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Evert Meulie
my personal web log
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James Bond: 12(!) actors, and 26 movies in 58 years
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In the swampy heat of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lolo Jones peers at a line of approaching rain clouds. The rumble of thunder carries across the track at Louisiana State University, where Jones is training for her second run at an Olympic gold medal. Jones entered the 2008 Games in Beijing as the favorite to win the 100-meter hurdles, but in the final race she clipped a hurdle and ended up finishing seventh. A lifetime of training evaporated with one error.
When it comes to this summer's Games in London, she's leaving nothing to chance.
Jones is attended by 22 scientists and technicians, paid for by Red Bull, her sponsor. It is her seventh training session with the team, and today they've arrayed 40 motion-capture cameras along the track. She's also being monitored by a system called Optojump, which measures the exact location and duration of Jones' contact with the rubberized surface on every step and after every hurdle. And a high-speed Phantom Flex camera rigged next to the track can zoom alongside Jones and film her at 1,500 frames a second. The Red Bull team calibrates the equipment while Jones warms up.
As sports go, hurdling is incredibly technical. A runner's raw speed has to be balanced against her form and technique as she clears the ten 33-inch hurdles. If you're running too fast and not focusing on your form as you approach a hurdle, you can suddenly find yourself too close to the barrier as you take off, and you'll hit it—as Jones did in 2008. Jones and her coach, Dennis Shaver, are seeking a deeper understanding of how she runs and how she might be able to adjust her technique to gain an advantage over her competition.
Adam Simpson
— Elise Craig
Just as Jones completes her warm-up, the skies crack wide open. The motion-capture session is washed out—the delicate cameras have to be moved under a tent for protection. As Red Bull's director of high performance and former US Ski Team sports science director Andy Walshe says, "We're the only people stupid enough to try and do motion-capture outside like this." But there's still the Phantom camera rig, which has no trouble handling the rain. Jones does a series of five sprints down the track, clearing the hurdles with a graceful aggression. The resulting hi-res footage is both beautiful and revealing, showing far more detail about her hurdling than the naked eye could ever see.
Jones and her coach gather with the scientists and watch the video to see how quickly she is getting her lead leg back on the ground after each hurdle. "We discovered that I wasn't kicking down my front leg as soon as I could," Jones says. "I'm just trying to get down a little sooner over every hurdle, maybe an inch closer on each one. Over the course of 10 hurdles, that's 10 inches, and when you're winning or losing by hundredths of seconds, that's a lot."
Richard Kirby, an engineer on the project, ticks off other discoveries. They found that Jones was usually fastest on her fourth or fifth trial, so Shaver increased the length of her warm-up time before races. They discovered that her left side wasn't as strong and stiff as her right, which caused her to wobble slightly down the track, reducing her speed, so now she's working to strengthen that side of her body. And they found that sometimes she lands with her center of mass behind her front foot, which for a sprinter is like pumping the brakes.
Almost none of these are things that could be seen even with normal video analysis. Shaver and Jones could have trained forever without noticing them. "A lot of things you don't know, simply because you can't measure them," Kirby says. "Getting data like this puts you in a position to ask intelligent questions."
For elite athletes, traditional training is no longer enough. To go from great to the best in the world, it's now essential to optimize every bit of performance, even if the gain is just a hundredth of a second. So in addition to relying on their coaches and teammates, they work with biomechanists, physiologists, psychologists, nutritionists, strength coaches, recovery experts, and statistical analysts. Rather than just eating their Wheaties like Bruce Jenner, they guzzle beet juice before a workout, because their team of nutritionists has determined that the nitrates it contains can improve aerobic exercise performance by as much as 2 percent. They don't just rub Bengay on tired muscles, they follow elaborate hydrotherapy regimens to limit muscle damage and reduce soreness by 16 percent. And instead of pounding out hour after hour of training, they sometimes do a targeted workout of insanely high intensity, approved by their physiologists, which can give them better results in as little as four minutes.
In short, science has become an integral part of an athlete's quest to reach new frontiers of accomplishment.
You'll see the results this summer in London, as competitors push ever closer to the ideal sprint, the flawless swim, the immaculate pole vault. It took evolution millions of years to produce the modern human. Over the past century, coaches have used intuition and discipline to vastly improve athletic performance. Now scientists are taking the last step, helping athletes approach perfection.
On the afternoon of April 10, 1896, 17 men from five countries set out to run the first Olympic marathon. Doctors warned that such an exertion might be extremely dangerous, and in fact only eight of the competitors successfully finished the contest—a Greek horse groom named Spiridon Louis won the race in 2:58:50. In Beijing 112 years later, Kenya's Samuel Wanjiru won the marathon on a sweltering day with a time of 2:06:32. After not much more than a century, Wanjiru had run his race—more than 2 kilometers longer than Louis', by the way—29 percent faster.
Adam Simpson
— Jordan Crucchiola
It's a remarkable change. After all, human beings have been running for the entirety of our existence as a species. Some evolutionary theorists actually believe it was our ability to run for long periods of time that enabled humans to survive—it allowed us to hunt by simply pursuing our prey to exhaustion. The fact that we sweat rather than pant to regulate our body temperature; the way that our legs store energy while we run, almost like springs; even the size of our rear ends—all of these are thought to be adaptations that enable us to run efficiently.
In sport after sport, you can see similar progression in our physical abilities at the most elite level of competition. In swimming, the men's 100-meter freestyle record has improved 29 percent since 1905. The men's shot put world record is 49 percent farther now than in 1909. For women, the gains are even greater—some women's field-event records have improved by more than 100 percent.
But after a century of massive accomplishment, the pace of improvement has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years. From 1905 to 1988, the men's 100-meter freestyle swimming record dropped an average of 0.32 percent a year. In the 24 years since 1988, it has dropped just 0.13 percent a year. You see the same thing in other sports. The curve is flattening out. In fact, studies suggest that current world records in some track events are approaching their absolute limits and that we might have only a percent or two of improvement left in us.
What happened? We spent the 20th century learning the basic science of human physiology, training, and nutrition. Sport went from an amateur pastime to a worldwide industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions of new athletes were able to compete. New equipment—from stronger, lighter shoes to drag-reducing swimsuits—radically elevated performance. Our understanding of nutrition led to the development of drinks and foods that ensure that athletes have the fuel they need during events. Strength and conditioning programs meant fewer injuries and more time to train. In 100 years, we developed a cohort of athletes whose physical accomplishments would have been unthinkable four generations earlier.
The challenges of the 21st century are very different. At this point, the easy improvements have all been made. Margins of victory are going to be smaller, and the tools that help athletes win will increasingly be found not in the weight room but in the lab. Many sports will begin to resemble auto racing, where wins are determined by a combination of driving skill and technology.
As sports scientist Giuseppe Lippi wrote in an analysis of world records over time, in the future "athletic performance will be determined less and less by the innate physiology of the athlete, and more and more by scientific and technological advances." Forget about recruiting the best athletes; if you really want to build a great athletic team, it's time to recruit the best PhDs.
A lot of those PhDs can be found near the Australian capital of Canberra, on a large campus that looks like a futuristic college attended solely by shockingly fit young people. This is the Australian Institute of Sport, and it's a global leader in merging science with athletic talent.
AIS was born out of failure: At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Australians won just one silver and four bronze medals. Worse yet, its tiny neighbor New Zealand won two gold medals. When Australia's prime minister at the time toured the Olympic Village, he was booed by the athletes, who felt they hadn't been given the necessary support.
In the US this might have been greeted with a shrug. In Australia, it was a national scandal. Sports, especially international competition, had long been an important component of Australians' self-image. As the country grew from its roots as a British penal colony, its new native-born population used sports to carve out an identity. "Sport in general, and Olympic sport in particular, is one of our few chances to shine on an international stage," said Australian sports historian David Nadel in a newspaper interview.
Adam Simpson
Jordan Crucchiola
To reboot the country's athletic program, the government decided to create an academy modeled in part on the sports factories of the Eastern Bloc. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact countries saw sporting events as an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of the communist way of life. Nearly every child was tested at an early age, and those who showed particular promise were shipped to the academies, where they trained year-round. (Unfortunately, the athletes were often given performance-enhancing drugs, sometimes without their knowledge.) These programs were funded and closely monitored by the central government.
AIS hoped to capture the intensity and success of the Soviet academies, without going to the same excesses. The idea was simple: Get the best coaches and the best athletes together on a year-round basis, without any distractions, and hope that athletic magic would result.
It worked well. Australia won 14 medals in 1988 and 27 in 1992. Then, in 1993, it was announced that the 2000 Summer Olympic Games would be held in Sydney. Like many host nations, Australia decided that a standout performance was crucial, and athletic funding was radically increased.
There had been a small sports science department at AIS since its founding. But as Australia ramped up for 2000, nearly $20 million was earmarked for research, and that small department became a juggernaut. Rather than smaller studies based around a specific athlete, the scientists were able to take on larger projects that had a profound impact for Australian sports as a whole.
AIS researchers set out to find new ways to wring more performance out of every Australian athlete. They conducted research highlighting the benefits of altitude training for aerobic athletes. They studied techniques to help athletes recover after a workout, from compression garments to hydrotherapy. Scientists at the institute developed an early tracking device called Minimax that allowed for instant motion analysis of athletes during competition. They pioneered programs to identify athletic potential and even to find athletes who might excel at a different sport better suited to their abilities. They developed a blood test for the banned drug EPO before the 2000 Olympics, hoping that a level playing field would benefit Australian athletes.
The results were astonishing. At the Sydney Games, Australia won 58 medals, placing it third in the podium count. That performance was even more stunning on a per capita basis. Australia's population was a little over 19 million, meaning the country grabbed one medal for every 328,000 citizens. China, which also won 58 medals in 2000, scored one medal for every 21.7 million citizens. "For every swimmer in Australia, there are three swimmers in the USA and 10 in China," says Bruce Mason, head of aquatic training and research at AIS. "We use technology to help close that gap."
They're also using technology to accelerate the training process. In 1993, Anders Ericsson and his colleagues published a paper called "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." The theory developed in the paper—and later popularized by books like Outliers—is that to become truly great at any skill, you need to put in 10,000 hours of focused effort. But at AIS, they've hacked that process, targeting just the specific aspects of a sport that make the most difference and helping athletes achieve world-class performance much more quickly. It's this kind of training that helped sprinters and lifeguards contend for a spot in the Winter Olympics.
When the skeleton—a sport that involves hurtling face-first down a bobsled track on a small sled—was reintroduced to the Winter Games, the Aussies had a problem. They had just one female skeleton athlete in the country and no bobsled track. But the team at AIS took that as a challenge: Could they use science to develop a world-class competitor in just a few months?
They determined that one significant predictor of success had nothing to do with the sled itself or even the skill of the pilot. The faster a competitor pushed the sled through the 30-meter start zone before jumping on it, the better they performed. So researchers set up a national testing campaign, looking for women with backgrounds in competitive sports who excelled at the 30-meter sprint. They also evaluated candidates to see how well they responded to feedback and coaching. Eventually, they picked a group of 10 athletes—including track sprinters, a water skier, and several surf lifesavers, an Australian sport that requires sprinting through sand.
The athletes were given access to the best coaching, equipment, and sports science. Every training and competitive run was analyzed and dissected as coaches looked for places to improve start and steering techniques. Specialized strength and conditioning programs targeted the needs of the sport, especially explosive power and sprint speed.
The program was a success: An Australian racer qualified for the Olympics just 18 months after she first saw a sled. Amazingly, she had completed only 220 runs before qualifying. (A typical US skeleton racer makes upwards of 2,000 runs before appearing in the Olympics.)
Adam Simpson
— Elise Craig
Australia's success has been accompanied by a boom in investment in sports science around the world. The UK, in the run-up to the London Olympics, has been spending about $160 million a year on UK Sport, its own high-performance athletic program. Canada's "Own the Podium" program spent nearly $100 million in the run-up to the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Qatar has established the Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence in Doha, hiring several AIS alums to help develop the program. And China, hewing to the state-controlled model, has enrolled 360,000 students in 3,000 sports schools across the country.
But there's at least one major country that hasn't yet followed the AIS model of centralized athletic training: the United States. There's very little government funding for research or training—almost all of the US Olympic Committee's funding comes from corporate sponsorships and individual contributions. Still, the USOC is striving to emulate the best parts of AIS-style training with what money it has. "AIS is simply the jewel of what you'd want a sports system to look like," says Peter Vint, a director of high performance at the USOC. "They're the model for countries all around the world."
It's not like anyone needed to teach Leisel Jones how to swim. She had competed for Australia in the 2000 Summer Olympics when she was just 15 years old, winning a surprise silver medal in the 100-meter breaststroke. Over the course of two more Olympics she won seven more medals, including three golds, while racking up another 14 World Championships medals. Many consider her to be the greatest breaststroke swimmer ever.
But now, at 26, Jones was trying to accomplish something unprecedented: qualifying for her fourth consecutive Olympics, something no Australian swimmer had ever done. And so she's come back to AIS for some very focused swimming lessons. The institute's aquatic facility is a $17 million marvel, with 30 cameras mounted above, around, and under the water and a motorized cart that runs alongside the swimmers to capture data on their strokes. One of the starting blocks is rigged with force plates and motion sensors; a snake of bundled cables runs over the wet deck to a computer with a huge plasma screen for a monitor.
Jones climbs up and takes her mark. Exploding off the block, she extends her arms and enters the water smoothly, taking three strokes before coasting to a stop, climbing out of the pool, and joining a huddle of coaches and scientists gathered around the computer.
Instantly, an image of Jones appears on the plasma monitor. The system maps all of the parameters of the start she's just performed—the amount of force she pushed with, the angle at which it was applied, her angle of flight through the air, the distance she went before entering the water, the angle of her entry, and her depth under the water.
A swimmer's speed at the start is the fastest they travel in a race—up to 5 meters per second. (As one coach put it, "The start is about them trying to minimize the loss of velocity.") For Jones, the trick is managing both how far she goes horizontally (farther is better) and the amount of contact she makes with the water when she hits (less contact reduces water resistance). Those two ideals are in opposition to each other, so the goal is to find the best balance between them.
Mason, the AIS aquatic director and the man who built the system that Jones is using, peers at the screen. "Leisel is leaving the blocks at about negative 20 degrees," he says. "We'd like to see her pushing off the blocks harder and leaving at a shallower angle, not getting so deep." If she can adjust her form on the start and make a few small alterations on her turns, he says, she should be able to shave a massive four-tenths of a second from her 100-meter time.
Jones climbs back up on the block to do another start, trying to implement some of the suggestions that the scientists have made. "We've always just had the subjective evaluation of coaches," Mason says. "Now we can give you the objective evaluation of what you're actually doing—and the feedback is immediate."
Six months later, Jones did in fact qualify for her fourth Olympic team. There's some speculation that she might even be the Australian flag bearer at the Games in recognition of the achievement. But for the scientists at AIS, who work so much with data and numbers, one thing stood out most in Jones' Olympic-qualifying swim. It was the margin by which she made it into the Games: just over four-tenths of a second.
Special projects editor Mark McClusky (@markmcc) wrote about Nike+ in issue 17.07.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


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A true work of art, this map of the North Pole regions is as beautiful as it is fascinating. Published with five articles on the Arctic including "Arctic Expeditions Commanded by Americans," this one of a kind map is loaded with information about Arctic exploration and is perfect for framing.
Coverage Area: North Pole, Alaska, Greenland, Spitzbergen, Franz Josef Land, northern Canada, northern Siberia, Sweden, Norway, and Finland


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Forgot your password?
An introduction to the world of Fuchs Technik!FUCHS TECHNIK has been one of the leading suppliers of security systems and depository and drying systems in the upper Puster Valley for the past 20 years.Our product range comprises the following areas: mechanical and electronic security systems access control systems car park automation for hotel, industry and public facilities depository and drying systems for different sectorsIn addition to more than 2000 hotels, various industrial and trade companies, public and military facilities, and private individuals have been amongst our customers.The operating range of FUCHS TECHNIK is not limited to Italy, but includes all of Europe, the United States and the former countries of the Soviet Union.The enthusiasm our customers show for our products results in great advertisement by spreading the word of the mouth, which again, is key to our success. Having enthusiastic customers is our aim!
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OK, I'm currently writing a wevserver, which is almost done. My current implementation just executes the program/script and redirects the output into a file which is then transfered through the socket. This is admitedly not so hot.
My question is: are there any better ways to do this? Can I "bind" or "pipe" the webserver's child's output directly through my socket?
I'm on FreeBSD, but my program should run on Mac OS X as well. Thanks in advance.


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RIO DE JANEIRO — Search crews found more bodies on Thursday, raising the death toll from the walls of earth and water that crushed homes in recent days to nearly 500 people, local media reported.
Whole families were wiped out in at least five towns in mountains north of Rio de Janeiro, while survivors were left scrambling Thursday to reach still-trapped neighbors.
Castaway's parents thought they would never see him again
The father of Pacific castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga said he was told his long-lost son vanished on a fishing trip but he didn't have the heart to break the news to his ailing wife.
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Dozens were still missing after the slides hit at about 3 a.m. Wednesday in the picturesque Serrana region after 10 inches of rain — a month's normal rainfall — fell in 24 hours.
More then 13,500 people were made homeless in the region, the Civil Defense agency said.
Most of the deaths were north of Rio, but at least 18 people also died in flooding in Sao Paulo earlier this week.
More rain, possibly heavy at times, is forecast through the weekend.
Some survivors recounted their ordeal while taking shelter Thursday.
"We were like zombies, covered in mud, in the dark, digging and digging" after the slides hit, said Geisa Carvalho, 19, a resident of Teresopolis where dozens died.
A tremendous rumble awoke Carvalho and her mother Vania Ramos as tons of earth slid down a sheer granite rock face onto their neighborhood.
The power was out, but by lightning flashes they could see a torrent of mud and water rushing just a few feet from their home — and the remnants of their neighbors' houses that were swept far down a hill.Video: Woman saved by daring rescue, but dog is lost (on this page)
"I don't even have the words to describe what I've seen," said Ramos during a 5-mile hike to the main part of her town in search of food and water. "A lot of our friends are dead or missing. There are people we may never find."
Carvalho and Ramos said they ran out of their home moments after the mudslide and joined neighbors in digging for survivors with bare hands and sticks.
They quickly located a family of four who had died under the rubble of their home — and said another neighbor's 2-month-old baby was washed away in his crib and has yet to be found.
Television footage showed many houses buried in mud as desperate residents and rescue workers searched for survivors.Video: Mudslides in Brazil leave hundreds dead (on this page)
"There was no way of telling which house would fall. Rich and poor — everything was destroyed," resident Fernanda Carvalho was quoted as saying by the Globo network's website.
Houses turned inside out
Nearly all the homes in their Caleme neighborhood were swept to the bottom of a hill, seemingly turned inside out.
Tangles of plumbing were wrapped in trees, children's' clothing littered the earth, massive trees were tossed about like toothpicks.
A river of water and mud flowed through the streets as a light rain continued to fall Thursday.
Only a few rescuers had managed to hike to Caleme by Thursday and they only had shovels and machetes — not the heavier equipment that may be needed to hunt for survivors.
Residents said they had no food, water or medication, and many made the long walk for help to the center of Teresopolis, about 40 miles north of Rio.Interactive: Mudslides mapped, explained (on this page)
Hundreds of family members crowded at a morgue Wednesday night waiting to identify bodies.
"It's like an earthquake struck some areas," said Teresopolis Mayor Jorge Mario. "There are three or four neighborhoods that were totally destroyed in rural areas. There are hardly any houses standing there and all the roads and bridges are destroyed."
Dozens also died in the towns of Nova Friburgo, Petropolis, Sumidouro and Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto.
"The city is finished," Nova Friburgo resident Carlos Damasio was quoted as saying on the online edition of local newspaper O Globo.
Morgues in the towns were full and bodies covered in blankets were laid out in streets.
President Dilma Rousseff flew by helicopter over the region Thursday. The nation's Health Ministry said it was sending 7 tons of medications to the area, enough to treat 45,000 people for a month, it said.
The death toll was expected to rise as firefighters reached remote valleys and steep mountainsides where neighborhoods were destroyed, Teresopolis's mayor said. About 1,000 people there were left homeless.
"I saw six bodies on my street," said 53-year-old Antonio Venancio, whose house was inundated with mud but still standing. "We just don't know what to do in the face of something so horrible."
'So many disappeared'
"There are so many disappeared — and so many that will probably never be found," said Angela Marina de Carvalho Silva, a resident of Teresopolis who feared she might have lost 15 relatives, including five nieces and nephews.
"There was nothing we could do. It was hell," she said.
Carvalho Silva took refuge in a neighbor's house on high ground with her husband and daughter, and watched the torrential rain carry away cars, tree branches and animals, and rip apart the homes of friends and family.
"It's over. There's nothing. The water came down and swept everything away," said her husband, Sidney Silva.
Television images showed one woman holding a dog in the ruins of her house as powerful floodwaters tore at the remaining walls.
She grabbed a rope thrown by residents from a nearby rooftop and was eventually pulled to safety, but had to drop the dog into the waters to save herself.
About 800 search-and-rescue workers dug for survivors.
In one town, firefighters rescued a 25-year-old man who held his 6-month-old son for 15 hours until they were both pulled out alive. The man's wife and mother-in-law were feared dead.
"I believe the number of dead is much more than was announced so far," Rio state environment secretary Carlos Minc was quoted as saying by Globo television after he flew over the region. "Many people died while they were sleeping."
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"Rescue teams are still arriving in the areas that have been worst affected," he said.
Minc described what he saw as a "striking tragedy," Globo reported. "From what I saw here today I can say [it] is the biggest catastrophe in the history of Teresopolis," he continued.
Deadly flooding and slides earlier this month caused havoc in Minas Gerais state north of Rio, where 16 people died and dozens of communities are in a state of emergency.
Heavy rains and mudslides kill hundreds of people across Brazil each year, especially during the South American summer.
The worst hit are the poor, whose rickety homes are often built on steep slopes with weak or no foundations.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.


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Scott Ambler is chief methodologist for Agile and Lean for IBM Rational.
In This Issue
- Enterprise Architecture: Reality over Rhetoric
- Participate in the "2010 IT Project Success" survey and potentially win a copy of "Reflections on Management"
- Hot Links
Enterprise Architecture: Reality over Rhetoric
For several decades we've heard that effective enterprise architecture programs are a critical success factor for medium-to-large size IT organizations. I have been a promoter of enterprise architecture, both in my writings and working with organizations around the world, yet after all these years it seems that the reality of enterprise architecture is nowhere close to fulfilling some of the rhetoric around it. So I decided to find out what's actually working in practice, and what's not working for that matter, in my January 2010 State of the IT Union Survey.
The survey was announced in my January 2010 column and by Dr. Dobb's editor Jon Erickson in a blog. As with previous surveys we had a robust set of responses, albeit with a bias towards North American respondents. There were 374 respondents in total, with 38% identifying themselves as developers, 27% in management or leadership roles, 13% were modelers, and 10% consultants. Four out of five respondents had 10 or more years experience in IT and 23% worked in organizations which had 1000 or more IT professionals. Two-thirds of respondents were from North America, 21% from Europe, and 10% from Asia Pacific. The original questions as they were asked, a summary slide deck, and the source data with identifying information removed for privacy reasons can be downloaded here free of charge.
Room to Improve
A critical issue that I wanted to explore is the adoption rate of enterprise architecture within organizations. Overall, only 47% of respondents indicated that their organizations had an enterprise architecture program currently in place. Of this group, 36% indicated that their program was expanding whereas the other 64% indicated that the program was stable. 9% of respondents indicated that their organizations were thinking about starting an enterprise architecture program and 34% indicated that they had no enterprise architecture program at all. However, when it came to people working in organizations with one hundred or more IT people the results were a bit better -- 63% of organizations had an enterprise architecture program (38% expanding, 62% stable) and 6% were thinking about starting one. It makes sense that larger organizations would be more likely to be focused on enterprise architecture than smaller ones as the need for an effective enterprise architecture program increases in step with the size of your IT department.
I also explored the benefits that organizations were experiencing as the result of their enterprise architecture program. I presented a list of 16 potential benefits and asked people to rate them on a scale of much improved to much worse. Although all of the potential benefits were rated positively, none of them stood out as clear winners. All of them averaged out to being somewhere in between no change and improved, but none approached much improved. However, individual respondents did indicate that some factors are now much improved since the introduction of their enterprise architecture program, so averages can be deceiving some times. The top five benefits were improved system integration, improved IT governance, greater chance that development teams follow a common technology infrastructure, improved business efficiency, and increased data integrity. Considering the low averages, my fear is that we may be over promising and under delivering when it comes to enterprise architecture programs.
What Works, What Doesn't
One of the things that I was hoping to do with the survey was identify the most important success factors for enterprise architecture programs. Not surprisingly, the survey showed that the "soft" people-oriented issues are most critical to your success. In fact, the top five were all focused on people: active involvement of business leaders in the enterprise architecture program, active involvement of IT leaders in the enterprise architecture program, the enterprise architects must be active participants on project teams, the enterprise architects must be trusted advisors of the business, and you need flexible enterprise architects. Coming in 6th, of 11 issues, was having a business case for your enterprise architecture efforts, something which I thought would have placed higher considering the current economic climate.
The survey also explored the potential pitfalls leading to the failure of enterprise architecture programs, with business issues and people-oriented issues being common culprits. The top five pitfalls, in order, were providing insufficient time for the enterprise architecture program to succeed, project teams not taking advantage of the enterprise architecture, it's too difficult to measure benefits of the program, the enterprise architects were perceived as "ivory tower", and development teams couldn't wait for their enterprise architects. Enterprise architecture programs are a long-term investment, granted if you're smart you'll show some tangible results on a regular basis, but the main benefits can take years to materialize. Considering that not giving the enterprise architecture program sufficient time is the leading cause of failure, the implication is that some organizations may not understand that enterprise architecture is a long-term play.
Issues such as project teams not taking advantage of the enterprise architecture, the enterprise architects being perceived as ivory tower, and development teams not being able to wait for the enterprise architects can all be addressed by taking a more agile approach to enterprise architecture. Effective enterprise architects collaborate directly with development teams, rolling up their sleeves and helping the development teams to implement the solution. Yes, this may imply that the architects get involved with actual coding. One of the unfortunate aspects of developer culture is that many developers don't respect other technical people who don't write code, so if the enterprise architects aren't willing to get their hands dirty every so often to write code it can lead to them being perceived as ivory tower. Furthermore, the concrete feedback of seeing code actually run, or not run as the case may be, can help to bring architects down to earth. The enterprise architects also need to invest some of their time mentoring people in architecture skills, work closely with the business to understand their needs, evolve the enterprise architecture artifacts, and share learnings with one another so that they can evolve the enterprise architecture appropriately.
Exploring the Hype
Technology platforms and strategies are first and foremost the most hyped topics when it comes to enterprise architecture. One of the questions presented a list of platforms and strategies and asked respondents whether their enterprise architecture included them. In order respondents indicated:
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 65%
- Common Frameworks 55%
- Business Process Management (BPM) 52%
- Components 43%
- Software as a Service (SAAS) 37%
- Product Line Architecture 31%
- Cloud Computing 22%
- Semantic Architecture 14%
I suspect that several of the platforms -- particularly SOA, frameworks, and components -- rated highly because they are mature and proven technologies. Cloud computing did surprisingly well considering that it's a relatively new strategy and I suspect its adoption will grow over the next few years. I was surprised that product line architectures rated as highly as it did considering that they require a fair bit of sophistication to implement effectively. Semantic architecture was likely rated low due to the difficulty of coming to a consensus around, and then actually implementing, common data definitions.
Architectural frameworks can be a contentious issue within the enterprise architecture community, with several to choose from and ardent supporters in each camp. This survey should shed some light on this debate because it explored framework usage within the context of successful and unsuccessful enterprise architecture programs. When it came to successful enterprise architecture programs, 39% of respondents indicated that they didn't know if their organization had adopted an enterprise architecture framework, 38% believed they had created their own, 19% were TOGAF, 9% Zachman, and 6% M/DODAF. On the other hand, for unsuccessful enterprise architecture programs, 60% created their own, 27% didn't know, 13% adopted Zachman, 7% adopted TOGAF, and nobody was following M/DODAF. Although there isn't sufficient evidence to determine causal relationships, it may be that adoption of a proven enterprise architecture framework increases the chance of success for your enterprise architecture program. Furthermore, it may also be that adoption of M/DODAF or TOGAF is more likely to lead to enterprise architecture program success than adoption of the Zachman Framework, something that frustrates me because I prefer the Zachman Framework. More investigation is needed on this issue, and your mileage may vary (YMMV) depending on the culture of your organization.
A relatively minor issue that I explored was what modeling notations people were using to describe their enterprise architectures. I've noticed over the past couple of years that the notation war was starting to rear its ugly head again, with people arguing between Unified Modeling Language (UML) and domain specific languages (DSLs). In the survey, 53% of respondents indicated that UML was being used in their enterprise architecture, 36% created their own notations, 25% were using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), 13% had no visual models at all, and 11% were using DSLs. So, although UML was being used by the majority of organizations it clearly doesn't dominate the enterprise architecture landscape, contrary to the claims of some UML bigots. Furthermore, for all the hullaballoo about DSLs they're not as popular as "standard" notations such as UML and BPMN. I'm happy to see these results as for years I've promoted in Agile Modeling that you should use the right model type for the situation that you find yourself in, and it appears that many organizations are in fact doing that when it comes to enterprise architecture modeling.
In conclusion, the survey appeared to show that a large percentage of organizations, particularly larger ones, are trying their hand at enterprise architecture. Many of these efforts are doing well, although on average enterprise architecture programs in practice don't seem to be living up to their promises. I hope that this survey has helped to shed some light on the current status of enterprise architecture, and better yet provide some insights for improving your approach.


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Aerialbot Air Raid and Stunticon Breakdown join the cast of warriors in Activision's upcoming War for Cybertron today, both ditching their gestalt groups for a chance to shine in the solo spotlight.
Back when the '80s cartoon was airing, the Aerialbots and Stunticons were a big deal. Until then (with few exceptions), the Autobots were cars, and the Decepticons were planes or cassette tape recorders or guns. The introduction of a group of good aeroplanes and bad cars, both of which combined to form giant killer robots, made my little early teen heart flutter with joy.
Now one member of each gestalt group gets a chance to go solo for their respective sides, likely to provide some sort of balance between the two different teams. It's the same mechanic used in the Revenge of the Fallen video game, with Jetfire and Sideways playing the roles of Autobot plane and Decepticon car.
Does this mean there's no chance of seeing Menasor or Superion in the game? Most likely. In fact, these two are lucky there being included at all, as they didn't exist in the cartoon until long after the Transformers came to earth. This makes me think that the developers might be taking some cues from the IDW comic book series, where the Stunticons have only just been given the ability to combine.
What I am trying to say here is that I know far too much about Transformers.
Look for the game to hit the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on June 22, and be sure to check out the newly updated Transformers: War for Cybertron website for the pictures of Air Raid and Breakdown in their vehicle forms.


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The Jim Baldi story
Following a July 20, 2010 story in the Hook, which delved into the circumstances surrounding Bel Rio Restaurant's sudden closure and Baldi's disappearance, the long-time local bookkeeper, bartender, and restaurateur became the subject of a number of local news stories. According to police, Baldi, who turned 49 on August 13, embezzled money from WK Foods and Proffitt Management between November 2009 and July 15, 2010. On January 4, 2013, Baldi was arrested in San Fransisco, where he was living under the name "Dario di Sovana," along with a young woman also rumored to be missing, who went by Eliana di Sovana. Details began to emerge about Baldi's life on the run as he awaited extradition to face charges.
|Bel Trio: Simpson, Weldon, Baldi launch Bel RioPublished on Nov 13th, 2008Bel Trio: Jim Baldi, Dave Simpson, Gareth Weldon plan to open Bel Rio in Downtown Belmont next week.PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR No one can accuse C&O owner Dave Simpson of...read more