It's been 3 weeks of presenting for me for two separate events; Microsoft Architect Councils in Christchurch, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Auckland, and a BrightStar Enterprise Architecture conference also held in Auckland. The tripping is now over and it's time I put some background material up onto this blog.
For the BrightStar conference attendees I know you can get the presentation from the BrightStar site and you should have been provided with the link and credentials from Brightstar.
For the Microsoft Architect Council meetings, which were public events, I've got a copy of the presentation loaded on my public SkyDrive folder.
Looking back over the presentations it's now easier for me to see the main themes come through and to recognise which have raised the most interest from attendees.
In random order they appear to be.
- The recognition of business value in the IT shared service line and the special function of architects to enable change, especially disruptive change in a company; something typically unrecognised in companies as typified by the statement fragment 'the business must make the decision...'.
- The explicit recognition of the conflict of interest between building a product right and building the right product and why this leads you away from a single project manager role in your project delivery towards separate programme and product manager roles.
- The discussion in the presentations about the normal but arguably short sighted pecking order of market facing teams over shared service lines and why this leads to the failure of brands and companies due to disruptive innovations.
- Why companies fail to be creative because they deny their staff the time fully saturate themselves with all the information required to solve a problem, and the time for their subconscious mind to actually figure it out. You can't achieve innovation in a project, projects are defined once you know what you're planning to do.
- The importance of addressing complexity and efforts to do this from modular programming through object orientation and service oriented architecture with lots of references to the work of Roger Sessions and his recent complexity papers.
All in all it was a great experience that benefited me probably a lot more than the attendees so a big thank you goes out to Microsoft and BrightStar for getting me along.
