The Case for Capability Mapping
Just as no military general would blindly charge into a theater of war without assessing battlefield assets, no IT leader should take on high-risk endeavors without a similar assessment of capabilities. Capability Relevance Today Sun-Tzu, the famous 6th century Chinese military general and strategist often wrote about the importance of capabilities in The Art of […]
How IT Can Learn from Product Management
Symptoms of Product Frustration Years ago I worked in a government-sector job. I recall a frustrated public safety officer expressing his discontent with another government division by comically referring to them as akin to the Department of Motor Vehicles. If memory serves, his exact phrase was: “They are like dealing with the DMV! Every time […]
Cloud Responsibility Quadrants
Fuzzy boundaries between IT and business units have created ambiguities with respect to SaaS cloud management. A simple tool to drive clarity around who-does-what is the cloud responsibility quadrants chart. Background Application portfolio management is a broad discipline. It requires an enterprise-wide perspective of how the collection of business applications ebbs and flows over time. […]
Building an Enterprise Architecture Practice
Enterprise architecture is similar to electricity in more ways than one. Like electricity, architecture is often out of sight, out of mind. That is until it stops working, at which point it becomes painfully obvious that something integral is missing. Architecture bears another similarity to electricity: throughout history, plenty of people lived their lives without […]
Meet the IT Department of 2025
Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the automation of everything is finally coming of age. Like it or not, these new technologies will inevitably infiltrate your enterprise. Does your IT department have the six critical skills needed to support these technologies? What’s Driving Tomorrow’s Skillset Tomorrow’s enterprise is indeed a strange place; a place very different […]
The Case for Standalone Data Teams
When data you need is held hostage by another group, bypassing the painful roadblock is a calculated move reserved for when all other options fail. Inter-Departmental Data Dependence The metaphor of data being held hostage is admittedly extreme, and it’s rare for those responsible for the coagulation of information flow to be intentionally apathetic. Unfortunately, […]
Junk Drawer Architecture
If finding technical diagrams or business documentation feels like an Easter egg hunt, something is likely wrong with your approach to collaboration. These two steps may be all you need to improve your situation. Junk Drawer What? “Junk-drawer architecture” is a term I use to refer to architectural artifacts that have no formal or centralized […]
Strategy Automation
High-tech firms are scrambling to find talented leaders to drive growing teams; an arduous process often rewarded with disloyalty and employee churn. It begs the question: have we become overly-dependent on leadership itself? If so then perhaps some aspects of management can be automated to lessen our reliance on these hot-spot leadership roles. High-Tech’s Revolving Door The high-tech […]
Enterprise Data Reference Architecture
When it comes to examining enterprise data architecture landscape, it is sometimes advantageous to functionally decompose the macro-level picture into a collection of relatively autonomous “modules” that can be analyzed in relative isolation. Below is a template or “reference architecture” I have compiled for doing just that. Each rounded rectangle represents a major module area […]
3 Crucial Cloud Capabilities
I2M: Identity, Integration, and Monitoring Clouds have come a long way in the past decade. They’ve gone from being mysterious, new technology fraught with security risks to what is now the de facto delivery mechanism for modern computing. But clouds are still just tools, and like any other tool, they must be professionally managed. Similar […]