Le changement

"Comme tout changement doit commencer quelque part. C'est l'individu isolé qui en aura l'intuition et le réalisera. Ce changement ne peut germer que dans l'individu, et çe peu être dans n'importe lequel d'entre nous"

Carl Gustave Yung

EA - Zachman or TOGAF?

Enterprise Architecture - Which methodology do you find most effective for long term strategy, Zachman or TOGAF?



Depends upon whether the organisation is new to the concept of enterprise architecture or not. For organisations with little experience I believe TOGAF provides a more comprehensive set of guidelines which can help get things on the road. I do believe however that TOGAF lacks the level of detail to continue this within it's enterprise continuum, which is where Zachman comes into his own.

The Definition of Cloud Computing (Draft) by the National Institute of Standards and Technology

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued two new draft documents on cloud computing for public comment, including the first set of guidelines for managing security and privacy issues in cloud computing. The agency also has set up a new NIST Cloud Computing Collaboration site on the Web to enable two-way communication among the cloud community and NIST cloud research working groups.

More info here

Extract all text from a PowerPoint presentation for translation purposes

Within the framework of my work I have been asked to translated a powerpoint presentation as I am the only native person speaking the 'target' language.

However, at my biggest surprise I got not text but a powerpoint presentation!!!!
The presentation had full of boxes with text up and down....
I could not imagine a single moment to edit the translation and copy and paste every box
I needed all this text into another format ideally text format for further manipulation and usage of a translator engine to further speed the work.

It should be definitely another way to perform this task.

SOLUTION:

The simpliest way I found is to
Open your powerpoint, save it as a pdf, then open the pdf file with Acrobat Reader and save the file as TXT [Save As Type to Text (Plain) (*.txt).]

Hope this trick helps someone!

Have a great day.

As an IT Architect how do you measure success (II)?

In respect to what KPI your organization follows or not, The simplest way for IT architect (matters any Architect) to measure his/her success is:

1) Develop your growth plan for short term and long term, what and where you want to be.
2) Knowledge Acquisition in changing business demands.
3) Build a design or solutions were all business elements (People process and Technology) are met and bridge all the gaps.
4) Achieve excellency in your work to gain buy-in for all your plans and designs.
5) Request Testimonial/Recommendations for your work (efforts are useless if you're not appreciated).

If you are done with above, you are on TOP success list, rest will follow :)

Rich Internet Applications Using Flex, Salesforce.com and Google App Engine

Very interesting reading here

As an IT Architect how do you measure success (I)?

In my opinion the success is measured by:

Was the solution implemented?
Did it provide the expected results?
and finally, Is the solution flexible enough to withstand change?

I mention the last one because IT is built on top of change. Any IT Architect (of any vertical) must incorporate the change aspect on its solutions. Please do not reduce the support for change just to the upgrades and additions to the solution. The end-of-life, disposal and deployment of new solutions also counts as change.