The IASA World Summit was another interesting event from Paul Preiss and his crew. Seems like the speakers get more interesting and relevant to EA practitioners at each IASA event. The ongoing debate on “Is EA a profession, a role, a specialty or something else entirely?” continued in full force.
Scott Ambler, IBM’s Chief Methodologist for Agile and Lean, spoke of his impressions of the roles and responsibilities of architects in an Agile environment. As always, when listening to Scott, I learned a lot and agreed with most of what he had to say. Since Agile is a development approach, most of what he talked about was pertinent to software architects, solution architects, project architects and application architects, but not enterprise architects. Not to speak for Scott, but I believe that is a distinction that he did not make, but would agree with. Scott?
George and I participated in a lively panel discussion with Scott Ambler, Paul Preiss, and Alan Hakimi, a senior architect in Microsoft’s Cloud Architecture group. A special thanks to Andy Ruth, who quite ably moderated our panel with a great set of questions and a little bit of an edge. We had a great discussion on topics like CEO elevator speech, best traits of an architect, the value of an architect spending time in the trenches, metrics for architecture, and a variety of other topics that the audience seemed very interested in hearing about.
We concluded our participation with a presentation on the roles and responsibilities of various architects across the different levels of enterprise architecture, including a discussion on our position on the separation of business architecture from IT architecture. The presentation was received very well. For a link to the whole presentation, see my post entitled “Architect Roles and Relationship with EA.”
An interesting, although not unexpected, bunch of side comments and discussions throughout the event held a common theme – the impact of cloud computing on EA, IT and business models. George and I will be sharing more of our thoughts on this over-hyped, but definitely relevant theme over the next few months.