Architect Role

Referring back to article The structural strength of steel, I will share some practical examples to encourage architect colleagues to break out of the role of „boxes and lines“ - which is usually expected from us. All of us should know stones and bricks what our architecture is built from - still should not be the best bricklayer, but even not the worst!

This first article is an infrastructural task, building a Redis cluster in well-controlled Linux environment on a RHEL7 host.

Without competition, the things will not improve. On the other hand multiple parties in a competitive situation may cause different problems. Let's go through these issues and get some tips to handle them.

I used to refer to the article below, which is unfortunately shrank in the information ocean of the internet. Luckily I saved that to myself to be ready all time, therefore now I can share it to you. Most of the text is saved from http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/ar-togaf1/. Please read the following discussion between David Jackson and Andras Szakal, certified ITAC architects and key members of TOGAF.

Why do you need Enterprise Architecture management? Based on the definition you find on the portal, you may know - or not. This article is for two kinds of people as the people has two different kinds: one understands why enterprise architecture and the other does not. Those who understands may find some good analogy to describe the necessity of EA, while the others would make sense of the essence. First of all, remember: EA is not a must!

The best team is where all members can say: the team cannot be successful without me and I cannot be successful without them.

This is an extra mind of me for the Do you need a team player? article.

I was thinking and working a lot about target architectures. Usually it is expected that you as architect will define a kind of map, which can be interpreted anyone in the company and reach the shiny targets on low cost zero time and no business outages. I would not say that it is not possible, rather if you plan cost, timing and migration phases but it is far to be simple. The real issue is that a target architecture is a collection of demands driving to ideal situation, which is not necessarily the place you would be; and the price tag, the duration and the full freeze of "disturbing" changes to reach the ideal situation makes most of the target architectures unreal. Let's see why!

The first part of preparing architecture directive discusses how to set up the architect's virtual organisation. This article gives you the details of functional and virtual roles played by architects, which will be the basis of the next chapter, the decision making mechanism.

Beyond the Domain and Enterprise Architect roles that was introduced before, here you will meat a new, the Lead Architect.

The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men: it is merely a question of dividing up their numbers.

Sun Tzu: The art of war

What should it mean in the field of architecture management? What to divide and how? How to keep control about a large Enterprise Architecture? Finally the recipe is the same as for war forces: you need an organisation, a kind of "command hierarchy" which enables the appropriate control over the entire Enterprise Architecture. This is the first part of a series about preparing Architecture Management Directive, which was one of the topic selected by you in the What would you like to read more? questionnaire.

The automatic answer for the question is: yes, certainly. The actual cultural flow as that each time you have to play the role of team members. At every day; in every projects and activities. Are there any issues with this approach? Unfortunately yes. Come to read them.

How do you recognise the good architects? What are their characteristics? There are some certain things, which as all certainties are so dangerous because of the different interpretations. On simple certainty is: an architect is the "owner" of the architecture. Fine. "Owner" as a farmer, or "owner" as an investor? Both the farmer and the investor would have similar target, to increase the earning, while their approaches, actions, interpretations, viewpoints are so different. After discussing many interesting topics and tasks the architects are working about and sometimes defining their roles it is the best time to pull the "ideal" architect out of the shadow!

"Early bird gets the warm, the second mouse gets the cheese."

(W Nelson)

Which one would you be? The certain answer is: it depends...

How to calculate the cost of project delays? This article describes an approach, which shows the cost of delays in the percentage of net present value  (NPV) of projects. The theory is not prepared to use on a single project. The target is to show the cost of delays generally for a given organisation, which runs several project in parallel, since the method uses generalities. The result is usable to help avoid or eliminate the bottlenecks in the company or organisation.

The calculation prescinds from the every day’s business but still focuses to the real problem, which is the accurate delivery of project targets, by effective resource allocation.

The topic which enterprise architects are working on is architecture management. This is a standing locution. Do we really know the meaning of the two words? Let's look behind the scenes and define properly what we are speaking about! The article uses common definitions of architecture and management then interprets the management functionalities from architects point of view.

Like great archers we have the right tool (the Bow), the models and processes (the Arrow) and the experiences (the Training). All the things needed for Architects is ready in our Archery program.

Ignaz Semmelweis was the "saviour of mothers". He was early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. He was referred to a mental institution - the place he died later. The linked article shows the details of his invention and invoke some thoughs of us about our "hygienic" work about managing Enterprise Architecture. Let's see some aspects, examples from EA practice when we work on something strange to our environment.

The Enterprise Architects as every professionals naturally would like to know how effective their work and how big their contributions in the business success. The maturity assessment of your Enterprise Architecture could answer these questions - and should be the basis of your improvements in the future and helps showing the provided values today.

Our exceptional team of experienced Enterprise Architects with a great track record of successful implementations of large enterprise-wide projects is ready to your challenges.