REAL Talk With Sam Holcman

Business Architecture (BA) is undergoing the same transformation: away from framework-centric, multiple-choice exams and toward practitioner-based competence proven through real work, with BIZBOK/CBA®-style certification as a well-known example of the older model, not the only one.

There is something absurd happening in enterprise architecture and business architecture today, and it is time we called it out. People are passing multiple-choice exams… or cramming through a sixteen-hundred-page framework manual, and then being told, Now, go modify it. Customize it for your organization. Modify it? Before you have ever used it? Based on what? That is not mastery. That is madness.

Most EA principles sound good but do not change a single decision because they are not testable. To make them real, convert each principle into a SMART goal plus 1–3 hard metrics.  Now you can wire that into governance (architecture reviews, portfolio decisions, roadmaps) and report progress quarterly. At that point, it stops being a poster on the wall and becomes a scoreboard the business can hold EA accountable to.  Let us explain why Architecture Principles faded away in the 1990's - let us not go backwards in time.

This Broadcast is a review and analysis of the Jan 22, 2026 - by Koenraad Schelfaut and Andrew Long CIO Article titled How to get your enterprise architecture ready for agentic AI.  This article misses the central - and fatal - flaw in its reasoning: it assumes that enterprise data is reliable enough to empower agentic AI when, for most organizations, it is not.  A concise 90-day, EACOE EA-anchored roadmap you can use with CIOs and sponsors is provided.

“If you are worried about the cost of going for it, just calculate the cost of staying where you are." We have all been there - staring at an opportunity that feels just out of reach. Maybe it is the next career move, a new certification, launching that business idea, or stepping up into leadership. The first thought that comes to mind? “Can I afford this? But here is the truth most people never calculate: staying where you are, has a cost too - it is just hidden.

We are living in an age of endless low‑quality information and recycled self-declared “best practices.” Framework tourists. Certification logos with no delivery record. 1,600‑page manuals that need another 800 pages just to implement, and most recently, another rambling set of explanations on the explanations! Your brain was not designed to drink from this firehose. Critical Ignoring means fighting the instinct to “consume everything” and instead curating a very small set of sources.

In a world of infinite content and finite attention, the real competitive advantage is not posting more – it is choosing better who you listen to.   In this episode, Sam Holcman breaks down 39 distinct online personas that dominate LinkedIn, Twitter, and professional communities - from the signal-boosting trusted advisor to the humblebrag hero and the engagement farmer. This is not about shaming individuals; it is about sharpening your discernment in a noisy, performative digital landscape.   The challenge is simple: look at who you follow and ask, “Is this person helping me think more clearly, act more wisely, and deliver more value?” Time is precious. Aim it at high-integrity, trusted advisors - not at the loudest voices in the feed.

The scientist who helped invent core building blocks of modern AI just walked away from Meta - with a blunt verdict: Large Language Models (LLMs) are a dead end.   In this episode of Real Talk, Sam Holcman unpacks why LLMs are fundamentally flawed as a foundation for serious enterprise decision-making - and walks through a live example of confident, credible, and completely wrong AI output.   The takeaway is simple and uncomfortable: the answer is not “more prompts” or “more tokens.” The answer is to stop blindly feeding the generic LLM machine and start building your own Enterprise Augmented Information™ (EAI) - an architected, governed data backbone that combines processing power with actual context and understanding, on your terms, for your enterprise.

To the EA and BA Community: SAP’s leadership in the Certification Community is moving them from Multiple Choice Exams to Demonstrated Competency. We in the EA and BA Community are next, moving EA and BA Certification from Multiple Choice Exams to Demonstrated Competency.   Enterprise Architecture 5.0 is here now. See more on Enterprise Architecture 5.0: https://www.eacoe.org/enterprise-architecture-5-0   ABOUT: The Enterprise Architecture Center Of Excellence™ (EACOE) and the Business Architecture Center Of Excellence™ (BACOE) provide a universal understanding and competence forum on Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture for General Management, Technologists, Academicians, and Practitioners interested in implementing Enterprise Architecture or Business Architecture. We are practitioner-based firms advancing the Enterprise Architect and Business Architect profession, discipline, and base of understanding - since 1972. - More on Enterprise Architecture: www.EACOE.org - More on Business Architecture: www.BACOE.org

This episode walks through 200+ methodologies, tools, frameworks, and technologies that were once sold as the future” - and are now forgotten, marginalized, or quietly replaced. Sam Holcman, who started his career in 1972 when it was all called “Data Processing” (spoiler: we are still just processing data), shares the hard lessons from 50+ years of watching silver bullets come and go. The pattern is brutal and consistent: every one of these darlings was proposed, hyped, taught, certified, and implemented - only to be displaced by approaches that were more understandable, more human-consumable, and actually usable by decision-makers. If your favorite framework, tool, or “AI-powered” platform vanished tomorrow… would your strategy still stand? Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your objective is enabling enterprise and business strategy. Everything else - every methodology, modeling tool, or framework - is a means to an end, never the end itself.

Shrinking attention spans are not a myth; they are a measurable reality, and EACOE and BACOE are the only EA and BA organizations whose methods are engineered around that reality rather than fighting it or ignoring it.

In this episode of Real Talk with Sam Holcman, we sit down with Mohammed Khalil, a Senior Enterprise and Business Architect who has implemented Enterprise Architecture across multiple industries worldwide. Mohammed walks through how he applied the EACOE methodology at one of Canada’s largest universities to reinvent how they manage curriculum - from idea to approval to delivery. He shares why he chose the EACOE Workshop and Certification over other alternatives, how he went from completing the EACOE Workshop to real implementation by Monday morning, and the concrete business results that followed: faster, cleaner decision-making, a clear three-year roadmap the business actually understood, and stakeholders who finally felt like architecture was working with them, not to them.  Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/74lfKxzP8lw ABOUT: The Enterprise Architecture Center Of Excellence™ (EACOE) and the Business Architecture Center Of Excellence™ (BACOE) provide a universal understanding and competence forum on Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture for General Management, Technologists, Academicians, and Practitioners interested in implementing Enterprise Architecture or Business Architecture. We are practitioner-based firms advancing the Enterprise Architect and Business Architect profession, discipline, and base of understanding - since 1972. - More on Enterprise Architecture: www.EACOE.org - More on Business Architecture: www.BACOE.org

A great enterprise architect and business architect is defined by mindset, behaviors, and outcomes in the real organization, not by the ability to pass a multiple‑choice exam.  Listen in for valuable parameters to think about.

Welcome to Real Talk with Sam Holcman, where we connect ideas, innovation, and intelligent decision-making. Today’s reflection: irrational exuberance - a phrase coined by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan in 1996 and revisited today through the lens of the AI revolution. Greenspan’s words warned of a human tendency - collective overconfidence - when belief outpaces evidence. It describes markets, but really, it describes us. Fast-forward nearly three decades, and you will hear the same energy around artificial intelligence: limitless potential, intense speculation, and a sense that this is the future.

TOGAF® is talked about and used, but an increasing number of major practitioners and researchers argue that it misses several critical ingredients for modern, outcome‑driven enterprise architecture. In the age of EA 5.0, these critical ingredients are lacking.  This broadcast will outline these ingredients that are lacking.

Today’s Broadcast. Billions were wasted, companies bankrupted, and governments embarrassed - all because of something we take for granted: software. This article is based on an outstanding article titled “Why Software Fails” by Robert N. Charette, in IEEE Spectrum, December 2025. You have probably heard the old saying “software is eating the world.” But what happens when software eats itself?

When evaluating Enterprise Architecture (EA) or Business Architecture (BA) advice, focus on whether the person, book, website, or post can demonstrate real decisions changed, risks reduced, or value created - not just fluency in frameworks and jargon. The most dependable advisors and materials walk through concrete situations, artifacts, and outcomes, and openly acknowledge what they learned. Remember that the time you spend consuming advice is often more valuable than the money you spend on it.

Agentic AI is accelerating all the trends that EA 5.0 and EACOE have been arguing for years: architecture must be business-led, continuously adaptive, and tightly connected to how work actually gets done. In this environment, the EA role does not disappear; it shifts toward orchestrating agents, data, and business capabilities in real time, which is exactly the role EA 5.0 is designed to formalize. www.EACOE.org

No I Will Not Peg My Biz on AI!

"One day, people will realize the DATA BELONGS TO ME" – remember that quote from the inventor of the internet and the web. We do not need larger data centers – we need better data, in an organized manner. It begins with a classification system that organizes stuff – data.  Think a library – the Dewey decimal system is the key to finding stuff – not endless building of libraries. In one study of medical databases, more than 50% of the total clinical text was found to be duplicated.  Google says 60% of the internet is duplicate.