There’s a lot of points that will be made in this blog entry. To keep them straight, I will highlight them right up front: Vendors are getting behind SCA because it reinforces a need for tools The importance of architects in software development Untested technologies are being pushed on IT like bad drugs from the… Read More »
As part of my job, I help customers to select the appropriate software to either fulfill a need or as a component of a larger solution. Fulfilling this role means comparing similar software offerings and selecting the best fit. The challenge in this goal is to map the vendor offering into a subjective requirement, such… Read More »
So, allow me to expand on my prior blog entry — Architecture Frameworks Don’t Make Architects — and answer the question, what does make an architect? To help structure my query, I went in search of a concrete specification that defines the difference between and engineer and an architect and found this http://www.pels.ca.gov/pubs/building_design_auth.pdf STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS… Read More »
So, I was about to blog on this topic when up comes a Tweet from Ron Schmelzer (@rschmelzer) over at ZapThink, “Question for the tweeple: do Federal EA Frameworks matter? And how do they stack up against non-Federal EA Frameworks? Do Frameworks matter?” Talk about synergies! Obviously, the value of EA frameworks is being questioned… Read More »
Wow, to read the positive reviews of SOA and what it’s doing for the IT industry, one would be likely to believe that there’s serious transformation occurring because of this architectural approach. Well, the truth is, implementing an SOA design such that real loose-coupling is achieved and that a service does not share a common… Read More »
A colleague recently sent me some IBM propaganda on SOA, BPM and EA. Discussing my opinion of the white paper with him sparked an idea for a blog entry about the my opinion on the relationship between these three methodologies. Okay, let’s dive into the meat of the issue. What, if any, is the relationship… Read More »
Yesterday, I read Fowler’s “Who Needs an Architect” , which is an odd piece that never really answer the question to my liking, but it did get me thinking. For me, being an IT architect is a full time job that has many facets. One facet is designing systems and applications; this facet is primarily… Read More »
It seems that I am not as flexible as I believed I could be on my thinking regarding SOA. I attempted to categorize various SOA engagements in my SYS-CON article entitled “A Classification Scheme for Defining SOA” . I believed that I could hide my dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity surrounding SOA by lumping… Read More »
There’s a lot of information hitting the bitwaves touting the value of cloud computing and it seems that within the IT industry those that profess positive opinions of an emerging market during a hype cycle seem to get more attention than those with negative or pragmatic opinions on the issue. Thus, the hype cycle reinforces… Read More »
On the last podcast with Dana Gardner, which will be released shortly, Dana commented on my oft contrarian views on information technology. At the time, I took it as a compliment, but it definitely gave me something to consider about myself — am I a real contrarian for contrarian-sake or am I just an experienced… Read More »