Our people weigh in on the issues of the day.

Blue Slate's people think a lot about the challenges facing their industries today. In the process, they often come up with completely unexpected slants on current issues, or new ways of thinking about business problems. Bluespeak is where they share those thoughts. Feel free to read and reflect.

[Any views or opinion represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blogger and do not represent those of Blue Slate Solutions.]

Semantic Web Summit (East) 2010 Concludes

I attended my first semantic web conference this week, the Semantic Web Summit (East) held in Boston.  The focus of the event was how businesses can leverage semantic technologies.  I was interested in what people were actually doing with the technology.  The one and a half days of presentations were informative and diverse.

Our host was Mills Davis, a name that I have encountered frequently during my exploration of the semantic web.  He did a great job of keeping the sessions running on time as well as engaging the audience.  The presentations were generally crisp and clear.  In some cases the speaker presented a product that utilizes semantic concepts, describing its role in the value chain.  In other cases we heard about challenges solved with semantic technologies.

My major takeaways were: 1) semantic technologies work and are being applied to a broad spectrum of problems and 2) the potential business applications of these technologies are vast and ripe for creative minds to explore.  This all bodes well for people delving into semantic technologies since there is an infrastructure of tools and techniques available upon which to build while permitting broad opportunities to benefit from leveraging them.

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Wednesday November 17, 2010 | By David Read

Strange, Our Enterprise Architecture Continues to Operate

For years we’ve been hearing about the importance of Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks.  The messages from a variety of sources such as Zachman, TOGAF, HL7 and others is that businesses have to do an incredible amount of planning, documenting, discussing, benchmarking, evaluation, (feel free to insert more up-front work here) before they will have a good basis to implement their IT infrastructure. Once implemented all the documentation must be maintained, updated, verified, expanded, improved, (once again, insert more ongoing documentation management work here).  Oh, by the way, your company may want some actual IT work aligned with its core operations to be accomplished as part of all this investment. I don’t believe such a dependency is covered well in any of the EA material.

I have always struggled with these EA frameworks.  Their overhead seems completely unreasonable. I agree that planning the IT infrastructure is necessary.  This is no different than planning any sort of infrastructure.  Where I get uncomfortable is in the incredible depth and precision these frameworks want to utilize.  IT infrastructures do not have the complete inflexibility of buildings or roads.  Computer systems have a malleability that allows them to be adapted over time, particularly if the adjustments are in line with the core design.

Before anyone concludes that I do not believe in having a defined IT architecture let me assure you that I consistently advocate having a well-planned and documented IT architecture to support the enterprise.  A happenstance of randomly chosen and deployed technologies and integrations is inefficient and expensive.  I just believe that such planning and documentation do not need to be anywhere near as heavyweight as the classical EA frameworks suggest.

So you can imagine, based on this brief background, that I was not particularly surprised when the Zachman lawsuit and subsequent response from Stan Locke (Metadata Systems Software) failed to stop EA progress within Blue Slate or any of our clients.  I’m not interested in rehashing what a variety of blogs have already discussed regarding the lawsuit.  My interest is simply that there may be more vapor in the value of these large frameworks than their purveyors would suggest.


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Thursday September 16, 2010 | By David Read