Ted McLaughlan

The role, impact and usefulness of the "Solution Architect" (i.e., "SA" to the "Enterprise Architect" or "System Architect") has been clarifying for several years across the IT Consulting community, particularly given the increasingly complex nature of SOA, Cloud-centric and Multi-Platform solutions required to meet increasingly real-time, agile and resource-constrained business information management requirements. The SA's role is essentially to be the IT architecture, engineering and resource management lead, as an IT solution is first conceived, planned and begins implementation. Very often, the SA's efforts are initially delivered as part of a proposal - complete with an engineering plan and schedule, high-level system architecture and product list, plus a cost estimate (both labor and direct). This typically assumes the proposals are meeting pre-defined acquis... (more)

On Becoming an IT Solution Architect - 5 Critical Practices

The Information Technology (IT) inventory of HR role and position labels is broad and deep. IT position descriptions may be closely associated with actual black box technology (like "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Administrator" or "Storage Area Network (SAN) Engineer"), or they may describe roles in a methodology-driven context required for IT success ("IT Project Manager", "Functional Requirements Specialist"). No IT job label is more loosely defined than the "Architect", even with a long string of descriptive adjectives ("Component Services Integration Application Architect")... (more)

Government Social Media & Cloud Computing

GovIT at Cloud Expo June 23, 2009 - During this morning’s IAC breakfast, discussing “Transparency, Collaboration and Web 2.0”, a panelist made a very interesting point. While the US Federal Government’s use of Internet social media services and cloud-based information-sharing applications is well underway, albeit at the very earliest of stages (mainly due to significant policy, privacy, security and simple “newness” issues), by far one of the major risks lies with accountability. Accountability in collaboration and information-sharing environments is typically achieved to some d... (more)

Information Management and Internet Marketing - Essentials for the Bad Economy

It’s a pretty straightforward economic reality hitting local and regional businesses right now - how to drastically reduce marketing and advertising expenses, while continuing to attract new customers and grow revenues. In any economy, good or bad, it is absolutely essential that your business, service and products continue to be represented and advertised in public media - in order to attract new, paying customers. This is Information Management 101 - but in the public domain. Read more about this Business Internet Marketing and Information Management topic, and why Internet Mar... (more)

The Brand Ambassador for Government 2.0

Great post recently about the Government 2.0 "Brand Ambassador", in FCW by Mark Drapeau. "It’s easy to see governments and their agencies as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. But that notion only prevails because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyperconnected world. As private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments also must adapt if they wish to communicate more ... (more)