jeffreyblake

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[jeffreyblake]

Worst Methods for Enterprise Architecture

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Burton outlined her baker’s dozen of “worst” enterprise architecture practices. The EA methods that Burton said muddied efforts and missed overall business returns are as follows:

1. No link to business strategic planning and budget process.

2. Confusing "IT Architecture" with "Enterprise Architecture."

3. Lack of governance.

4. Too much standardization.

5. Focusing on the art/language of EA rather than the outcomes.

6. Strictly adhering to architectural frameworks.

7. An "Ivory Tower" approach by IT and EA team members.

8. Lack of communication and feedback.

9. Limiting the teams to IT resources.

10. Missing performance measures.

11. Picking a tool before understanding business needs.

12. Focusing on the current state first and primarily.

13. Thinking that implementation equals completion.

via information-management.com

[jeffreyblake]

7 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Klout Score

Are you below your target Klout score? Schaefer reveals seven simple ways to climb up the ranks:

1. Build a network. The key to increasing a Klout score is similar to finding success on the social web in general: Build a targeted, engaged network of people who would be legitimately interested in you and your content.

2. Create meaningful content. Adopt a strategy to create or aggregate meaningful content that your network loves to share with others. Provide links!

3. Engage. Actively engage with others in a helpful and authentic way. Ask questions, answer questions and create a dialogue with your followers.

4. Don’t scheme. Any gaming behaviors that fall outside the basic strategies will eventually catch up to you. For example, specifically targeting conversations with high Klout influencers will probably be more annoying than successful. If you keep focused on your network strategy and your content strategy, you’ll succeed.

5. Interact with everyone. Don’t be afraid to interact with Klout users with lower scores – it won’t hurt your own score. In fact, it helps build their score and in turn makes you more of an influencer.

6. Publish. Remember, you don’t have to make a movie or be elected to office to have power now. All you need to do is publish. Access to free publishing tools such as blogs, video and Twitter have provided users with an opportunity to have a real voice, so take advantage of these many platforms.

7. Keep at it. Don’t be discouraged by your score. It’s more important to just enjoy your social media experience and let the chips fall where they may.

via mashable.com

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The Principles of the Global Workforce

1. Distance doesn’t matter.

Employees now expect to be able to collaborate in real-time with any co-worker. They expect to have access to whatever data or services the company offers no matter where they happen to be. Where in the world that co-worker actually works is irrelevant. They may be working from home, different offices, at airports, manufacturing facilities, or even on a ship somewhere. Knowledge workers need the flexibility to work wherever they must in order to best complete their jobs. That may mean on-site, at a customer’s office, or even from the quiet of their own home. IT must be an enabler for the way business needs to operate. Waiting 20 minutes for a file to be sent between workers – even if they are across the world from each other – is no longer acceptable for the employee or for the customer project that they are working on.

2. Business never stops.

With a globalized workforce – and a rapidly globalizing customer base – businesses cannot afford their operations to be stopped for even a few minutes. Responsiveness to disaster or failure – often characterized by recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) – must go far beyond responding to common problems like a failed SAN or a downed fiber connection. Issues like hurricanes or a flu pandemic might force workers to operate from home for an unspecified period of time. Compromised data centers may require enterprise to rapidly switch operations to secondary locations with no loss in information.

3. Applications and data must be available everywhere but all in one place.

With organizations working harder to protect their valuable data and sensitive customer information, many IT organizations are engaging in IT consolidation projects. Consolidating data makes it easier to track, protect, and restore. Beginning with remote tape backup and progressing to more complicated projects like file servers, document management applications, PLM systems, and Web applications, CIOs are demanding that data be brought back from remote offices. At the same time, businesses recognize that the data and applications were “out there” for a reason – that’s where they needed to be accessed. So while consolidation is an important strategy for data protection and cost control, it can negatively impact business operations unless LAN-like performance can be maintained everywhere.

4. Knowledge must be harnessed – and data must be managed.

Consolidation goes a long way to eliminating the islands of storage and data that evolve over time. But with organizations being required to react quickly in the face of change, or move in order to take advantage of an opportunity, flexibility in moving data and applications is essential. CIOs must be able to quickly move massive amounts of data, and potentially set up application infrastructure in remote locations overnight. New offices and merged/acquired businesses must quickly be absorbed into the fabric of the existing organization by providing them immediate access to new systems and data.

5. There are no second-class enterprise citizens.

The days of the “important” people working at corporate HQ are rapidly fading. Employees everywhere are now empowered to make important decisions. Whether it is designing or manufacturing a product, working with a customer, or working on a localized version of an advertising campaign, work happens everywhere. And the work of the distributed employee isn’t less important than anyone else’s work. Just as importantly, these workers need to interact with their colleagues, applications and data everywhere. CIOs and IT managers may no longer prioritize workers based on their geographic location. Every member of the enterprise needs to have access to the same applications, at the same level of application performance.

from "The CIO's new guide to design of global IT infrastructure"

[jeffreyblake]

The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:

Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice.

Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice.

The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision. In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one: complacency leads to failure.

via en.wikipedia.org

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Adjyle Online Marketing and Promotion

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Cloud Decisions

• Evolution rather than replacement.

The private cloud can evolve from existing virtualized infrastructure, enabling the transition to cloud computing without a complete and disruptive infrastructure overhaul.

• Security and compliance.

With a private cloud, data is retained within the enterprise, behind the corporate firewall, where IT can exercise full control over security, privacy, and regulatory compliance. With public clouds, enterprise data is housed in external data centers—and may move from location to location, without IT’s knowledge or consent. The dynamic movement of data in a public cloud may also present compliance challenges with local regulations.

• Service level agreements (SLAs).

Keeping applications in-house can help IT continue to meet SLAs deining performance, availability, and other critical business requirements. Some external providers may not be able to furnish the same level of service.

• Cost.

A large enterprise private cloud can provide economies of scale, resulting in total cost of ownership (TCO) that is competitive with or lower than public clouds. Intel IT, for example, found that services can be hosted internally at equal or lower TCO than hosting them externally.

• Building expertise.

Architecting a private cloud enables IT organizations to develop a knowledge base that can be applied to public clouds in the future. When creating the private cloud, IT will need to develop detailed application and data inventories, and gain key skills such as managing cloud SLAs. This experience will help build effective relationships with public cloud providers, enabling IT organizations to assess whether they meet enterprise requirements

(excerpt from http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/cio-agenda-paper-vmware.pdf)

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7 Primary Business Drivers for Social Media

Enhance branding and awareness

Protect reputation

Extend public relations

Build community or loyalty

Extend customer service

Facilitate research and development

Drive sales or leads

via briansolis.com

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Social Network Users' Bill of Rights

1.Honesty: We will honor our privacy policy and terms of service.

2. Clarity: We will make sure that our policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand.

3. Freedom of speech: We will not delete or modify user data without a clear policy and justification.

4. Empowerment : We will support assistive technologies and universal accessibility.

5. Self-protection: We will support privacy-enhancing technologies.

6. Data minimization: We will minimize the information users are required to provide and share with others.

7. Control: We will work toward enabling users to own and control their data and won’t facilitate sharing their data unless they agree first.

8. Predictability: We will obtain the prior consent of users before significantly changing who can see their data.

9. Data portability: We will make it easy for users to obtain a copy of their data.

10. Protection: We will treat user data as securely as our own confidential data unless they choose to share these data, and notify them if these data are compromised.

11. Right to know: We will show users how we are using their data and allow them to see who and what has access to their data.

12. Right to self-define: We will allow users to create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. We will not link them without their permission.

13. Right to appeal: We will allow users to appeal punitive actions.

14. Right to withdraw: We will allow users to delete their accounts and remove their data.

via blog.diasporafoundation.org

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The 5 Laws of Engagement

Law 1: We seek comfort in relationships: Surround us with community, which we’ve seen success with like Facebook, Twitter and 4chan. Most interestingly is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Law 2: We all have something to say. So give us tools to express ourselves. Tools include comments, notes, and all the fun things Facebook has given us with Timeline, etc.

Law 3: We need to feel important. Use rewards to make us feel special. How do you make people feel special? One way is through exclusivity like Gilt Group. One way is through badges on Foursquare.

Law 4: We are hypnotized by beauty. Give us something beautiful to look out. Flipboard puts the image first. Instagram is a series of beautiful images within a community.

Law 5: We are captivated by the unknown. So target our curiosity. Foursquare does this with points! Pinterest does with page after page of constant intrigue.

via thenextweb.com

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[jeffreyblake]

Anne Boe's Keys to Successful Networking

Clarify your career goals.

Develop long-term win-win relationships.

Nurture your network daily.

Be actively involved in your community.

Meet as many people as you can.

Take your business cards everywhere.

Make friends, even when you don't need them.

Act like a host, not a guest.

Become an interested person.

Develop your listening skills.

Trust your intuition.

Take people risks.

Master the art of small talk.

Work smarter, not harder.

Value yourself and your life.

Take action daily towards your goals.

Become your own energy manager.

Learn to ask for what you want.

Give thanks for what you have.

Acknowledge your skills and talents.

Say "Thank you. "

Become an inverse paranoid - decide the world is conspiring for you.

Determine your priorities - protect your energy.

Learn to want what you have.

Know that there are more side doors in the world than there are front doors.

[Source: Anne Boe]

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Creating an IT Strategy - Management by Maxim

I have heard that 90% of all businesses do not have a written Business Strategy.  Its in their heads - but as an Enterprise Architect how do you extract it so that you can create a viable IT Strategy?  Often times CxOs don't have time to have a strategic dialogue.  One way to solve this problem is to employ the "Maxim Process"

The Maxim Process is described by Broadbent and Kitzis in [Broadbent+05] as a pragmatic way to extract enough information for a good enough IT strategy while not investing more than a day’s workshop with senior management. The CIO will organize a work-­‐ shop with CxOs, which will lead to documenting 2 kinds of so-­‐called Maxims:

Business Maxims

And as a result IT Maxims

Maxims are a few concise principles that are used to document the strategic direction of an enterprise. A Maxim workshop will usually not produce more than around 5 business maxims. For each of those, management will derive 4-­‐5 maxims for the IT function that will help to support them.

A typical Maxim Workshop will be split up into two parts:

Part 1: Finding the Business Maxims,

Part 2: Deriving the IT Maxims

An external facilitator should moderate the workshop day and process.

To give examples imagine an old economy financial service provider like a big insurance company that runs more than one brand name on the market. For such an enterprise you could find the following business maxim:

Create synergies in back office and service functions wherever brand identity is not compromised

IT maxims that could be deducted from such a business strategy could be:

Define standard architectures and platforms used by all of the group’s companies in order to leverage synergies and to reduce IT cost

Harmonize the IT application systems for the group’s companies wherever there is a business case for this.

  SOURCE: TOGAF9 QuickStart Guide 2009

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What Does an Enterprise Architect Do ?

Business Technology Strategy

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

Your organization’s business and technology strategy and rationale

Your competition (products, strategies and Processes)

Your company’s business practices

Your Technology Portfolio

Influence business strategy

Translate business strategy into technical vision and strategy

Understand customer and market trends

Capture customer, organizational and business requirements of architecture

Prepare architectural documents and presentations

Visionary

Entrepreneurial

  Organizational Politics

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

Who the key players are in the organization

What they want, both business and personal

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Listen, network and influence

Sell the Vision, keep the vision alive

Take and retake the pulse of all critical influencers of the architecture project

Able to see from and sell to multiple viewpoints

Confident and articulate

Ambitious and driven

Patient and not

Resilient

Sensitive to where the power is and how it flows in your organization

  Consulting

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

Elicitation techniques

Consulting frameworks

Soft Skill techniques

Build “trusted advisor” relationships

Understand what the business people want and need from the architecture

Understand what the developers want and need from the  architecture

Help developers see the value of the enterprise architecture and understand how to use the technology successfully

Committed to others’ success

Empathetic and approachable

An effective change agent and process savvy

A good mentor and teacher

  Leadership

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

Yourself

Set team context and vision

Make decisions stickp>

Build teams

Motivate

You and others see you as a leader

Charismatic and credible

You believe it can an should be done and that you can lead the effort

Committed, dedicated, passionate

You see the entire effort in a broader business and personal context

  Technology

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

In-depth understanding of the domain and pertinent technologies

Understand what technical issues are key to success

Development of methods and modeling techniques

Modeling

Trade-off Analysis

Prototype, Experiment, and Simulate

Prepare architectural documents and presentations

Technology trend analysis/roadmaps<

Take a systems viewpoint

Creative

Investigative, Practical, Pragmatic, and Insightful

Tolerant of ambiguity, willing to backtrack, seek multiple solutions

Good a working at an abstract level

  Risks and Rewards

Risks

Rewards

Responsibility without corresponding control

A lot of resistance and disappointments along the way

Often encounter others that believe they have a better idea or solution

Focus on interesting and complex issues

Opportunity to advance to very high levels in the organization with business and technical focus (rather than personal and fiscal)

Opportunity to make an enormous difference to the company and clients

Source: IFEAD

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[jeffreyblake]

Kim Cameron's 7 Laws of Identity

1. User Control and Consent:

Digital identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent. 

2. Limited Disclosure for Limited Use

The solution which discloses the least identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable, long-term solutio.

The Law of Fewest Parties

Digital identity systems must limit disclosure of identifying information to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.

4. Directed Identity

A universal identity metasystem must support both “omnidirectional” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.  

5. Pluralism of Operators and Technologies:

A universal identity metasystem must channel and enable the interworking of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.  

6. Human Integration:

A unifying identity metasystem must define the human user as a component integrated through protected and unambiguous human-machine communications.  

7. Consistent Experience Across Contexts:

A unifying identity metasystem must provide a simple consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.

via idcommons.org

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Ten Topics a Venture Capitalist Cares About

According to Guy Kawasaki The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem 2. Your solution 3. Business model 4. Underlying magic/technology 5. Marketing and sales 6. Competition 7. Team 8. Projections and milestones 9. Status and timeline 10. Summary and call to action

[Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net]

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Five Ways to Organize Information

In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman notes that there are five basic ways to organize information:

Alphabet: The organizing principle used by dictionaries and telephone books.

Category: The segmentation of things by attribute or functionality, such as color (shirts) or capabilities (product line).

Continuum: Similar to category, but rather than using discrete buckets, this uses a range of values that are expressed in numbers or units. Examples of these magnitude measures include from small to large or from light to heavy. A list of products ordered by price would be a continuum; at the same time, the products could be categorized as inexpensive, moderate, or expensive.

Location: Physical location — in geography, points on a map; in anatomy, muscle groups; in an equipment manual, an exploded drawing.

Time: A timeline or a set of eras, useful when describing product or organizational history.

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10 Places to List Your Local Business

If you have a small business and you have just created a website then you want to started advertising your site.  The best way to get recognition is to have your URL listed on other websites.  The easy way to start is to create a business listing in as many directories as possible.  Here is a list of 10 to get you started.

Google Places

Yahoo Local

Bing Business Portal

Super Pages

YellowBook

Angie’s List

Yelp

Citysearch

Merchant Circle

Insider Pages

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