Publications
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Estimate What? A Business-Driven Method for Early Scoping and Estimation of Architecture Impact
Open Group Conference, San Francisco. This presentation introduces a method to provide a business with specific “yes and no” questions they can understand and answer to drive a model that identifies the enterprise technology impact of a solution to drive an estimate. In practice, this has been very well received and resulted in a better understand of scope for IT and better visibility to business regarding the impact of their requests. In addition to introducing the theory and practice of the approach, it also reviews some of these real world case studies. While the technique applies to a wide variety of industries, the case studies reviewed will be for banking and a health care.
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Implementing an Enterprise & Solution Architecture Capability at a Health Care Insurer
Open Group Conference, Boston. This is a case study of re-launching an Enterprise and Solution Architecture practice at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island. It will review a multi-year journey to build capability both upward toward managing from a more enterprise perspective and downward to formalize the practice of designing and implementing solutions in order to streamline the road to production. This transformation took place on the heels of a migration to a new core processing platform and over the course of the enormous architecture challenges presented by Health Care Reform, thus requiring a careful and incremental roll out so as not to impact any regulatory deliverables. The study will highlight the common challenges of building capability while juggling the typical workload of mission critical activities, and share some strategies for being successful.
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Establishing a Partnership with your Business
Open Group Conference, Philadelphia. Enterprise Architects have been advocating for a seat at the business strategy table since the dawn of, well, enterprise architecture. In many cases even getting a clear understanding of the business strategy is a challenge, let alone participating in its formulation. By establishing partnership with the business, EA can better understand and even influence the business strategy, thus enabling IT to more effectively empower businesses goals and objectives. More importantly, EA can extend beyond the technology boundary and take an active role in transforming the business. This is a case study of a step by step approach for building such a partnership at a top 15 US bank.
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Assessing Architectural Significance – A Lightweight Approach
The Open Group Conference, Cannes. Knowing when and where to engage an architect is a critical factor in successfully managing an IT portfolio, particularly in organizations where architects are scarce – and often expensive – resources. Many times it is clear which projects would benefit from the participation of an architect; in other cases, the decision is not so obvious. In these not-so-obvious cases, a structured means of assessing a project’s architectural significance is key. This presentation provides a lightweight, flexible set of techniques and guidelines for assessing the architectural significance of a project to aid in determining when to engage an architect.