Using Enterprise Architecture to achieve competitive advantage through IT. Are you successful or aggravated?

August 06, 2008

Role of an Architect: Lessons from the movies - Part 7

- Amit Jnagal, Senior Technical Architect, Infosys

In my last post, I talked about the movie The 300 Spartans and the lessons it held for Architects about doing the right thing, courage under fire, looking for alternatives etc.

My Cousin Vinny (Year of Release: 1992; Director: Jonathan Lynn; Our Architect: Vincent Gambini, played by Joe Pesci; Architect's Character: Lawyer handling his first case for his cousin).

‘My Cousin Vinny’ is the story of a lawyer who finds himself defending his first cousin on the charges of first degree murder in his first ever trial. He has no experience as a lawyer and has never even attended the court as a lawyer, is totally unaware of the process or the protocol. He learns on the fly, makes silly mistakes on his first case, is excited by the trivial stuff, but makes a solid come back using his fundamental skills and saves his cousin from an almost certain seat on the electric chair.

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August 01, 2008

Reason, Stakeholder Engagement / Management and EA

Current issue of the New Scientist magazine has a very interesting cover story on “Seven reasons why people hate reason”.  Now, that is a guide I would have loved to have alongside during some rather difficult stakeholder engagements, when I couldn’t stop thinking “If only they could be reasonable…”.

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July 31, 2008

The most important considerations for Enterprise Architecture projects

As part of a proposal, a prospect asked us to provide the 10 most important pieces of advice for an EA team. Wow, I thought, that’s a really good question. And short of being able to do an awful lot of literature research (I am still on this assignment in the Middle East, and my library is at home back in Frankfurt), I just took a shot.

I did not manage to get together 10 guidelines, but have a look at these 4 – and please feel free to fill in with your own experience.

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