The Customer 360, Explained A 360-degree view of anything simply means taking a full, comprehensive view of the subject area in question. For example, a manager may ask her employee to complete an “employee 360 review” which would encompass feedback via the employee’s staff from below, the employee’s horizontal peers,

Delivering faster. Saving money. Building new business capabilities. These are value points that make enterprise architecture more relevant than ever. Yet delivering EA at today’s breakneck pace of business requires automation. Here are two ways to do just that. EA’s Slow Pace For many organizations, enterprise architecture is still viewed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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