I’m really looking forward to them, and hope you are able to join!  Click on the titles to register for the events.

The Future of Mobility

1/25/2011 (10am – 11am PST)

In the few seconds that it takes you to read this abstract, Apple will have sold another 54 iPhones and 11 iPads. Did you know there are over 80 unique Android handsets available from carriers today, and by the end of this month, over 30 Android slates will be available for purchase. Although a little late to the party, Microsoft is also not giving up and is reportedly spending $1bn marketing and developing Windows Phone 7.
 
In this Webast, the first of a new Mobility series from Neudesic, we’ll build on these amazing facts by exploring the emerging trends around mobile device adoption, discovering the types of enterprise applications that people are building today, the challenges they face, and concluding by sharing thoughts on the incredible opportunities for your organization in this fast moving area.

Mobile Business Intelligence

2/22/2011 (10am – 11am PST)

Many analysts are predicting that 2011 will be a tipping point for mobile devices embracing BI. Given the adoption of mobile devices across organizations, in many cases led by the CxO level, it’s hard to argue. But what does BI really look like on mobile devices? Given the screen real estate and touch form factors, what can be accomplished today, and what’s better left to the desktop instead? In addition, what are the factors affecting integration and connection with back end reporting systems?

In this Webcast, part of a new Mobility series from Neudesic, we’ll look at the factors that make BI successful on mobile devices, understand the market landscape for BI solutions today, and cover some of the opportunities and challenges of implementing a mobile BI solution in your own organization.

The Certification

The CITA-P certification evaluates an IT Architect across six core areas:

• Business / Technology Mapping
• Design Skills
• Human Dynamics
• IT Environment
• Quality Attributes
• Software Architecture or Infrastructure Architecture (you pick one of the two)

Each of the above six areas has around ten or so subcategories which go into some detail.  There is a worksheet available here on the IASA site that covers all six, and can be very useful to reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses, even if you are not planning on taking the exam.

The goal of the certification is to gauge your level of competency across each of these six areas.  The majority of this will of course be based on your knowledge, experience, and personal reflections. 

The Process

Because it would be impossible (and indeed, wrong) to certify IT Architects through a multiple choice examination, the process of certification is an involved process, although very well structured.

The first part requires submitting a set of documentation.  The details of what is required can be found in the application guide, and for my submission I decided to offer my perspectives and thoughts across the six certification areas.  I wrote a story about each, reflecting my experience, views, and examples of projects that I’ve been involved in.

After submission, I received my date for the in-person board review, which is split into three parts:  The first part is a 30 minute presentation of your choosing.  The board is looking for experience across the certification areas, and also for communication skills.  Staying within the 30 minute timeslot and having a presentation that is both engaging and covers all of the areas is difficult, but important if you are going to be successful.

Following the presentation comes a line of questioning, with each of the four board members given ten minutes to question you about your presentation.  The idea here is not to pick holes in the presentation or play stump the chump, but merely to validate experience in areas that you may not have shown in the presentation.  A large amount of my presentation was based on a framework around cloud computing, so while I had many questions related to this, I also saw the board trying to relate the material to other areas which I didn’t mention in the material.

After the first round of questioning, you are given a 15 minute break.  This is a great opportunity to get some water and gather your thoughts while the board compares notes to look for areas they might have missed.  Another round of questioning follows (4 x 10 minutes) on various topics and it’s all over.  After the board review concludes, the board members meet and you are given their decision together with helpful advice in a couple of days.

A Good Thing?

Although this is my first experience, I’ve been a strong supporter of IT Architect certification since my time in the Platform Architecture Team here at Microsoft, and I believe it’s a good thing for the industry.

We see many IT Architects in our industry today.  Most inherit that role during the natural evolution of their career.  Many of these are indeed valid IT Architects, but I have the impression that other are also riding on the cache of the title.  If we are going to grow this profession, it’s important that we standardize the areas and level of experience we expect from this role.

More Information?

For more information about CITA-P certification in your area, I would recommend getting in contact with IASA for more information.

Let me start with a personal dilemma:  I’m debating moving my blog (currently running an old version of Community Server) to something different (either a different provider or upgrading to the latest version of Community Server).  Although it’s been very reliable, the thing that concerns me about my blog is that I don’t intimately know how it works.  I’ve looked through a lot of the forums, and even other open source blog providers, but the architecture for everything that I’ve seen so far seems just too unwieldy for what I’m trying to accomplish.

While searching, I began asking myself the question – “Instead of the most architecturally correct design, what would be the smallest design that supports my need?  And more importantly, how would these two be different?”  Small in this instance refers to the number of modules, configuration files, lines of code, and other parts of the design.  I think as architects and developers we have a habit of defaulting to configuration files, extensibility, and dependency injection into our designs from day one – even though the core use cases of the design don’t immediately demand it.  We design too much in for the future or for edge cases which ends up in “I’ve abstracted this setting into this_obscure_setting_config.xml just in case we need to switch the setting in the future”.  Nice extensibility – but will anyone ever actually switch that setting?  Really?  And if someone did, does a recompile of the code really add that much headache over the additional abstraction and testing required for the extensibility?  Jeffrey Pallermo covers an element of this recently in his post about hard coding.

Coming back to my blog example, what would a “micro architecture” for my blog look like?  I would assert that I could do the following:

Eliminate Elaborate Database Access Code.  Do I really need it?  Do I really need a database abstraction layer (myDal) that inherits from an interface (IDal), uses a configuration file (database_config.xml) and some dependency injection under the covers so that I can switch out the driver at some point in the future?  Probably not. 

Question the Need for a Database.  Talking of which, do I actually need the database itself?  Access to the database (or lack thereof) seems to be the root cause of issues that I have when my blog goes down.  Two primary considerations for using a database are performance and indexing.  Performance?  I would like to think that millions of people visit my blog every day, but the reality is somewhat different.  Even with 50 comments attached to a blog post, a file system solution would probably perform well enough for anyone reading the blog.  Indexing?  Sure, I would like search enabled on my blog, but why not just redirect to (or embed) an existing Google search, parameterized to my domain? 

Create a Minimal User Interface.  I got thinking about what HTML controls I would need to supply to enable updates and edits to posts – the question is, do I really need a fully functioning Admin UI to update the blog?  Would it not be simpler to only expose a MetaWeblog or ATOM publishing API instead and use something like Windows Live Writer to create and edit my posts? 

No Admin UI for Creating “About” and Other Pages.  Again, do I really need the administration overhead for handling this?  Can I not just create a new .ASPX or PHP page and attach it to the site.  Seriously?

Remove Skins and Styles from the Code.  No brainer.  Reference a CSS and be done with it.  The blog’s responsibility should be to only output well formatted HTML that can be styled with CSS.

I’m sure there’s more that I’m missing, but hopefully you get the idea.  To sum this up and conclude, I would argue that a “micro architecture” could have the following principles:

It’s OK to ignore edge cases.  The architecture is designed only against core use cases, and nothing else.  With the exception of input validation, edge cases are not considered.

It’s OK to write code – as long as that functionality doesn’t exist in another solution that can be reused.  Subsystems are written only when there is not a valid external solution that can be used.

It’s OK to hardcode configuration values.  Hardcoding is OK for core use cases (providing that it doesn’t invalidate security – for example, you don’t want to be hardcoding usernames and passwords, of course)

It’s OK to recompile.  Recompiling is really OK if edge cases are introduced at a later point in the future.  I actually think this is healthy because it encourages developers to open up the solution (and possibly improve the solution as a result of what they’ve learned since they last wrote the code). 

It’s OK to unit test.  Because a greater focus is given to the code of an application (as opposed to 50 million different configuration files), unit tests and test driven development become even more important. 

Maybe I’ll actually try this out and see what happens?

1.  Issue 16 has just been released to the web!  You can find it here, and can also download a PDF version of the magazine here.  The theme of issue 16 is Identity and Access, and Diego explains more about the articles in his blog post.

2.  The call for papers for Issue 18 has just been released.  Again, Diego uncovers the details here, the theme of this upcoming issue is Green Computing.  I’m really looking forward to this issue, especially given all the work that is happening in this space, especially some of the advances in infrastructure architecture.   

It’s a good question – and one that we try to answer in the current version of the Architecture Journal, aptly titled "The Role of an Architect".  There are a lot of great articles in this issue, although my favorite has to be the "A-Z guide to being an architect" by Mark Bloodworth and Marc Holmes.

You can read the latest issue Architecture Journal and in PDF format, or even download our Journal reader, a WPF application for taking all of the issues offline. 

This can include fundamental issues that you may even be facing now, such as internal authorization strategies; not only for employees, but how do you include partners and customers?  More complex issues may include tiered access; what data is relevant to each user or user group?  How do you secure that data?  Is all identity data relevant in any circumstance or does it depend on the role of the user at any given time? How do directories compare to claims based authentication? What happens with multipart, distributed transactions? What about auditing in various contexts?

If you have opinions that you would like to share with the architect community on identity management, here is your chance! Follow the instructions below to send an abstract before the cut-off date and you could see your thoughts and ideas shared with over 60,000 readers, translated in 5 languages, and distributed at multiple conferences around the world!

The cut-off date for abstracts for the next issue is April 21st 2008.  If you are interested in making a submission, here are the details:

How do I make a submission?

To submit an idea for a paper, please send the following:

• A 2 – 4 paragraph abstract explaining how your paper fits the "Identity Architectures" theme of the magazine
• A 1 – 2 paragraph bio
• A list of previously published articles

Submissions should be made via Email to editors@architecturejournal.net

We receive many submissions for each issue, so we encourage you to put time and thought into the submission.

When will I know whether my submission is accepted?

After the call for papers has ended, you will be notified via Email as to whether your submission was successful or not.

What happens if my submission is accepted?

If accepted, you’ll have between 6 weeks to submit two drafts and a final version of your paper. These dates will be clearly communicated. Your first draft will be reviewed by an editorial board to ensure it is on message for the magazine. Your second draft and final version will be subject to both technical and copy editing.

The magazine is generally available in print and online 4 weeks after final drafts are submitted.

What are the guidelines for papers printed in the Architecture Journal?

We recommend that papers are between 3,500 and 4,500 words in length – although we have accepted shorter and longer papers in the past. The article should be submitted using Microsoft Word. Diagrams should be submitted in either Microsoft Visio or Microsoft PowerPoint, and will be reformatted for the magazine.

Do I still own the work?

Yes. We ask you to sign a release form that gives Microsoft permission to reprint the article, but ownership of the paper remains with you, the author.

Will I get paid for writing?

We do not currently reimburse authors for contributing to the Architecture Journal.

Will I get copies of the magazine as an author?

After printing you’ll be sent 10 copies of the Journal for your own use.  Additional copies can be requested.

Where can I get more information?

Check out this link.

All of these articles can be found here, and were written jointly with IASA members and Microsoft over the past few months.  These articles fit into a larger skills taxonomy, which you can find on the IASA site here.

If this is for you, you may also be excited to know that we are holding a pre-conference for aspiring architects at TechEd US in June. 

Each November my team holds a conference called SAF – the Strategic Architect Forum - an event where we invite the top 250 IT Architects from organizations around the world for three days of discussions and sessions.  Although the conference is in it’s seventh year, being an invite-only event we traditionally haven’t shared any of the presentations.  Given the quality of speakers and topics this year however, we wanted to share the content more broadly and will be releasing the video, slides, and transcripts. 

This page on the MSDN Architecture Center contains the recordings from this year - you can check out many of the great sessions we held at the conference, including keynotes from Donald Ferguson (Technical Fellow at Microsoft),  Behrooz Chitsaz (Microsoft Research), Charlie Bell (Amazon), Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto (MySpace), and Paul Glen (C2 Consulting) – plus a selection of other breakout sessions.