The Open Group Conference India — at Chennai

By Balasubramanian Somasundram, Honeywell Technology Solutions Ltd.

Yesterday, I attended the first of the three-day Open Group Conference held at Chennai, India. It was a pleasure to meet like-minded fellow enterprise architects and discuss the challenges that we face and opportunities ahead of us. I would like to thank The Open Group and Capgemini for conducting these events across India.

I would like to mention some of the highlights of yesterday’s event. If you are attending this event in Hyderabad or Pune in next couple of days, You wouldn’t want to miss to listen to Dr. Pallab Saha’s session. Dr. Pallab is from Singapore and he presented Enterprise Architecture practices in the Singapore Government. For a change, I had the opportunity to listen to a real business case study when Dr. Pallab explained how EA can help solve some of the real and complex business problems in the government sector.

He also went on to add how the traditional management methods approach problem solving by a divide-and-conquer method.  He said these methods make us “micro smart, macro dumb”. How true? In fact, a few days ago, I had written about how our management methods are rooted in the Industrial era and it had to be changed if we aspire for real transformation.

Dr. Pallab also extensively displayed some of the models that are used to solve those complex issues and insisted upon how systemic and strategic thinking is essential in the Enterprise Architecture space.

Apart from this session, there were very good case studies on Cloud Computing from various organizations, and Architecture Trends from The Open Group.

Not to miss, I had the opportunity to present a session on Enterprise Architecture & Project Portfolio Management. The session received a very good response from the audience and quite a lot of questions as well. I wish I had more time to discuss and debate the questions.

I got good number of contacts from this conference! And I am looking forward to touch base with them again to discuss some of the key themes.

The Open Group India Conference is underway this week; it will next travel toHyderabad (March 9) and Pune (March 11). Join us for best practices and case studies in the areas of Enterprise Architecture, Security, Cloud and Certification, presented by preeminent thought leaders in the industry.

Balasubramanian Somasundaram is an Enterprise Architect with Honeywell Technology Solutions Ltd, Bangalore, a division of Honeywell Inc, USA. Bala has been with Honeywell Technology Solutions for the past five years and contributed in several technology roles. His current responsibilities include Architecture/Technology Planning and Governance, Solution Architecture Definition for business-critical programs, and Technical oversight/Review for programs delivered from Honeywell IT India center. With more than 12 years of experience in the IT services industry, Bala has worked with variety of technologies with a focus on IT architecture practice.  His current interests include Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Computing and Mobile Applications. He periodically writes about emerging technology trends that impact the Enterprise IT space on his blog. Bala holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from MKU University, India.