EA - Enterprise Architecture or Extreme Aggravation

- Amit Jnagal, Senior Technical Architect, Infosys

In my last post, I talked about the movie My Cousin Vinny and the lessons it held for Architects about sticking to the basics, understanding your customers and understanding yourself.
In this post, I am going to look at The Pursuit of Happyness (Year of Release: .2006; Director: Gabriele Muccino; Our Architect: Chris Gardner played by Will Smith; Architect's Character: Sales Man turned stock broker who know how to dream big and keep it going).

‘The pursuit of happyness’ tells the story of the trials and tribulations of semi-successful sales man for whom every day is a struggle. The essence of this movie is how to dream big and manage it along with the daily struggle. We usually get too involved in the tasks that are assigned to us and find very little or no time for stuff that matters outside assignments. Very few other industries, other than ours, have employees who are up to speed with the usage of the term ‘work life balance’ and how it affects them.

Continue reading "Role of an Architect: Lessons from the movies - Part 8" »

Posted by Guest Author at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We just completed our 3rd annual survey on Enterprise Architecture. The survey brought out some very exciting findings, as well as some which we see as potential gaps or blue ocean. 

One of the key findings is that participants of the survey saw Enterprise Architecture as a capability that was core to their business and inherently part of their organization's crown jewels. However, given the daunting set of activities that most Enterprise Architecture functions have to execute today, the opportunity to work with ESPs and enlist them to execute some of these activities is real. In other words, some activities (the more tactical ones), can be outsourced to a strategic vendor partner.

Continue reading "Outsourcing of Enterprise Architecture (EA) functions and Infosys' EA survey" »

Posted by Sohel Aziz at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

EA has long been seen as time consuming to implement, difficult to get buy in and govern. Do organizations really have the luxury of choice? The cost of not aligning and optimizing is bringing systems to a grinding halt, not because of lack of CPU power, but dwindling funds to manage them. Very similar to the fuel crisis and need for better efficiency or alternative energy thinking, the time is ripe for efficient EA. What EA also needs is a dose of lightning up. EAlite anyone?

Continue reading "IT strategy and agile EA in the new economy" »

Posted by Sohrab Kakalia at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

EA enabling strategies and principles should be specific to each enterprise; And is governed by its business strategy by a large extent.  In recent times, some common EA enabling strategies, in one way or the other, have influenced EA more than the others. This entry is an attempt to identify some of those more ubiquitous and important ones, that may further be elaborated on case to case basis.

Form an Architecture Governance Team
 

• A central team constituted with representation from stakeholders across the organization, should govern the planning, evolution and implementation of an Enterprise Architecture framework
   
• Architecture should be well thought through to meet the common goals of all stakeholders.
   
• The central team also should play a key role in establishing products, design and technology standards
  

Continue reading "Enterprise Architecture Enabling Strategies" »

Posted by Santanu Dey at 06:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)