Inside Architecture
Notes on Enterprise Architecture, Business Alignment, Interesting Trends, and anything else that interests me this week...
Momentum and Inertia
In Physics, Momentum and Inertia are related. In the battle for mind-share, they are as well. If I...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/20/2007
SOA Economic Model: Avoiding Chargebacks with Transaction Ratio Funding
There are still people who believe that Chargeback models work. For example, Mark Denne argued in...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/19/2007
Good intentions - bad SOA
Joe McKendrick brings up a very important point about "building SOA" in an organization where the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/13/2007
Creating a constrained definition for a measurable business process
Ask ten business people about "the billing process" in your company. Get specific. Diagram it out....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/13/2007
How often do I get to be part of the "next" big thing?
Ran across this post that asks "Why is Enterprise Architecture becoming the next big thing?" There's...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/11/2007
WSPER quietly, then go away
Found an interesting initiative called WSPER ("whisper") at https://www.wsper.org/ that aims to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/11/2007
Beware of SOA in a box
As I've discussed many times, SOA is not a product. It is an architectural style. That said,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/10/2007
Washing fences
Quality is a skill. We need to teach it to our children, just as assuredly as we teach...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/08/2007
SOA drives an odd data model
Information Architects are an interesting crew. Take everything you know and love about a person who...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/08/2007
Replace SOA Governance with SOA Marketing
Many of the SOA marketeers have grouped around the notion of SOA Governance. I have a bone to pick....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/07/2007
IBM comes around, agrees with Microsoft on SOA
David Linthicum pointed out this gem from IBM's Bobby Wolfe that admits, openly, that you cannot buy...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/31/2007
When they are not ready...
Leadership is a funny thing. You cannot lead someone to where they are not ready to go. You have to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/29/2007
Enterprise Architect: Breadth, Depth, and Interchangable Parts
Alan Inglis has posted a second time about the need for an Enterprise Architect to be oriented more...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/29/2007
Actionable Enterprise Architecture through Feedback
This is my third post on Feedback loops and EA. At the Gartner EA Summit in the spring, I was...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/27/2007
Agility, Feedback, and Enterprise Architecture
I blogged a few days back about agility in EA: Deliver Early, Deliver Often, Take Feedback, Iterate....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/26/2007
Business Case for Integration, part two
My good friend Harry Pierson took a pass at my 'business case for integration' post the other day on...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/24/2007
Is it time to bring the FEA concepts to the commercial space?
For years, we've been living with Zachmann and now TOGAF as commercially available EA frameworks,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/24/2007
Agile Enterprise Architecture
One of the things I've learned from Agile methods: Deliver Early, Deliver Often, Take Feedback,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/23/2007
The Business Case For Integrated Systems
I've been looking at the 'business case for integration.' How odd does that sound? If I'm going to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/22/2007
SOA and BI support the same goals
Special thanks to Loraine Lawson for pointing out this excellent article in DMReview titled "BI,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/21/2007
Writing down thoughts - harder than it should be
I just hit the 'send' button on a rough draft of a 10-page document describing key elements of our...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/21/2007
The perfect service oriented architecture is... small
Special thanks to 'Jerman of the Board' for this blog post on a good book, "The Paradox of Choice."...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/19/2007
Does APM reduce cost? That depends.
The goal of Application Portfolio Management is to reduce the cost of owning the portfolio. The...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/18/2007
Put a ruler to the blueprint... is it useful?
My favorite posession in high school was my drafting board. Yep... I was geek, even then. I was...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/16/2007
We are going to miss... do we stretch out the Sprint?
We had a really good discussion this afternoon between the 'agilists' in Microsoft on one of our...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/15/2007
SOA is not a disruptive technology (selling SOA, part three)
I've been having a really fun discussion these past few days with some folks on how (or what) to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/15/2007
Politecture
Aaron Hanks gets credit for coining this term. Ever heard the old saw that says that software...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/14/2007
A Maturity Model for Data Integration
Integration is an odd thing. You have to make many people agree on common things in order for it to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/14/2007
When we talk to the business, should we sell SOA?
There is an interesting logic argument in the SOA community that says: IT has lost the trust of the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/14/2007
EDA: Avoiding "coupling on the name"
A friend of mine, Harry Pierson, is a great thought-provoker. I'm a big fan of thought provokers....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/12/2007
I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies
I wander the blogosphere on occasion looking for new articles on "selling SOA to executives" and I...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/11/2007
When do you need an abstraction
I had a good question from an architect the other day. He was looking at one of my models, where I...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/08/2007
Killing the Command message: should we use Events or Documents?
If we want to decouple a SOA system, we must get away from the notion of the remote procedure call....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/07/2007
Binding SOA to BPM instead of BPM to SOA
SOA has more traction these days than BPM does. SOA tools are more mature, but they are also wildly...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/06/2007
The business services of SaaS
I ran across a really cool post from gianpaolo pertaining to his work on service delivery platforms....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/05/2007
Putting Application Portfolio Management into the picture
Gabriel Morgan knocks one out of the ballpark in this blog post that traces the connection from...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/01/2007
Why Business Process Management is more than BPEL
I recently heard a presentation from a competitor to Microsoft Biztalk talk about their business...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/31/2007
Free Code - Getting IT out of the Applications business
There is one big thing we must do if we are to make IT align with business strategy, we need to get...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/30/2007
Using Massive Multiplayer Online Concepts to Build a Shared Architecture
How can we leverage the power, and draw, of massive multiplayer online game experiences to build a...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/28/2007
How is Business Process Management related to Service Oriented Architecture?
I'm at a large training conference this week, doing a presentation on my ideas around Middle-out SOA...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/26/2007
Should corporate bloggers go "internal only?"
Todd Biske asks a good question about corporate blogging: how do you build sufficient trust to allow...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/24/2007
All models are wrong, some models are useful
A collegue reminded me of one of my favorite "architecture" sayings yesterday, which I had on my...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/23/2007
What you need to make middle out SOA architecture work
In middle-out SOA, we want to do as little as possible from the "center." The real value is at the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/21/2007
SOA without executive support
Joe McKendrick asked a really good question in a recent blog that I'd like to tackle: how to build...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/20/2007
Is Durability in messaging 'bad'? Libor thinks so.
Thanks to Harry Pierson for pointing out an interesting post from Libor Soucek. He links to Harry...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/19/2007
Mort no more - A whole new list of "developers"
For those of you who like to poke at me for my support of Mort (whom I love), you will get a huge...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/19/2007
What are the requirements for enterprise event security?
In a SOA, to be effective, we need to share both data and events. Events, as I have discussed...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/18/2007
Avoiding the Ivory Tower
One challenge of Enterprise Architecture, in any organization, is figuring out how to "be relevant"...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/17/2007
Building a better horse
Martin Fowler wrote a post recently on the value of Design. Quite a good post, actually, in which he...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/13/2007