Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

To the managers and customers of this software project:

• You have the right to an overall plan. The team should tell you what they could accomplish in the next year or two years, and tell you how much that would cost.


• You have the right to see progress. From the very beginnings of the project, the team should be producing functionality that you care about. The functionality should be in the form of a running system, proven to work by passing repeatable tests that you specify.


• You have the right to change your mind. As software development proceeds, you should be able to substitute new functionality for old. You should be able to change the relative priorities of the features of the system, dictating what should be done first and what should be done later.


• You have the right to be informed of schedule changes. Since some things will turn out to be easier than expected and some things harder, the schedule is going to change. You have the right be informed of such changes as soon as the programmers know about them. You have the right to exercise your business judgment by choosing among options for reducing scope so as to restore the original date. You have the right to cancel further development at any time and be left with a useful, working system that reflects your investment up to that date.

Been thinking about all the recent laptop thefts and figured someone in the blogosphere could steer me in the right direction...



1. Anyone aware of open source disk encryption software that works with Windows XP? The only project I have ran across is Truecrypt.

2. GNU folks have created a replacement for PGP named gnuPG. Curious if any third party that specializes in cryptography has certified this project?

3. Would love to also learn about open source equivalents that allow for securing USB, Firewire, etc for Windows XP.

Been thinking about all the recent laptop thefts and figured someone in the blogosphere could steer me in the right direction...



1. Anyone aware of open source disk encryption software that works with Windows XP? The only project I have ran across is Truecrypt.

2. GNU folks have created a replacement for PGP named gnuPG. Curious if any third party that specializes in cryptography has certified this project?

3. Would love to also learn about open source equivalents that allow for securing USB, Firewire, etc for Windows XP.

Been thinking about all the recent laptop thefts and figured someone in the blogosphere could steer me in the right direction...



1. Anyone aware of open source disk encryption software that works with Windows XP? The only project I have ran across is Truecrypt.

2. GNU folks have created a replacement for PGP named gnuPG. Curious if any third party that specializes in cryptography has certified this project?

3. Would love to also learn about open source equivalents that allow for securing USB, Firewire, etc for Windows XP.

Been thinking about all the recent laptop thefts and figured someone in the blogosphere could steer me in the right direction...



1. Anyone aware of open source disk encryption software that works with Windows XP? The only project I have ran across is Truecrypt.

2. GNU folks have created a replacement for PGP named gnuPG. Curious if any third party that specializes in cryptography has certified this project?

3. Would love to also learn about open source equivalents that allow for securing USB, Firewire, etc for Windows XP.

Been thinking about all the recent laptop thefts and figured someone in the blogosphere could steer me in the right direction...



1. Anyone aware of open source disk encryption software that works with Windows XP? The only project I have ran across is Truecrypt.

2. GNU folks have created a replacement for PGP named gnuPG. Curious if any third party that specializes in cryptography has certified this project?

3. Would love to also learn about open source equivalents that allow for securing USB, Firewire, etc for Windows XP.

Been thinking about all the recent laptop thefts and figured someone in the blogosphere could steer me in the right direction...



1. Anyone aware of open source disk encryption software that works with Windows XP? The only project I have ran across is Truecrypt.

2. GNU folks have created a replacement for PGP named gnuPG. Curious if any third party that specializes in cryptography has certified this project?

3. Would love to also learn about open source equivalents that allow for securing USB, Firewire, etc for Windows XP.

Just got off the phone with a friend from Trinidad who is learning information technology and is a savage reader of my blog. He asked me several very thoughtful questions which I have listed below. Today, I have to eat humble pie...



In order to not wear out my fingers from too much typing, I have taken the liberty to paraphrase the conversation.

Friend: Do you think that lightweight processes are gaining acceptance in America?

James: Emphatically yes. Several years ago, I used to only run across companies whose business was in some form technology using approaches such as SCRUM, Extreme Programming and Crystal but never would meet anyone in corporate America that was practicing agile methods. Many haven't even heard about it. Nowadays, I can find handfulls here and there. It is definetely growing.

Friend: Before joining your current employer, you worked for several Internet startups. In hindsight I bet you thought that many of the ideas you had at the time were dumb. Anyway, You must have mastered the elevator pitch?

James: I worked on Lowestloan.com, Wingspan Bank and Carbonek. Lowestloan was funded by Billionaire Carl Icahn so the elevator pitch was needed here. Likewise, Wingspan Bank was funded by Bank One so the same goes. The only VC entity was Carbonek. I remember engaging in a conversation with several CEOs of small banks in the Boston area regarding funding and believed that I did a pretty good job of mastering the elevator pitch.

Friend: Nowadays, you seem to talk a lot about enterprise architecture. Having read your book, I know you intuitively understand the problems facing large enterprises and are sincere in the desire to not only make the enterprise more nimble so that speed to market, total cost of ownership, system qualities and sense of community are all improved but also have taken a keen interest in sharing what you know with others.

James: Maybe we could brainstorm how we can get several large corporations to consider outsourcing to Trinidad as a preferred location over India. The ability to jump on a flight and rescue a bad project in hours is priceless. Trinidad has the same culture and a first hand understanding of what good customer service actually looks like. It is not about training but having a personal context. Trinidadian's get to watch our TV shows and buy many of our goods. If money flows to Trinidad in one form, it will flow back to the United States in another form, making both economies stronger. The same story doesn't really hold true with India. I wonder if I could get several industry analysts to consider researching Trinidad as an alternative location for outsourcing.

Friend: So James, as I understand agility, one describes requirements in context of user stories. This feels similar to the notion of an elevator pitch. What would you say is your thirty second elevator pitch as to what your business customers desire in terms of the current form of enterprise architecture you promote?

James: Doh! Actually, I never connected this thought. Next time I will go and read my own blogs on humility...

I was in Best Buy when I overheard two technologists whom I could tell worked for a competitor (They were still wearing their employee ID badges) and they were talking about the architecture of a business reengineering effort where the CIO and his cronies were brought in to get things in order. Some how though all they seemed to do was to cause lots of their good people to mail out resumes and overspend on fat bottomed architectures. NOTE: I did not make up this term, it came out their mouths...



They described legacy client-server approaches as architectures that were big-bellied in that all the business logic was hard-coded in the middle tier. The discussion seemed to point to the fact that they couldn't develop SOA around them. Others within their architecture team were of the belief that they would leverage the "features" of their favorite database vendor.

Essentially all business logic was encoded in stored procedures in the data tier. They used templating approaches to achieve consistency and standardized all language constructs on this tier by writing only in SQL. They even process XML in SQL.

I suspect that if I hung around long enough to eavesdrop on their conversation, they may have talked some architecture approaches being top heavy...