Current issue of the New Scientist magazine has a very interesting cover story on “Seven reasons why people hate reason”. Now, that is a guide I would have loved to have alongside during some rather difficult stakeholder engagements, when I couldn’t stop thinking “If only they could be reasonable…”.
Continue reading "Reason, Stakeholder Engagement / Management and EA" »
As I sit down to blog for the first time on the Enterprise Architecture blogs, a very fundamental question crosses my mind. That is how do architects speak, or communicate in general.
A very common occurance is to use a lot of buzzwords. I once encountered an architect who said "issue A and issue B are orthagonal". He meant A and B are independent of each other. Architecture patterns too - be they singletons or facades - can be confusing explanations to IT management and customers.
Gartner recently published their June 2008 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture (EA) tools. (See http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=697707&ref=g_sitelink (registration required); or a free version at http://www.troux.com/company/news/pressrelease.asp?pr=080618_gartnermq_pr.xml).
A couple of things sprang to mind as I skimmed through the report:
Tools are rarely the main reason for unsuccessful EA activities. There's the commonly quoted phrase "a fool with a tool is still a fool" (and can add "a fool with a tool can do more damage more quickly").
Continue reading "Enterprise Architecture Tools & the Gartner Magic Quadrant" »
