On Friday February 19, 2010, I underwent laser eye surgery (Intralase Sub-Bowman’s Keratomileusis) to correct my short sightedness. I have worn glasses since I was 6 years old and contact lenses since I was 16. Over the past 15 years, I developed an allergic reaction to the protein buildup on the contact lenses and had to restrict my use to sports only. This is a quantum leap forward for me and I am floored by the results – no more glasses! Thank you to my surgeon, Dr. Suren Sanmugasunderam, FRCS (C) and his team at London Eye Centre.
The evolution from squinting to see, to having thick, then thin lens glasses to contact lenses and now to laser eye surgery led me to think more about several topics:
Problem Management – as described by IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL):
A `problem’ is an unknown underlying cause of one or more incidents, and a `known error’ is a problem that is successfully diagnosed and for which either a work-around or a permanent resolution has been identified. Read more...
Tonight, I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer on Enterprise Architecture for a class at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. My colleague Brian Hosier invited me to give an overview of EA for his students.
I had to do some serious chopping of my 2 hour workshop to get things down to a manageable timeframe. Even then, I felt extremely rushed and barely skimmed the surface of all that Enterprise Architecture is. The class went well and I got great questions from the students. I hope this short introduction to EA helped some of them think about the big picture.
As I was presenting, I realized how much our EA practices are IT influenced. This is a natural thing being that we grew EA out of IT and IT is where it primarily resides. As I presented some of the artifacts we developed, it became apparent that I need to rethink how to present EA to newbies. After a bit of theory and overview, I presented how EA can be applied strategically, tactically and then a bit on business architecture. The problem was that for each area except Business Architecture, my examples were very technology focused. Read more...
In my conversation with Gene Leganza, Forrester VP Research last week ( @gleganza), we spoke about how to address delivering technology in a consistent manner. It inspired me to write this post about our Solutions Council. Here goes:
How do you handle service requests in your IT organization?
Have you adopted an IT Service Management approach?
Can you confidently articulate standard solution architectures for commonly requested services?
In the past, we struggled with a lack of consistency in our technology solution delivery. Even though we are a centralized IT department, clients received different solutions and services depending on who they contacted. Imagine how confusing it was for our clients; they could get application solutions from one of LAMP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Lotus Domino application platforms. Two clients with similar requests could get two different solutions based on which developer they talked to. This further added to the complexity of the application portfolio we manage – meaning more time spent on “keeping the lights on” and less on delivering new solutions. Read more...
I have the honour to speak to the International Institute of Business Analysis (Vancouver, BC, Canada Chapter) tomorrow at a Lunch and Learn session.
I will be speaking about how we built a Strategic Practice group that uses EA as the framework to guide other practices like Security, Program Management and of course Business Analysis. I will use the EA Model, I talked about in an older post to position how EA and BA fit for our organization.
Since we are still early in our development of these horizontal methodologies, I will be talking about how BAs’ requirements gathering become the source for our solutions architecture work. Over time, I hope we can grow our Business Analysis practice into a Business Architecture practice.
So if you had a chance to talk to a captive audience of BA’s, what would you say?