Frederick Vanbrabant's
delirious rantings

Antwerp, Belgium

What's the use of Archimate anyway
• 7 min read

What's the use of Archimate anyway

Last week, I discovered a new podcast called The Enterprise Architecture Experience. They had two episodes featuring interviews with Dr. Svyatoslav Kotusev about his books and work. Svyatoslav is a fascinating figure in the Enterprise Architecture space 1, and I was delighted to hear his insights on the podcast. The conversation did not disappoint.

Near the end of the podcast, Svyatoslav made a brief remark about ArchiMate, stating that it is a language spoken only among architects and reinforces the stereotype of the ivory tower architect. His comment resonated with me, and I have been reflecting on it ever since. Allow me to share my thoughts.

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Enterprise architectural skunk works
• 9 min read

Enterprise architectural skunk works

Most big organizations I’ve worked with are more akin to an ecosystem of multiple smaller companies. These smaller companies all share the same umbrella of the bigger total but internally compete for resources and priorities. Think of it as a federation of specialised companies that all share the same banner and want to achieve the same bigger goal.

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Mapping out an organization is a massive task
• 7 min read

Mapping out an organization is a massive task

A big part of enterprise architecture is keeping your architecture model up to date. Without this model, it’s impossible to do your real job in advising projects, strategy and general company awareness. The problem is that getting a full model is a daunting and maybe even impossible job. Let’s talk about the pitfalls and how we can approach this.

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Modeling data and information in an organization
• 9 min read

Modeling data and information in an organization

The last weeks I’ve been focusing a lot on the data and information models in our architecture. Organizations have so much data flowing around that it’s hard to effectively map it all out. That’s a shame because there are some very valuable learnings to be had from that data.

That’s why I wrote this post; it’s mainly to gather my current thoughts on this topic. Might as well share it with you. It’s a combination of techniques I’ve done at previous organizations (things I know work) and things I’ve been thinking about for a long time now (things that might work). So this isn’t a full-on manual, more a collection of current thoughts. I hope that makes sense.

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Turning Complexity into Manageable Complication
• 6 min read

Turning Complexity into Manageable Complication

Have you ever made bread before in your life? Like from start to finish? It’s not a difficult thing to do. You start off with flour, yeast, salt, and water. Combine them, let that dough sit for a while, knead it again, let it sit again, shove it in an oven, and voila: you have a bread.

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Enterprise architecture needs to get better at architecture strategy
• 6 min read

Enterprise architecture needs to get better at architecture strategy

I’ve been reading a lot of strategy books these last weeks 1 (also two James Bond books, but that is probably not related to this post), and I’ve been trying to tie it to my everyday work of enterprise architecture. 

Most of these posts are just me finding an excuse to put my thoughts to paper to see if they make sense, so why not write a new post about what I’ve learned? It’s also a perfect time, with the end of the year approaching, to maybe reflect on the next year and how we can tackle it.

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Taming Chaos: Handeling vendor based architecture
• 6 min read

Taming Chaos: Handeling vendor based architecture

I’ve noticed a huge shift in the architecture of big companies in the last few years: companies are shifting from in-house development to third-party applications, shedding the traditional ‘Not Invented Here’ stigma in favor of external innovation.

It is not hard to understand the rationale behind it: you can use the best tools in the market 1 to handle parts of your business, the vendor handles all the technical maintenance, and they even keep improving the software, and most importantly, you don’t need in-house people dedicated to the job.

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Communication for team leaders - Ownership
• 6 min read

Communication for team leaders - Ownership

And we’ve come to the last post in the series of “communication for team leaders.” This one is about ownership.

You can find the other posts here.

And these posts are based on a part of my talk, “I just became a team lead, now what” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWtSbTded0o).

The red line in these posts

A smart reader like you has probably found the pattern in these posts; they all have a focus on keeping people engaged and motivated. This is a very important part of leadership. If you can’t motivate your people to stand behind their work, you will never get good results. At best you will get passable work; at worst you will get an open vacancy.

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Communication for team leaders - Context
• 5 min read

Communication for team leaders - Context

This will be the first post in a series of three called “Communication for Team Leaders”. The first focuses on context and why it’s crucial in daily communication and task-giving.

These posts are based on a part of my talk, “I just became a team lead, now what” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWtSbTded0o).

You can have a fantastic team of subject matter experts and brilliant technical people, but if they don’t talk to each other, you will never get a good product or outcome for a project. I don’t think this is a new statement. Soft skills have been a focus of conference talks for a while now. We keep talking about empathy and how we bring messages, yet I haven’t seen a lot of practicality in those talks, and as a result, the adoption in companies is fairly low. I hope I can bring some practicality to this topic with these posts.

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