Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : architecture

Enterprise Architecture framework comparison on MSDN

pooyad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:48:00 GMT

Browsing the MSDN Architecture Center I ran into a nice article on descriptions and comparisons of the major Enterprise Architecture frameowrks.

I always go back and forth with my feelings on Enterprise Architecture. Everyone knows we need it, but it's so hard to get right that it has a pretty bad reputation in most large organizations. Enterprise architects tend to be seen as "academics in the ivory tower" whose work does not have a major impact on day to day operations of IT.

As with everything else in IT, I think the forgotten aspect is people. When done poorly, enterprise architecture design is a multi-year project that is done mainly in the "CIO's office" and does involve the IT team on the ground. It ends up consisting of many documents (artifacts) that no one will ever read again once the project is completed.

When done well (as described in parts of the article), it gets buy-in from the business at the start and involves the people who are currently developing and maintaing the IT infrastructure throughout the process. The article talks about bringing in a consultant in most of the hypothetical scenarios, but this can be very hard to do right. The consultant must be an expert in enterprise architecture but also has to work extremely well with others, since we all know how IT people tend to be when outside consultants are brought in to augment their work.

Read the article, it's a good description of the different frameworks and might give you an idea for which (or which set) may work for your organization.

Architecture Thursdays webcasts for aspiring architects (May 24th)

pooyad — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:08:00 GMT

A well respected colleague of mine is working on a series of webcasts for aspiring architects, this should prove to be an incredibly valuable series especially for everyone who is a part of GulfSkyscrapers.

I'll be attending and I invite all of you to join me. We're planning on hosting this at Microsoft Offices with pizza for everyone and some great discussions afterwards. Hope to see you there. Register at the links below:

There will be a series of 4 webcasts on consecutive Thursdays covering the following topics:

Architecture 101 (Mohammad, May 24)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338971&culture=en-CA

Software development lifecycle and methodologies (Dave, May 31)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338974&culture=en-CA

Services orientation and other architectural paradigms (Dave, June 7)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338978&culture=en-CA

Transitioning from a developer to an architect (Mohammad, June 14)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338980&culture=en-CA

Microsoft Architect Forum: SaaS session

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:21:00 GMT

A great overview of Software as a Service (SaaS) from Kevin Sangwell.

Micrososft Architect Forum: SOA session

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:20:00 GMT

Here is my presentation on Service Oriented Architecture. I tried to make this a practical guide and discuss what I consider a very important (but often neglected) aspect to a successful SOA implementation, business modeling.

It is in powerpoint 2007 format, the 2003 version is too large to post, but I will convert to PDF soon and update.

Microsoft Architect Forum - Dubai March 27th

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:56:00 GMT

Thanks to all for attending the first (of many) Microsoft Architect Forum in Dubai last week.

As promised, I'm posting the slides from the sessions for everyone who attended and for those who did not have a chance.

Each session is posted seperately, most are already online (see attachment to each blog entry covering the session), the others will be soon. Below is the opening by Arvindra Sehmi and Pooya Darugar.

Architecture is Magic!

pooyad — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:56:00 GMT

That seemed to be consensus of some very long discussions with Udi. In essence, I'd like to have a way to make architecture more concrete, have a roadmap for how someone can become an architect, have some way to rate how good architects are, and make our profession more understandable for others and was looking for ideas on how to do this.

I know this is hard (maybe impossible), but I think it's part of our responsibility as architects to groom the next generation and try to make our profession easier to grasp and aspire to. We talked about so many subjects at length and at the end that was the only thing we could agree on. I think this reinforces some of my thoughts that a large part of the skills needed to be a successful architect is problem solving. This particular set of problems happen to be in the field of IT and around software and infrastructure design, but the general problem solving skills are still what seperate the good architects from the bad ones. Obviously technical knowledge is a fundamental requirement but being able to apply the wide array of technical knowledge to a specific problem is the key.

I'll have a lot more to say on this subject in future posts, but for now I'm trying to do my part by encouraging the architect community in the Gulf to get together in a forum and have these kinds of discussions. I think the more smart people we have dreaming up ideas on how to do this the better we'll be able to make progress on this problem for our whole profession.