Archives October 2018

In times of the digital transformation, almost all industries are facing challenges caused by highly accelerated technology innovation cycles and new and disrupting competitors.  Today, companies put a tremendous effort into innovation initiatives. A recent Boston Consulting Group survey reported that nine out of ten senior executives believe generating growth through innovation is essential for success in their industry. Innovation is a trend that runs through all organizations, not just a segregated discipline performed by specialized people only. Read More

The famous parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. The complete text of the poem is here.

When I read the parable I instantly found it to be very suitable to use it for companies within the digital transformation. Companies are elephants employing blind men like: Read More

Over the last two years, business architecture became more and more well known in the (IT) architecture community. Many friends of mine who formerly named themselves ‘Enterprise Architects’ start to use ‘Business Architect’ or ‘Enterprise Business Architect’ on their business card. But what does this mean? Is the discipline of Enterprise Architecture and their weak foundation on immature frameworks about to be replaced by Business Architecture? Is the work done by businessarchitectureguild.org gaining more and more importance? Has the concept of ‘architecture’ finally achieved it’s dedicated goal – the mind of business people?

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In most companies I know, enterprise-wide architecture models are designed by a few enterprise architects and are typically not widely accepted by developers. Today, agile solution teams and enterprise architects are separated by huge walls of ignorance and misunderstanding. Enterprise architects (EAs) manage their repository of artifacts and build to-be roadmaps. Solution teams do not care about the work of the EAs and do whatever their product owner wants them to do. Strong links between solution architecture and enterprise architecture seldom exist, which questions the use of the latter at its very core.

What you should do: Read More

Trapped in the vortex of digital transformation, almost all industries are facing challenges caused by highly accelerated technology innovation cycles, new and disrupting competitors, and, last but not least, a tremendous amount of technical debt in their vast historically grown IT landscape.

Dave Sag’s blog provides a good summary of what technical debt means.

To deal with this area of tension companies trust in ‘Agile’ gurus that tell them how they must change their organization and culture to become ‘agile’. If we look at the complexity of the application landscape of a typical company it becomes obvious that they simply can’t be agile without renovation projects that make their legacy IT agile.

What you should do:

• Reduce your technical debt step by step by the renovation of your legacy IT. Agile IT landscapes make companies agile, not agile coaches that focus on culture and organizational aspects.
• Hire business architects instead of agile coaches.

Previous Posts:

Launch of the Architectural Thinking Framework®

For sure, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is still a very immature, weakly defined field. Most of the methods, tools, and frameworks suit the requirements of real-world projects only to a small degree. Most of the elements EAM tries to structure and manage towards a to-be state’ are abstract and hard to grasp. Archimate®, a modeling notation for EAM, for example, defines more than thirty elements, most of them are vague abstractions and far from tangible. In practice, EAM is much more focused on designing application landscapes than providing a holistic view of the enterprise. EAM is still very much about ‘application portfolio management’ that tries to minimize IT costs without alignment to the business capabilities.

But how can this sad situation be changed?

Our suggestion is to apply three values to your EAM practice: Read More

When Agile software development was born in 2001, it defined a set of four principles:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

I have worked in several Agile teams where ‘responding to change over following a plan,’ often got misinterpreted to mean “don’t have a plan.”  Those teams often find they waste time by adapting too much.

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Enterprise Architecture has a long tradition of mighty architectural gurus drawing fancy diagrams that never reach the reality of solution development.

In his article on the ‘Agile Modeling’ approach, Scott Ambler states:

‘An ivory tower architecture is one that is often developed by an architect or architectural team in relative isolation to the day-to-day development activities of your project team(s).The mighty architectural guru(s) go off and develop one or more models describing the architecture that the minions on your team is to build to for the architect(s) know best. Ivory tower architectures are often beautiful things, usually well-documented with lots of fancy diagrams and wonderful vision statements proclaiming them to be your salvation. Read More