not inspirational

I know in the blogosphere, waiting a few days to provide comment on an announcement like this one hardly puts me at the leading edge – but hey. Although I can’t claim to be breaking any news, there are a couple of other points about IBM’s purchase of Telelogic that I think are worth making.
As [...]

 

Posted by admin on June 15, 2007

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Swimming against the tide

Nick Malik poses an interesting question here – are we making things difficult for ourselves by calling Enterprise Architecture Enterprise Architecture? His point is (if I’ve got it right) that architecture work is kind of crunchy, focusing on very well-bounded and defined outputs – whereas EA work is delivered within a different context. Enterprises morph [...]

 

Posted by admin on May 29, 2007

Real-world Enterprise Architecture part II: conversation, federation, road trips and tools

In my previous post I explained how in order to get real value out of Enterprise Architecture (EA) work, it’s critical to focus not only on the outputs of EA work, but also on the process/practice of EA – and moreover that the process/practice has to focus on *conversations*.
What does this mean for tools, technologies [...]

 

Posted by admin on May 15, 2007

Real-world Enterprise Architecture part I: journey vs destination

I was talking to Donna Burbank, Director of Enterprise Modelling and Architecture Solutions at Embarcadero a few days ago – she was briefing me about the company’s new EA/Studio product. We digressed a fair bit along the way, particularly sharing notes regarding our experiences of how Enterprise Architecture (EA) *actually* works in the real world. [...]

 

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