Microsoft Architect Insight Conference

Micro-Presentations

2008-04-01T16:33:00Z

We wanted to give everyone who wants it the opportunity to present at the 2008 Architect Insight Conference (AIC). In order to stand a chance of accommodating the demand, we had to create a session that was a little different from the normal presentation setting. I’d like to introduce you to Micro-presentations. Micro-presentations are an excellent way to convey a lot of information to your audience in a short period of time.

The rules are simple: 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. The slides should be configured to automatically change after the 20 seconds. This ensures the rules are followed, and makes certain we have some fun J The subject is down to you, but should be interesting to the audience, i.e. your fellow AIC attendees.

If you fancy a go send your presentation to msaic@microsoft.com, or turn up on the day with your deck on a USB stick or your PC. Please be aware that we will be limited for time so we’ll run on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.

Btw – I forgot to mention, the presenter of the best session gets an Xbox 360 J

Any questions send an email to the above alias or post a question to the blog.

Simon

Welcome to the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008 Blog

2008-02-27T12:53:00Z

Join Microsoft on 28 - 29 April 2008 at Beaumont House Old Windsor for a two-day architectural retreat designed for senior enterprise, solutions and infrastructure architects, plus CTOs and senior IT decision makers.

The purpose of this blog is to update all conference goers and other interested parties of the latest updates to the agenda and individual sessions during the final run up to the event.

To take a look at the agenda and to register please go to www.microsoft.com/uk/architectinsight and take a look!

Read the press coverage on Insight Conference

2007-03-23T15:02:00Z

Since the conference earlier this month, there's been a fair bit of coverage from journalists such as Tim Anderson and David Norfolk, part 1 and part 2. Have a read and let's continue to drive the debate on the topics covered at Insight.

Switch onto ARCasts - 1st Insight interview is now available!

2007-03-20T17:27:00Z

If you didn't manage to catch Ron Jacob's ARCast live interview with Richard Hall, CTO of Avanade UK, while you were at the Insight Conference, then it's now available to download from here. Richard is talking about "The Gridframe Era", and it's well worth tuning in.

Insight presentations now available

2007-03-15T19:57:00Z

The presentation decks from the recent Insight Conference are now available to download from here.

SOA underground

2007-03-12T19:56:00Z

A great session at Insight was the one produced by the boys at London Underground. If for nothing else you've got to see their demo!

Here's a great article from Tim Anderson, one of the reporters at Insight this year!

The Future Clinic

2007-03-12T12:39:00Z

The software industry is experiencing a phase of dramatic growth and change through advances in communications, technologies and the globalisation of markets. Given this fast pace of change it is easy to think that predicting near impossible. However, given these dynamics it is essential that an organisation is able to adapt and respond quickly and therefore play a part in understanding emerging trends and their likely impacts.

Give these factors what are the major opportunities for the industry to grow rapidly over the next 5 to 10 years?

What should the industry be doing now to shape this future rather than waiting for the future to hit it?

Notes

Ubiquity of network

Off-line v on-line
Always –on
Simpler, cheaper applications
Browser world (10-15 yrs)
Practical models – greater abstraction
Richer interfaces
Semantics v syntax

Business focus v IT focus

How do we capture requirements for out-sourcing?
Training of an architect
Will anyone write code?
Or will computers write code for us?

Service Oriented globalisation

Network services
New stuff – technology, wasted resource to learn
Lag support for new products
More plg to migrate, interop

National boundaries

Globalisation – driven by costs, time (follow-the sun)

Education

More business engagements
Scholarships
Accreditation Architecture
UML-BPEL-business logic

Innovation Clinic

2007-03-12T12:38:00Z

The software industry is experiencing a phase of dramatic growth and change through advances in communications, technologies and the globalisation of markets. What are the challenges and strategies to ensure that the UK remains ‘the place to be’ for investment and entrepreneurial ideas.

The culture in the UK seems to drive against the entrepreneur (mentality) but this is changing with Web 2.0 etc. and this is changing globally.

This is not entirely a question about increased VC investment which is a drop in the ocean when compared to public capital investment.

What does innovation mean to an organisation and what are organisations doing or what should they be doing to encourage innovation both within their organisations and externally?

Notes

The Innovation squeeze

IT is not able to innovate within the Enterprise.

IT does not necessarily know how to innovate within the Enterprise

Innovation is suppressed by processes and constraints placed upon IT

The business innovates and then imposes this on IT as requirements to deliver faster and cheaper.

Too much time is spent on fixing what is wrong with IT

All this squeezes innovation out of IT and out of the organisation to SMEs

SMEs have more freedom to innovate but the conditions in the UK do not make this easy either.

Taxation is to prohibitive to innovate

This then forces innovation out of the country along with the innovators themselves to other countries with better climates etc.

Globalisation Clinic

2007-03-12T12:36:00Z

The software industry is experiencing a phase of dramatic growth and change through advances in communications, technologies and the globalisation of markets. What and how do businesses need to develop and accelerate towards adopting a global business model in order to reduce costs and deliver faster more effective solutions?

How will the SME ISV for example meet the challenges of globalisation so that they can compete and be successful?

What are the strategies that need to be devised?

What are the opportunities and threats that globalisation introduces?

There is no real framework or model to support or help businesses transition to take advantage of global opportunities. What does this framework look like?

Notes

1. Initial introduction and first thoughts around the room on topic of globalisation:

Audience included a few organisations with extensive offshore experience, a few nearshore providers of application development services to their respective markets, a few who were considering / planning offshore activities and approximately half who had no direct experience.

One noted that their business model had adopted Application Service Provision (ASP) for the supply of many key IT systems, increasing their agility but also dependence on a variety of global suppliers.

One academic/researcher noted that their small firm increasingly acted as part of a globalised supply chain servicing clients around the world.

One supplier working closely with government raised concerns over data jurisdictions and the need to ensure security within critical national infrastructure - seen at odds with globalisation.

Local government and SME representatives were unsure of applicability to their segments.

Interestingly few raised globalisation as a source of new markets or differentiated competitive advantage, and most associated globalisation with offshore/outsourcing of IT functions to third-parties driven by commoditisation or resource shortages.

2. Pursuing this topic Group was asked to reflect on opportunity / benefits/ threats regarding offshore/outsourcing:

A few organisations responded with positive current experiences, although mentioned that these had been reached via some painful earlier learning. Others mentioned that 'factory' style outsourcing to a third party had proved far more difficult than imagined, sighting methodology and cultural factors (particularly with respect to lack of documentation to drive offshore requirements analysis and knowledge transfer) which had resulted in far higher management and governance overheads.

Service providers noted that they saw their core projects, with less than ten team members operating with agile development methodologies as 'secure' from offshore competition.

Many noted that successful adoption of globalisation and outsourcing implied a change to their current business model which in turn would precipitate change in IT processes.

A major bank noted that it was in the process of adopting 'follow the sun' business processing with many staff spread overseas (business and IT).

Nearshore service providers (Ireland, Israel) saw themselves successfully competing versus offshore players using their local knowledge and proximity to clients to tightly integrate with customer practice and management.

Many saw offshoring as a staff augmentation activity, and one organisation had established their own captive offshore development facility to closely integrate culture and working practice.

In particular organisations saw opportunity to outsource testing to third parties.

Several raised issues of security and data privacy/protection (including those under regulatory and governance regimes) as significant limiting factors to the use of external parties, especially in other countries with differing legislative regimes.

3. Group was asked to comment on best practice experience in outsourcing:

Many noted communication and governance, and suggested that an evolved model with common process, 'one team' approach was ideal though frequently difficult to achieve particularly with respect to convincing existing IT staff to participate.

Some mention was made of 'impedence mis-match' between methodology levels, especially with respect to communicating requirements and avoiding hidden assumptions.

Effective knowledge management and transfer was highlighted as key to success and needed to be actively managed.

Where more agile development was required, adopting model driven development and continuous test/integration approaches were seen as smoothing the 'factory' approach to offshore delivery.

One organisation noted that difficulties in testing user oriented functionality had encouraged them to perform this phase onshore where feedback from users was easier to elicit, promoting a prototyping approach.

Microsoft evangelists noted that thrust of information worker and development tools development was to encourage closer communication and common practices across virtual teams.

Several noted that their selection of business partners and service providers had evolved to include factors such as geographic reach, cultural fit and focus on quality of training to suit their cultural and business segment

4. Straw polls:

Only circa 5% of Group saw globalisation as increasing market opportunity

Approximately 10% saw globalisation increasing competition

Only 1 member was currently conducting innovation in offshore centres

Vast majority thought Software as a Service (Saas) from third-parties would never be adopted by their organisation (circa 75%)

Few had seen any distinct change in business model due to globalisation which had in turn changed IT architecture or geographic deployment (one example given in re-insurance industry selecting offshore centres such as Bermuda for taxation/regulatory reasons, driving new IT systems to be deployed there but accessed remotely)

5. Asked how globalisation influenced architectural decisions:

Several organisations, particularly in finance, mentioned data architecture and governance being heavily influence by location/legislative regimes with respect to compliance/storage/sharing.

It was noted that many areas had high 'regulatory flux' such as China, vastly complicating architecture and design processes. Architects mentioned having to conduct first hand discussions with national regulators and extensive peer group contact to keep pace with change as no central source available.

Many saw specification/documentation standards as having to be evolved to keep pace with globalisation.

One mentioned use of thin-client solutions to provide global access but ensure data resided locally due to regulatory restrictions.

Many saw adoption of standards as key, particular within their own IT supply chain (up and down stream).

6. Final round of comments, thoughts across the Group to close:

Both local government and SME organisations saw direct access to offshore solution providers as unlikely.

However when questioned, government bodies certainly saw possibility of using common shared service models across UK public sector, which in turn might be provided or resource globally.

For SMEs they also saw the likelihood of trusted intermediaries (such as telco players) providing comprehensive IT management services which in turn might incorporate third party/offshore elements

Skills & Education Clinic

2007-03-12T12:30:00Z

The current thinking is that Higher Education is generally providing a rich set of courses and according to the latest UCAS figures HE acceptances are up and at a record high. It seems that the challenges that are really there are in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and Computing courses at Secondary School (from key stage 2 onwards) and thus the pull through to HE is lower. The subjects are seen as dry/boring/too difficult and there are better paid jobs elsewhere (Medicine, Law etc.).

Therefore, a large potential of students are being missed and it is nothing to do with numbers falling off into HE and the questions is therefore, what can be done to reverse this trend?

The second issue that is surfacing is the weak link between universities and industry that stifles software innovation from working in a connected way. The government too is interested in this area and wants industry to deal with the increasing skilling issues including aging population, rapidly changing work landscape and so on. This has implications for business large and small and raises the question of what is and what should the industry be doing to reduce this skills issue?

Notes

1. Lack of formal Qualifications

It’s not about IT Qualifications
It’s about other subjects
How do we make these subjects more interesting?
They need to be more fun
We need to take a few more risks
We need to value teachers

a vicious circle
Parental influence

More public funded projects
Need to teach team working and collaboration skills
Plagiarism

2. How do we maintain inspiration?

How do you know if you are able to think?

More use of Gap years
Constant rate of change
Balance between “Black box” implementers and composers

3. IT covers a huge range of disciplines

Software Development poorly served by Engineering metaphor
More like advertising agencies?
Creative
Male-dominated
People skills very important

4. Education – shift in emphasis to Money/Cash

Ie focus on paying back of loans
Emphasis on conformity not excellence
Industry – short term approach to finances

Offshoring etc.

The degree one does is not that relevant
More required on people skills
Industry skills -> IT
Funding
Real world experience
Problem Solving
Accreditation

But can you apply what you know

Incentivise industry to engage with people in education

5. Not enough training

Need to educate people in breadth and depth of opportunities
Incentivise Industry – tax breaks

6. Image problem

Unclear career paths
We advertise our failures
Gap in technology being taught
Put motivational individuals in front of your people
PR Job required – need to do better
School/uni syllabuses
Research – better role for universities feeding into what companies are doing

Developing the Future @ Insight

2007-03-12T12:20:00Z

There were several features at Insight that were there to promote networking and debate among the attendees. To be honest they were met with a mixture of reactions - mostly what the heck are you asking us to do etc. etc.

The clinics were aimed at discussing the key themes that have been identified during the reasearch phase for the second "Developing the Future" report which is due out in May this year (click here for DtF1). There are four themes one of which was given to each room as a focus for discussion:

Skills & Education
Globalisation
Innovation
The Future

Each room contained 6 tables each holding 8 delegates selected at random. The facilitator then introduced the session and the groups were given 30 minutes to discuss the theme and arrive at 5 or so points for group discussion. The slide deck will be posted up on to the main insight website shortly and the next few posts will contain the output from each of these rooms.

Thank you!

2007-03-08T15:29:00Z

From everyone involved in devliering Architect Insight we'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone that attended Architect Insight this year and for driving the debate!

Wow! There's much still to do including getting the slide decks up onto the main site along with the other output that was generated in bucket loads!

BTW - what time did we leave the bar?

Keep an eye on this blog as we'll use it to notify you of any updates to the site over the coming weeks.

So anyone think they'd do it again?

Call yourself an architect?

2007-03-02T01:28:00Z

At last year’s inaugural Architect Insight Conference Martin Fowler and I found time to violently agree with each other that the whole analogy between IT and civil engineering was spurious, misleading and based on a failure to understood the very different risk profiles between building a bridge and designing a piece of software.

In a nutshell, “real” architects have a clearly defined role to minimise the otherwise immense risks that would arise during the build phase. That’s why garden sheds are designed not architected. Software doesn’t have a similar high-risk build phase – it has a design phase and a compile stage, the latter being automated and relatively trivial because all the risk is in the quality of the design, not the quality of the compilation. So there’s a good argument for saying that everyone from junior developers upwards are more analogous to architects than they are to brickies.

Having said that, there are important similarities between civil engineering architects and technology architects. We both convert our clients’ wishes into solutions, we are both measured in part on the aesthetics, durability and fitness for purpose of our designs, we both value independence of mind and we are both called to account for the expense and value of our creations.

But that’s not why we call ourselves architects. We do it to create a little prestige and to distinguish ourselves from others that we view as either less qualified or differently qualified. And we have been successful to the point where everyone now wants to be called an architect. There are even job adverts for information architects and migration architects, with job descriptions seemingly lacking any significant architectural component.

The Architects Act of 1997 strictly forbids anyone not registered under the act from practicing or carrying on business using the word “architect”. The effect is somewhat spoiled by the next clause which exempts naval, landscape and golf-course architects, but the wish to reserve the word for a special sort of practitioner is clear. As computing struggles on its journey from wild west frontier to learned profession, perhaps we should be following the example set by our near-namesakes and protect our job title.

So, Essence of Architect – can we define it, and can we test for it? If so, we have a profession and a set of entry criteria. If not, we’ve got an inflated job title that can be adopted by everyone who fancies it. That’s why this year’s Architects Insight focus groups are examining the various architect roles in IT. The ultimate aims of running the focus groups are to:

Introduce consistency in job titles for architects in technology roles.
Limit “job title inflation” where anyone capable of any design activity is in danger of being labelled an architect.
Better differentiate architecture roles from other senior technology roles such as Technical Consultant and Software Engineer.
Further the professionalisation of the top of the IT professions.
Better understand what attributes mark out an IT professional as being suited to an architecture role.
Assess the appropriateness of various qualification criteria to safeguard the professional standing of IT architects.

Mike Lloyd

Managing director, Carbonflame

Software as a Service (SAAS) Workshop – we are all ears!

2007-02-28T00:08:00Z

Successful SaaS - what will it take?

5^th March 14:30 to 17:10

The SAAS Workshop on day one of the conference will be an ensemble effort – 3 of us and many more of you folks (it is after all a Workshop). Richard (who knows about customers), William (who knows about hosters) and myself (who knows about ISVs) are currently working through how to best use the time. We want to ensure everyone in the room (a) at least stays awake, (b) hopefully finds it very useful and (c) ideally gets really stuck into an engaging discussion around what it will really take for SAAS to be successful from the ISV and the customers perspective. This week we pull together the detail of how we will run the workshop and are very open to suggestions about how you would like the time to be used. What do you hope to hear covered? What would send you rushing for the Exit? What is the key concern you have about SAAS that you would like explored? If you have suggestions to make then please contact me (just keep the initial contact short as we can pick it up over “proper” email after that). Thanks in advance.

I am also trying something a little different for this conference. Over on my blog I am creating a diary which looks at how we are pulling together this workshop. Hopefully it won’t put you off too much but maybe it will help you make an informed decision about whether you should attend (Fingers crossed – you will)

All the best.

Eric Nelson
Application Architect
Microsoft UK

London 2012 – Newham – Architecture?

2007-02-27T20:12:00Z

Interesting?

Well it is given the scale of the London 2012 project and Newham’s own undertaking to deploy a Converged Network Infrastructure.

The Architecture challenges we're facing around Network Infrastructure include:

Fixed and Mobile services
Wi-Fi, Wimax
Mesh layer
RFID/NFC

In addition we also need to support Applications for

CCTV
Digital Media
Ticketing
Accreditation
Asset Management
To name a few….

The Newham Technology Working Party - 2012 Games (NTWP) is a specialist unit focused on planning and delivering legacy technology from the LB Newham to LOCOG and the ODA and aims to maximise the legacy potential of the games for the benefit of its community and those of its neighbouring boroughs.

We hope to see you at the Conference and our presentation…