Brett Colbert's Blog

As the economy continues to take it's toll, more and more companies are looking at ways to simplify their technical or systems architecture in an effort to reduce complexity and costs. I will highlight four ways to simplify your company's technical architecture: 1) Governance process - Your technical architecture will continue to be polluted without a proper governance process in place. The "end-state" and standard technologies need to be defined as a way to guide and govern. A governance process includes things like a design review process by the senior architects or your Enterprise Architecture council - this design review needs to occur BEFORE coding is started. Remediation plans need to be created in situations for which the architecture does not meet standards. 2) SOA approach - A service oriented architecture approach will drive simplification. Once you determine the business services that exist and the ones that are needed what naturally follows is a simpli

It's easy to identify the negatives related to the economic downturn. A bigger challenge is to identify the new opportunities that the downturn provides. As an example, now is the time to uplevel your team by hiring top talent. 1) Given the miriad of layoffs, there is a larger group of unemployed, talented folks who are available for hire. 2) Given the elimination of bonuses and the decline of stock prices, it is easier to hire away top talent then in the good days of big bonuses and stock value. "I can't leave because I have too much value in my stock options" has been significantly decreased in almost every company. 3) Although incremental hiring might be frozen, you can always make the case to replace less strong resources with stronger external talent. Think about it this way - a one for one swap but increasing your talent base. The second opportunity is to increase your discipline in Portfolio Management (PfM). PfM is sometimes ignored or deprioritized when ti