Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects March 28, 2024 When it comes to the discipline of life and improving our lives, we need a Life Architecture methodology to achieve a desired life.  Life Architecture must be governed by a set of guidelines, practices, principles, concepts, conventions, assumptions, and rules – similar to an Enterprise Architecture methodology used by organizations – …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects May 25, 2021 On March 30, 2010, someone tried to sell 10,000 bitcoins for $50.  The highest bid was only $20 and no one bought them.  By April 2021, those coins were worth half a billion dollars, give or take.  That got me thinking.  Is it possible that something could go from nothing to …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects January 26, 2021 When I think of intelligence, I think of the CIA – short for the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA gathers, processes, and analyzes national security information in order to protect the US from danger such as terrorism and military attacks. The CIA’s purpose is to prevent or divert danger before it …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects July 15, 2020 As the name DevOps implies, it is a combination of “Development” and “Operations”.  DevOps has become a popular organizational structure and trend for delivering rapid software deployments within the enterprise.  And the best thing about DevOps, it provides both business and IT advantages.  While the business may view IT as bureaucratic …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects April 16, 2020 I’m not here to debate who’s the king of the castle when it comes to cloud offerings. Many Fortune 500 companies will tell you that AWS is the “beast”. I guess that’s like being a king. Whether a cloud vendor is the king or not really depends on a customer’s cloud …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects October 9, 2019 Proper IT budgeting is what makes or breaks an organization. Organizations either optimize their IT services or make a mess of it. IT leaders have a duty to develop a successful IT budget to keep their organization competitive and operationally efficient. IT budgeting can range from a painful annual process to …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects August 29, 2019 There’s Public cloud, Private cloud, Hybrid cloud, and now we have Multicloud.  So, what is Multicloud?  Multicloud is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single heterogeneous architecture.  Specifically, it’s getting all your cloud solutions to work together by using Private clouds and Hybrid clouds with multiple …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects August 17, 2019 Let’s face it, everybody is moving into the cloud.  If you’re not already in the cloud, you’re most likely behind your competitors.  The question is whether you should go into the public or private cloud, or some hybrid.  When moving to the cloud, companies have some important considerations to tackle: regulatory …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects May 28, 2019 The toughest part about protecting corporate IT assets in the cloud is knowing what these assets are and who is using them.  Cloud providers are pretty good at hiding everything going on in the cloud infrastructure – from the cloud’s core to its edge.  Thus, we don’t always have a clear …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects February 26, 2019 The toughest part of selecting a process framework is understanding what’s available, and which framework to use that will have the most advantage for your organization.  A starting point is to ask “How do organizations apply frameworks?”  This depends on the type of business process framework being adopted.  Organizations use a …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects February 2, 2019 A client recently asked me if Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is still relevant.  I explained that SOA is still relevant as ever, although Application Programming Interface (API) is all the buzz at the moment.  This is really a technical discussion but I’ll try to explain it in business lingo.  From my point …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects August 23, 2018 In News Release #1, the focus was to explain what Service-as-a-Architecture (AaaS) was, and what it was NOT. There is a lot of confusion as to what AaaS is, and if you conduct a survey with ten IT professionals, chances are that you’ll get ten different answers, unless of course they’re …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects August 15, 2018 Everything is a service these days, even architecture.  If you’re planning to offer any kind of product or service today, chances are you won’t be the first.  I can’t help but think about Kicking Horse Coffee and the fact that they went from a family-owned small town coffee roasting business to …

Ade Odusote, Senior Domain Architect Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects May 22, 2018 While an Enterprise Architect leads the development of a single holistic enterprise architecture model for the whole of the organization (from all architecture perspectives including Business Services, Business Processes, Information, Applications, and Technology), a Solution Architect provides a bridge between specific business problems and issues and the solutions which are …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects February 4, 2018   Business Reference Models illustrate the functional and organizational composition of the core business of an organization. We sometimes call them industry reference models because they may pertain to a specific industry. You can find industry-specific business reference models for all kinds of industries, including aerospace & defense, airline, automotive, banking, …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects January 22, 2018 Before we jump into cloud integration, I have a foundational question: What is cloud? We better understand what it is that we’re integrating before we dive in. I think this is a fair question considering that cloud is a misunderstood term as it applies to information technology. Most people seem to …

Bob Ivkovic, Principal of IT Architects January 15, 2018   Artificial Intelligence or AI has been around since I was born, and I’m no spring chicken.  When I started my career as an Oracle DBA back in 1983, we had an AI group in the IT department.  I’m not sure they ever got off the ground, or anyone else had …