Architect Survey at IASA NYC

  • Article

An interesting post from Bill Zack on "What topics architects are interested in?". While it doesn't give us the breadth that we would like, it does give us an idea what keeps these 25 IASA architects up late in New York City.

It interesting to see the major trends below:

  • For the most part architects are still trying to solve existing problems and are less concerned or worried about future architecture styles or patterns (i.e., Cloud or S+S)
  • Architects are still trying to get a handle on process
    • Architecture Development Life Cycle (#5), SDLC (#5), Agile (#4), EA Practices (#1), Technical Strategies (#7), Six Sgima (#8), Test Processes (#6)
  • We are still wondering how to interop between .Net and J2EE :)
  • Architects do not want to reinvent the wheel. They want proven practices from the industry.

 

Top 8 List

#1
Enterprise Architecture: Successes and failures, what worked and what didn’t.  Lessons learned

#2
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

#3
Cloud Computing, SaaS, S+S. Offshoring and Outsourcing. Cloud Infrastructures. How Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. do it. Cloud Virtualization

#4
Presentation by local companies on how they handle Enterprise Architecture
Agile Methodologies (including Agile Architecture, Scrum , Lean)
Industry Architecture practices (Financial, Telcom/Media, Government, Health)

#5
Application/System/Project Life Cycle Management.
Distributed caching
Business Intelligence, Data Modeling, Data Warehousing
Case Studies, Case Studies!
Architect soft skills (Presentation skills, leadership, persuasion, politics, etc.)
Business Process Reengineering
Modeling (Data, Architecture) Concerns and tools
Scalability (web and database)
Usability
Real-world relationships between Architecture, Development Operations and Quality Assurance
Domain Driven Design

#6
Concurrency, parallelism and the death of Moore’s law
Test Driven Development
When to replace old systems. The end of the life cycle
Siloed Information systems and how to integrate them
Virtualization
Open source economics, tools and licensing issues. GPL, FreeBSD, etc.
Career development

#7
Why Projects Fail
Defining Technical Strategies
Defining the roles and responsibilities of the architecture group (case studies and/or panels)
Representational State Transfer (REST)
Rule based computing
Data presentation Methodologies (Aggregation, Visualization, Presentation)
Risk Management
Master Data Management (MDM), Data Governance Strategies
Simple Iterative Partitioning (SIP) Methodology workshop
Performance metrics
Forecasting Methodologies
Enterprise Architecture Frameworks
Portals (.NET and J2EE)

#8
Interoperability between J2EE and .NET
Six Sigma
IP protection considerations
TCO and other cost/benefit measures