A Practical Road Map to Enterprise Architecture

On this auspicious day April 1, 2009 I decided to release

"A Practical Road Map to Enterprise Architecture"

A collection of 8 diagrams:

1. Enterprise Architecture Practices Diagram

2. Enterprise Architecture Practice Descriptions

3. A 4-Tier Architecture Footprint

4. Gap Analysis Strategy with Architecture Alignment Benefits

5. Agile Development & Production Practices Road Map

6. Agile Development, Change Management and Governance

7. Agile Development & Production Practice Descriptions

8. Zachman Framework Influence

These diagrams summarize my approach from the last 12 years.

In the next few weeks I will blog about each idea in these diagrams.

Presentation Recommendations

I am putting together a series of slide presentations to be distributed at
Axiom Architectures at Google code

In writing these presentations I recognized that I was falling into the trap getting too caught up in covering every little detail. In other words I was writing a paper and passing it off as a presentation. The upshot was that the material was generating inertia rather than momentum during my talks.

So to better connect with my audience, I jotted down these presentation recommendations:

A. Comfort

1. Recognize that you were invited because people believe in you.
2. Take comfort from this belief.
3. The audience wants to get to know you.

B. Narrative

1. Tell a memorable story.
2. Maintain a consistent thread throughout your story
3. Tie in your personal experiences, perspectives, insight, opinions and humor.

C. Material

1. Condense the slides to focus entirely in support of your story.
2. Your slides are only sign posts for the audience to follow your narrative.
3. Pull out any distracting diversions and props.

D. Profound

1. List papers and references so the audience can stay connected with you and your knowledge.
2. Consider suggesting some next steps.
3. Close with a profound statement to invite stimulating questions.

Scala - What Inspires Me

During the last year I have been developing in Scala and will be giving my first talk to the Denver Open Source Users Group on August 5, 2008. The preparation for this talk got me to reflect on what inspires me about Scala. There is:

1. The uniform object model that incorporates primitives as first class objects.

2. Strong typing and clean generics.

3. Traits for composing mixins.

4. Dynamic construction for mixing classes and traits at run time for dependency injection.

5. Closures and functions passed as values.

But what inspires me the most is pattern matching. OO and FP combine into something entirely new. A match looks like an ugly Java switch statement with type enhancements, tuples and extractors. But what I see is a lovely dance between deconstruction and reconstruction that enables you to transform anything.

Indeed something to be inspired about.

For those unfamiliar with Scala, it is an ambitious merger of OO and FP (Functional Programming) that sits up top of the JVM and fully interoperates with Java. Visit www.scala-lang.org for complete information.

Viability with Open Source

I really love the fact that we are witnessing first hand the emergence of lightweight and accessible enterprise integration with Apache Service Mix and Camel

I can't think of a better environment than Apache. Apache practices a pure form of Open Source which invites lots of good committers that promotes creativity along with quality. With this support Apache has the resources to take on large enterprise projects.

Vendor sponsored Open Source falls short in attracting outside committers.

The ecosystem that enterprise projects require has become too big for any vendor.

So not only are we witnessing accessibility but long term viability.

I Finally Get It - Apache Camel Endpoints

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I enjoyed Bruce Synder's talk about Apache Camel at the Denver Open Source User Group meeting on June 3, 2008

I first saw Camel as just a language living inside an ESB and talking to its internals. However it finally dawned me during the talk what Camel can do outside on its own.

Camel can transport and translate anything between endpoints in just 3 lines.

This blows my mind.

I am going to put an endpoint in all my applications.

The next logical step is to create a Borg implant endpoint.

Enterprise Architects can now reveal their true colors and broadcast that final memo about the status of the integration project:

"That resistance is futile, you will be assimilated".