Enterprise Architecture

Today's organizations require a well-defined enterprise architecture (EA) practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation for the successful development and execution of strategy. The Enterprise Architecture blog category dives into principles and practices that help guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. Read our best practices on how to better communicate and drive business transformation. Get information on aligning your capabilities to company strategy. Get insights from experts and step-by-step advice on fostering successful change management to encourage business-centric conversations about technology. You’ll also get tips to translate business strategy into IT strategy, ensuring you can be more collaborative in helping the business make smarter decisions.

BEWARE: Smart People with Dumb Tools

You have intelligent people in your organization. You hire the best engineers, architects, IT managers and executives. Why insult their intelligence by providing them with tools built for the 90s? There was a time not that long ago when fluency with Excel was a measurement of your business acumen, but today there are spreadsheet alternatives...

Office Space 2: The Rise of Milton

Forbes Contributor Jason Bloomberg recently wrote a few articles addressing the current state of Enterprise Architecture. In his first post, Is Enterprise Architecture Completely Broken?, he explored whether enterprise architecture is completely broken, a question not uncommonly heard in our industry. We often discuss the changing world of Enterprise Architecture on the Troux blog, and...

The Risk of Doing Nothing

Current events paint a picture of a finance sector plagued with “Technical Debt” resulting in security breaches, ATM lockouts, blocked debit and credit cards, and more. It often feels like as consumers we have little choice but to accept these faulty systems. But, the more I read about these challenges, the more the enterprise architecture...

Data: Bigger Doesn’t Always Mean Better

No doubt about it, Big Data is big business. It has certainly captured the imagination and wallets of business executives everywhere. In fact, Gartner estimates that Big Data drove $34 billion in worldwide IT spending last year.¹ With that kind of money being spent, it’s probably safe to say Big Data is a big deal. That...

Doing the Right Thing vs. Doing Things Right

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”¹ Businesses have always had tremendous decision-making challenges due to lack of relevant, complete, accurate, and timely information. And this problem has become more acute as businesses expand or down-size, the pace of change increases, and the breadth of change expands. So with all of...

Strategy and Execution Belong Together

The Economist recently published an interesting article, Strategic moves: Big consulting and accounting firms are making a risky move into strategy work, about what seems to be a new consolidation movement amongst the major strategy consulting firms and operations specialists in a effort to offer both strategy and execution services. Traditionally, within enterprises and throughout...

Black Swans Are More Common Than You Think

The term “Black Swan” was coined by University of Oxford, Saïd Business School professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe high-impact events that are rare and unpredictable but in retrospect seem not so improbable. In the world of IT, black swan projects reap catastrophic effects and even result in a complete corporate meltdown. According to Taleb’s...

How to Build the Business Case for Enterprise Architecture

Building the investment business case for Enterprise Architecture (EA) requires speaking the language of business and delivering quick and ongoing returns. That was the advice from Bodhi Choudhuri, director of Enterprise Architecture at American Express, during Troux’ recent Building the Business Case for EA webinar. With EA initiatives facing stiff competition for funding and CIOs...

Aligning Applications Portfolios with Business Needs and Strategy

In previous blogs, APM: How Much Are Your Applications Really Costing You? and APM: Why Organizations Don’t Understand the TCO of Their Applications, I focused on how organizations can start to determine the technical and business value of their application portfolios. In this post, I would like to focus on aligning applications portfolios with the business...

Why Organizations Don’t Understand the TCO of Their Applications

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is a process used to attempt to capture application performance and spending over time. Recently, Gartner published a report stating that “Fewer than 10% of Global 2000 organizations understand the full costs of their applications.” ¹ Why are so many organizations failing to do this right? I believe these organizations are...