This page captures articles and material that I’ve found interesting or important to my engagements in the commercial world. I highly recommended if you find my blogs of interest that you check out these articles.
Project Aristotle
This is one of many articles on the results from Google’s project aristotle, an attempt to discover what makes an effective team.
After years of intensive analysis, Google discovers the key to good teamwork is being nice
The results confirm the approach I’ve used for decades myself which is to foster the team culture, understand what motivates people and work together increasing the teams engagement on the job. Finally there is solid research demonstrating the importance of trust within and team and that the views of the quite ones is just as critical as the views of those that constantly speak. So finally this research is available so we can push back on bad leaders and bad managers who think its only about skills, micromanagement and leadership by fear or in the the articles words
“Google’s data-driven approach ended up highlighting what leaders in the business world have known for a while; the best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally. It has less to do with who is in a team, and more with how a team’s members interact with one another.”
Enterprise Architecture Mistakes
A summary of Gartner research on the top 10 EA mistakes. Some of these really struck a cord, where as I think a few are a little off the market, many such as the first one appear to be common and cripple the operation of an EA team.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-10-enterprise-architecture-mistakes-gartner-research-church
Articles on poor security (Lack of Enterprise Architecture / assurance)
The recent attacks on mongoDB cloud installations is worth a read below.
and an article by the vendor
https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/how-to-avoid-a-malicious-attack-that-ransoms-your-data
My view on this is that businesses (particularly smaller ones or ones with political problems) are using cloud solutions to fast track activity in the business. By ignoring the need to design systems with appropriate assurances they are just fast tracking themselves into a ransonware attack and putting their customers data at risk.
MongoDB is particularly interesting as its easy to use this technology in a reasonably secure way, by applying appropriate due diligence there is no reason this technology should be unsafe however if your expecting the vendor or anyone one hosting it for you to have done that you’re going to be very disappointed.
If you’ve been hit by such an attack you might want to demand answers from your business on how these systems are being setup without appropriate solution assurance. Would you build a house without plans? If no then why would you become depending on people that establish enterprise software without a plan?