E-book bullits

Will the printed book disappear? Here are my bullits:

• During many years I wanted to own every book I read. Since I was an enthousiastic reader, I owned many books.
• For instance I used to have nearly complete collections of work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Philip Jose Farmer, Simon Vestdijk, Asimov, van Vogt, Varley, Fay Weldon and so on. I lived alone, and my house contained an ever growing number of Ikea's Billy's.
• Recently this changed. I now live in a much larger house, with more rooms, but with less walls to place a book case. I also grew a little "blase": many books appear to be boring after 50 pages or so.
• There is also the problem of the limited amount of luggage to take with you on a plane: there were times I finished the first book before the plane reached its destination.
• It seems the e-book will solve all this. Last summer I managed to read " Flatland" using the very small screen of my GSM. Not the most ideal e-reader. Nevertheless I enjoyed reading about the adventures of A Square. These days I own a mobile phone with a screen resolution of 800 by 480!
• Of course e-readers are just beginning to emerge; they are slow, expensive and limited to 4 or at most 16 shades of black. But it is a start.
• An e-reader can't give you the same sensations as a printed book; the smell and feeling of my first Jack Vance are unique and can't be copied. However now I am aware of the possibility to put 10.000 scifi pdf's on a 8GB SD card.

For me the printed book is history!

ps BullITs are bullets vaguely related to IT.

Architecture Bullits

It was Ronald Ham's idea to visit the Open Group Conference in London together with a group of people from Higher Education, implementers of Enterprise Architecture in their own institutions. We started with a day organized by David Rose, where we met some JISC colleagues and exchanged experiences.

Here are my bullits:

• EA in HE seems to be in a startup phase in the UK. However, Roehampton University and Liverpool John Moores University definitely are practitioners.
• JISC are stimulating EA by giving grants for special EA projects. That could work. SURF should do something similar. (cf the SurfShare program).
• TOGAF 9 had its European launch at the OG conference. However, the real theme of the conference was the gap between business and enterprise architects (observation by @rtolido).
• Enterprise Architecture will achieve nothing if not connected to the business. So architects always must engage the business in their projects. They also need sponsorship in higher circles (like any other consultant).
• Several speakers talked about EA maturity models. I will look into this. Am interested in a model assessing the maturity of an organization w.r.t. EA.
• Sogeti's Martin van den Berg spoke about the importance of PSA's. I was in a different session, but will invite him to speak in Delft.
• I attended a session on cloud computing. I do not think we need a special TOGAF for the cloud.
• I suddenly realized that business analysis is in the middle of the TOGAF circle: requirements analysis.
• Many people in the audience were using Twitter during the presentations, to comment or to report. A new, fascinating and very useful experience to me.
• Jack Hanison gave a very interesting talk about entering the cloud. Do's and don'ts, what is it really about.
• TOGAF 9 is very large. However there is no need for a discussion about a "light" version. One is always free to adopt only part of it.

Much to think about!