The Enterprise Architecture

Sharing files with friends has never been easier. Whether it is via old-school hard copy methods like CDs, DVDs and USB drives, nefarious peer-to-peer torrents like BitTorrent or new shared, private cloud storage services like Dropbox, getting a photo or music file from one person to another takes mere seconds. The problem is that people inside businesses aren't using these services just to share personal files. They are circumventing secured content management systems like SharePoint in favor of consumer-friendly services in order to share files with third parties. For businesses, Consumerization of Sharing Tools (CoST) can encourage insecure file sharing and the impact can be startling. WikiLeaks was the result of a failed SharePoint deployment. The user simply circumvented the SharePoint system, downloaded extremely sensitive data and made it available to the w... (more)

Business Design for the Service-Oriented Enterprise

The way we design business is undergoing profound transformation. For the past 100 years business design has been directly influenced by Frederick Taylor, focused on how we do work and how we can make it more efficient. The LEAN and Six Sigma movements are the visible manifestation of that thinking. Together with BPM they have focused on incremental improvements of primarily internal processes and tasks encoded in process orchestration and workflows that control how the enterprise works. But this is equivalent to looking in the rear view mirror to design tomorrows business. In t... (more)

Architecture Evaluation Framework for ORM Technologies

Object Relational Technologies form the backbone of most of the enterprise Java applications. Choosing the appropriate technology however is one of the most important decisions for an enterprise architect. More often than not, such a decision is either a hit or miss. Mistakes done in selecting the appropriate technology results in performance bottlenecks, lack of scalability, unreliable transaction handling etc. More than the problem with the specific ORM technology, it's the suitability of that technology to the underlying business needs and non-functional requirements. This ar... (more)