Canadian Federal Government Architect Forum

About: This post provides an overview of the Canadian federal government architect forum organized by Microsoft and provides some information about the upcoming architect forums

Hello,

Last week we organized a forum where top architects working for the Canadian Federal Government got an insight in to Microsoft's plans for the coming years, provided feedback to Microsoft and got an opportunity to discuss common IT challenges. Christian Beauclair presented the infrastructure roadmap followed by a demonstration of Office 12 and Windows Vista by Rick Claus. During the Q&A for this session, the following comments and concerns were discussed

1)      Business users will most probably need training on the new office 12 User Interface. Although the new UI is very intuitive and a significant improvement over the current version, it will be a good idea for IT and business managers to plan for the training strategy

2)      The changes in the ‘early’ release process for Vista and the concept of  ‘Community Technology Previews” (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/)

The infrastructure roadmap was followed by development roadmap presentation by Mohammad Akif (yes that’s me) where I provided roadmaps for Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Windows Presentation Framework (Avalon), Biztalk , Visual Studio (Orcas) and XBOX 360 (yes I could not resist including a slide on XBOX 360 architecture). During the Q&A for this session, the following comments and concerns were discussed

1)      Microsoft needs to provide more guidance on how to upgrade applications written in .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 and to Indigo/Avalon

2)      How to learn about the latest technologies (http://www.microsoft.com/learning)

During lunch, participants enjoyed playing Call of Duty 2 through wireless XBOX 360 controllers before separating in to two breakout sessions for infrastructure and development architects. The development architects, facilitated by me, discussed “Designing, implementing and testing Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)” for more than two hours. It was a very lively discussion with strong opinions and common themes, some of the highlights of the session are as follows, I will be posting my opinions and research on these issues in the coming weeks

1)      Justifying the value of SOA to business users – We decided that it is imperative to translate the benefits of SOA to relevant benefits for the business users. Whereas things like ‘reuse’ might be appealing to the IT management, business user need to know specifically how we will help them improve service to their customer base. I will be publishing a white paper on this subject and blogging about it in the coming weeks

2)      Cultural and organization changes – We discussed a model that is based on incentives and enforcement, requiring executive sponsorship and personal/group motivation to create an environment that encourages the development of reusable services

3)      SOA Governance – We discussed the challenges and potential solutions including the role of registries

4)      Designing and Implementing SOA – We discussed the capabilities of Visual Studio Team System as a platform for implementing services oriented architecture

Overall it was a great learning event for Microsoft and the participants (based on their comments). We are planning to hold similar type of forums for other cities and verticals within Canada in the next six months (Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa), if you are an architect and would like to participate in any of these forums as a participant or a panelist please send me an email. Please note that a significant percentage of the audience and presenters are from a non-Microsoft (J2EE) background and a large portion of the time is spent on discussing technology-agnostic best practices.

I would also love to get comments about the issues raised in this blog, if you have read this far, I am assuming that you find this blog useful J please do recommend it to your friends and coworkers as I would love to involve the larger IT community to discuss these topics.

Best regards,

Mohammad