What topics are architects interested in?

  • Article

We recently held a New York IASA chapter planning session to determine the topics that the chapter members are most interested in having covered at future meetings. We did a brainstorming session with about 25 of our members that resulted in a list of approximately 45 potential topics. Then the entire membership engaged in a dot voting exercise to rank the topics. The results below group them by the number of votes received. Topics in the same group were requested equally.

We thought that you would be interested in the results since they are indicative of what is on architect's minds today.

#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