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06/21/2006 Entry: "Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit: Day 1"

This morning I had a nice (upgraded to first class) flight to San Diego. I could see the hotel from the airport, but it was too far to talk. I caught up with my partner-in-crime Andy and we caught up on all things SUPERVALU and Albertson's.

Today's keynote was very interested. The CTO from Amazon told some great stories. I got great nuggest of information from him and from some of the Gartner people.

We went into the Gas Lamp District for dinner, and I'm stuffed. California does have very good food.

Tomorrow is a full day, but hopefully I can type up some notes and perhaps even post them.

Notes are posted in the entry page.

Time for new leadership
Architects are leaders (process oriented, comprehensive, pragmatic, and quality mind set)
Value is derived in business and financial efficiency
EA can provide a basis for innovation, not just bringing in new technology

Building the amazon.com platform
Shared resources are inhibitors to scale
SOA can provide resource isolation
SOA facilitates transitions from application to platform
Wrap all databases
No direct access to data!
Use aggregators (i.e. services)
Measure at the 99.9% level
Start with the customer and work backwards
Never expect your system to be stable, always assume incidents are happening

Integrating EA and SOA
Architecture is a process, a translation of change
Architects compose holistic solutions
Review IFaPs: Identifiers, Formats, Protocols
Architecture should enable compatibility between past, current, future, open-ended evolvability: design for change
Modularity can be a jigsaw puzzle (400 pieces make 1 picture) or a tangram (7 pieces make n pictures)
Application architecture moves to metadata: software is generic engines (ex. HTML renderer) metadata is the application (ex. HTML data)
Describe all architectures in IFaPs
“Less is more, simpler is better, easy beats hard”
Unintended resuse is good. Better than rote mass consumption.

Intel case study
Skills: business strategy, enteprise strategy, technology, communications, leadership, organizational politics, influencing and negotiation
Good SME != good architect
Continuously consolidate, standardize and retire legacy systems