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

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.

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

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

Over the years I’ve spent a fair sum of money on IT products and services, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve always wanted to spend more. But poorly written IT contracts– whether new or inherited– have imposed limits on my buying power. Like a wet blanket sapping a once brightly-lit

I often present enterprise application portfolio views to C-level executives. I convey color-coded views of company applications, grouped by function such as financials, CRM, communication and collaboration tools, and so on. Something a bit like the following: Discussions often emerge around reconciling figures between systems. For example, it’s not uncommon for the sales