REAL Talk With Sam Holcman
R.E.A.L. - Realistic, Enabling, Actionable, Logical. Every day we hear jargon and see writing from so-called “experts,” and we don’t know what we should follow and what we should avoid. Published practices aren’t always best practices! Listen to episodes from Sam Holcman’s radio show, webinars, and podcasts, Real Talk with Sam Holcman. Each episode gets to the bottom of what business executives, managers, practitioners, and staff actually need to create innovative solutions that deliver- no utopia required. This business podcast provides practice-based insights into business transformation, enterprise architecture, business architecture, organizational transformation, and technology transformation based on real-world practices. We provide you with insights that can provide true value to organizations and individuals that face today’s and tomorrow’s competitive pressures and provide a usable takeaway from each program.
Episodes
Welcome to Real Talk with Sam Holcman - where we stop confusing activity with progress and start talking about how businesses actually work.
Today I want to talk about something touchy in the Business Architecture world: the difference between belonging to a club and practicing a discipline. Specifically, the world of the Business Architecture Guild® and its BIZBOK® Guide on one side… and BACOE, the Business Architecture Center Of E...
Many CEOs excel in vision, leadership, and financial acumen - yet remain only vaguely familiar with the disciplines of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Architecture (BA). They hear the words. They see the frameworks. But they do not always connect with the business value that drives strategy, change, and decision-making. That gap can be dangerous.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is shifting decisively from theory-heavy, exam-driven certification to demonstrated, practice-based competence that delivers measurable business outcomes.
- In: Practitioner-based paths that validate portfolios, scenarios, workshops, and demonstrable outcomes - certifying that you can architect, not just that you can pass an exam.
- Out: Credentials earned solely by scoring above a cutoff on multiple-c...
Organizations have been stockpiling data for years, expecting that one day it will become a strategic asset. With generative AI, that moment has arrived - but without disciplined data practices, the promise quickly turns into frustration. The differentiator is no longer access to powerful models; it is the ability to shape, govern, and trust the data that feeds them, which is exactly the gap the AI Data Modeling Masterclass is desi...
Let us start with the uncomfortable truth: large language models - ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and their peers - are built on a foundation that looks suspiciously like “copyright infringement as a service.” These systems could not exist without consuming massive quantities of human-created text, images, and code. In another industry, that would be called derivative work. In AI, it is called innovation.
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 explai...
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...
“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, h...
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 everythi...
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 ...
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 uncomfortabl...
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 Archi...
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...
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.
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 ...
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.
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