George Paras and Tim Westbrock featured guests on A&G Webinar Nov. 16

Join George and Tim for a webinar on November 16, hosted by A&G Magazine.  We’ll also be joined by special guest Dave Baker, a longtime friend and industry colleague from PwC.

We’ll review the findings from the A&G 2011 Year-End Survey, discuss trends we see shaping the role of enterprise architect going in to 2012, and answer listener questions.

Follow this link to the Architecture and Governance Website for more information and to register.

Social Networking – What’s good for them is good for EA

Enterprise architects have historically struggled with the process of publishing content to the stakeholders in their organization.  Conventional advice has been to create an intranet site or other document repository primarily serving static documents such as strategy papers, standards lists, domain architecture documents, models, etc.   That approach has its weaknesses, not the least of which is that the content and access methods aren’t particularly engaging to the larger community of casual stakeholders including members of the extended EA community of subject matter experts and contributors, and the more formal members including senior managers and leaders in both IT and the business.

Many organizations have begun to deploy blogs, wikis and other related social networking technologies in response to demand from various user communities for easy to use tools that support collaboration and information sharing.   In fact, many EA practitioners are well down the road choosing social networking technologies and helping the business develop usage guidelines.  

Surprisingly, EA practitioners as a whole have been reluctant to embrace the use of social networking for their own purposes, namely to share their thoughts and ideas with others in the enterprise, and to welcome commentary and perspectives from interested parties outside their own groups.  The key is to become comfortable sharing trends, ideas about the impact of those trends and thoughts on future EA changes, even before fully formed.   Post often and openly, resist the urge to assign rigorous categories, and tag and link freely.

The technology, and the behavioral changes that can result once the team becomes comfortable with it, can help improve the perception of the role of the EA group by the rest of the organization.  It can further recruit additional participants, effectively multiplying the reach of constrained EA resources.

Hold the Date! – George Paras Keynote at Denver IASA ITARC on May 6, 2010

In a keynote presentation at the upcoming IASA ITARC Denver Event I will be discussing  the leadership challenges that many current and aspiring IT leaders face in their organizations, and how they can overcome those challenges by applying selected enterprise architecture concepts to their decision-making framework.  Not surprisingly, I advocate moving EA “upstream” within the management structure and expanding the context to make it more relevant to the business.   Doing so isn’t easy.  It requires a combination of skills in leadership, process integration within the Office of the CIO, and appropriate content in business and information architecture.   In this session attendees will learn how to get started on this journey.  

If you are in Denver and plan to attend, please let us know.  We’ll be available to discuss  ideas with any organization interested in expanding the scope and reach of their EA practice into business-oriented EA. 

The International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is the premier association focused on the architecture profession through the advancement of best practices and education while delivering programs and services to IT architects of all levels around the world.  The IT Architect Regional Conference is the first event in Minnesota to address the pressing needs of IT architects today. There are 12 seminars and two tracks separated by specialty: Enterprise and Fundamentals. Architects of all levels can take their skills to the next level.

Edmonton – Larry DeBoever speaks about Trends at CIPS ICE 2009

Larry DeBoever will be speaking November 4th in Edmonton at the CIPS ICE 2009 Conference.

Business & Technology Trends That Will Drive Transformation 2010-2012: A Few Big Predictions and a Much Smaller Survival Guide

We are entering a period of profound transformation that is being driven by significant advancements in information technology and the rapidly changing economics of technology. The enormous implications of these emerging capabilities upon the way organizations do their work, the solutions we implement to enable the business, and the underlying technologies are not well understood by executive leadership, IT professionals and the security community. In this entertaining and insightful discussion, Larry DeBoever describes several key technology trends, the underlying ‘tech-tonics’ (the economics of technology) that will accelerate their adoption, and their potential impact upon business, government, education the family, and IT professionals.

Topics include:

• What big vendors know that you don’t
• Three technology trends that really scare me
• five rules for separating real trends from techno-fads
• A six-part Survival Guide. What your IT organization needs to do NOW to stand a chance

Survey: Help Us Plan New EAdirections Events

In response to several inquiries, we have created a survey to the larger community to understand your needs for high-quality, practical and pragmatic education including conferences, workshops, webinars, roundtables, etc.  Please take a few minutes to complete this short survey. 

DRAWING – At the end of the survey you will be asked if you would optionally like to enter a drawing for a complimentary one hour Mentoring Teleconference to discuss your IT Leadership, EA, Portfolio Management, Governance, IT Strategy, Alignment, Cost Containment or Transformational Initiatives.

EA Futures From 22F

At this very moment I am stuffed in 22F on a completely full flight returning from New York and it gave me a chance to look at my journal, and review the notes from a couple dozen or so conversations I have had this week and last. While none of my conversations were specific to EA, there were a number of very consistent and complementary themes which will, I suspect, impact the EA of complex organizations over the next several years. 

 

First, the conversations.

 

Yesterday, I spent several hours with Hardev Dhindsa who has a small firm, Exact Solutions, whose iWatch technology is installed on roughly 2,500 performance critical servers in 7 of the 10 largest investment banks (e.g. Lehman, Goldman, JPMorgan, Barclays) and no where else – let me repeat – “no where else”. 

 

I was introduced to Hardev by a mutual friend who thought I could give him some insight into the potential market for his product and help with strategic planning. As that conversation progressed, Hardev and I began talking more and more about the evolution of IT (in the broadest sense) over the next few years.

 

(At some point I will write more about the evolution of ‘systems management architectures’ but for the moment let me say that Hardev has built a query-level performance monitoring tool that is lightweight, non-invasive and used by all of these banks to ensure very high (subsecond) service levels for SQL queries. The simple fact is that tools from CA, Tivoli, HP, BMC, et. al. provide effective OS monitoring, database monitoring and network monitoring but they don’t provide insight into the performance of SQL queries. Nor do these tools help ‘support staff’ identify which queries create problems. Hardev’s approach is as brilliant as it is simple. And DBAs faced with unrealistic pressures to ensure performance should embrace iWatch to simply prove – “Hey, it’s not a database problem!” But that’s another blog.)

 

On Monday, I spent a couple of hours with Harold Heath who is Enterprise Technical Architect at Citigroup and someone I have chatted with for awhile. In the course of that conversation, Larry Burgess, another EA at Citi who I have met before, joined us.

 

Last week, I was at the GoldenGate User Group Conference where I delivered the closing keynote. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have been on GoldenGate’s Board for about four years and I think they are the leader in transactional data management.) I had the chance to speak to a number of GoldenGate’s clients and partners. Attendees included end users such as UBS, JPMorganChase, Visa, BofA, First Data, Shell, Sabre, MGM, ADP, etc. and partners including IBM, HP, Teradata, Ingres, GE Healthcare, Cerner, Amdocs, etc. The conference had one of the best CIO panel discussions I have ever heard. On the panel were Roger Burkhardt who was CTO at NYSE for 6 years (before recently joining Ingres as President & COO), Penny O’Hara who is CIO for BT Health which is leading the re-engineering of healthcare delivery across the UK, and Craig Murphy who just retired as CTO of Sabre Holdings.

 

Now to my journal.

 

So, I talked with and listened to a bunch of really bright people. At first my notes appeared to be all over the road but I eventually reduced them to a consistent set of nine, very concise, ‘EA Futures’. After reviewing my first draft I decided that my desire for conciseness might, unfortunately, demonstrate the Law of Unintended Ambiguity (I just made this Law up), so I thought a little ‘translation’ might clarify as needed.

 

Here we go…the 9 EA Futures to come out of my recent conversations are:

 

1. ‘Electron-ification’ of all business processes is the goal. Translated as “straight-through processing in as ‘real-time’ as we can make it is how we want everything to work.”

 

2. Self service everything.  Translated as “most users that need to interface with #1 should just do it themselves any time they want; they get better service and we reduce headcount, wahoo!!”

 

3. Active data warehouses. Translated as “‘electron-ification’ requires ‘self-service’ which means information has to be current not just accessible”; said differently, “we can’t do #1 and #2, unless we do #3”.

 

4. Pan-process/pan-service.  Translated as “we need to take an enterprise view of everything (i.e. #1, #2 and #3”) whether we are talking about business processes or application services”.

 

5. ‘XML-ification’ of the enterprise. Translated as “this is how #1 thru #4 talk to anything most of time, and talk in a very agile way, but XML has a lot of overhead”.

 

6. Horizontal scaling is a must. Translate as “#1 thru #5 means way more bandwidth, way more storage and way more processing so you better think in terms of building out and not up”.

 

7. Cost-effective computing is required. Translated as “relentless focus on driving down the cost of terabytes, gigabits and MIPS in the context of #1 thru #6 and the requirement that you bow toward San Francisco everyday” (note: San Francisco was Gordon Moore’s birthplace).

 

8. Open systems is a key strategy. Translated as “Linux” or “you can’t get #7 done without it, and if you can’t get #7 done forget about #6, and if you can’t get #6 done you can’t afford what’s really required for #1 thru #5.”

 

9. Zero downtime. Translated as “planned outages are just as bad as unplanned outages so you better correctly architect and enable #6 thru #8 so you can deliver #1 thru #5”.

 

Yeah, it was a stimulating two weeks. And this blog barely scratches the surface.