Archive
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The articles page is updated on a weekly
basis. If you missed one last week, or you simply would like
to read some of the articles we have featured in the past, you can find
them all here in the archives.
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Alternatively click here to return to this week's articles.
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Please be aware that the article links on
this page were correct at the time of original publication.
Unfortunately we are unable to ensure that all past articles remain
accessible and therefore apologise for any broken links that you might
find on this page.
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Monday 25th May
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Interesting blog
article on why the IT department struggles to 'align with the
business', despite all the new ideas and repeated attemptsto make it
happen. Apparently, IT must change its image and stops 'being
different' from the rest of the organisation. |
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Monday 18th May
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Interesting blog
article on why the IT department struggles to 'align with the
business', despite all the new ideas and repeated attemptsto make it
happen. Apparently, IT must change its image and stops 'being
different' from the rest of the organisation.
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Many
organisations looking to use SOA as part of their integration approach,
confuse the use of Web Service technology with a Service Oriented
Architecture. Although messages play a significant part in the
mechanics of the integration, these should not be the focus of the
approach. Services should be designed 'top-down', from a clear
understanding of how information and functionality should best be
provided to the rest of the architecture. In many ways, Services start
to look more like objects in an Object Oriented software solution, but
closely related are services and objects?
This slightly technical
article compares the design principles and approaches of Service
Orientation and Object Orientation and noteably concludes that the most
important thing is the definition of the service interface. |
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Monday 11th May
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This article suggest that both keeping you IT
house in order and
understanding your It landscape is key to surviving, especially where
mergers and acquisitions are concerned.. |
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Monday 20th April
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CIO and CEO conflict in the cloud – some are
citing cloud computing as
the ultimate recession technology, predicting cost savings of up to
25%. However, whether the technology is mature enough is open to
debate, with Gartner advising enterprises to avoid major cloud projects
for two years. |
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Monday 13th April
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Interesting blog that puts a different slant on
the architecture
function in the current environment. If you haven’t got senior backing
then it’s probably good advice – hunker down for now and prepare to
start again later. |
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Monday 30th March
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Industry figures suggest that around 80% of
errors in software development projects are introduced in the
requirements gathering stage – but is the only the fault of the
business analyst? |
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Monday 16th March
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Two industry organisations focussed on
Enterprise Architecture have announced that they have merged. The
Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA), an affiliate
of The Open Group, has merged with the Global Enterprise Architecture
Organization (GEAO), the two groups announced this week. |
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Monday 2nd March
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The Government is facing growing calls to
re-think the way it approaches large, complex IT projects, being urged
to move away from centralised IT programmes to break projects into
smaller chunks and make use of open source software. Some predictions
are that around £600m savings a year could be made.
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Despite the potential pitfalls of relying on
'The Cloud' for your
office productivity tools - the widely reported outcry when Google's
Apps went off-line last year highlighting this - The Guardian media
group
has chosen Google Apps as its default office suite - backed by
OpenOffice for Mac users who require more heavily formatted work. |
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The fallout from
the mis-interpretation of Anne Thomas Manes' blog about 'SOA is dead'
is still settling. As this article points out, its only when people
start to cut through the hype and misinformation that SOA will deliver
the value that it promises. And that value is out there. Too often
people get bogged down in the technology aspects of the implementation.
First and foremost, this is an architectural approach to delivering
software solutions, that needs to be architected and designed correctly
before the technology tools are wheeled out. Just because you're using
Web Services doesn't mean you're doing SOA. |
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Monday 23rd February
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Ubuntu Linux
Project founder Mark Shuttleworth on what it takes to get people to
change and how to identify the best changes for your organisation. Of
particular interest are the points about how making the same changes as
other organisations isn't always the best way for your organisation to
stand out, and that tought times are good. |
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Confidence in
open-source solutions from the corporate arena seems to be growing
according to a recent Forrester survey. The cost savings that can be
made are clearly too tempting to pass up as organisations tighten their
belts. However, as this article points out, open source doesn't always
mean free and large IT vendors are now looking into how to monetise it. |
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Monday 16th February
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According to
this article by Anne Thomas Manes, there have been so many
implementations of SOA that have failed to deliver on their promises
that business has had enough and will no longer pour funding into SOA
initiatives. However, as she points out, this is not because the
service-based approach is wrong, rather that SOA has gained a very bad
name through these failed implementations that have all to often been
much the same sorts of systems but just using Web Services. This is an
important point to recognise. Using Web Services technology does not
mean that you are service oriented now. The 'A' in SOA stands for
Architecture and successfully delivering the correct service-based
environment for your systems requires that the Enterprise Architecture
is understood and leads the definition, management and approach to
delivering the services. Interestingly, this is equally true for all of
the successor technologies that are mentioned in the 'obituary' at the
start of the article. Embracing 'service-based' is an architectural not
a technological initiative but one for which the real benefits are
worth the effort. |
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Monday 2nd February
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Richard Sykes
looks at how the rise of Barack Obama underlines the importance of
having a message and delivering on it. In particular he looks at how
the promises of The Cloud still involve a long journey before they can
be delivered. Having a clear understanding of all the elements of your
architecture will be vital to make the right decisions about where The
Cloud can be exploited while avoiding risk and most importantly
reducing cost. |
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Monday 26th January
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Although people
have been talking about mash-ups for some time now and they are yet to
be as prevalent as expected, they have the potential to be a vital tool
for integration. As this article points out, SOA has been heavily
linked to mash-ups - and quite rightly. Interesting to note that the
difficulties of implementing SOA are cited as reasons for the slower
impact of mash ups. Such difficulties are not technology problems per
se, but rather software architecture issues. Success with SOA depends
on how you implement the SOA 'applications', not the service
infrastructure technologies. |
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Monday 19th January
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Last week, a
group of open-source software advocates set out a road map for the
future of the software industry to 2020. They described a very bright
future, based on social networks, open cloud computing with CIOs
avoiding vendor lock-in by championing the use of FLOSS - Free Libre
Open Source Software. The French "libre" is used to clear up the
ambiguity of "free", with the emphasis on 'unfettered' rather than 'no
cost'. |
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Monday 5th January 2009
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This article
warns IT departments who are scaling down on project work that they
should not skimp on project and portfolio management. Doing so will
lead to increased costs. |
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Monday 29th December 2008
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A discussion of the reasons why so many large IT
projects do not perform well. |
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Monday 8th December 2008
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An interesting
view of how a large logistics firm changed its core IT architecture in
just 72 days to implement a Service Oriented Architecture, rather than
following the trend of applying the SAP templates used by their
European and US offices. Now they claim to be able to plug-and-play
their systems, both internal and with 3rd party suppliers. |
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Monday 1st December 2008
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A review of
Intel's recent demonstration of Social Networking technology for the
workplace at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is no surprise that Intel called
this 'Enterprise 2.0' social networking but the end-user platform for
this demonstration is a prototype mobile device. |
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We see more and
more use of open source technology these days but it is important to be
clear that 'open source' doesn't necessarily mean free. There's open
source and there's open source. It is interesting to find out how Sun -
who have a strong track record with open source and strategy for it
that is growing - see 'commercial' open source. |
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