IT Architecture
Gartner: SSDs Simply Can’t Replace Hard Drives
Gartner: SSDs Simply Can’t Replace Hard Drives (via slashdot) Hard-drive manufacturers can breathe a sigh of relief—solid-state disks (SSDs) won’t replace their “traditional” product lines anytime soon, according to a new Gartner report. Given the enormity of future capacity needs, it will be impossible for CIOs and IT managers to completely replace hard…
How to Land a Job at Red Hat
After hiring about 200 people in each of its last three quarters, open-source provider Red Hat is on track to bring its total new hires to 900 to 1,000 as its fiscal year ends Feb. 28. It’s primarily looking for software and technical support engineers, and salespeople who can help it strengthen its cloud-technology capabilities. “Specifically, we’re looking for people who can architect complex solutions and integrate our products and technologies as we expand on our foundational enterprise operating system… continue…
Agile or Not, Requirements Management Can’t Be Skipped
These days, requirements management is often misunderstood or under-appreciated in IT. Many people have used migration to Agile methodologies as an excuse to discard requirements or rethink how they’re used to support most projects. One of the key tenets of Agile application development is not to over-think technical requirements in advance. The premise is that it’s usually impossible to accurately predict the details, which would invariably lead to costly rework after the fact—as opposed to an Agile approach of incremental refinement. So… continue…
10 Must Have Skills for IT Architects
IT architects use diverse technologies to engineer solutions across the enterprise architecture stack. Some of their roles can be more specific, and so require focused knowledge of just a few aspects of the environment. But if you want to work across a broader range of projects, you’ll need to have these 10 foundational skills. For addition stories on IT Architecture, click here.
5 Steps to Mastering Design Patterns
Design patterns are an important part of software engineering today, but what many folks don’t realize is how ubiquitous they are becoming within the full spectrum of IT activities. This is partly due to the flexible nature of patterns. Mastering design patterns is a critical part now of most IT architects’ roles, and from a larger perspective is also becoming increasingly important for most enterprises. Design patterns are meant to accomplish three critical things: Increase the speed of the design… continue…
Here’s the Job Trend You Need to Know About
In some areas, tech job trends followed surprising paths during 2012. Big Data and cloud efforts, for example, were stymied at some companies by architectural, cultural and organizational issues that got in the way of data sharing, meaningful analysis and effective migration. The result: CIOs slowed down their hiring to explore possible solutions. The good news, according to David Foote, CEO of researcher Foote Partners, is that hiring should ramp up in these areas in 2013 after deciding to weave… continue…
How EAs Can Juggle Roles With What They’ve Got
Here’s a professional caveat regarding solution architects and enterprise architects: They’re often the same people. An EA and an SA can fill each others’ roles and, in fact, this happens quite a bit. That said, if you’re an EA who’s asked to take on a solutions architect’s role, there are differences between the types of work you’ll do. The good news is the roles share common skill sets, which is why they’re grouped under the umbrella “IT Architecture.” Confused? Here’s… continue…
The Key to Streamlining IT Governance
Governance as a service is a relatively new concept, with few vendors currently providing tools specifically targeted to it. At first glance, IT governance doesn’t seem like a particularly complex topic. Remarkably, though, governance tends to be one of the hardest tasks facing the typical enterprise today, for many reasons. Among them: Most organizations don’t view governance holistically. In other words, they address it in chunks as governance-related challenges arise. This leads to different processes and subcultures for areas like data… continue…
How Do You Apply Integrated Design?
When people think about design they often visualize Apple’s products or a user interface. But design in IT is much more than that. While many pieces of an overall lifecycle are concerned with design tasks, say like the UI, the process itself is also driven by the need to create functional systems. This holds true for both hardware and software, as well as complex enterprise initiatives like ERP or even cyber security. If we consider “design” as a verb—the activity… continue…
10 Skills All IT Architects Should Have
IT architects are people who have the ability to engineer and design solutions across the architecture stack and across diverse technologies. While many architecture roles are more specific and require expert knowledge of one or several particular aspects of a larger enterprise environment, architects who intend to work across a broader range of projects need to possess a common set of foundational skills. The top 10 foundational skill sets for IT architects are as follows: Data modeling: Data modeling and… continue…
Alice Hill
C.S. Magor
Cat Miller
David Brumbaugh
David Chie
Dawn Kawamoto
Don Willmott
Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson
Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Lekan Oguntoyinbo
Leslie Stevens-Huffman
M Noivad
Mark Feffer
nick kolakowski
Stephen Lahanas
Susan Hall
Vincent Chow
