Martin Kaarup

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. This article emphasises the importance of architecting enterprise wide systems with quality capabilities and a service orientation that more properly reflects business agility and enables new opportunities to create much more focused, efficient, and adaptable organisational structures. Describing the problem domain Desirable as it might be, delivering agility is not straightforward as the following obstacles must be overcome: [7, 9] Organisational culture and project orientation. In the same way that project orientation inhibited the reuse of components, it may also stifle agility. The ne... (more)

Solving the Good Will Hunting Problem

I've seen the movie Good Will Hunting from 1997, starring Matt Damon in the role as a mathematical gifted janitor, twice. The first time I hadn’t taken a course in graph theory, the second time I had. Regarding the mathematical aspect of the movie, it makes all the difference. The second time I could actually understand the problem the professor posed when he threw down the gauntlet. In the movie the MIT professor stated a, supposedly, very tough problem that they had worked on intensely for almost two years before they were able to solve it. It reads: "Draw all the homeomorphic... (more)

My scale-free contacts

One drawback of returning from Avega’s 2009 conference in Karpathos, Greece, is having a head full of ideas and recharged batteries. It manifested itself a couple of days ago. Around bed time, I felt a sudden urge to map all my contacts, and their connections as well, on the professional network site LinkedIn. Supposedly, I should be able to see the scale-free invariance property of a social network. That night I went to bed at around 4 a.m. and I was still miles from completing my data gathering. I didn’t finish the next night either – or the next. The fourth night it dawned on... (more)

Computers Are Just Tools; Computer Science Is About People

In some sense computer science is like geometry. When the art of measuring crop fields was under development by the ancient Mediterranean’s it was most naturally coined geometry – literally meaning measurement of the Earth. Geometry was slowly developed by many scholars to solve a wide range of practical applications. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, forecasting expected crop yields, division of land into parcels, and even to build some of the Seven Wonders of the World as present in classical antiquity. Later on, Arabic and European scholars expanded the notion o... (more)

I Like Ants - Grand Masters of Business Opportunity

Since this is my first blog post I thought it should be memorable and so I will share a secret passion of mine. I like ants, I really do. Compared to Avega I might even like ants a little bit more. Compared to my wife, well, she’ll always win big, but only because I know my priorities in life – not because of the ants. Fastest path Even though I’ve first read about ants five, ten, fifteen years ago, I still enthusiastically teach others about the beautiful fastest path algorithm that ants use to optimize their harvest – and sometimes I also do this against people's will (like whe... (more)