mattcascio: Great way to get FIFA head-to-head stats: http://shar.es/mUAfk Netherlands 1-0-0 vs Uruguay 0-1-0 (1974 group game)

I produced this page after fielding a question for a succinct definition, in three pages or less, describing what Enterprise Architecture is, and how it is valuable.  Unfortunately, I don’t have time at the moment to pull all the various strands of information together as a nifty three page document.  What I can do, at this time, is provide a series of links to prior articles that can help to describe and define Enterprise Architecture from my point of view. 

First off, let me say that Microsoft does not favor, endorse, or promote any particular EA framework.  We have had experience with numerous approaches and frameworks, have developed our own metamodel and framework for internal use that guides our strategic planning.  Our consulting organization, Microsoft Consulting Services has many Enterprise Architects among the ranks.

Selected Links:

Nick Malik (me):

• Value of EA (link), (link),
• Functions of EA (link),
• Double Iron Triangle of EA (link)
• Job desc for Business Architect (link),
• EA vs. SA (link),
• IEEE1471 and EA (link),
• measuring EA (link),
• On being relevant (link)
• Multiple interacting teams (link)
• Review of TOGAF 9 (link),

 

Gabriel Morgan:

• EA vs. SA (link),
• traceability (link),

 

Mike Walker:

• EATK article (link)

 

And of course, there’s the Wikipedia’s entry (to which I have contributed) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_architecture

Here are some useful blog posts from some friends in the blogosphere:

Leo de Souza: EA Maturity Model (link)

Chris Potts: Definition of EA (link), Moving EA out of IT (link)

Adrian Grigoriu: Review of Gartner Emergent EA (link)

NickMalik08660255080411867307154672466808767056421354188739433047241905164931735986559508116836157186381019200134907865718659980311252741497929477517028480399971939079801565994313498422436603440358504978440795

Google has acquired ITA, developer of the airfare search and pricing system QPX that is used by major airlines. The deal is for $700 million in cash and comes after months of rumors about Google buying ITA.

Now that it’s a done deal, Google plans to move into the lucrative travel search business and compete with the likes of Bing Travel, Expedia and Kayak.

In a statement, Google’s VP Search Products & User Experience Marrisa Mayer says, “We’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket.”

Travel is one of the last major online verticals Google had not yet sunk its teeth into, though it’s long been assumed the company would eventually either build or buy something to compete. Back in 2008, the rumor was that the company would acquire Expedia.

On a website that Google’s created with more details about the acquisition, the company says: “Searches for travel-related information are among the highest-volume queries we receive at Google,” highlighting the obvious opportunity that exists in the space. Google does note, however, that whatever they launch will “refer people quickly to a site where they can actually purchase flights … we have no plans to sell flights ourselves.”

Now we’ll wait and see what they launch once the deal closes. We’ll also see what the response is from competitors, who probably always believed Google would launch a travel product, but now have to address a huge threat.

[img credit: kevindooley]

Reviews: Google

More About: bing, Expedia, Google, ita, Kayak, travel search

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Google is working on a social service to rival Facebook, if web rumors are to be believed.

And while Google’s social networking efforts have so far fallen flat, even satisfied Facebook users should hope that the search engine’s efforts bear fruit — Facebook needs a true competitor to provide choice in the marketplace.

Whether Google can succeed in social networking is questionable, but web users should hope for a positive outcome.

That’s the topic of my CNN column this week.

Check out the column at CNN.com >>

Reviews: Facebook, Google

More About: cashmore, cnn, facebook, Google, Google Me, pete cashmore

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mattcascio: Make sure u visit healthcare.gov now that it's live.

Domain registrations up, e-commerce huge worldwide. Internet continues to be a big deal.boneinthefan

Isaac Asimov once said, “It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to unlearn.” 

When we first teach business stakeholders about Enterprise Architecture, we have to help them to unlearn some bad habits.  We have to help business people to unlearn their reliance on hierarchy and to begin to trust real data, analysis, and measurement to affect change in their own companies.  We have to replace old and worn out concepts, ones that led to early success but will not lead to ultimate success, with new ideas.  We have to replace bad practices with good ones.

So why do we replace “management by gut feel” with a flawed and incomplete metaphor: the concept of a roadmap?

The roadmap is one of the very first things that most Enterprise Architects ever produce that the business will actually see as valuable.  Don’t get me wrong… goals maps and capability assessments are valuable… but they are not so valuable that business people will pay to have highly paid people on staff to produce them over and over.  Once, yes, but not every year.  Not unless there’s something tangible and useful that they can use.  A roadmap, on the other hand, is directly useful.  It is the result of a great deal of thinking and planning and illustrates, for all stakeholders, the order in which a problem will be attacked, by which teams, with all the interdependencies, tradeoffs, and constraints considered.  It is the output that, we tell them, reduces the likelihood of failure in an area of business that normally fails: the effort of change.

There is no debate that the EA roadmap, properly executed, is valuable.  However, the roadmap, properly executed, is not a map of roads.  It is not an illustration of all of the possible connections between point A and point B across a landscape.  The metaphor is completely absurd.  The picture below is a roadmap.

And, in enterprise architecture, we would also refer to the following "thing” as a roadmap.  Each of the bars represents a project that takes place over time.  The picture is intentionally blurred. 

How is the first image is even remotely similar to the second?  They are not. 

So what, you say!  What’s the actual problem here?

The problem is simple: the word “roadmap” already has a meaning.  A map of roads is an illustration of all potential routes in a landscape.  It is most frequently used in a very specific context.  The person viewing a map is frequently interested in driving their individual car.  They are one person, in one car, driving from one origin to one destination.  Regardless of the origin, and the destination, the map doesn’t change.  As far as a map is concerned, there is no traffic.  There is no contextual analysis: only facts.  All of these statements are true of a “map of roads,” but none of them work in the context of Enterprise Architecture.

An Enterprise Architecture roadmap, on the other hands, represent many people, on many projects, all acting in tandem.  They are not going from a single origin to a single destination.  They are moving from many origins to many destinations, in a manner that provides benefit, with careful analysis of interdependencies and constraints.  An EA roadmap is a negotiated settlement that considers the needs of many stakeholders. 

By using the word “roadmap,” and then presenting an EA roadmap like the blurry image above,  and we are asking our stakeholders to unlearn the concept from the first image (a map of roads) and to learn a new meaning.  As if our job wasn’t already difficult enough!  We are asking them to unlearn years of bad business planning, and the first thing we do is given them a word that doesn’t match the thing we are trying to teach! 

If you want to cut down a tree, don’t start with a dull saw. 

Enough already.  Let’s stop using the word roadmap.  Let’s call it an “action plan” or an “orchestration.”  Something that implies that we are getting a group of people to  behave as one in order to benefit them all.  But most importantly, let’s teach a concept that we want our stakeholders to actually use.

NickMalik1354188739433047241916254832648428178001020303968999019318591719660545901370633403440358504978440795

mattcascio: Platform fragmentation is a key challenge for Android http://shar.es/mjPF8

Google announces a new way to connect the web to your television at its annual developer conference.gearheadgal

HTML5 brings new opportunities for web designers and developers.chrisd77

It’s an unhappy day for Apple fanboys. Dan Lyons Newsweek’s tech correspondent just ditched the iPhone for Android, slamming the phone and Steve Jobs’s control-freak strategy in very harsh terms.

It might be tempting to dismiss this on the grounds that Dan Lyons is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fool whose confidence in his own judgment is in inverse proportion to its quality; his gullibility about SCO’s allegations in their lawsuit against IBM became legendary, and some of the stuff he’s written about blogging is hilariously stupid. Given his track record, betting directly against his technology and market projections would be smarter than betting on them.

Yes, but…Newsweek is an awfully big megaphone. And the larger news isn’t the bad stuff that pushed him away from Apple, it’s the good stuff the pulled him towards Android. The Android 2.2 feature list is a body blow from which the iPhone, already trailing Android devices in unit sales, may not be able to recover.

I’m not going to be coy about this. You can talk about all the other cool 2.2 features all day long, but the real killer is that Android 2.2 phones will be on-demand WiFi hotspots. This by itself will have all the laptop-toting road warriors I know falling over themselves to switch to Android phones. Imagine, no more airport and hotel connection fees; it’s easy if you try. Buh-bye Apple.

Announcing Flash 10 support twists the knife. OK, Flash is fragile crap and we’d all be better off if it disappeared, but as a way to ram home the contrast between Google’s “do what you want” and Steve Jobs’s “do what I want”, Flash support is a marketing gesture that’s pretty tough to top.

I’m not going to count off the rest of the feature list here, because I want to focus on the larger picture. Apple has been outflanked by Google’s multi-vendor strategy, outsold in new unit sales, and is now outgunned in technology and user-visible features. Again, I was expecting this…but not so soon.

mattcascio: My Blog Now Using Google Font API & Google Font Directory http://tinyurl.com/3yagpzv

Google’s move to open-source its VP8 video codec as part of its WebM Project has gotten wide support from browser makers and other industry players, but the open source community was notably absent from today’s announcement, with the obvious exception of Mozilla. There was no shout-out from the Free Software Foundation, who had urged Google to open-source the codec earlier this year to kill Flash.

Instead, a smiling Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch walked on stage to announce that his company is going to ship VP8 support as part of Flash. So what do open source developers think about the move, and what’s going to happen to Ogg Theora, the current open-source video codec of choice for projects like Wikipedia?

“This is great news,” said Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, founder of the Xiph.org Foundation, when I reached him by phone right after the announcement. Montgomery is spearheading the development of Ogg Theora and is a Theora developer himself, but he called VP8 going open source “absolutely wonderful” and sounded honestly stoked about the initiative. Montgomery did mention that Google didn’t make too much of an effort to reach out to open source developers ahead of the official announcement. He was notified of the development, but many others weren’t. “We have to see how it’s going to play out in the open source community,” he told me, adding that it will be a while until VP8 will really have an impact.

So will VP8 kill Ogg Theora? “Maybe in the long run it will,” he said, but the Theora community is for now committed to its road map, and Montgomery said he doesn’t think this development will be immediately affected by VP8. He did acknowledge that Theora is about 10 years old now, adding that codecs usually have a life cycle of 20 years. Theora is based on On2′s VP3.2 codec, which was first released in 2000. There have been ongoing discussions in the open source world about whether Theora is as good as H.264, but Montgomery doesn’t think this matters anymore. “We don’t want to play catch up,” he told me. “We want to be leapfrogging.” Having an advanced codec like VP8 available would finally make this possible.

This sentiment was echoed in a blog post published by the Open Video Alliance, which has been advocating HTML5 video with open codecs for some time. “This is excellent news from Google, Mozilla, and Opera, and will help catapult web video into the next generation,” the post reads.

More on Google I/O

• Google’s Apple Complex on Display at I/O Tech Insider
• Never Charge for a Mobile App (and Other Freemium Lessons From VCs) Tech Insider
• UPDATED: What’s New: All the News That’s Fit to Print at Google I/O Tech Insider
• Google Tries to Offer a Grown-up Cloud Tech Insider

Florian Mueller, founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents Campaign, was a little more skeptical: “While it appears to be a nice gesture if a major player releases software on open source terms, it’s imperative to perform a well-documented patent clearance,” he wrote us in an email. He mused that HTC being sued about Android shows Google might stand on the sidelines if developers get into trouble with video patent holders, and added: “We all know Steve Jobs’ recent email in which he said a patent pool was being assembled to go after open source codecs. So the patent question is really a critical one.”

However, Montgomery didn’t share this outlook. He acknowledged that Google and other companies supporting WebM are a much bigger target than Theora’s supporters have been, but said that patent litigation around open-source video codecs isn’t any more likely after the announcement than it was before. He pointed to the fact that no one has ever tried to bring claims against Theora, but admitted that you can never say never. “Patents are like every teenager carrying a hand gun,” he told me.  Sooner or later, one of those guns could go off.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user kevindooley.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: What Does the Future Hold For Browsers? (subscription required)

Google’s move to open source its VP8 video codec as part of its WebM Project has gotten wide support from browser makers and other industry players, but the open source community was notably absent from today’s announcement, with the obvious exception of Mozilla. There was no shout-out from the Free Software Foundation, who had urged Google to open source the codec earlier this year to kill Flash.

Instead, a smiling Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch walked on stage to announce that his company is going to ship VP8 support as part of Flash. So what do open source developers think about the move, and what’s going to happen to Ogg Theora, the current open source video codec of choice for projects like Wikipedia?

“This is great news,” said Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, founder of the Xiph.org Foundation, when I reached him by phone right after the announcement. Montgomery is spearheading the development of Ogg Theora and is a Theora developer himself, but he called VP8 going open source “absolutely wonderful” and sounded honestly stoked about the initiative. Montgomery did mention that Google didn’t make too much of an effort to reach out to open source developers ahead of the official announcement. He was notified of the development, but many others weren’t. “We have to see how it’s going to play out in the open source community,” he told me, adding that it will be a while until VP8 will really have an impact.

So will VP8 kill Ogg Theora? “Maybe in the long run it will,” he said, but the Theora community is for now committed to its road map, and Montgomery said he doesn’t think this development will be immediately affected by VP8. He did acknowledge that Theora is about ten years old now, adding that codecs usually have a life cycle of 20 years. Theora is based on On2′s VP3.2 codec, which was first released in 2000. There have been ongoing discussions in the open source world about whether Theora is as good as H.264, but Montgomery doesn’t think this matters anymore. “We don’t want to play catch up,” he told me, “we want to be leapfrogging.” Having an advanced codec like VP8 available would finally make this possible.

This sentiment was echoed in a blog post published by the Open Video Alliance, which has been advocating HTML5 video with open codecs for some time. “This is excellent news from Google, Mozilla, and Opera, and will help catapult web video into the next generation,” the post reads.

Florian Mueller, founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents Campaign, was a little more skeptical: “While it appears to be a nice gesture if a major player releases software on open source terms, it’s imperative to perform a well-documented patent clearance,” he wrote us in an email. He mused that HTC being sued about Android shows Google might stand on the sidelines if developers get into trouble with video patent holders, and added: “We all know Steve Jobs’ recent email in which he said a patent pool was being assembled to go after open source codecs. So the patent question is really a critical one.”

However, Montgomery didn’t share this outlook. He acknowledged that Google and other companies supporting WebM are a much bigger target than Theora’s supporters have been, but said that patent litigation around open source video codecs isn’t any more likely after the announcement than it was before. He pointed to the fact that no one has ever tried to bring claims against Theora, but admitted that you can never say never. “Patents are like every teenager carrying a hand gun,” he told me.  Sooner or later, one of those guns could go off.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: What Does the Future Hold For Browsers? (subscription required)

Today we are excited to announce a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers.

The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

Getting started using the Google Font API is easy. Just add a couple lines of HTML:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving. For example, cache headers are set to maximize the likelihood that the fonts will be served from the browser’s cache with no need for a network roundtrip, even when the same font is linked from different websites.

These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.

The fonts in the Google Font Directory come from a diverse array of designers, including open source developers and highly regarded type designers, and also include the highly acclaimed Droid Sans and Droid Serif fonts, designed by Ascender Corporation as a custom font for Android. We invite you to browse through the directory and get to know the fonts and designers better. Since all the fonts are open source, you can use them any way you like. We also have a separate project hosted on Google Code for downloading the original font files. Since they’re open source, they can be used for just about any purpose, including for print.

We’re hoping designers will contribute many more fonts in coming months to the Google Font Directory. If you’re a designer and are interested in contributing your font, get in touch with us by completing this form.

To showcase the Google Font API, Smashing Magazine has relaunched their site using the open source Droid font hosted by Google. We’re excited about the potential for integrating the Google Font API into many types of publications and web applications. For example, the new themes for Google Spreadsheet forms are a great example of a rich visual experience using web fonts.

This is just the beginning for web fonts. Today, we’re only supporting Western European languages (Latin-1), and we expect to support a number of diverse languages shortly.

By Raph Levien & David Kuettel, Google Font API team

mattcascio: My latest blog post: Acid3 Test results, see http://bit.ly/cURQWi

Assuming shareholder approval, Google will gain access to key VoIP technology.boneinthefan