Mike Walker's Blog

The State of Enterprise Architecture

2010-07-26T23:25:23-07:00

Recently there was a panel discussion regarding "The State of Enterprise Architecture: Vast Promise or Lost Opportunity?". It was actually a very interesting panel discussion. Take a peek when you have a moment.

Here are a few excerpts that I really agree with:

In a lot of cases, we make a big deal about the technical expertise of architects, but in a lot of architectural engagements that I have been involved in, I didn’t actually know anything at all about the subject matter that I was being asked to architect.

What I did know how to do was ask the right questions, find the people who knew the answers to those, and help the people who actually had the information orchestrate, arrange, and understand it in a way that allowed them to solve the problem that they really had.

This is very true. It is all about asking the right people the right questions and even more often it's about asking those same people the next two or three questions that are the real answers you are looking for. This also isn't something that is easy for anyone to pick up. While the occasional cheat sheet/checklist is good as a refresher to make sure you tied everything off it should be used as the end all be all. Questions alone with out the right people asking them are not effective.

In terms of its maturity as a profession, it may be 100 or 200 years back, compared to law or medicine, but on the other hand, the quality of the practice is much more like where medicine and law were 50 year, 25 years ago.

I have to agree on a lot of fronts. It is somewhat the EA Wild West out here. There are so many competing frameworks, certifications and methods that it is difficult for the EA community to have a common vocabulary or measurement.

The fundamental with leadership in EA is that architects don’t own things. They are not responsible for the business processes. They are not responsible for the sales results. They are responsible for leading a group of people to that transformation, to that happy place, or to the end-state that you're trying to achieve.

Enterprise Architects only have influence to the organization where it needs to be. This is both good and bad. I think that the previous comment made about the quality of the EA practice being equivalent to 25 to 50 years ago wouldn't be the case if EA's didn't have to "earn there keep" as influencers. They have to earn there stripes to be effective in the industry. This is the true test of a good EA.

If you do not lead and do not take the risk to lead, the transformation won’t occur.

As an EA it's all about putting yourself out there and taking calculated risks for yourself, not necessarily for the company.

Again, very good panel with Dana Gardner,Jeanne Ross, Dave Hornford and Len Fehskens.

For more information and the full article:

Transcript (Download)
iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com

IEEE 1471 adopted as ISO/IEC 42010:2007

2010-07-24T13:40:36-07:00

If there was one standard that I believe has high value in maturing it is IEEE 1471. It is the underpinning behind how we describe our architectures. Unfortunately, there is little momentum behind this but we are now seeing incremental movement on it. As we talked about in 2007 in the post, Architecture Modeling - IEEE 1471 has been adopted by ISO there was adoption by ISO but there has been somewhat radio silence.

Now in May of this year, IEEE 1471 has continued efforts to be incorporated by ISO as ISO/IEC 42010:2007 and is now communicating some of it's revised goals.

For those that are not familiar with IEEE 1471 it is the standard for describing architectures. It provides a meta-model that illustrates the relationship of information.

The new joint revision goals:

Widen the scope of application from software-intensive systems to general systems architecture (including enterprise architecture);
Harmonize with the ISO systems engineering (ISO 15288) and software engineering (ISO 12207) life cycle processes; and
Produce common vocabulary to align terms and concepts with other ISO architecture efforts, including RM-ODP (ISO 10746) and GERAM (ISO 15704).

For more information on this check out:

The 50 smartest people in Tech

2010-07-09T10:16:29-07:00

Interesting article on the smartest people in tech. I also had to give a plug to my leader of IV Nathan.

See the article here: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/09/the-50-smartest-people-in-tech/

• How we chose the smartest people in tech

Co-founder, Intellectual Ventures

Microsoft's first chief technology officer is a man of many passions (he's a serious foodie, and his nature photography has been featured in books), but his true love is innovation. At Intellectual Ventures, which funds inventors, Myhrvold, 50, is setting out to prove that funding inventions -- as opposed to business ideas -- can be as lucrative as conventional venture capital. IV today has more than 30,000 intellectual-property assets, acquired and developed internally, many of which seem years away from commercialization, much less an IPO. (Example: an invention to halt global warming that involves creating a thin film of sulfur dioxide around the planet.) But Myhrvold has assembled such impressive mind power that Bill Gates (no slouch in the IQ department) regularly stops by to brainstorm. --B.K.

Who took over Microsofts Certified Architecture Program?

2010-05-07T00:08:31-07:00

In one of my previous posts I shared an email and press release from IASA on the subject. Now I am seeing that the Open Group is debating that fact.

So did Microsoft name IASA's CITA-P certification replacement for the MCA program?
According to the Open Group, No. Microsoft will fund a three year membership in AOGEA, or a one-year membership in IASA and the opportunity to be IASA certified. AOGEA does not recommend that MCA certified individuals replace their certification with any other certification because it still entitles you to the same benefits and privileges, now with the added value of being a part of the AOGEA community.

See the Open Group FAQ for more details: http://www.aogea.org/membership/mca.jsp

So what does this mean? Not one group took over the MCA program to begin with. It’s simply a conversion program for certifications. Microsoft needed to put them somewhere so they diversified. It looks like the terms of the conversion with IASA is a bit different in that it really isn’t a conversion but rather the door in for another test to becomes a certified IASA architect.

The Open Group looks like they are respecting the merits of the MCA program and accepting MCA architects with arms wide open.

No these architects have to ask themselves, which one is more appealing?

A Fool with a Tool is still a Fool

2010-05-06T23:26:13-07:00

Today I was asked a series interesting questions in regards to why architects are so insistent on collecting models. He asked with passion, why there was a need to capture information from across the enterprise in a systematic way. Of course it didn’t help that there was the beginnings of an architectural current state analysis and road mapping exercise on my whiteboard and posted on my wall.

This led into a series of very challenging questions posed:

Why would you build a model/picture of an environment or set of systems when you could just walk down the hall and talk to the person that wrote it?
Isn’t a model subject to interpretation?
If the architects in the company are looking at these models and making decisions how can we be sure they are making the right ones based on potential inaccuracy of the models.

After talking for about an hour about this I was able to finally get to the source of all the questions. As a developer, this person felt that architects and technical decision makers in the organization would take these models and make decisions in isolation and potentially abused on false information that would in turn potentially impact the developer in a negative way. Now we are getting somewhere… We have a case of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt or FUD. But, this fear is a common fear, especially if the organization has gone from little to no architecture maturity to the very beginnings of a structured architecture discipline.

So we have some FUD here, is this unfounded? Absolutely not. Believe it or not, sometimes architects over engineer or model an application, solution, platform or an enterprise in a less than optimal way. Sometimes downright inaccurate way. So is it fair to be worried, YES!

So this is where we actually get into why I label the post the way I did. So in the analogy, “A Fool with a Tool, is still a Fool” we have a direct correlation with this scenario.

When we look at the “Tool”, it would be the architectural artifact. This could be an architecture description, a model or a set of data supporting a solution.

The “Fool” or potential fool is either the creator or the end user of the specific artifact. Let’s just say that it is an architect for a moment. The architect who is going to use this tool or architecture model for a very specific set of purposes. One being, to make decisions.

For example, if the architect is going to use this information to make decisions it is the responsibility of that architect to think about the following questions:

Is this the right model I should be basing by decisions off of?
How accurate is the information displayed in the model? If unsure, ask someone.
Understand the following principle “all models are false but some are useful”. Models that are created will sometimes have interpretation of a problem built in. As an architect you need to know how to quickly identify these areas.
What was the created date?
Are there tools and mechanisms that keep the information refreshed and thus the model can be trusted better.
Finally, don’t be afraid to ask a lot questions!

What about these initial questions around the validity of the architectural approach? Has anything changed? Do we change the way we make decisions? No you do not. All of these questions center around information quality and collaboration. These are core tenets of good architecture practices. Models are extremely useful if used properly. However, we always need to be mindful of the fact, garbage in equals garbage out. The architecture model is only useful as the diligence that went into it, the maintenance of the information and that it is verified as valid ongoing.

The focus on the model specifically is actually the wrong center of focus. The center of focus should actually be on the user of that model. Let’s change the scenario and say that the model is actually 100% accurate. However, the architect that uses it isn’t the most seasoned and makes bad decisions off of a very accurate model. Where is the breakdown?

At the end of the day, the best tools still need a qualified operator. That is the essence of the analogy and why it applies so much to this scenario.

So if you are not challenging and following models blindly, yes, you are the fool in the scenario. But if you understand that architecture artifacts are just one tool in the toolbox and those tools need to be sharpened, tuned and even sometimes upgraded you’ll be just fine.

Microsofts Certified Architect (MCA) replaced by IASAs CITA-P Certification

2010-05-04T15:33:33-07:00

IASA’s CITA-P Certification Named by Microsoft to Replace the Microsoft Certified Architect
Austin, TX, (PRWEB) May 3, 2010 -- In a conference call and email announcement on Wednesday April, 28, Microsoft Learning announced that it would discontinue offering the Infrastructure and Solutions architect certifications, and would fund the migration to the Certified IT Architect Professional (CITA-P) offered by the International Association of Software Architects (IASA).

IASA has created a grandfathering process to allow easy adoption of the CITA-P certification for current Microsoft Certified Architects holding the Solutions or Infrastructure specialization. As MCA’s have already gone through a rigorous interview process similar to the CITA-P Board review, the grandfathering process focuses on mapping skills and experience to the IASA skills taxonomy.

Andy Ruth, the Vice President of Education for IASA, launched the MCA Infrastructure and the MCA Solutions credential in 2004 while with Microsoft Learning. According to Microsoft, the credentials were launched to help establish the IT Architect profession at a time when the IT industry needed thought leadership and architectural taxonomy.

Ruth believes the profession should be self managed by the practitioners in the form of a professional association, as in other industries--medical, legal, etc. “The certification of a profession needs to be run by the profession, not from within a vendor with a specific product or technology. Microsoft releasing the certification to IASA is recognition of that.”

“IASA is not trying to sell a product or specific technology, so individuals and organizations can be confident there are no ulterior motives in their certification and education programs,” said Paul Preiss begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, CEO of IASA. “IASA’s mission is to support architects on their career path, and ensure they have the skills and knowledge necessary to deliver on the core value proposition of the profession: to make and save their employer money through the use of information technology (IT).”

Darren Day, Microsoft Certification Business Manager, who hosted the call for Microsoft said that IASA has "developed large and supportive communities dedicated to the IT Architect profession.” He continued, “They are technology agnostic, respected in the industry, and offer trusted IT architectural programs and credentials for the breadth architect.”

Read the entire release at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/05/prweb3946754.htm or go towww.iasahome.org to find out more.

Solution Guidance Packager for Visual Studio - Feature Builder Power Tool

2010-04-19T16:18:34-07:00

Recently a good friend and former co-worker of mine, Michael Lehman released the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 Preview for RC on the Visual Studio Gallery. This is a power tool that is intended to help Technical Leads or Solution Architects (.Net focused) to extensions, code snippets, guidance maps of tasks or steps, models which can be shared within Visual Studio or with others in the Visual Studio Gallery.

The tool can create two different kinds of extensions using Feature Builder.

Standard Feature Extension - can contain tools, code, and a simple map - it will run on the Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Professional editions (in the final version of this tool).
Ultimate Feature Extension - can contain everything a standard Feature Extension can contain, as well as rich modeling and visualization tools that can take advantage of the modeling platform inside the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition (required). These tools can be used to provide a logical view of your target solution, and to visualize your existing code. This is the preferred type of extension to use if you intend to provide architectural guidance or share specific refactoring or pattern knowledge.

An introductory video (which includes a "hello world" example) is available on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/FeatureBuilder .

Additional information and support will be available via the Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Discovery & Modeling Tools Forum

Microsoft Office 2010 Suite RTM

2010-04-16T17:07:13-07:00

Earlier today Microsoft announced the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. This is a big milestone for Microsoft and much anticipated.

The key dates for folks are:

April 27th - Release for SA/Volume Licenses Customers
May 1st - General Availability
May 12th - Launch Party (to participate in the launch go to: http://www.the2010event.com)

So what do you do if you have already installed the beta and kicked the tires a bit. Well in traditional fashion the folks at Microsoft have made it impossible to have an upgrade path from the Beta bits to the RTM bits. See the following post form a third party source:

http://blog.fpweb.net/sharepoint-2010-pre-rtm-to-rtm-is-not-supported/

In Microsoft's defense, this should be expected as this is the normal mode of operation for pre-RTM bits. For those that have done more than the OOB, chuck it up to experience with the new platform.

The reason behind this decision is, during 2007 Beta->RTM upgrade process, some customers got garbage left (orphaned objects, for example) inside their installations. This caused a lot of support issues in the past and even today they are still coming. When support engineers got a call and dug into the customer's envoriment, after spending a few hours they finally found it was caused by those garbage left. It is a general understanding that Beta software is not supported by CSS for general public as there're not enough bandwidth and resources, so to avoid the problems that would hurt you someday in the future, we decided to make clear that this upgrade should be avoided, unless you have the go live license and are supported by CSS for this process.

Like I said, migrate the data from a public beta farm could be possible for some content. For example, you can write a program that reads the list items in Beta farm to a database table or XML and then put them to a list in RTM farm, keep metadata and permissions. However I cannot answer you if you use a specific API to export data is a correct way or not, that depends on how you use it. There could be 3rd party solutions from microsoft partners.
Jie Li - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010general/thread/b9817862-fd35-413a-b018-ce5c500b6760

Force.com vs Windows Azure - From Setup to Hello World

2010-04-14T15:03:23-07:00

Lately I have been doing an evaluation of Cloud Platforms from a variety of providers. I ran across this interesting video that walks through the setup process and the creation of a simple hello world web application from beginning to end.

The configuration, setup and provisioning steps are often overlooked and it was really good to see someone put this together.

Take a look, I think you will be surprised.

I tried to look for a similar comparison to Amazon, Google and IBM but came up short. If anyone has these I would really like to see a balanced evaluation across the cloud providers.

SharePoint and Office 2010 Keynotes

2010-03-06T09:23:08-08:00

SAVE THE DATE

Watch Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announce the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 11 a.m. EST. The live keynote focuses on the next wave of productivity that delivers:

End user productivity across the PC, phone and browser
IT choice and flexibility
A platform for developers to build innovative solutions

Join the virtual launch event with Microsoft executives, product developers, partners and customers to:

Find out how peers and partners are already seeing benefits to their business by leveraging the next wave of productivity.
Submit your questions through live Q&A.
Participate via blogs, tweets, social media networks, commenting, and more.

View on-demand breakout sessions showing how Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 meet the unique challenges people and businesses are faced with today, and provide the solutions they need for tomorrow.

Get a head start, experience Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 now.

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