THE JOURNAL
Ideas for building
better things.
Practical perspectives on software architecture, business capabilities, and the people behind great products.
Latest writing
7 articles Page 1 of 1Make-or-Buy in the Age of AI
The world is changing, but are you, as an Enterprise Architect, changing with the times? The cost of building software has dropped dramatically, and is still falling. The traditional “buy before build” principle deserves to be reconsidered.
Capability Based Planning
What is Capability Based Planning? Let’s explore it with the help of a simple analogy of a log cabin on a lake.
Getting your Technical Debt House Under Control
Everyone loves to complain about technical debt, but not all technical debt is created equal and tackling it can become a nightmare if we can’t find a clear path to resolving it. Here’s a simple analogy that will help your teams think about how to approach their technical debt.
Developing Ubiquitous Languages
Eric Evans coined the term Ubiquitous Language in his excellent book “Domain Driven Design” and it means that we should align the language of the IT systems we build (and the developers who build it) with the language of the users who will use the software. While this seems like common-sense, and it should be…
Introduction to Capability Maps
Capability maps are an incredibly useful tool from the field of Enterprise Architecture, but aren’t widely known outside of this discipline. A recent talk I gave with a room full of smart IT consultants revealed how only a small proportion of people working in the field of IT have worked with them (and many have…
The C4 Model in Practice
As an architect I use the C4 Model at lot. This article explores this modelling technique and looks at ways to get the most out of it.
Getting Started with Strategic Business Planning
Companies of any significant size are complex organisms, potentially with many departments and a myriad of teams and personalities all working autonomously. How can we ensure that everybody works in an aligned way to achieve our business goals? By creating a business strategy of course! But how does one go about creating (and executing) such…
