Eben Hewitt - Collected Quotes

"A hypothesis is a starting point for an investigation. When you hypothesize, you make a claim about why something might be the case, based on limited data, to offer an explanation or a path forward. You wouldn’t make a proposition about something you are certain of. You may not have enough evidence yet to even convince you that it’s true. But making such a claim puts a stake in the ground that suggests a path for focused analysis." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"[...] an architect’s work [...] comprises the set of strategic and technical models that create a context for position (capabilities), velocity (directedness, ability to adjust), and potential (relations) to harmonize strategic business and technology goals." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"An insight is when you mix your creative and intellectual labor with a set of data points to create a point of view resulting in a useful assertion. You 'see into' an object of inquiry to reveal important characteristics about its nature." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"As we know, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. Adding security reduces performance. Sharding and partitioning the database affords greater performance and distribution but creates complexity that is difficult to manage. Adding robust monitoring can generate huge volumes of log data to be stored, rotated, secured, and cleansed. Keeping the design 'simple' often defers the interests of flexibility until later, where it becomes very expensive." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"Every strategy starts with a set of problems to be solved. The strategy itself is the set of solutions to those problems. A Logic Tree is the critical starting point for any strategy. It ensures you have defined the problem correctly and helps you enumerate the best strategic solutions." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"[...] strategy is about determining the problems and opportunities in front of you, defining them properly, and shaping a course of action that will give your business the greatest advantage. Balancing problem solving with creating and exploiting new opportunities through imagination and analysis is the cornerstone of a great strategy." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"Technology systems are difficult to wrangle. Our systems grow in accidental complexity and complication over time. Sometimes we can succumb to thinking that other people really hold the cards, that they have the puppet strings we don’t." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"The culture of your organization comprises your stated principles, and to a far greater extent, the actual lived principles as reflected by the attitudes, communication styles, and behaviors of your teams." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"We know what forecasting is: you start in the present and try to look into the future and imagine what it will be like. Backcasting is the opposite: you state your desired vision of the future as if it’s already happened, and then work backward to imagine the practices, policies, programs, tools, training, and people who worked in concert in a hypothetical past (which takes place in the future) to get you there." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)