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 —…

A case against normalizing layoffs — I wish CEOs and executive teams would take as much responsibility for having to lay off people as they do for success in their businesses. Wouldn’t it be great if CEOs would admit “Hey I messed up! I allowed us to over-hire. I made acquisition mistakes. …

Salesforce just laid off 8000, Amazon laid off 17000… Meta, Twitter, Stripe and many more companies have also laid off employees. It reminds me of 2001 and 2008, when we saw a similar situation unfold. Having been through many of these cycles, over time I have built a cautious paranoia…

An internal message from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was leaked to the media recently. The message was an inquiry from Marc as to why new employees are less productive. I find this inquiry valuable and kudos to Marc for crowd-sourcing the answer(s) from employees. …

The euphoria around solutions such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT as well as Google DeepMind’s AlphaCode is unlike anything I’ve seen for quite a while. Here are some of the statements that are being made: “OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the Google Search killer.” “OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s DeepMind AlphaCode will completely change how…