Author Archives: Above The Line IT Guy

What is Architecture?

Background: Architecture and Engineering are two terms often used to describe IT roles. In 2002, I was fortunate enough to work on a large Enterprise project using Spewak’s methodology. Prior to that project, I worked on many financial data related … Continue reading

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Architecture versus Re-Engineering

Modernization of business applications can take many forms. One approach is doing a deep dive into the current implementations to document the current state. Another approach is to create a technical architecture of the current implementations. In the first approach, … Continue reading

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Understanding a Business Application

A Business Application is the solution developed by an IT area to improve and accelerate the pace at which a business can perform it’s tasks.  Developing a business application covers many disciplines and incurs costs from a variety of services. … Continue reading

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Master Data Management – Data Velocity

Worldwide master data management (MDM) software revenue will reach $1.9 billion in 2012, a 21 percent increase from 2011, according to Gartner, Inc.  The market is forecast to reach $3.2 billion by 2015.  Research by Dell ‘Oro group is predicting … Continue reading

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Importance of Relevant Data

Most software solutions fall short of customer expectations due to one common problem: Not properly capturing the relevant business data.  Failure to capture the relevant data makes it difficult,  if not impossible for the business to measure results.  In my … Continue reading

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The Purple Trap

Data modeling is a methodology used to logically represent the data you store about your business and is an important early step in any Data Warehouse project. The quality and grain of the data identified in the data model is … Continue reading

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SOA and IT Services

It’s not unusual to find confusion between Service Oriented Architecture, SOA, and IT Services.  SOA is a methodology used to take advantage of re-use and ease of maintenance.   IT Services on the other hand is a broad term used to describe … Continue reading

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IT Service Catalog

Cloud Computing has added a new degree of complexity to managing IT by increasing the number of IT providers. A robust IT Service Catalog sets the stage for effective IT management in the new world of Cloud Computing.   The … Continue reading

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Configuration Names

Configuration Management is very important to running a large company’s IT organization.  Configuration management provides you with all the data needed to understand the impact a change to the IT systems will have.  The critical question to answer is what … Continue reading

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What makes a Business Application

Business Process Modeling, BPM, and Data Modeling, DM, are two disciplines key to designing a robust Business Application.    BPM outlines process, procedures and business logic used to run the business. DM organizes the data stored to manage and measure business … Continue reading

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