The 5 Laws of Engagement

Law 1: We seek comfort in relationships: Surround us with community, which we’ve seen success with like Facebook, Twitter and 4chan. Most interestingly is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Law 2: We all have something to say. So give us tools to express ourselves. Tools include comments, notes, and all the fun things Facebook has given us with Timeline, etc.

Law 3: We need to feel important. Use rewards to make us feel special. How do you make people feel special? One way is through exclusivity like Gilt Group. One way is through badges on Foursquare.

Law 4: We are hypnotized by beauty. Give us something beautiful to look out. Flipboard puts the image first. Instagram is a series of beautiful images within a community.

Law 5: We are captivated by the unknown. So target our curiosity. Foursquare does this with points! Pinterest does with page after page of constant intrigue.

via thenextweb.com

 

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Anne Boe's Keys to Successful Networking

1. Clarify your career goals.
2. Develop long-term win-win relationships.
3. Nurture your network daily.
4. Be actively involved in your community.
5. Meet as many people as you can.
6. Take your business cards everywhere.
7. Make friends, even when you don't need them.
8. Act like a host, not a guest.
9. Become an interested person.
10. Develop your listening skills.
11. Trust your intuition.
12. Take people risks.
13. Master the art of small talk.
14. Work smarter, not harder.
15. Value yourself and your life.
16. Take action daily towards your goals.
17. Become your own energy manager.
18. Learn to ask for what you want.
19. Give thanks for what you have.
20. Acknowledge your skills and talents.
21. Say "Thank you. "
22. Become an inverse paranoid - decide the world is conspiring for you.
23. Determine your priorities - protect your energy.
24. Learn to want what you have.
25. Know that there are more side doors in the world than there are front doors.

[Source: Anne Boe]

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Creating an IT Strategy - Management by Maxim

I have heard that 90% of all businesses do not have a written Business Strategy.  Its in their heads - but as an Enterprise Architect how do you extract it so that you can create a viable IT Strategy?  Often times CxOs don't have time to have a strategic dialogue.  One way to solve this problem is to employ the "Maxim Process"
The Maxim Process is described by Broadbent and Kitzis as a pragmatic way to extract enough information for a good enough IT strategy while not investing more than a day’s workshop with senior management. The CIO will organize a workshop with CxOs, which will lead to documenting 2 kinds of so-­‐called Maxims:

• Business Maxims
• And as a result IT Maxims

Maxims are a few concise principles that are used to document the strategic direction of an enterprise. A Maxim workshop will usually not produce more than around 5 business maxims. For each of those, management will derive 4-­‐5 maxims for the IT function that will help to support them.

A typical Maxim Workshop will be split up into two parts:

• Part 1: Finding the Business Maxims,
• Part 2: Deriving the IT Maxims

An external facilitator should moderate the workshop day and process.
To give examples imagine an old economy financial service provider like a big insurance company that runs more than one brand name on the market. For such an enterprise you could find the following business maxim:

• Create synergies in back office and service functions wherever brand identity is not compromised

IT maxims that could be deducted from such a business strategy could be:

• Define standard architectures and platforms used by all of the group’s companies in order to leverage synergies and to reduce IT cost
• Harmonize the IT application systems for the group’s companies wherever there is a business case for this.

SOURCE: TOGAF9 QuickStart Guide 2009

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Eight Hybrid Thinking Principles for Enterprise Architects

1. Coordinate from the outside in. Once the "outside" design is in place, it serves to guide the foundation for inside structures.
2. Pursue a portfolio of strategies.   Evaluate many small bets instead of single large ones
3. Harmonize, rather than optimize.  Enterprise architects learn to focus on "harmonizing" a diverse set of existing approaches and less on creating an optimal approach from scratch.
4. Coordinate, rather than architect.  Hybrid thinking approaches view the enterprise as a collection of interdependent portfolio management processes, with the goal of coordinating across and among these portfolios.
5. Focus on interactions, not interactors.   Hybrid thinkers must focus on coordinating the behaviors among systems rather than optimizing the internal mechanisms of such systems.  Gartner sometimes refers to this approach by the phrase "architect the lines, not the boxes." "Lines" refers to behaviors shared among systems, and "boxes"
6. Embrace a different approach to standards.   The focus shifts from thinking of standards as "inhibitors of choice" to "enablers of change." Hybrid thinkers emphasize that the purpose of standards is to enable coordinated interactions and behaviors to change and evolve.
7. Encourage continuous and participatory interaction.  Hybrid thinking charrettes enable individuals to overcome traditional process barriers by fostering more collaborative, creative and meaningful outcomes. Design is done best when it is peer to peer.
8. Focus on business outcomes, not IT outcomes.

Source: Gartner 2010

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What Does an Enterprise Architect Do ?

Business Technology Strategy
What You Know	What You Do	What You Are
Your organization’s business and technology strategy and rationale Your competition (products, strategies and Processes) Your company’s business practices Your Technology Portfolio	Influence business strategy Translate business strategy into technical vision and strategy Understand customer and market trends Capture customer, organizational and business requirements of architecture Prepare architectural documents and presentations	Visionary Entrepreneurial

 

Organizational Politics
What You Know	What You Do	What You Are
Who the key players are in the organization What they want, both business and personal	Communicate, Communicate, Communicate Listen, network and influence Sell the Vision, keep the vision alive Take and retake the pulse of all critical influencers of the architecture project	Able to see from and sell to multiple viewpoints Confident and articulate Ambitious and driven Patient and not Resilient Sensitive to where the power is and how it flows in your organization

 

Consulting
What You Know	What You Do	What You Are
Elicitation techniques Consulting frameworks Soft Skill techniques	Build “trusted advisor” relationships Understand what the business people want and need from the architecture Understand what the developers want and need from the  architecture Help developers see the value of the enterprise architecture and understand how to use the technology successfully	Committed to others’ success Empathetic and approachable An effective change agent and process savvy A good mentor and teacher

 

Leadership
What You Know	What You Do	What You Are
Yourself	Set team context and vision Make decisions stickp> Build teams Motivate	You and others see you as a leader Charismatic and credible You believe it can an should be done and that you can lead the effort Committed, dedicated, passionate You see the entire effort in a broader business and personal context

 

Technology
What You Know	What You Do	What You Are
In-depth understanding of the domain and pertinent technologies Understand what technical issues are key to success Development of methods and modeling techniques	Modeling Trade-off Analysis Prototype, Experiment, and Simulate Prepare architectural documents and presentations Technology trend analysis/roadmaps< Take a systems viewpoint	Creative Investigative, Practical, Pragmatic, and Insightful Tolerant of ambiguity, willing to backtrack, seek multiple solutions Good a working at an abstract level

 

Risks and Rewards
Risks	Rewards
Responsibility without corresponding control A lot of resistance and disappointments along the way Often encounter others that believe they have a better idea or solution	Focus on interesting and complex issues Opportunity to advance to very high levels in the organization with business and technical focus (rather than personal and fiscal) Opportunity to make an enormous difference to the company and clients

Source: IFEAD

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What is the difference between Architecture and Design?

Architecture	Design
Essentials dictated by the mission (problem, need or opportunity) and its environment	Decisions compatible with the architecture
A different architecture implies a different mission	Different designs may address the same mission
Defines a class of acceptable solutions	Defines a single specific solution
About suitability or fitness for purpose, as defined by the mission	About engineering optimization, within architectural constraints
Role of the architect is mostly to make correct inferences about the mission, solution and environment	Role of the designer is mostly to make correct decisions about the solution
Architecture is done by architects	Design is done by developers
Primary audience is mission and solution stakeholders, which usually includes designers and implementers	Primary audience is solution implementers
About the mission and solution in their environmental context, i.e., outward looking	About components and subsystems of the solution, i.e., inward looking

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Kim Cameron's 7 Laws of Identity

1. User Control and Consent:
Digital identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent. 
2. Limited Disclosure for Limited Use
The solution which discloses the least identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable, long-term solutio.
The Law of Fewest Parties
Digital identity systems must limit disclosure of identifying information to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.
4. Directed Identity
A universal identity metasystem must support both “omnidirectional” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.  
5. Pluralism of Operators and Technologies:
A universal identity metasystem must channel and enable the interworking of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.  
6. Human Integration:
A unifying identity metasystem must define the human user as a component integrated through protected and unambiguous human-machine communications.  
7. Consistent Experience Across Contexts:
A unifying identity metasystem must provide a simple consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.

via idcommons.org

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