Thoughts on Enterprise Architecture and Project Management

Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #13 Coming December 2, 2008

The (Lucky) 13th Carnival of Enterprise Architecture that I host through Blog Carnival is coming up on December 2, 2008, with submissions due by December 1, 2008. If you have an EA- or IT-related post that you'd like featured through the Carnival, you can submit the Permalink URL and related information here.

This is a very easy and effective way for EA and IT bloggers to get their messages across to a wider audience, and I hope that EA and IT bloggers will consider submitting their best pieces to the Carnival. Please note that you do not have to be the author of the material to submit it, as long as it: a) meets the guidelines below; and b) honors the author's copyright and fair use guidelines.

As always, here are a few pointers for article submissions to the carnival:

* Off-topic material, sales pitches (direct or disguised) for products & services, and content spam will be not be published. Prior to every carnival episode, I delete a number of pieces of obvious spam, vendor ads, and off-topic material prior to publication - and it's a complete pain in the rear, believe me. Please don't waste your time or mine and thanks in advance.

* Feel free to nominate blog posts of others for the Carnival, but make sure to identify the author!

* Material posted in previous editions of the Carnival will not be re-published, regardless of who submitted it and when it was originally submitted.

Again, the deadline for submissions is December 1, 2008, and the carnival will be published on December 2, 2008. I look forward to all worthy contributions!

Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #9 Coming on March 4, 2008

After a hiatus, I'm pleased to announce the 9th Carnival of Enterprise Architecture that I host through Blog Carnival is coming up on March 4, 2008, with submissions due by March 2, 2008. If you have an EA- or IT-related post that you'd like featured through the Carnival, you can submit the Permalink URL and related information here.

This is a very easy and effective way for EA and IT bloggers to get their messages across to a wider audience, and I hope that EA and IT bloggers will consider submitting their best pieces (or those of others that they particularly like) to the Carnival.

A few pointers for article submissions to the carnival:

* Off-topic material, pitches for products & services, and content spam will be not be published. Every month, I delete a number of pieces of obvious spam, vendor ads, and off-topic material prior to publication. Please don't waste your time or mine and thanks in advance.

* Feel free to nominate blog posts of others for the Carnival, but make sure to identify the author!

* Material posted in previous editions of the Carnival will not be re-published, regardless of who submitted it and when it was originally submitted.

Again, the deadline for submissions is March 2, 2008, and the carnival will be published on March 4, 2008. I look forward to your contributions!

After a hiatus, I'm pleased to announce the 9th Carnival of Enterprise Architecture that I host through Blog Carnival is coming up on March 4, 2008, with submissions due by March 2, 2008. If you have an EA- or IT-related post that you'd like featured through the Carnival, you can submit the Permalink URL and related information here.

This is a very easy and effective way for EA and IT bloggers to get their messages across to a wider audience, and I hope that EA and IT bloggers will consider submitting their best pieces (or those of others that they particularly like) to the Carnival.

A few pointers for article submissions to the carnival:

* Off-topic material, pitches for products & services, and content spam will be not be published. Every month, I delete a number of pieces of obvious spam, vendor ads, and off-topic material prior to publication. Please don't waste your time or mine and thanks in advance.

* Feel free to nominate blog posts of others for the Carnival, but make sure to identify the author!

* Material posted in previous editions of the Carnival will not be re-published, regardless of who submitted it and when it was originally submitted.

Again, the deadline for submissions is March 2, 2008, and the carnival will be published on March 4, 2008. I look forward to your contributions!

The Most Important Data of All

I found an interesting example of what data is the most important of all: time. How it's recorded, calculated, accounted for, etc. is vital to the health and well-being of any information system and the applications and people that depend on them.

It is often the most innocuous and innocent of bugs and flaws that causes, or has the potential to cause, great harm and loss. Our example today is the much vaunted F-22 Raptor fighter plane. This baby is so advanced, it blew older fighter jets out of the water in simulated war exercises. They also cost $125 million USD each. Not a cheap machine, by any measure.

Recently, 6 of these were en route to Japan from Hawaii with tanker escorts. All was fine until they crossed the International Date Line. As the Daily Tech article relates:

When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to "reboot" the systems to no avail.

Luckily for this group, the weather was clear and they had the tanker escort lead them in the limp all the way back to Hawaii. Had the weather been poor, or the units in a combat situation, the outcome would have been much more severe and perhaps grave.

The problem was traced back to a very small segment of the 1.5 million lines of Ada code that runs these planes. After identification, the problem was fixed, and all is expected to return to normal operations.

There are similar time issues on the business side of things. I know of numerous organizations that spend much time, money, and hand-wringing "fixing" systems (primarily legacy) twice a year when the time shifts from daylight savings to standard and back again. they think they have the problem solved at these 6-month intervals, but then something else happens during the next switch. This time around they can add the fact that DST happens earlier beginning in March. The smarter ones have adopted Universal Time Coordinates (UTC) as a date/time standard as legacy systems are replaced. UTC plus-or-minus an offset for timezones is the only reliable way of figuring out what time it is. And those values are more important than a lot of people believe.

Time data and operations should be basic blocking-and-tackling for every development group. When time issues get trivialized or overlooked, the "soft underbelly" of a system will be exposed sooner or later, and the consequences could be severe, even tragic.

And not to be left as afterthoughts or to very junior development staff.

Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #3 - February 19, 2007

Welcome to the February 19, 2007 edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture.

Business Process Management

Sagar Satapathy presents Nastiest Malware Trends posted at Business Intelligence Lowdown.

Sagar Satapathy presents Getting Organized: Lesson #1 for Small Business Owners posted at Management Strategies: 18 Tips to Manage Your Blog Network.

Scott Sehlhorst presents CMMI Levels and Requirements Management Maturity Introduction posted at Tyner Blain, saying, "A comparison of the CMMI and RMM frameworks for describing and managing software development processes."

Enterprise Architecture

John Wu presents EA to think outside stovepipe posted at LEA.

Robert McIlree presents Dealing With Compliance Overreactions posted at Technology Architecture & Projects, saying, "How to address compliance 'issues' within IT that have no value."

Pankaj Arora presents Way Forward in 2007 posted at Enterprise Architecture : Continuous Process.

Pankaj Arora presents Few thoughts on Ruby posted at Enterprise Architecture : Continuous Process.

Craig Borysowich presents The Birth of the EA Security Reference Model (SecRM) posted at Tech Architect.

Scott Sehlhorst presents How To Use Timeboxes for Scheduling Software Delivery - Tyner Blain posted at Tyner Blain, saying, "Enterprise teams are often afraid to approach incremental delivery - timeboxing is a great way to manage incremental (and even agile) delivery, with reporting that "makes sense" to old-school management teams."

System Architecture

OpenAsthra presents PoTerm - A Serial Terminal Shell posted at OpenAsthra, saying, "PoTerm is terminal software which deals with serial communication, this is an opensource"

Avant News presents Windows Vista Startup Music Designed on Macs posted at Avant News, saying, "A little Vista satire..."

alik presents SOA, Strong Authentication, Standard Authorization - Cool Solution posted at alik levin's.

Sagar Satapathy presents Top 10 Largest Databases in the World posted at Business Intelligence Lowdown.

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of enterprise architecture, blog carnival.

Still Time Left to Submit Posts to the Carnival of EA #3

There's still time left (until February 17th) to contribute posts to the Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #3 that I'm hosting at Blog Carnival. Submission is easy, and BC and I take care of the rest.

Please note that spam and pitches for products or services devoid of any other content or off-topic will not be published.

You can submit your works here with my thanks in advance!

Software Testing Tips

Just think how reliable software would be if we tested systems this thoroughly.