About Author: Chris

Description
Chris Lockhart has more than nine years of experience in architecting, implementing, and testing technical solutions for large multi-line corporations representing several different industries. Chris has provided technical advice and thorough implementation strategies for highly complex integrated systems comprising security, middle-tier Web application components, messaging, collaborative middleware, and back-end data sources. He has focused on providing solutions that take advantage of portal technologies and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to solve real-world problems for clients.

Posts by Chris

  • With a weak crop of developers and architects, I'm concerned we're growing a generation of bad IT managers, directors, VP's and CIO/CTOs. I'm afraid our next generation leadership will be more concerned with the acronyms after their names, with frameworks and methodologies, than with the actual work of IT. That is, with theory rather than delivery.

    Down in the Trough

    With a weak crop of developers and architects, I'm concerned we're growing a generation of bad IT managers, directors, VP's and CIO/CTOs. I'm afraid our next generation leadership will be more concerned with the acronyms after their names, with frameworks and methodologies, than with the actual work of IT. That is, with theory rather than delivery.

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  • Companies like innovation. But they won't be early adopters of an ill-defined and constantly changing mindset. They'll wait for it to calm down a bit, solidify and congeal. Then they'll slowly roll it out and gradually update it over time. Suggesting they take an ADHD approach of constant churn and ongoing rip and replace of the latest EA theories doesn't help them or us as practitioners.

    On the Bleeding Edge

    Companies like innovation. But they won't be early adopters of an ill-defined and constantly changing mindset. They'll wait for it to calm down a bit, solidify and congeal. Then they'll slowly roll it out and gradually update it over time. Suggesting they take an ADHD approach of constant churn and ongoing rip and replace of the latest EA theories doesn't help them or us as practitioners.

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  • EA, like the business and IT philosophies that underpin it, is constantly changing. If enterprise architecture is an architecture in which the system in question is the whole enterprise (including business processes, technologies, and information systems), then there will always be dynamism to it. These elements and components are under constant change.

    The Illusory Maturity of EA

    EA, like the business and IT philosophies that underpin it, is constantly changing. If enterprise architecture is an architecture in which the system in question is the whole enterprise (including business processes, technologies, and information systems), then there will always be dynamism to it. These elements and components are under constant change.

    Continue Reading...

  • We seem to measuring a lot of things lately. The sheer volume of status reports and dashboards and timelines and updates would seem to indicate we have lots of metrics being captured and reported. But I've seen firsthand how numbers are shoddily derived, over reported, incorrectly reused and re-reported and it doesn't inspire confidence. What does it mean that leadership is basing decisions on these values?

    Death By Metrics

    We seem to measuring a lot of things lately. The sheer volume of status reports and dashboards and timelines and updates would seem to indicate we have lots of metrics being captured and reported. But I've seen firsthand how numbers are shoddily derived, over reported, incorrectly reused and re-reported and it doesn't inspire confidence. What does it mean that leadership is basing decisions on these values?

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  • There's been quite a lot of recent discussion around the rise and fall and rise again of SOA as a means for constructing a services-based view of an enterprise or a solution. I totally support that idea. But to take it one step beyond mere technical views and introduce the common lexicon bridge, we need to be having discussion centered around the capabilities associated with those services.

    Capable EA

    There's been quite a lot of recent discussion around the rise and fall and rise again of SOA as a means for constructing a services-based view of an enterprise or a solution. I totally support that idea. But to take it one step beyond mere technical views and introduce the common lexicon bridge, we need to be having discussion centered around the capabilities associated with those services.

    Continue Reading...