5 Key Components of a Successful Enterprise Architecture Function — Creating and managing a successful Enterprise Architecture function requires a variety of different hard and soft skills. In addition, each company is different and the Enterprise Architecture function needs to calibrate and align itself to the specific company. However, there are five common features of a successful Enterprise Architecture function…

I talk to a lot of customers in my role as IT CTO at Salesforce. Data always comes up in discussions with CIOs and CTOs. Actually, I can’t think of any recent conversation when data did not come up as a topic. Here are some thoughts on data that I…

A simple analogy… When I present to companies about “Why does a company need an IT Enterprise Architecture team?”, I like to start with the following picture. I pose the question “Does this work?” to the audience… which of course elicits many responses. The typical responses are as follows: —…

Enterprise Architecture — How We Do It Internally The two words, “Enterprise Architecture”, elicit various reactions — everything from “we tried that and it doesn’t work” to “we need that!” to “we have an effective EA practice”. Unfortunately it is possible (even easy) to do Enterprise Architecture incorrectly, with an approach that is lethargic, technology-first and theoretical —…

Many companies that I talk to are trying to up-level their architecture governance. It seems to be a new trend to prioritize architecture governance and it’s great to see! I get a lot of questions about architecture governance such as: what are best practices what approaches have we put in…

I get a lot of questions from our customers about ‘architecture principles’: what are Salesforce IT’s architecture principles? what common architecture principles should be considered? how do I determine my company’s architecture principles? how do you enforce them? how do you measure on-going alignment to them? Without architecture principles, the…

Yeah, I know. It’s counter-intuitive. Here’s the common thinking- “times are tough so cut IT”. It might be hard to believe but it’s during the downturns and slowdowns that you want to double-down on improving your IT systems. Why? When things are great (like the last 10 yrs) and companies…

As the global economy looks likely to enter a recessionary period, we can anticipate that companies will: reduce or eliminate employee hiring reduce contractors reduce corporate budgets and more carefully watch expenses In previous prolonged recessions, we have also seen companies ‘manage out the bottom x%’ of employees. Entering a…

Eventually in your career, you will have a bad boss. Someone who epitomizes bad characteristics such as being unethical, only caring about themselves, being insecure, taking credit for your work, etc. It’s impossible to articulate all the ways in which a manager can be a poor manager. …