Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

The 5 guiding principals of Enterprise Architecture - This is right on the money from my experiences of doing Enterprise Architecture:

No Strategic Vison, No EA: If you know where you are, but you don't know where to go. Don't plan a journey.

Good is Good Enough: An Enterprise Architect knows he has achieved the perfect solution not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

The Only Constant is Dynamics: Dynamics is the only constant while adaptiveness is the natural variable, so plan for this constant.

Pure Logic is the ruin of the Spirit: Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit and creativity delivers unexpected opportunities, so use your creativity.

Be Enterprising: If you want to create an Enterprise Architecture, don't drum up the architects to collect information and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless value creating possibilities of the enterprise.

On Wednesday the 2^nd of May I'll be hosting an event on Enterprise Content Management with Helen Rayner from Telecom and Clark Thomborson from Auckland University. It should be a really interesting event with Helen and Clark presenting as they are ECM experts in industry and academia respectively.

Full details including speaker bios are at the Fronde News Website but a taste is below:

The Great Fronde Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Event

Date: Wednesday May the 2nd 2007 Times: 4:30pm to 6:00pm Venue: Fronde, Level 7, 131 Queen Street, Auckland

Overwhelmed by mountains of information and yet not able to locate anything useful? Feeling alone trying to outline information management strategies and drive the implementation of content management solutions? Confused about how to organise and manage content in your organisation? Come and hear from a panel of information management experts and users on how they have addressed the situation and what results they have achieved. Learn from the collective experiences and best practices, and understand the capabilities of the technology to better manage your information assets.

Our Panelists are Professor Clark Thomborson, ECM expert from the University of Auckland, Helen Rayner, Information Manager Policy & Strategy for Telecom and Lukas Svoboda, Principal Consultant at Fronde. The panel will go through theoretical and practical aspects of Enterprise Content Management as well as demonstrate some of the features in Microsoft's latest ECM offering – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

To book: To book yourself on this event please phone Wendy Watson on 09 377 2400 or email her at Wendy dot Watson at Fronde dot com

Further Information: If you would like to know further details on this event please phone Lukas Svoboda on 09 377 2400 or email him at Lukas dot Svoboda at Fronde dot com

Tonight (Thursday the 26^th of April) I will be speaking at the Auckland ICT Cluster. I'm speaking on Technology Strategy and how important it is to select the right technology for your product or IT development. The details from the cluster are as follows:

"Selecting the right technology for your product – the right technology strategy"

Lukas Svoboda of Fronde will talk about some of the key strategies to employ when looking at selecting technology for a product or IT development. Lukas will also look at some of the latest application trends and how they can help with Technology Strategy. Lukas is a highly acclaimed architect in the New Zealand IT community and during his 13 years in the IT industry has developed significant experience in consulting and designing systems for corporates, software vendors and government departments.

5.30 to 7.00 p.m. - Networking with refreshments
5.30 to 6.00 p.m. - Drinks & pizza
6.00 to 6.05 p.m. - Welcome
6.05 to 6.10 p.m. - Five one-minute presentations by cluster members.
We will draw business cards on the night.
6.10 to 6.30 p.m. - Lukas Svoboda, Fronde Systems Group.
6.30 to 7.00 p.m. - Further networking

Cost: $15 for members, $25 for non-members; payable by Direct
Credit or cheque in advance.
Location: Location will be AUT Technology Park, James Fletcher House.
Level 4, 581-583 Great South Road, Penrose.

Jim Donovan is the CEO of Fronde and has now started a new blog. Wow, I must say I've very impressed to see a CEO of a big System Integrator writing a blog in NZ. Even better it happens to be the System Integrator  I'm working for :) Welcome to the blogosphere Jim!

If you have been following my personal blog (www.kiwibohemian.com) you might know that I've changed jobs having moved from Optimation to Fronde. At Optimation I had the title of Managing Principal and I was supposed to be doing strategic consulting (not much eventuated) but I ended up mainly focused on building the Microsoft Practice. Having moved over to Fronde I'm now no longer doing any active practice building (Fronde has a fantastic Microsoft capability already well in place) and instead focusing on Strategic Technology Consulting. Anyway, to cut a long story short – My focus has changed. I'm now focusing on Enterprise Architecture again and linking EA to Solutions Architecture as my day to day job. Part of my new focus is to pick a few key IT areas and I've tentatively decided to focus on Service Orientation, User Experience and to a lesser extent Microsoft Enterprise Technologies. To this extent I'm thinking I might refocus and even rebrand this blog around these areas. Any thoughts from blog land out there? Would it make this blog any more or any less useful? And yes it is 4am good Friday. Too many exciting things keeping me from sleeping J

Fantastic, Microsoft has finally realised that releasing Expression Studio with MSDN is a good idea. These tools while primarily targeted at Designers require developer integration and buy-in. So software folk like me who have an interest can now properly play with and demonstrate the value of Expression Studio within a development life cycle. Nice one Microsoft!