Composibility » Architecture

Beyond Software Architecture

travis — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:59:15 +0000

Some of you may be aware I’m currently in an Executive Master of Business Administration program right now. It is pretty exciting and I’m learning a ton. I’m currently in our marketing seminar. While I’m nearly complete with the class, I picked up a book I read a few years back. Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions by Luke Hohmann.

I liked the book very much because it really gets you to think of the customer of your software solution (as us IT folks have a tough time doing sometimes). As software or solution architects we need to make sure that we have a good solution for our customers on day 1 and on day 400. The book didn’t discuss in detail how to lead development teams as it is written from a product managers view of software. Product Managers should be considered marketeers in software product companies. The book describes brand, usability, software GA & Beta release cycles, technical ease concerns (like installation and patch management) but after reading the book felt I need more and something maybe be missing.

Well I what was missing in my MBA marketing seminar. I wouldn’t recommend this book outside of a graduate level program but we are walking through Marketing Management: United States edition by Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, take a look here. I’m sure there are other books that get to the point quicker. I found that this book in combination of the Hohmann book has really given me some good insight to Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions. I knew many of the components prior to reading either book or being in the class but its been really nice to see how it all fits together.

Currently, in software companies, all the rage is a new marketing book title Blue Ocean Strategy. I haven’t read it yet as the MBA keeps me reading a lot but it’s on my book shelf for when I get a break.

FEA and Content Integration – Gilbane DC

travis — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:29:54 +0000

I forgot this from months ago. I should post my slide deck from the “The Gilbane Conference – Washington DC: A conference on Content Technologies for Government and Non-Profit Agencies in Cooperation with CMS Watch.” I presented on the FEA and Content Integration. In a nut shell I explained parts of the FEA and its alignment to ECI. Note that ECI is more than just technologies but its an architecture. The FEA intersects with ECI in the Technical and Data Reference models.

Cheers!

Mid-Atlantic IASA Presentation

travis — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:01:44 +0000

I had the pleasure to present to the local chapter of the IASA. I spoke about an ECI project focusing in on the Information Architecture work that happens with the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). I also spoke about some technical considerations and patterns that can be used in an ECI project. I had about an hour long presentation and we had about 30 minutes of conversations. There was quite a bit of GREAT feedback and GREAT discussions. Here is the slide deck with presenter comments so that you may some what follow along with some more context.

The Big Picture

travis — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:05:49 +0000

“All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.” – Ernest Hemingway

Even Hemingway had thoughts on architects. In many conversations about the requirements of an architect I usually here people say that architects are big picture IT people. I do agree that architects need to carry a vision for and a roadmap to get to a big picture. Architects should be able to do the same for small pictures. Additionally, the architect better be able to single-handedly build small pictures. When an architect lays out a complicated design or use case the architect should be able to produce some runnable, usable, understandable documentation and code. If the architect doesn’t understand how to produce the micro level artifacts than I think that that architect may be an IT manager disguised as an IT architect.

There are many articles (opinions) on what an IT architect is and does. Here are two recent articles about what is an architect. I wrote about it in the IASA Newsletter. I like this article about enterprise architects and if you’d like to read more try Google.

DCBUG presents: SOA Distilled

travis — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:59:09 +0000

Invitation:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the not-so-new buzzword flying around the IT Industry. Organizations indicate they need a SOA, but are not sure how to implement a SOA or even define the Word “SOA” itself. With numerous SOA definitions being published throughout the industry (vendors, governing bodies, open source organizations, academia, etc…), how do you know how to define SOA and what it means to your business offering and current/potential client-base? How do you know your SOA Taxonomy is the same Taxonomy other organizations are using?

Many providers, programs and projects claim they are implementing SOA, but are they really doing so?

Please register at BEA’s Dev2Dev site.

Who’s Ted

travis — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:07:01 +0000

I recently ran across the ted.com website based on a blog entry from Thinking and Making. The TED site is opening (through video casting) a window to an “exclusive” or maybe better an “inclusive” group of some thinkers and achievers on TEDTalks. Other presenters of interest: if you’re a lefty then you’d like Al Gore’s talk, if you’re a righty Rick Warren from saddleback speaks about having a purpose filled life, and if you need some motivation (or better: inspiration) Tim Robbins presents. Personally I enjoyed some of the Architect’s presentations.

Not many disagree that the IT Software industry needs some self regulation and that we don’t have to reinvent things. For instance Architects have been around for a while and are better regulated than their software counterparts. So, when I can, I read about and research non IT architect related architecture items and design principles.

An impressive presenter and architect named Joshua Prince-Ramus, I guess he is the “lead” architect on the Seattle Public Library building. If you are a software architect, or for that matter, any type of IT Architect, you should review the video. Joshua shows with simplicity how to find large project requirements and get developers to build the requirements. Although he talks about concrete and physical structures, an IT Architect should definitely understand how it relates to code and silicon.

Hyper rational process

Loose the baggage of “rational” thinking to come to a better conclusion.
Think about design as typical requirements, in against the grain patterns.

Architecture by team

Everyone on an architecture team owns the authorship as no one person owns the architectural artifacts.

Design to Compartmentalized Flexibility

Keep requirements distinct in the design.

Take a look at the Louisville project. The architect actually explained how the developer can build the architecture cheaper by utilizing an unconventional building development pattern.

Another, architects (presentation) at the TED site is Cameron Sinclair. He discusses an open source model of architecting and designing for times of humanity crisis. IT architects can take away a few items of interest and apply them in architecture practices.

Getting the “Community” (read: owners) to accept and own the design.
Design is to improve the community and not to design a jewel.
Starting/Growing/Cultivating an architecture community of practice.
Promoting good design practices.
Working with governance and be a good governor.
Architects are more like conduits.

Bill Joy spoke at TED as well, and I sent an email off to the TEDTalks people to see when they’ll cut the video for his presentation. Hope to see it soon.

Enterprise level workflows require Enterprise level technologists.

travis — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:06:49 +0000

All too often I hear fellow techies getting it wrong while implementing integration projects. We seem to try and immediately go after “the low hanging fruit” that is getting two or more systems to exchange data. Too bad that exchanging data has become the mundane part of an integration project, thanks to current standards. Techies and other project participants need to take a step back and work with the business owners to document the “as-is” workflows, data schemas, taxonomies, and all other boundary items to validate the business feasibility of implementing the workflow. There are way too many boundary items in many workflows that are not considered until the end of the project’s process. Let’s look at a simple example workflow in a picture, because we can.

An Accounts Payable department requests for IT to build some automation for on-boarding a new Vendor. This is what the IT department in conjunction with the AP department builds.

A new vendor gets added to you Vendor Management application. Some data is exchanged to the AP system. Some data entry happens in the AP system and is promoted to an active Vendor. A nightly cron (read: batch script) runs that sends the new active vendor information to the Enforcement application. AP is assures that the requirements are implemented. This is the end of the AP project.

However, the workflow continues because of previously built requirement. An exchange of data between the Vendor Management application and the Enforcement application was built by others in the IT department.

An automatic generic Policy is assigned to the new Vendor, as part of the new vendor rules in the Enforcement application. The problem is that the Vendor hasn’t finished the original contract and gets immediately flagged by the Enforcement application’s new default policy for underperforming in their SLA. The negative data gets sent to the Vendor Management application and alerts Sr. Management as to the negative performance of the new Vendor.

The project team that approved the project artifacts and built this integration missed some important steps. The integration/workflow designers missed a human/manual phase gate that is installed in the process at the #2 arrow. There is a wait task; an enforcment application administrator used to wait for a phone call from the Business Owner of the Vendor Management application for authorization to input the vendor into the Enforcement application with a specific custom Policy.

his is a simple example of how not watching the true enterprise workflow is dangerous. This happens in not just integration projects but also in content life cycle workflows. A piece of content can easily move to a published state without all the right people and groups being allowed to review the content. We all know that some content, when published, can become highly visible, to not just customers but regulators as well. So it is important to know, not just some, but all the rules and tasks of the complete workflow before process are computerized.

Moderating at the Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for Government

travis — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:52:21 +0000

This last Wednesday I “Moderated” a presentation given by James Melzer. I figured I would try my hand with this podcasting thing. So with James’s permission I used my Olympus digital voice recorder (WS-100) and taped his presentation. I used Audacity to edit the audio. I was very pleased with the control and ease that I was able to edit and prepare the audio. I know some audiophile’s out their will provably say that my editing skills suck but to them I say “Hi, I think the quality is ok.” You can hear all of the presentation just fine and all the questions you can hear by increasing the volume. Here is the actual presentation if you would like to try and follow along with the mp3.

Oh yeah if anyone knows of a opensource (linux or windows based) non-linear editor that exports to flash or a quicktime please leave a comment. I was fooling around with sync’ing the presentation images with the audio. I was able to edit it well with my normal DVD editor but the issue is that it would only output mpeg4. The file ends up being like 510MB’s at a low quality setting. I would like an editor that could export the video to make the file a lot smaller and sorry I don’t want to use the M$ file format.