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
This topic is one that should sound familiar to anyone who has been around enterprise architecture, transformation, or banking, as one example, for more than a few years: everything old is new again. The latest version of the old story is being told through “purchased models,” “off-the-shelf ontologies,” and what some are now calling the semantic operating system for banking, as one example. Buying somebody else’s model of your ind...
There is a lot of noise right now about Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy, and one phrase you have probably heard is this: “Your AI strategy will fail if you do not fix your data debt.”
Now, there is truth in that. Years of fragmented systems, inconsistent definitions, and patchwork reports really are catching up with us. AI will expose every weakness you have buried in your data.
But if you take that message into the C‑suite or ...
I want to talk about legacy thinking.
Not old thinking. Not wrong thinking. But thinking that was right - sometimes brilliantly right - and then calcified into doctrine.
Look up at the sky. Something remarkable just happened in space.
Blue Origin flew New Glenn - their massive, orbital-class rocket - for the third time.
And they flew it on a booster they already landed and refurbished. The same first stage. Flying again.
That is not a s...
Organizations are learning a costly lesson: AI does not fail first because of the model; it fails because of the data foundation beneath it. More than half of generative AI projects were abandoned after proof of concept by the end of last year, largely because organizations lacked the data readiness required to move from controlled pilots into production environments.
This is precisely why EACOE matters. The Enterprise Architecture ...
Let us be honest - most Enterprise Architects and Business Architects start the day the same way.
You roll out of bed, scroll through overnight emails, open at least six tabs of frameworks you will only partially read, warm up yesterday’s coffee because the meeting starts in five minutes, and think…Maybe today I will finally fix that capability model.
Because let us face it - every good architect knows their day does not really start...
CIOs are under intense pressure to harness AI to drive efficiency, innovation, and competitive advantage - but as a recent CIO article states on reimagining business processes makes clear, the first step is not to “automate faster,” but to rethink how work actually happens before a single model is deployed. In this context, the EACOE Process Visualization approach emerges as a best‑practice methodology for reworking processes in pr...
If your AI and analytics investments still feel like disconnected projects instead of an enterprise capability, this episode of Real Talk with Sam Holcman shows how Palantir quietly turned ontologies into a strategic moat - and how the same ontology‑driven principles behind EACOE and BACOE can turn your architecture into an execution engine for real business outcomes.
If you are a CIO, CTO, or Architecture Manager, you are already paying an “architecture tax” you never approved.
It shows up as overlapping platforms, programs that cannot finish, and “strategic” projects that quietly die after burning millions. The surprising culprit: ten everyday EA/BA words that your organization thinks it understands - but does not.
When these words are fuzzy, your architecture is fuzzy. And fuzzy architecture is...
In both EACOE enterprise architecture and BACOE business architecture, ontology is the backbone: it tells us what kinds of things exist in the enterprise, how they relate, and how those meanings stay consistent as we automate, integrate, and apply AI.
Today, that makes ontology not just a theoretical idea, but one of the most valuable, underused skills in the AI job market – and a critical success factor for serious Enterprise Archi...
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 everything...
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