Hammer Time IT in big corporates has become so afraid of making mistakes that hardly anybody will stand up and say following corporate platform standards, or waterfall design, might not be the best approach. This is a post in favour of (some) tool-first thinking.

Strained Relationships Just what is all this fuss about NoSQL? Is the relational database dead? Or are we just in need of alternative options to solve a new breed of problem?

Law and Order Has Enterprise Architecture had its day? All rise. The court is in session.

Quixotics Anonymous Quixotics Anonymous a special interest group for the down at heart in corporate IT. Patron Saint: C. Northcote Parkinson.

Gangstas Dont Scale Enterprise integration had a tendency about ten years ago to be all asynchronous. Enterprise Architects, seduced by talk of cheap limitless scale from vendors, installed message based middeware everywhere. But asynchrony has some important constraints that aren’t always obvious. This article illustrates one of these constraints using an example from The Wire TV show.

Walking the Walk

The Estimation Game Much of what happens during portfolio planning is just wasting time on a wistful mirage.

Was that Tactegic or Stractical When there’s a clash of opinion on whether to go strategic or tactical, do not waste time debating how you could do the tactical first then deploy the strategic option later. It. Never. Happens.

Planning the Plan Portfolio planning and the McFarlan Matrix in action.

Brewers CAP Theorem An explanation of Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem, which says you cannot have more than two of Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance in web-based distributed systems.