The Governance Apparition Financial governance? Project governance? Architecture governance? Service governance? All just distractions that prevent us from seeing that we just need a reasonable process.

The Death of Architecture The first of a two-parter that looks at enterprise architecture and reality. One thing to get straight, to make architecture effective, is to realise that it is, in and of itself, a mirage. It’s just an idea with no value until it’s made real.

A Loose Coupling Strategy Sometimes (or maybe all the time) you’ve got to make architecture count quickly. There’s no time, or buy-in, to any longer term visionary fluff. In these cases refactoring is your friend.

Enterprise Design Debt The concept of design, or technical, debt is fairly well covered around the web. This article looks at how all that debt being created on projects might be wrapped up and managed from an enterprise perspective.

Build or Buy Or Customise and Confuse A short article on why thinking in simplistic terms like buy or build your software is dangerous. There are some good rules that should determine which is right for which situation. Both are necessary, but buying when you really should be building can be a major mistake.

The Requirements Delusion Successful IT requires that you educate your business into getting the best from its technology capability by exploring the possibilities, not blindly trying to meet their requirements.

Frequency Analysis Decoder A basic game that encrypts a random piece of text using a substitution cypher and lets you use frequency analysis to decode it.

SOA Myth and Mystery SOA can be dangerous if it’s seen (or sold) as a panacea. Like any IT design approach it’s hard to get right. Put all your success eggs in your SOA basket at your peril.

The Business Alignment Fallacy Business alignment is a hot topic in IT. Here I put forward the idea that attempting to align IT and the business is a fruitless exercise, because alignment is a fallacious concept. Everyone in the organisation is the business. IT is therefore already aligned. What’s needed is talk about possible capabilities, not talk of alignment.

Fractal Amplification 1 Good coding, and ultimately good architecture, is about a very very very simple concept - putting the right thing in the right place.