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Notes on Enterprise Architecture, Business Alignment, Interesting Trends, and anything else that interests me this week...
Self Improvement in a team
What is the correct responsibility of the team to improve the skills of each team member? As in many...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 04/07/2007
Microsoft, BPEL and Open Standards
We are frequently criticized for not supporting enough open standards. Honestly, I think it's...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 04/04/2007
If you don't trust your experts, how expert are they?
I had a great chat with an experienced IT software development leader in IT this afternoon. He was...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/30/2007
Getting a system to consume a "fictional" service
Have I got an architecture for you! It's cool. We have a set of services that underlie the user...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/24/2007
Web 2.0 vs. the IT department
Michael Platt posted a set of observations recently that offered up some troubling conclusions. In...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/23/2007
Understanding Enterprise Architecture
Just came back from an all-day offsite with the EA team in Microsoft IT. It occurs to me, in...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/22/2007
When a task consumes your life
I'm working on a single task, part of a much larger project. It is on the critical path, and I know...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/16/2007
Hero or Rebel
If you do what is needed, but not what you are told, are you a hero, or a rebel? In software, as in...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/13/2007
So what's in a roadmap, anyway?
Microsoft is an odd bird. It is a dynamic place, with different business units moving at their own...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/12/2007
fun activity for kids: count to 1000 on your fingers
Not that it's fun to count to 1000, but kids will not believe you until you show them not only that...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/10/2007
Sharepoint Business Data Catalog and system adapter patterns
A pattern is a solution that occurs many times. You recognize it and describe it and others use it....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/10/2007
An Agile Business Planning Model
In IT, for years now, we've been debating and arguing for changes in the way in which we write...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/08/2007
Perhaps it is time to declare victory in the battle of Rules Engines vs. Dependency Injection
I watched on the sidelines, not long ago, as a team of architects carefully inspected and examined...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/06/2007
The importance of a name
Enterprise Architecture is a young science. I was reminded of that today as I sat through a...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 03/01/2007
Top 100 patterns: Building from a nascent catalog
My respect for Grady Booch has grown over the past few days, as I've investigated the idea of...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/20/2007
Top 100 patterns: how to pick the list
In my previous posts, I suggested that we should create a list of the top 100 patterns that every...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/19/2007
Why create a list of the top 100 patterns?
I posted a blog entry about creating a list of the top 100 patterns that every developer should...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/13/2007
What are the top 100 patterns that every developer must know?
It has been 10 years since the seminal publication of the Gang-of-Four Design Patterns book. Since...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/12/2007
The minimum amount of architecture needed for Test Driven Design
My good friend Malcolm posted a response to my IFaP article and asked, in essence, "what is the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/09/2007
IFaP : Middle Out Architecture
There is some discussion these days about "middle out" architecture. The key idea in "middle out" is...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/08/2007
The best employee I ever had
I was deep in the mix during the dot-com bubble. It was one heckuva ride. In the early days, it was...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/07/2007
A case study in breaking up a tightly coupled integration
About 15 years ago, Microsoft upgraded their internal system that manages the list of unique product...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/03/2007
Managing the bindings from systems to EAI infrastructure
Every system is responsible for publishing its own events. I hold that as a core requirement of...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 02/01/2007
What about a Software Development Guild?
I work for Microsoft. However, I wonder if the answer to deciding if a developer is 'qualified'...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/31/2007
Gently pushing
In think that one of the most valuable traits of an enterprise architect is the ability to push...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/30/2007
Systems Architecture Interview Questions
Next week, I'm interviewing another architect, so I've gone over my list of "things to ask an...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/29/2007
What do you want said at your funeral?
An old saying goes: on their death bed, no one ever turns to their family and says "I wish I had...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/29/2007
Case study: create and use Platform Goals to reduce churn
If you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to prove to someone that your project is...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/27/2007
IT Parable: It's 10 o'clock... do you know where your requirements are?
Joshua and Frank were having a chat over coffee the other day. Well, Frank was having a chat. Joshua...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/25/2007
Should IT report to the CFO?
Christopher Koch at CIO magazine, as part of the research for their annual "state of the CIO"...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/23/2007
Should a performance cache query run through your EAI hub?
When you pass a message from one system to another, you have to decide: do I want the message to...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/20/2007
Your SOA is JABOWS (Just A Bunch Of Web Services) and I can prove it
Are you ready to answer this challenge... can you prove that your Service Oriented Architecture...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/16/2007
Apply API design guidelines to SOA?
Thought occurred to me when reading Brad Adam's blog that the names we give services need to be as...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/16/2007
Build TDD adoption through Support-First efforts
I am convinced that Test-Driven Development is the single greatest hope that our industry has, as a...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 01/16/2007
Taking your name off of a project
You cannot often choose the projects that you work on. However, the ones you work on should reflect...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/22/2006
Internet-wide Services Integration Architecture needed now!
As I mentioned in a prior blog entry, the lack of a single consensus mechanism for different...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/20/2006
The roadblock to Software As A Service
Prediction for 2007: The market for Software as a Service is going to peak soon, and then fall off....
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/19/2006
Declaring architecture in the code
Code sits below the architecture. It is not an expression of architecture. Code realizes...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/18/2006
A SOA Infrastructure Reference Model
I realized that I had been using a reference model, in my head, for a long time when describing the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/14/2006
Finally got to read the SOA Reference Model from OASIS
It's a gem. I never want to hear "there's too many definitions of SOA" or "There's no definitive...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/13/2006
Requirements for an Enterprise Service
An enterprise SOA service is not just any old web service. There are specific requirements that it...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/12/2006
Encouraging Enterprise Services
Enterprise Services save money. When done well, they create discoverable, supported, consistent, and...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/11/2006
Should SOA be Top Down or Bottom Up
It's the age of the mash-up and mix-in and composed service... yet I continue to wonder if we...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/09/2006
Is SOA just an implementation of Responsibility-Driven Architecture?
A response to my prior post on Responsibility-Driven Architecture got me thinking... what is the...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/06/2006
Responsibility Driven Architecture
I'd like to introduce you to a simple term: Responsibility Driven Architecture. Like a design...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/01/2006
Enterprise vs. Application Architect
A team that I work with is hiring an application architect. (Solutions architect, if you prefer that...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 12/01/2006
Should the name of a department be encoded in a namespace?
One thread of discussion going through our internal community is this: should the .Net namespace...
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/29/2006
Enterprise Architecture Lessons from City Planning
This entry has been deleted. My apologies.
Author: Nick Malik Date: 11/28/2006