APIs: Five things you need to know about the Open Travel Alliance

What is the OTA?

The OpenTravel Alliance provides a community where companies in the electronic distribution supply chain work together to create an accepted structure for electronic messages, enabling suppliers and distributors to speak the same interoperability language, trading partner to trading partner.

What does the OTA look like?

A set of XML schemas (XSDs) that define travel-related entities organised into common and domain-specific types. Domains include Air, Rail, Hotel, Vehicle, Insurance, Cruise. AirPriceRS example below (from XMLSpy):

OTA Pros?

• Off-the-shelf extensible set of components developed by the travel industry that can save valuable time and effort when designing your XML message structures.
• Provides a common vocabulary.
• Helps towards developing a canonical schema/data model .
• The OTA is updated twice a year, and all schemas are backwardly compatible.
• Maximum flexibility – all elements and attributes are optional which allows companies to choose which parts they want to use.
• Enables companies to derive maximum value from legacy systems by wrapping them in a service façade.

OTA Cons?

• Provider systems may only support subsets of the OTA.
• Companies often have their own internal vocabulary for OTA entities – mapping from one to the other can be confusing.
• Bespoke schemas will still be required. However, XML namespaces allow OTA and bespoke vocabularies to be used side-by-side.
• If you make any custom extensions to the OTA, these will be lost when moving to a new OTA version.
• The flexibility of OTA entities can sometimes result in unwieldy messages.

Why use the OTA?

The choice of whether to use the OTA or a bespoke solution will ultimately depend on how applicable the OTA is for a specific travel sector and the take-up of OTA by provider systems in that sector. Smart421’s experience of working with Virgin Atlantic to develop their SOA offering is that using the OTA is beneficial.

 

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Network Rail using BigData and rugged mobile to improve their data analysis

Tonight’s British Computer Society (BCS) event in the Davidson Building opposite the Savoy in London was the first one I’ve attended for years. The subject was the Network Rail “ORBIS” programme which focuses on data asset management.

The attraction for me was three-fold: First, I’m developing a keen interest in the railways generally thanks to our work with ATOC RSP and second, because of Smart421′s focus on BigData challenges. Thirdly, the agenda mentioned something about specialist mobile apps, which is my main interest in leading our Enterprise Mobile capability in Smart421 which is backed with IBM Mobility solutions.

The slick presentation from the impressive Davin Crowley-Sweet and his team brought out the approaches to data as an asset and highlighted the challenges of modernising an organisation that still collects much of its information, such as survey data, on paper. The slideshow was “Prezi” style zooming in and out like a game of Angry Birds and contained a LOT of detailed analysis and roadmaps which made me glad I sat in the front row to try and take it all in.

My rough notes are summarised here but I believe the interested reader can learn much more about ORBIS (which has been “reverse-acronymed” with the name “Offering Rail Better Information Services”) from the Network Rail website. The first point to note is that this is not another BigData experiment but an extremely far-reaching business transformation programme, focussing on business processes and aiming to be business-led. There are very serious business benefits already being gained and (according to the paper linked to above)

the £327 million total cost of ORBIS is expected to yield £270 million in asset benefits plus £100 million per year in maintenance improvements.

An iPhone for every maintenance engineer

The company took the far-sighted step of giving every engineer their own ruggedized iPhone along with the request to use the built-in features as best they could to suggest what can be used. Not surprisingly, one of the most useful features was GPS, accurately pinpointing problems with rails. Then when engineering work comes along on the Sunday consigning us travellers to the replacement bus service the disruption should be minimised as engineers should be guided directly to the problem location. Taking photos with the iPhone of problems with rails was another obvious use and now there are Apps being developed (one per month on average) that can automate some of the data capture along with the photos. I asked the presenter Edward afterwards about the apps and he said there are now developments across other platforms and O/S to use other (perhaps cheaper Android-based) handsets. Having around 12,000 engineers with a ~£500 iPhone is significant cost although the positive aspect of the workers being given the desirable devices should not be overlooked.

These unstructured data inputs were combined with significant mapping data, collected using helicopters and cameras on trains similar to “Google Streetview”. I think they mentioned collecting a few Terabytes of data from each train journey that was recorded in this way. That is some BigData problem to deal with the analysis and Network Rail to develop some sophisticated decision support rules around which stretches of railway need maintenance work most urgently based on the data analysed around curvature of the line, weather conditions, etc.

Some 20,000 miles of track, 40,000 bridges and tunnels and huge electrical, telecoms and physical networks make for a highly complex set of problems to manage. The seven year mission focuses on 5 asset types: Fixed assets, Fleet assets, Topology, Topography, Unstructured data (schematics, drawings, etc). It has several defined stages, in stage 1 it asked “what?” and “where?” and continues in stage 2 to try joining up and optimising the collected asset data.

The Contribution of Data Analysis to saving lives

There is a strong emphasis on improving safety through improvements to data management; recommendations following rail disasters like the terrible Lambrigg crash in Cumbria, for which Network Rail are still apologising, said that the points failure could have been detected and fixed earlier with better data analysis. Literally a case of life and death software.

Davin answered questions after the presentation and made the very relevant observation that enterprises should manage their operational data in the same way as they manage any other (physical) asset: know what it is and where it is, monitor its quality, use it while it is relevant and when it reaches end of life get rid of it.

 

Are we architects no longer doing architecture?

Caution workforce in the road!

What would your reaction be if the workforce in the road, fixing the road, did not have any tools or machines to do the job?

Frustration at the waste of time in the resulting traffic queue?

What would be your reaction if the washing machine repair man turned up without his tool kit, without a diagram of the appliance and without access to spare parts?

Refuse to pay the bill?

A security company providing security without enough staff

Questions in Parliament?

How is that so many Enterprise Architects can do their job without the tools of their trade?

Often Enterprise Architects are missing vital parts of their tool kit:

• Standards
• Principles
• Reference architectures
• Models of the Organisation
• Application Landscape
• Analysis and design tools
• Information sources to feed the analysis tools
• Stakeholder analysis

Worse than this they seem to lack the basic tools to be able to create the EA tools they need such as the processes to maintain the models, principles, guidance and governance.

Do you wonder why EA gets a bad name?

I am not suggesting that we go back to the old EA approaches

• Boil the ocean documenting the current state
• Tons of detailed standards (always out of date)
• Heavy handed governance that increases costs,  misses deadlines and the point

And any of the other EA anti-patterns

Togaf 9.x of course points us at lots of artefacts and things to do, it is supposed to. We do not have to do them all, we can mix and match – What happens when we mix and match ourselves out of TOGAF9.x in all but name? Are we no longer doing architecture?

There are precedents for this situation:

SSADM was created and adopted, but everyone picked the bits they liked or could do. No one could afford to complete the whole SSADM – Especially with paper and pencil (there were few tools around).  SSADM became discredited; Every claim of compliance was subject to interpretation.

A similar thing happened to PRINCE.

I guess that there are many other examples of the dilution of the good practices until they are no longer effective.

Will this be the fate of TOGAF?

Are we architects no longer doing architecture?

 

EA & BPM Conference 2012

Last week I attended the EA & BPM Conference in London. This is an interesting event covering the Holy Trinity of Enterprise Consulting; Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and Business Architecture (the key filling pulling this sandwich together).

This was the second year they have collocated the BPM Conference with the EA Conference and I think this makes for a really interesting mix. It also highlights the rise of BPM as a key function in the Enterprise. This was reflected in the exhibitors where BPM was a recurring theme on the majority of the stands. I found there was so much of interest that selecting a session was really tough over the course of the three days so I’ll highlight a few of my favourites.

Day one was a collection of seminars. I was intrigued by Alec Sharp’s Data Modelling seminar. Not for everyone Alec insisted on audience participation as he gradually built up his set piece of normalisation dance moves. Bizarre initially but I gradually found myself totally buying in to this. It’s a great way to reacquaint yourself with the various forms of normalisation. This was however a serious session providing tips and techniques for applying this ‘Misused Technique’. I’ll be laying out my diagrams in a more structured form and looking to apply ‘Guerilla Modelling’ where I encounter resistance to modelling in the future.

I was introduced to Blue Ocean Strategy during Jeff Scott’s Key Note on day three. He showed the use of the Strategy Canvas as a tool for developing strategy potentially making your competitors irrelevant. This was particularly interesting and BOS has been added to my reading list as a source of inspiration for my growing Business Architect’s toolkit.

For me the most challenging speaker, and also presentation attendee, was Michael Roseman. His constant reference to ‘Commodity BPM’ and ‘Cute’ ideas pushed you to think about the desired outcomes and values of your BPM initiative. Sure you need the fundamentals in place but conventional analysis and modelling techniques aren’t guaranteed to produce the innovation Enterprises need in today’s highly competitive and changeable environment. His classification of brainstorming as a child’s technique that is more often than not a hit and miss affair was great. He continued to explain that what’s needed is patterns for thinking and innovating that allow you to move towards a repeatable approach.

It was a great three days with an enormous amount of information and learning to be gained from both the presenters and in discussions with the exhibitors and attendees between the presentations. I’ve come away with new tools, techniques, ways of thinking and an even larger backlog of reading to cover. All I need is some time to sit down with a good book and a cold beer…

 

A history lesson?

According to a Gartner survey presented at their EA summit in London the order of merit for the integration of EA into Business is:

1 Asia

2 South America

3 Europe

4 USA

It demonstrates that emerging economies and their developing organisations are more prepared to engineer and construct their businesses with help of the EA, than organisations in either the US or Europe.

I suspect that history is repeating itself – In the late 1970s Lean Manufacturing (Just in Time) had been developed by Toyota and had just been discovered by US businesses. Toyota, who had had a pressing need to catch up with the USA and Europe manufacturing, developed the processes originally started by Henry Ford.

In the face of competition from Japan in the 70s and 80s the US and Europe needed to catch up with Japan’s manufacturing methods and desperately copied the ideas emerging from Japan and from Toyota.

I predict that from 2013 and beyond, when the businesses in the USA and Europe realize that to compete with Asiapac and South American businesses – they too will have to re-architect and re-engineer their organisations and processes, just like in the 70s and 80s.  This time it will be the business models and the business processes created by EA that will be re-exported to the US and Europe by the developing economies.

Calling all Enterprise Architects – are we ready for the challenge?

 

Enterprise Architecture mistakes – part #1

Over the years, we’ve seen some blunders in the Enterprise Architecture (EA) world, and some reoccurring themes have emerged. Being honest, we’ve even been in the room sometimes when they happen . So we thought we’d document a few of these mistakes – here’s the first three. Feel free to add comments with your own favourites – maybe we’ll collate this info together at some point and summarise it in a white paper.

Introduction

Do these things (below) for a while, and then pack your bag because your EA function will be disbanded. OK, it might be renamed (always a good rule – if a project is failing, the first thing to do it rename it) or re-organised in some way – but it’s just the organisation thrashing around you as it tries to deal with the fact that YOU HAVE FAILED. A clear symptom of this is when other teams start doing what you might consider to be EA work (“hey, I should be doing that”) – that’s when you know you’ve blown it.

Great PowerPoint strategy, but no execution

Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless (Morris Chang)

A common EA behaviour is to specify a preferred technology for some enterprise function, but define no roadmap to create the necessary dev/test environments, train people etc – therefore the barriers to use by projects are just too high for any one project to bear. The strategy is therefore utterly pointless, even damaging in fact as it just wastes resources.

Seduced by complexity

The engineer in us loves it – e.g. we love trying to populate the whole Zachman grid. It’s like Pokemon – you’ve “gotta catch ‘em all!”. Also, we love to have a conceptual model, then a logical model, then a physical model etc – and for some aspects of EA maybe this is appropriate. But the numerous dimensions can multiply up to create a seemingly infinite number of artefacts and viewpoints that you can never complete (and definitely cannot maintain).

If you feel a need to fill in all the boxes or else “I’m not done, I don’t have a complete EA”, just take step back. It’s nonsense. Ask yourself these questions:

• Why are you there? To support the business that you work for.
• Where do they get the value? Probably 50% of the value of EA comes from the first 20% of the effort – having a vision for various aspects of your EA, and a candidate roadmap to get there.

Modeling hell

This is a special case of the “seduced by complexity” error that deserves its own special mention. There is something incredibly seductive about using a model ling tool…

• You suddenly feel “if only I could capture everything perfectly, then the world would be perfectly understood!”…
• …quickly followed by “and if I could capture the right meta-data, maybe I could execute some of my model, or at least have some great live reporting from it!”…
• …slowly followed by several months of coffee and darkened rooms…
• …and then rapidly followed by your notice period

Sure, model ling has its place (a key role in fact) but the trick is to remember why on earth you are doing it and what value you and the business as a whole will derive from it. Otherwise you’ll descend into the 9th level of model ling hell…

 

My advice: Don’t be last

When it comes to adopting cloud computing, to my mind there are three types of company:

• Early adopters who swallow the pill in a big way. They’ll get burned, almost without exception. But they’ll come out stronger, leaner, meaner and faster than the rest.(Netflix, I’m looking at you.)
• Those who do their homework the day it’s set. They’ll either have or will shortly select non-mission critical applications and move them into the cloud, and at the same time start looking to create new apps in the cloud albeit in a low key way. These guys will be slow and steady, but they’ll get there in the end. (Most of the 2015 FTSE 100?)
• Those who do their homework the night it’s due. They’ll wait for everyone else to ‘take the risk’ for them, and only then start a gradual, lumbering migration. Just like at school, these guys will get outpaced by the competition. For some of them, it’ll be a terminal mistake. (Most of the current FTSE 100?)

Make no mistake, all companies will end up in the cloud eventually. How (and if) you get there is up to you.

My advice? Don’t be last.

 

Enterprise Architecture and BPM Conference 2011

Recently, I attended the 3-day conference in London that combined, for the first time, EA and BPM, which had in previous years been the subject of separate conferences, see the overview at http://www.irmuk.co.uk/eac2011/overview.cfm for more details. Thanks to Robin Meehan presenting a session with Visa Europe we got a good deal on the ticket to go to all three days including the Seminar on Wednesday.

The first day gave me the opportunity to see the legendary John Zachman present a half-day introduction to his famous “Zachman EA Framework”. The seminar was subtitled “Enterprise Physics”, which made me think of Star Trek and Scottie the Engineer but maybe that’s just me. Zachman prefers using the terms “ontology” or “classification” rather than “framework” for the core 6×6 matrix (sorry, “normalised schema”) that compares with the periodic table that underlies the whole of chemistry. The main thrust of Zachman’s very entertaining presentation was that nobody can carry out any seriously complex activity without architecture and that architecture is the same for enterprises as it is for aeroplanes or one hundred storey buildings (but harder).

The analogies and application of EA to science and engineering showed how relatively young and immature is the whole practice of EA and Zachman can rightly claim to be a pioneer in the late 1960s and still going strong now at the age of 76. Robin Meehan wrote about him two years ago and I would echo a lot of the sentiments he expressed regarding the energy and passion he still displays.

In the afternoon on day one I attended a seminar on Business Process and BPMN, which told me that BPMN 2.0 has only four basic building blocks that result in 100 or so detailed objects with embellishments and decorations. For example there are something like 63 different categories of “event”. What BPMN 2.0 does is categorise into “common core” of just a few important fundamental concepts that can code the majority of simple business processes. There were a range of tool vendors in the exhibition supporting BPMN in various ways, many now based on standard archimate-style notation.

What surprises me a little bit is the way the business process delegates still seem to think they exist alongside EA whereas by definition EA encompasses the whole enterprise, as Zachman says “The whole thing including the business architecture and processes”, so therefore BPM falls within EA.

Day Two

Day 2 started with a nice opening by Sally Bean (@cybersal on twitter – Twitter was in evidence including tags #IRMEAC and #IRMBPM that I used for a bit) and Roger Burlton (@RogerBurlton) that focused on having a disciplined, coherent and shared architecture strategy that encompasses both EA and BPM; ok, I would argue EA already encompasses BPM but it’s good the similarities and overlaps are now being recognised and acted upon. The other statement that stuck with me was that “The common repository” is critical, something that causes a debate in our group with respect to federated SOA and autonomy of business units within an enterprise.

The keynote was given by Thomas Lawton (@TCLawton) who was clearly suffering with mild laryngitis so has to be applauded for getting through his description of breakout strategy, leadership and vision wheels so well. Some nice categorisations of businesses in frame of their response to the recession (Panic, Protect, Cloak, Conquer) and then in terms of breakout, being offensive (in the “attacking” sense in British parlance), i.e. “…the best form of defense is attack”. He spent a long time exploring the nature of growth opportunities, where Google are a “True Original” taking an emergent market by storm and Tesco are a “Big Improver” moving from laggard to leader in established market. I stopped to think about it and would probably categorise Smart421 as “Wave Rider”, not really a true original but taking on and leading the way in an emerging market (EA Consultancy). The only thing that bothered me slightly was the example in this space was Ryan Air – I’d like to think we have a much friendlier customer focus! Thomas’s “Vision Wheel” was an interesting concept, separating external and internal aspects and the final section was about how to create a “Magnet company” that excites markets and attracts customers. The key seems simply to build the Vision for the future based on the six aspects: Price, Features, Quality, Support, Availability, Reputation. I had a go at doing this for Smart421 below. It would be interesting to get other peoples’ views on the ratings.

The afternoon keynote from Ian Gotts of Nimbus focused on CEOs and specifically selling BPM projects to CEOs. The first rule he quoted was “not BPM”, which was a theme of some other talks “Don’t mention architecture”. It reminded me of the famous football autobiography by Len Shackleton where he entitled a chapter “What the average club chairman knows about football” and left the page completely blank. Gotts’s talk used examples from the transformation of Carphone Warehouse from a basic “phone shifter” to a rounded customer-oriented gadget shop with supporting processes. The slides contained some interesting predictions like the market for BPM services to top $24bn in the next few years and he had a nice graphic showing an exponential increase in spending by 8 of their customers recently (could just be coincidence as business always increases over time). It was entertaining and made me more aware of how to present to senior business-people, as if I didn’t already know not to mention IT terminology.

Also today, I had the pleasure of attending two presentations by working Enterprise Architects from Shell and British Gas. It is always enjoyable hearing about real-world experiences that highlight gaps in the models. Dan Jeavons from Shell is far too youthful to know as much as he does about Enterprise Architecture but I found myself agreeing with what he was saying and it confirms my belief that implementing EA needs sponsorship from the top and there is a right way to do it (meta-model definition before tooling for example).

Jane Chang from British Gas pretty much developed her own practice, on the back of delivering Smart Metering to the company’s 10 million customers. The programme has been a great success and now has a large 400-person development team working on it to meet the architecture vision. A very good end to the day.

Day Three

And so to the third and final day of EAC and BPM and the obvious highlight was the presentation bySmart421 CTO, Robin Meehan and Chris Forlano Lead Enterprise Architect at Visa Europe on “Maturing Visa’s Enterprise Architecture Practice”.

Robin Meehan CTO at Smart421 (pictured left) with Chris Forlano, Lead Enterprise Architect at Visa Europe. Photo by Andrew Smale.

The session was appreciated by all and they asked some very interesting questions, like “How did you justify a 530 days budget for this work?”, which should probably have been answered by Mark had he been there.

Prior to that I went along to a Lean Six Sigma presentation and learnt a few more strings to use around promoting Quality through reducing variance (Six Sigma) at the same time as addressing the 7 Sins of Waste (Lean). I thought Peter Matthijssen was really good at using examples to introduce LSS as a practice for aspiring Business Process Architects and explained the concepts really well.

The morning keynote was probably the best talk of the whole conference by Jason Bloomberg on …. you’ve guessed it… The Cloud!   Or more specifically, “Architecting the Cloud – How EAs should think about Cloud Computing”. Both the Pros and the Cons were presented and the not so subtle message to delegates was to not let vendors drive down the route of private cloud and that public cloud cannot be trusted. I did think some examples: a Cloud employee taking a memory stick to your server and stealing your data, or the police impounding your (shared) boxes because of illegal activity by someone else was a little bit OTT. The main message reinforced our view that you must architect for the cloud and synergies with SOA were well presented, in particular the suggestion to extend SOA Governance to cover Cloud Governance, a reasonable extension as I’ve always thought SOA Governance should govern the underlying platforms for capacity and autonomy anyway. I didn’t quite get his point of Cloud services using REST couldn’t be governed as part of SOA because surely SOA is technology agnostic? His last slide on availability and redundancy with reference to the April Amazon outage provided a good discussion point afterwards and if anything this will be good for service providers like Smart421 offering experienced Cloud consultancy.

My second session of the day was “The Success of a Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture approach ‘STREAM’” by Jaap Schekkerman, Thought Leader Business Technology Strategy. I wasn’t completely convinced that these methods will work for everyone and the recommendation to design business methods on A0 format was provocative to someone like me who believes in a more componentised approach and that a process should fit on a single page to be understandable. Some of his slides also suffered from the A0 format and were incomprehensible. However, I did like Jaap as a presenter and he does have some original methods built into STREAM, which stands for:
Speedy Traceable Result-driven Enterprise Architecture (or Asset/Agile) Management, and it can be integrated with other frameworks and methodologies.

If I have one regret from this conference it is some of the session choices I made – Oliver Robinson’s presentation about improving the National Policing Agency drew a lot of praise, as did Tom Graves from Tetradian on “Respect as an Architectural Issue: a Case Study in Business Survival” but you can’t be everywhere. At least I have all the slides and further references like to tetradianbooks.com for the last one.

I admit I also suffered a little bit of BPM-fatigue after a while of going round the numerous vendors and trying to understand their products. However, if anyone has a need to deliver a BPM tool then I’ve got some good contacts now and a backpack full of literature and demos so give me a call or tweet me @smaley

 

Getting Gartnered in London

From left: Brian Burke (Research VP, Gartner), Robin Meehan (CTO, Smart421), Drew Fettes as Manuel, Johnny Hansler as Basil Fawlty, Neil Miles (MD, Smart421), Julie Short (Research Director, Gartner). Photo by kind permission of Jim Templeton-Cross

During 2010, Smart421 decided it was time to take a stronger position on thought leadership and increase our brand awareness. We wanted to be mentioned in market research reports and appear at high-level events. We set to work to develop a good rapport with Gartner, known worldwide for their research and analysis of the IT market at an enterprise level. They enjoy significant influence providing reports, events and consultancy designed to help people evaluate and decide on technologies and suitable suppliers.

Smart421 has already started delivering briefings to Gartner analysts and is sponsoring two key Gartner summit events in 2011. More : http://bit.ly/b2qEPX

Our first event was the Gartner Entreprise Architecture Summit [website] which took place 09-10 May at the Park Plaza Westminter Bridge, London.  Gartner delivered a very high quality audience exceeding 300 people, 34% of whom were UK delegates. Smart421 was represented by our management team Neil Miles (MD), Robin Meehan (CTO), Martin Brazill (Director of Sales & Marketing). We also invested in deploying a team including Lead Consultant with specialisation is EA, as well as Customer Account Managers. No doubt Smart421′s CTO will be blogging about the conference sessions, which included Brian Burke’s key theme of “gamification” which had delegates buzzing during conversations I had (and some I overheard) during lunch and other refreshment breaks on day one.

From left: Drew Fettes as Manuel, Johnny Hansler as Basil Fawlty. Photo by kind permission of Jim Templeton-Cross

Day one also saw a Networking Reception which provided a informal place for delegates to meet sponsors, talk shop and reflect on the day. After a full day of conference sessions, delegates and analysts alike emerged looking to be entertained and to enjoy some hospitality. Smart421 stepped up to the mark and, even though it was our  inaugrual summit, we managed to pitch it just right with a stand flowing with goodies and our “Dinner at Fawlty Towers” theme, thanks to our comedy duo look-alikes courtesy of Laughlines.

Not that Smart421 can be compared in any respect to a shabby hotel in Torquay run by a maniac, but feedback indicated that people liked the fact we were very approachable, different from the crowd and didn’t take ourselves too seriously. Now that sounds like Smart421 to me.

The Tattinger champagne went down rather well, so did the fresh strawberries from Alder Carr and our Suffolk Cupcakes were a big hit.

Gartner organisation was top notch, the Park Plaza Westinster Bridge staff very efficient, our fellow sponsors very friendly and, perhaps most importantly, the delegates seemed to really appreciate the entire 2-day event.

Photos by kind permission of Jim Templeton-Cross

 

Open Group London 2011 – Enterprise Architecture conference

Yesterday was a busy Enterprise (EA) Architecture day – I was presenting with a colleague from Visa Europe at the Open Group conference, and then was off to the Gartner EA Summit for the evening networking event, where Smart421 was a sponsor and had a stand. Due to a rare piece of good fortune the two events were within walking distance of each other near Westminster, and so I could race from one to the other. I even walked past Vince Cable along the way – despite last week’s hammering at the polls he was looking quite chipper. More about the Gartner EA summit in another post – maybe I’ll even mention Basil Fawlty…

The presentation was about the maturing of Visa Europe’s Architecture practice, and was jointly presented with Mark Pettit (on the left in the picture) who is head of EA for Visa Europe. Smart421 and Visa Europe have worked closely on this ongoing continual improvement process since mid-2009, and so it was nice to be able to shout about our joint success. The EA world certainly needs to celebrate successes whenever it has one, because they don’t seem to be that common . We got good interest from the audience which was flattering, including some interest in using the presentation material as a case study for an EA under-graduate university course in the US (see below).

The attendance at the Open Group event was a little disappointing I felt – maybe about 120 delegates or so, but as always I picked up some useful snippets and a few gems during the day. Your impression of an event is always skewed by which streams you chose to attend, but there seemed to be a strong focus on business strategy (measured via balanced scored card from Kaplan-Norton) and it’s relationship to EA which was interesting – I detected a shift from the historical “is business architecture really part of EA?” wrangle towards general acceptance.

There was a stronger representation from the Middle East than I’ve ever seen before at these conferences, and clearly the Open Group see this as a key growth area. I attended two very credible presentations from speakers from this region.

The final presentation of the day that I attended was related to the teaching of EA in universities, specifically Penn State in the US. Dr Brian Cameron is clearly getting a lot of traction with industry bodies and companies – with really encouraging student employment and starting salary rates. I was surprised in a recent interaction with a university in the UK that architecture in general was so poorly represented in their Computer Science degree curriculum, and so Penn State’s advances in this area show the way forward. Tomorrow’s graduates are going to be assembling solutions from cloud-based components, not writing pages and pages of Java (although this “nuts and bolts” knowledge is still necessary, I accept) – so the EA discipline is going to become an even more relevant skill over time.