Talking at EAC this June!
I’ve reached new heights and have been accepted (after much scrutiny it must be said) onto the agenda at the Enterprise Architect Conference in June! Here’s my fully vetted and grammatically corrected abstract for you to savour:)!
Implications of cloud computing for enterprise architects
The “Cloud” is everywhere these days with every CIO shouting “I want one of those!”; a bit like they did with SOA and we ended up with the dreaded ESB! With Cloud the promise of procuring services without the cost and hassle of IT staff is all too appealing for many! But wasn’t this one of the great promises of “outsourcing” and we all know where that’s ended up! The problem this time is in many dysfunctional organisations the motivation in moving to cloud is as a way to bypass IT – this can only be a recipe for disaster longer term. So how can IT get on the front foot? How can IT become part of the solution rather than the problem? Rather than sitting back and waiting to pick up the pieces or a new job? For many large organisations this is something they may recover from, but for many others it will be disastrous, just spreading the spaghetti beyond the perimeter of the organisation. With clouds the problems don’t go away and issues of security, data governance, service management, contingency planning, Integration and management quickly come to the surface. To further exacerbate this issue, cloud has no simple definition, encompassing pretty much everything these days, such that what cloud is to you can be quite different to what it is to me! However, this is not to say that cloud is just vapour, it offers many great benefits but should be viewed in a broader context of what the business is trying to achieve. In this session we will seek to provide guidance on preparing for cloud. We will build a cloud taxonomy and an approach to using with key stakeholders from business to IT. We will discuss how looking above process and implementation at business capabilities enables EAs to engage in different discussions about the business. We will then consider the future of the IT department in terms of new responsibilities and roles and understand the key architectural considerations of entering into a world of hybrid architectures. Finally, while EAs yearn to be heard by the business it is too easy to isolate ourselves from the rest of IT along on the journey. We’ll look at key lessons from agile development and how these can be applied at the architectural tier and in so doing learn what “technical debt” is and how,in the right hands, it is a good thing!
See you there and also note that IASA will be sponsors too:)!