Enterprise Architecture Quotes

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

One IT executive in an investment banking company claimed that 80 percent of his company’s programming code was dedicated to linking disparate systems, as opposed to creating new capabilities.

Googie architecture could...be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. There are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors.

Chicago is what a polite person would call a colorful place. It’s a den of crime and corruption. And it’s a monument to architecture and enterprise. It’s violent and dangerous, and an epicenter of music and the arts. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, monsters and angels—they’re all here. The

First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects!

Architectural refactoring is hard, and we’re still ignorant of its full costs, but it isn’t impossible. Here the best

Don’t over-specify. Beyond a point, the effort to be complete exceeds its value – following the law of diminishing returns.

An enterprise must transform by changing its culture, changing its bureaucracy, changing its organization, changing its technical architecture—and making them agile.

Architecting for the enterprise, when all you really need is a cute little desktop tool, is a recipe for failure.

Connascence, in the context of software engineering, refers to the degree of coupling between software components. (Connascence.io hosts a handy reference to the various types of connascence.) Software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other(s) to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system.

Architecture is a fuzzy amalgamation of ancient knowledge and contemporary practice, an awkward way to look at the world and an inadequate medium to operate on it. Any architectural project takes five years; no single enterprise—ambition, intention, need—remains unchanged in the contemporary maelstrom. Architecture is too slow. Yes, the word "architecture" is still pronounced with certain reverence (outside the profession). It embodies the lingering hope—or the vague memory of a hope—that shape, form, coherence could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily. Maybe, architecture doesn't have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything—a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130)

Thus pleasantly conversing on the favorable circumstances of our position as compared with those of past pilgrims and of narrow-minded ones at the present day, we soon found ourselves at the foot of the Hill Difficulty. Through the very heart of this rocky mountain a tunnel has been constructed of most admirable architecture, with a lofty arch and a spacious double track; so that, unless the earth and rocks should chance to crumble down, it will remain an eternal monument of the builder's skill and enterprise. It is a great though incidental advantage that the materials from the heart of the Hill Difficulty have been employed in filling up the Valley of Humiliation, thus obviating the necessity of descending into that disagreeable and unwholesome hollow.

One of the patterns from domain-driven design is called bounded context. Bounded contexts are used to set the logical boundaries of a domain’s solution space for better managing complexity. It’s important that teams understand which aspects, including data, they can change on their own and which are shared dependencies for which they need to coordinate with other teams to avoid breaking things. Setting boundaries helps teams and developers manage the dependencies more efficiently. The logical boundaries are typically explicit and enforced on areas with clear and higher cohesion. These domain dependencies can sit on different levels, such as specific parts of the application, processes, associated database designs, etc. The bounded context, we can conclude, is polymorphic and can be applied to many different viewpoints. Polymorphic means that the bounded context size and shape can vary based on viewpoint and surroundings. This also means you need to be explicit when using a bounded context; otherwise it remains pretty vague.

That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us the plainest parable. How divinely do vault and arch here contrast in the struggle: how with light and shade they strive against each other, the divinely striving ones. — This is a clear description of the Gothic cathedral where you really feel that life itself has become congealed-one could say it was congealed life. It is often compared to a wood or to the branches of a tree; all sorts of animals run up and down those columns and spires. It is wood that has become stone, or spirit that has become incorruptible matter, and the architecture symbolizes the struggle from which it arose. One sees the struggle itself represented in Norman art, in those manifold representations of the fight between man and monsters, particularly. In the Gothic cathedral this conflict is fully developed and fully represented in the enormous height and depth, in the light and the shadow, and in the extraordinary complication of all those architectural forms melting into each other, or fighting one another. It is also expressed in the peculiar arches built outside the church to support the walls inside; it gives one the idea of tremendous tension, of a thing that is almost bursting. When you look, for instance, in Notre Dame in Paris, at the tension of the walls inside supported by the arches, you realize how daring the whole enterprise was-to catch so much spirit in matterand what they had to do in order to secure it. There is no such thing in the Norman cathedrals; they are really made of stone, while in the Gothic cathedrals one begins to doubt the weight of the stone. And a little later one sees the same peculiarity in sculpture. In the cinquecento sculpture of Michelangelo and the later men, they seemed to deny the immobility of the stone; up to that time, stone had been practically immovable, even Greek sculpture, but with Michelangelo, the stone began to move with a surplus of life which is hardly believable. It seems as if it either were not stone or as if something wrong had happened. There is too much life, the stone seems to walk away. It begins to move till the whole thing falls asunder. You see, that is what Nietzsche is describing here. He calls them the divinely striving ones that are no longer striving; they have congealed, they have come to rest. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1109-1110)

Reliable complexity always begins with simplicity.

Enterprise Data Warehouse Bus Matrix The enterprise data warehouse bus matrix is the essential tool for designing and communicating the enterprise data warehouse bus architecture. The rows of the matrix are business processes and the columns are dimensions. The shaded cells of the matrix indicate whether a dimension is associated with a given business process. The design team scans each row to test whether a candidate dimension is well-defined for the business process and also scans each column to see where a dimension should be conformed across multiple business processes. Besides the technical design considerations, the bus matrix is used as input to prioritize DW/BI projects with business management as teams should implement one row of the matrix at a time.

Describing architectures through implementation is akin to constructing a picture of your current or desired soulmate from pictures cut out of US Magazine; the result may paint a good picture of what you have or want, but it in no way describes how it is that the soulmate will meet your current or future needs.

leverage points that set us apart from the crowded marketplace.   Business Architecture is all about vision, alignment

History is the collective consciousness of the then intellectuals and not just some numbers, time and events.

MDM plays a key role within an information architecture as a provider and custodian of master data to the enterprise. This

Use this advice to prod your thinking, but don't use it as a replacement for your thinking. In the end you have to make, and live with, the decisions yourself.

For advanced analytics, a well-designed data pipeline is a prerequisite, so a large part of your focus should be on automation. This is also the most difficult work. To be successful, you need to stitch everything together.

It is Okay to Start Up Your Company with the Self-Centric Inside-Out Approach that is Based On Moral Authority But If You Really Want to Be Successful in Your Enterprise; Making the Very Best of an Architecture Change Management Process and Change Management in This Information and Wisdom Age, You Must Go Beyond the Domain Architectures and Significant Element of Just Outside-In Approach to Focus More On Full-Scope Enterprise that is Based On Outside-Out Approach Especially If the Broad-Context Work Has Already been done Which Makes it Easier to Focus on the `Big-Picture’ of the Extended Enterprise.

An Organizing System is an abstract characterization of how some collection of resources is described and arranged to enable human or computational agents to interact with the resources. The Organizing System is an architectural and conceptual view that is distinct from the physical arrangement of resources that might embody it, and also distinct from the person, enterprise, or institution that implements and operates it.

Architecture Building Blocks. Explain the purpose of Architecture Contracts. Explain the purpose of an architecture definition document. Explain the purpose of the Architecture Repository. Explain the purpose of an architecture requirements specification. Explain the purpose of an Architecture Roadmap. Explain the purpose of the Architecture Vision. Explain the purpose of business drivers, business goals and business principles. Explain the purpose of a capability assessment. Explain the purpose of a change request. Explain the purpose of a communications plan. Explain the purpose of a compliance assessment. Explain the purpose of an implementation and migration plan. Explain the purpose of an Implementation Governance Model. Explain the purpose of an organisational model for Enterprise Architecture.

The town was relatively small. Beyond the sad side was a side maybe five years from going sad. Maybe more. Maybe ten. There was hope. There were some boarded-up enterprises, but not many. Most stores were still doing business, at a leisurely rural pace. Big pick-up trucks rolled through, slowly. There was a billiard hall. Not many street lights. It was getting dark. Something about the architecture made it clear it was dairy country. The shape of the stores looked like old-fashioned milking barns. The same DNA was in there somewhere.

These activities would have been nothing like the majestic cults of the Middle Sepik region, including those of the Abelam: great collective enterprises uniting large villages under the patronage of powerful ancestral spirits; men's cults of war and human sacrifice, predicated on ranked secrecy and female exclusion, generating magnificent, world-class works of ritual art and architecture.

There is no AI without IA,” where “IA” is information architecture—another term for ontology.

Evolving a widely reused resource also requires coordination because changes must be compatible with all existing systems or users. Such coordination can slow down innovation... Some digital companies have even begun to explicitly favor duplication because their business environment rewards economies of speed.

This technical debt (future rework) will cause problems later.

The transformation of a monolithic application into a distributed application creates many challenges for data management.

Jim Crookes, chief architect at BT, has observed, “Companies get the systems they deserve. A company’s systems estate is a result of its culture, organizational history, and its funding structures. Coherent, well-integrated systems will only ever exist in companies that value coherence and integrated service.

ENTITIES Entities encapsulate enterprise-wide Critical Business Rules. An entity can be an object with methods, or it can be a set of data structures and functions. It doesn’t matter so long as the entities can be used by many different applications in the enterprise.

What do we talk about when we talk about architecture? As with any metaphor, describing software through the lens of architecture can hide as much as it can reveal. It can both promise more than it can deliver and deliver more than it promises. The obvious appeal of architecture is structure, and structure is something that dominates the paradigms and discussions of software development—components, classes, functions, modules, layers, and services, micro or macro. But the gross structure of so many software systems often defies either belief or understanding—Enterprise Soviet schemes destined for legacy, improbable Jenga towers reaching toward the cloud, archaeological layers buried in a big-ball-of-mud slide. It’s not obvious that software structure obeys our intuition the way building structure does.

The other new role that evolutionary architecture creates has enterprise architects defining enterprise-wide fitness functions. Enterprise architects are typically responsible for enterprise-wide nonfunctional requirements, such as scalability and security. Many organizations lack the ability to automatically assess how well projects perform individually and in aggregate for these characteristics. Once projects adopt fitness functions to protect parts of their architecture, enterprise architects can utilize the same mechanism to verify that enterprise-wide characteristics remain intact.

The Scaled Architecture you will discover in this book comes with a large set of data management principles. It requires you, for example, to identify and classify genuine and unique data, fix data quality at the source, administer metadata precisely, and draw boundaries carefully. When enterprises follow these principles, they empower their teams to distribute and use data quickly while staying decoupled. This architecture also comes with a governance model: engineers need to learn how to make good abstractions and data pipelines, while business data owners need to take accountability for their data and its quality, ensuring that the context is clear to everyone.

What I envision is an architecture that brings all the data management areas much closer together by providing a consistent view of how to uniformly apply security, governance, master data management, metadata, and data modeling, an architecture that can work using a combination of multiple cloud providers and on-premises platforms but still gives you the control and agility you need. It abstracts complexity for teams by providing domain-agnostic and reusable building blocks but still provides flexibility by providing a combination of different data delivery styles using a mix of technologies.

What project structure are we using? What rendering strategy are we using? What state management solution are we using? What styling solution are we using? What data fetching approach are we using? How are we going to handle user authentication? What testing strategies are we going to use?

Patterns are useful starting points, but they are not destinations.

One of the problems with Domain Model is the interface with relational databases. In many ways this approach treats the relational database like a crazy aunt who’s shut up in an attic and whom nobody wants to talk about.

The value of business architecture is to provide an abstract representation of an enterprise and the business ecosystem in which it operates. By doing so, business architecture delivers value as an effective communication and analytical framework for translating strategy into actionable initiatives. The framework also enhances the enterprise’s capacity to enact transformational change, navigate complexity, reduce risk, make more informed decisions, align diverse stakeholders to a shared vision of the future, and leverage technology more effectively

A strain of newly minted “cyberlibertarian” ideals informed the early Internet, which assumed that a fairly minimal communications layer was sufficient; obviously necessary higher-level architectural elements, such as persistent identities for humans, would be supplied by a hypothetical future layer of private industry. But these higher layers turned out to give rise to natural monopolies because of network effects; the outcome was a new kind of unintended centralization of information and therefore of power. A tiny number of tech giants came to own the means of access to networks for most people. Indeed, these companies came to route and effectively control the data of most individuals. Similarly, there was no provision for provenance, authentication, or any other species of digital context that might support trust, a precious quality that underlies decent societies. Neither the Internet nor the Web built on top of it kept track of back links, meaning what nodes on the Internet included references to a given node. It was left to businesses like commercial search engines to maintain that type of context. Support for financial transactions was left to private enterprise and quickly became the highly centralized domain of a few credit card and online payment companies.

enterprise service buses, one of their great downfalls was that they didn’t establish a common data protocol between all of the applications connected to the bus.

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

Martin Fowler NoSQL Distilled: "In general, with remote communication you want to reduce the number of round trips involved in the interaction, so it’s useful to be able to put a rich structure of information into a single request or response." Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" "Due to the latency costs of remote calls, it's better to err on the side of sending too much data than have to make multiple calls.

Management means measurement, and a failure to measure is a failure to manage.

wombat” is a Waste Of Money, Brains And Time.

Try chunking in groups of three. This keeps relationships simple, with each component validated by two others.

methodology is a way of thinking – not a substitute for it.

Aim for perfection, but be practical. Do your best. And always be aware of, and respond to, feedback, comments or suggestions.

Trust begins with tangibles.

Discover sense – then make it commonly known. Tell people. Make it a basis for your architecture or designs. Explain everything – even the obvious.

Make it easy to change business or process rules to cater for new situations, or to support needs that weren’t thought of at the time of the initial requirements.

There is logic to the structure of a design, and there is logic to how a design is used. The two are very different in nature.

As a minimum, the following areas should be considered: The stakeholders. The budget. The future direction and current culture of the organisation. The baseline Architecture Landscape. The current processes used for change and operation of IT. The skills and capabilities of the people within the enterprise.

Table 2.1 RASCI Matrix

If you can’t lead, you can’t scale.

DBAs who rarely genuinely restructure schemas build an increasingly fossilized world, with byzantine grouping and bunching strategies. When DBAs don’t restructure the database, they’re not preserving a precious enterprise resource, they’re instead creating the concretized remains of every version of the schema, all overlaid upon one another via join tables.

Details derail sales. Buyers want to be stirred into action. American architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham understood this. When he was eulogized by his arch rival Frank Lloyd Wright as “an enthusiastic promoter of great construction enterprises,” Wright spoke to Burnham's sales abilities more than his architectural style, and said, “His powerful personality was supreme.