Enterprise Architecture in Calgary

I went to a CIPS (Canadian Information Processing Society) lunch on Tuesday and the topic of discussion was 'The State of Enterprise Architecture'.  The talk was given by Martin Mysyk, the curator of www.enterprisearchitecture.ca.  Actually, it was more of a discussion lead by Martin.  This was appreciated as there were many practicing architects in the room and it was good to hear the variety of perspectives, challenges, and concerns that these fellows face.

Martin began by posing the question 'What do Enterprise Architects Do?'  Someone responded from the back of the room, 'We slow projects down!'  Everyone laughed and then we got more serious.  Other answers were offered:  'we provide strategic vision, influence, and guidance to the enterprise',  someone read a Wikipedia definition for EA's.  In the end, Martin compared EA's with municipal planners.  I thought this was interesting and decided to google it, and I found this page:  Enterprise Architecture Analogies  Some interesting food for thought.

A slide was displayed about EA As a Career and a short discussion ensued on how does one get their foot in the door (certification, promotion from BA role, promotion from SA role, etc).  EA's require a delicate balance of technical and business expertise, combined with superb soft skills like communication and effective discussion leadership.  Martin recommended a book called the Zoom Factor by Sharon Evans.  I might have to pick this one up as it looks like it might be interesting.

Warming to his subject, Martin moved into the EA Practice.  He reviewed several different flavours of EA methodologies out there today, commenting that TOGAF seemed to be the current favourite.  A slide was displayed with EA Practice at the top, followed by four boxes (focuses of EA?):  Business, Data, Applications, and Technology.  I was surprised that Security didn't count among them, and it didn't seem to arise in the discussion as much as I thought it would.  If TOGAF suggests that a Business architecture is important, doesn't a Security architecture merit some consideration?  Perhaps I missed it in the diagram...

Some important considerations for EA's that came up in the discussion:

• We need to consider growth versus optimization in Calgary right now (considering the price of oil)
• Who in the organization should benefit from EA?   Is I.T. really the right place for every organization's EA practice? Some companies have their EA practice reporting to the Legal dept.  others report to Operations, or even the CEO.  
• Perhaps the question is 'Where can the EA practice provide the most value in organization?'  Answers to these questions will be different for each situation.  Depending on the answers, one may have to reconsider who the EA practice reports to...

And finally our discussion wrapped up with the challenges that EA's face:

• We need to prove our value with a small budget.  How do we do that?
• How do we influence the decision makers without seeming heavy handed?
• How do we provide guidance and structure to development and growth without seeming heavy handed?

I'd love to have some comments!

A couple more business ideas...

I think one could (somehow) put together a company that offers to host data for clients for free, in return for being able to datamine their data.  Obviously there would be privacy rules to consider and content with.  However, my intuition is telling me there are still opportunities in this area that are yet untapped.

My other idea would be to build light fixtures that incorporate a similar 'fan' model to the Dyson fan - in other words, no blades as part of the light fixture.  Rather, there would be a main hub that houses and hides the working fan.  The fan would blow the air at high pressure through slots in the light fixture.  The slots could be anywhere on the light fixture.  The fixture itself could potentially even move....

Based on the cost of these 'blade' fans, I'm sure a bundle could be made on similar light fixtures.

Adding another idea to this (Aug. 4).  I'm very surprised I don't see more rechargeable (hair) blow driers out there.  Along with that, hair clippers.  When I'm getting my hair cut, the stylist is always messing around because the cord isn't long enough, or the cord has knocked something over or gotten twisted or caught on something...   Isn't that what building contractors wanted cordless drills for?  They've been around for years. 

The Value of IT Certifications and Skills

After I've told my students at school how I finally managed to get a full time job in IT, they've asked me what I thought was the most important thing I did to get that job.  I've always answered 'getting my SCJP certification' (Sun Certified Java Programmer). It's been over 10 years since I started working at the job.  While I still maintain certifications are important for developers who are trying to break into the industry, I've become less enthusiastic about them and what they mean now that I have more experience. 

Having said that, I ran into a couple of articles today that I thought were very interesting:
15 IT Certifications That Can Get You a $100,000 Salary
30 Tech Skills That Can Get You a $100,000 Salary

Granted, the way these articles are written is 'just a little bit of' hype.  These skills and/or certifications aren't going to net you a 100k salary all on their own.  They need to be married with a resume that has several years of IT experience and related, well developed soft skills.

IT New Hire/Contract? Thoughts on IT On-Boarding

Being a contractor, I get to see and experience the on-boarding practice of different companies in different industries on a regular basis. This gives me an opportunity to provide a 'value-add' for the companies that I'm contracted with. Because of my fresh perspective, I can more easily pinpoint areas of opportunity for improvement in the first week on the job.

One thing that has always surprised me, and remained fairly consistent in all of the companies that I've worked with is that they don't seem to have the infrastructure ready for new hires.  I always seem to spend the first week doing one of the following:

• waiting for a computer or even a desk to sit at.
• waiting for access to my computer or to files, folders, applications, servers, etc.
• setting up/configuring my computer - installing required applications, setting up internal website bookmarks in browsers, etc.
• waiting for licenses for the applications I need to run to do my job.

I find this lack of organization dumbfounding.  HR knows that a new hire is getting on-boarded weeks in advance.  Similarly, the team/department should know as well.  I don't think there are any real good excuses for having new hires sit on their hands for the first week while everyone gets organized.  Bringing new hires on board should be a Standard Operating Procedure.

While I'm waiting for access or a license, I busy myself with looking for things that people with history at the company would view as the 'status-quo', but are really issues that could/should be considered problematic or improvable.

Opportunities like:

• Single Points of Failure.  (email server(s), monitoring server(s), shared drive(s), VPN access, etc)
• Lack of network segregation between environments (can I ping/telnet from a dev or staging server to production?)
• Misnamed or legacy names for servers or monitoring notifications that are understood by employees but a source of confusions for newbies
• Lack of templates for common documentation
• Lack of exportable outlook email rules that can be shared with the team
• Lack of exportable browser favorites that can be shared with the team
• Consolidating and organizing documentation (critical documentation in 12 different folders scattered through different directories is a recipe for confusion)
• Lack of Automation - continuous integration through to automating deployment.  Automating monitoring
• Preventing Fat-Finger errors (adding confirmation messages in start scripts)

Granted, not all of these will be applicable for every IT position.  Also, share your findings with your new supervisor and get his blessing before going and changing everything.  Suggest with encouragement, don't criticize! You don't to come across like your trying to relieve someone of their position.  You are there to make things better for everyone.

So, next time you are on-boarded for a new IT position, keep these things in mind.  Hopefully they can help both you and your new company.  Also, if anyone has some other suggestions of things to look for, please add a comment!

business idea - Muffin wrappers

Make edible muffin wrappers - My wife had a problem with some new muffin wrappers she tried sticking to the muffin.  Why can't they make edible ones?  If you get the texture just right, it could change the muffin/cupcake industry....

In fact, making products out of 'by-products' is good business.  Henry Ford did it with waste wood from his Model T's.  He turned it into charcoal bricks that ended up being used for fire fuel.  This side product eventually turned into a company called Kingsford Charcoal.  If you've ever had a charcoal BBQ, I'm sure you've bought a bag of their briquets.

Dell Latitude Diagnostic Error Code 2000-0142 Hard Drive Failure

'Apparently' the hard drive on my laptop failed yesterday.  Out of the blue I got a couple of popup windows complaining about some dll not being able to load, and then the windows blue screen of death.  I thought maybe my machine got too hot, but I tried rebooting after letting it cool off and it didn't do anything after the Dell splash page during the boot.  So I ran a BIOS diagnostic and got the following error:
Msg: Error Code 2000-0142
Msg: Unit 1: Drive Self Test
Failed Status Byte=77
I called Dell and they basically confirmed what the diagnostic test said - my hard drive was fried.

Not wanting to give up on my hard drive that easily, I googled to see what I could do.  I discovered I could try to repair windows using the Windows Recovery Console.  So I found my Windows CD and booted from it and went to the Repair option.  Once I had entered the Admin password, I got a command prompt and after a bit of searching around I discovered that most of my hard drive seemed to be intact.  This, however, was still in the dos prompt of the Windows Recovery Console.  I couldn't back up my files to a USB from there.

I tried chkdsk, chkdsk /p, and chkdsk /r - those all worked successfully.  Yet my machine still wouldn't book.  So I preused the list of commands available to the Windows Recovery Console (here) and tried a few more - bootcfg, fixboot, and fixmbr.  In the end, it was fixmbr (which repairs the master boot record on the specified disk) that ended up working for me.

My laptop is 4 years old now.  I removed the battery a couple of months ago, and with problems like this starting to happen, I going to start shopping for a new one.  Hopefully this info helps someone out there though.

Business Idea - Automated Lawn Mowers

Similar to my business idea regarding automated window washers, yet I think this one would potentially be even easier to implement. I was driving down our ring road here in Calgary and seeing all the grass growing very fast in the median and around the overpasses. I also saw a tractor/lawn mower left by the city over the weekend in one of the medians and it sparked a thought... Why couldn't lawn mowers be automated? It turns out somebody already has that idea. Check this link out: http://www.robomow.com/

These aren't industrial size/strength machines, though. I guess there are a couple of challenges with using an automated mower in an industrial/municipal context:
- Keeping them secure - they'd potentially be easy to steal. You could get around this by putting a GPS tracker on the unit something like this: http://www.gpspolice.com/
- More varied terrain - the mowers would have to content with steeper hills and soggy or muddy grass that they could get stuck in. The unit would have to be able to manage/mitigate these.
- Safety - The units would need to be well tested with emergency shut offs logic in a bunch of places to ensure the public's safety.