Architecting Flexibility – Wrap-up and Content
We just completed our six city tour across Canada, Architecting Flexibility. The afternoon event was part of Energize IT, so if you attended any of those sessions, there is a good warp-up post on the IT Pro blog. Thank-you to all who attended! We hope you enjoyed the content and conversation as much as we did. Typically, at this time of year, our team hosts the Canadian Strategic Architect Forum. But, as many of you are aware, we postponed that event until later in the calendar year to accommodate travel freezes, etc. The CSAF is our premier Architect-focused event in Canada and we felt that waiting almost 18-20 months between events was going to be too long – thus the genesis for Architecting Flexibility.
We decided to approach it like a mini-CSAF, attempting to cover topics such as the Architectural discipline, innovation, implications and facilitate peer interaction. Along the way, we had many requests for the content, so this post is all about delivering on that request. However, it’s worth giving you a behind the scenes look at how the content evolved from city to city.
The following are links to the content for:
- Montreal, March 18, 2009
- Calgary, April 1, 2009
- Mississauga, April 1, 2009
- Vancouver, April 8, 2009
- Ottawa, April 8, 2009
- Edmonton April 29, 2009
As the title suggests, our approach was Flexibility, so we structured the talks like this:
- The Plus in “Software Plus Services”: we presented the catalysts driving demand for cloud computing and introduced you to Microsoft’s vision of Software + Services
- Flexibility of Delivery: instead of thinking about ‘solution delivery’, we introduced the notion of ‘service delivery’ and discussed tradeoffs and options between on-premise data centers, partner hosted and a cloud platform.
- Choice of User Experience: it’s all about the end user! We presented a framework and options for thinking about how to architect the right delivery channels for your application.
While we tweaked minor things as we went through the process, there were two key changes we did in response to your feedback. The first piece of feedback was centered on the ‘Choice of User Experience’ presentation – this topic can be challenging for most of us as we tend to spend our time in the technical details. However, if you compare the slide decks from Calgary and Vancouver, you will see a substantial adjustment in approach. You challenged us to present the content in terms of patterns and case studies instead of iterating through the technical options.
In response, we created a grid of options, similar to delivery flexibility, and presented them by iterating through a set of solutions and discussing the “why’s” involved in each decision.
The second piece of feedback we heard was directed at the level of technical and business depth to the content. When we built the original set of slides, we were very careful to target the content at the audience we suggested attend. For the most part, our content was at the level you were expecting, but based on the questions we got and the evaluation results, two parts of the presentation were identified in the ‘Flexibility of Delivery’ talk.
We had many requests for additional technical detail around security and integration. When discussing cloud computing, these questions are always number 1 and 2. We decided to include content about claims-based authorization and the service bus patterns that are leveraged inside Azure’s .NET Access Control service and the Internet Service Bus.
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The next piece of feedback related to the content level didn’t actually have anything to do with technical depth. Architects tend to live in space that exists between the business and IT - facilitating interaction, among other things – and that requires us to have a depth around the business opportunity as well. We got many questions that could be categorized as “(What) should I move to the cloud?” So we worked with our corporate Architecture team, consolidated research notes and presented a framework by adding an additional dozen slides on the economics, risk evaluations, application style and modality, as well as target cloud functionality. We wrapped this section by presenting a fictitious organization and a walkthrough of their application portfolio and how they made the decision.
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Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank our list of panelists who assisted us conclude each event with a peer group conversation. The questions from the audience were always fascinating and the opinions were varied!
- Jason McIntyre, Senior Consultant, Habanero Consulting Group
- Darren Jeffery, Manager, Architecture, Web Services and Principle Architect, FortisAlberta
- Rob Burton, Manager - IT Architecture, WestJet
- Tom Opgenorth, Independent IT consultant specializing in application development with .NET
- Dave Woods, Owner of Solidhouse Inc., A .NET Consulting Firm
- Barry Gervin, Principal Consultant and Architect, ObjectSharp
- Bill Baldasti, Vice President, Infusion Development
- Guy Barrette, Solutions Architect, Microsoft Regional Director for the Montreal region
- Mario Cardinal, Senior consultant specialized in enterprise application architecture, MVP in the competency of Software Architect.
- Daniel Nerenberg, Independent IT strategy consultant based in Montreal
- Jean-René Roy, champion behind DevTeach
- Shaun Walker, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, DotNetNuke Corporation
- Kent Alstad, Chief Technology Officer, Strangeloop Networks
- Rob Church, Director Enterprise Architecture & Integration, Inventure Solutions – a subsidiary of Vancity
We hope you enjoyed the event and as always, continue to leave us feedback in the comments.
Craig Gibson
Architect Advisor, Developer and Platform Evangelism Group, Microsoft Canada
