Inside Architecture
Notes on Enterprise Architecture, Business Alignment, Interesting Trends, and anything else that interests me this week...
Kudos to Cambridge for refusing to cover up security holes in “Chip and PIN”
One challenge with long-running news stories is that it is often difficult to keep track of the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/26/2010
Enterprise Architecture and the Lessons of History
I am an Enterprise Architect. It is my job to look at things the way they are, and envision...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/24/2010
How (not) to convince an architect
I’ve been watching, with a mixture of dismay and mirth, a LinkedIn discussion between Adrian...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/09/2010
Will Wikileaks be responsible for the next attack on the United States?
I rarely do a personal rant on my blog… preferring to stick mostly to Architecture, but this time, I...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/06/2010
Creating a compelling visual story
One thing that I’ve become fascinated with over the past few years is the difference between...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/03/2010
EA Leadership and Compromise: Sometimes, success is not what you think it will be
About a week ago, I blogged a short story about a fictional town that faced a problem, with two...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/29/2010
The Little Town of Busit
Once upon a time, there was a little town called Busit in a valley, deep in the mountains. ...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/21/2010
Are we documenting the wrong things?
James McGovern blogged recently about his dislike of documentation as part of software...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/20/2010
Enterprise Architects Are The Gears, Not The Grease
I’ve often heard “soft” metaphors used when discussing Enterprise Architects. Some compare EA...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/16/2010
Business Architecture Apprentice Training Model
There is no question that businesses need Business Architects. There is no question that...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/13/2010
How many business architects do you need?
This is an interesting question, and it depends on a lot of different kinds of answers. The...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/12/2010
How to know if your application is “strategic”
Enterprise Architects get involved in some pretty hairy discussions. One responsibility that...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 10/21/2010
Cool Idea – replacing the escalator
Ran across this on the blog of Andy Blumenthal… very cool idea.
Author: Nick Malik Date: 10/07/2010
Enterprise Strategic Architecture in Product Development
We see a lot of discussion, in the frameworks, books, speeches, and the blogosphere that discusses...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 10/03/2010
Can Federal EA ever include the full scope of Enterprise Architecture?
Adrian Grigoriu recently posted about the failure of EA frameworks to address real enterprise...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 10/02/2010
Linthicum’s Challenge: Where does SOA stop and EA start?
Tom Graves, David Linthicum, and I recently got into an interesting discussion on Twitter as the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/19/2010
A roadmap to BPM democratization
A few days ago, I blogged about a talk provided by Phil Gilbert at the BPM2010 conference. In...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/17/2010
Who among us uses the EABOK?
Know what doesn’t come up in conversation all that often? The EA Body of Knowledge document,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/15/2010
Enjoying the BPM 2010 Conference
The field of Business Process Management is not a huge field, but I believe it to be an important...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/15/2010
Evolving the Enterprise Business Motivation Model
As my readers may know, I published a metamodel for business architecture about 18 months ago in the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/10/2010
Assumptions under a Zachman Framework presentation
I am writing this blog post while I am listening to a teleconference from Sam Holcman, founder of...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 09/09/2010
Introducing: Ecosystem Quality Attributes
There are benefits to taking an idea from one domain and applying it to another. We all know...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/31/2010
On vacation
...at a really great place. I'm at Rancho La Puerta, a "destination spa" in Tecate Mexico (just...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/23/2010
When demand management is confused with alignment…
One of the most common, and reasonable, mechanisms for achieving clarity on the roadmap for a single...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/12/2010
The Mission, Capabilities, and Business Output of Enterprise Architecture
In the response to my most recent post on Enterprise Architecture, Brenda Michelson posted a very...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/10/2010
A reasonable canonical definition of Enterprise Architecture
Clearly we want one. A thread on LinkedIn a couple of months ago attempted to define the value...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/08/2010
Tangled
Barry Briggs put together a tag cloud for the Technology Office a few days ago… that inspired me to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 08/05/2010
Avoiding Business Architecture Paralysis
A close cousin to “analysis paralysis” is BA Paralysis. This unfortunate situation occurs when...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/22/2010
Can Enterprise Architecture be effective if we ignore the needs of the customer?
In my prior post, I pointed out that the Zachman Framework is limited (fatally flawed even) by the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/15/2010
Zachman’s Fatal Flaw: No Row for the Customer
John Zachman’s Framework for Information Systems Architecture, later renamed as the Zachman...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/07/2010
Our own worst enemy: BPM pros tell horror stories about working with EA
I recently asked two questions on LinkedIn. I asked BPM professionals what they thought about...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/06/2010
A Rough Primer on Enterprise Architecture
I produced this page after fielding a question for a succinct definition, in three pages or less,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 07/02/2010
Creating context between BPM and EA
I’ve spent some time in recent weeks focusing on the touchpoints between practitioners of BPM and...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 06/22/2010
Design for Business Agility: Can Mathematical Models be developed?
Sometimes, if you multi-task two different activities, your mind finds connections between them that...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 06/17/2010
Inserting Architectural Governance into the IT Program Funding Cycle
People do what you pay them to do. That much is clear. In most businesses, if you pay...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 06/15/2010
Improving how you measure the maturity of a business capability
Depending on the level of maturity of your Business Architecture practice, there are many different...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 06/12/2010
It has value… but do you need it?
Recently, Chris Potts threw this nugget out on Twitter: chrisdpotts Instead of 'demand-managing' to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 06/09/2010
What process gives a tool to a fool?
Mike Walker recently blogged about the veracity of architectural models, and the precautions that...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 06/08/2010
Is the concept of a “roadmap” working against Enterprise Architecture?
Isaac Asimov once said, “It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 05/31/2010
Update to Blogging Site
Hi Folks, If you have wandered the wilds of the MSDN or Technet blogs in the past few days, you will...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 05/25/2010
Doing Business without EA is like building a chain of “open” links
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 05/11/2010
Drawing Effective Technical Diagrams
As architects, we spend a good bit of time trying to get a very complicated set of ideas...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 04/29/2010
Service Oriented Architecture Conceptual Model
Almost two years ago, I described some of the key concepts of service oriented architecture,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 04/16/2010
Building less than you know you’ll need
In the past, I’ve been guilty of this sin: gold-plating. Back when I was a solution architect,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 04/09/2010
Does app portfolio simplification solve the wrong problem?
As you may know, I agree with Roger Sessions that one of the value propositions of Enterprise...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/25/2010
Azure – Practitioners Guides
I think that this post by Bill Zack is pretty useful. The post lists resources for everyone who...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/17/2010
How the Program Management Office Views Enterprise Architecture…
There’s an interesting analysis available through the PMO Executive Board on “Project...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/10/2010
Should IT run “like a business” or “like a non-profit?”
Why is it so hard to run IT like a business? Because, I can choose to be a customer of a...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/05/2010
Is there a Minimum Age for Enterprise Architect
This is apparently a discussion that comes up on a repeated basis on LinkedIn, and was asked again...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/24/2010
What does the brand of “Enterprise Architect” stand for?
Fascinating, sometimes, what happens when managers assign job titles. Today, I ran across a fellow,...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/23/2010