By Sreekanth Iyer, Executive IT Architect, IBM
It was quite a lot of learning on a Saturday attending The Open Group conference at Bangalore. Actually it was a two day program this year. I could not make it on Friday because of other work commitments. I heard from the people who attended that it was a great session on Friday. At least I knew about a fellow IBMer Jithesh Kozhipurath’s presentation on Friday. I’d the chance to look at that excellent material on applying TOGAF® practices for integrated IT Operations Enterprise Architecture which was his experience sharing of the lab infra optimization work that he was leading.
I started bit late on Saturday, thinking it was happening at the Leela Palace which was near to my home (Ah.. that was in 2008) Realized late that it was at the Philips Innovation Campus at Manyata. But managed to reach just on time before the start of the sessions.
The day started with an Architecture as a Service discussion. The presentation was short but there were lot of interesting questions and interactions post the session. I was curious know more about the “self-service” aspect on that topic.
Then we had Jason Uppal of ClinicialMessage Inc. on stage (see picture below) , who gave a wonderful presentation on the human touch to the architecture and how to leverage EA to make disruptive changes without disrupting the working systems.
Lots of take-aways from the session. Importantly the typical reasons why certain Architectures can fail… caused many a times we have a solution already in our mind and we are trying to fit that into the requirement. And most of these times if we look at the Requirements artifact we will be see that the problems are not rightly captured. Couldn’t agree more with the good practices that he discussed.
Starting with “Identifying the Problem Right” – I thought that is definitely the first and important step in Architecture. Then Jason talked about significance of communicating and engaging people and stakeholders in the architecture — point that he drove home with a good example from the health care industry. He talked about the criticality of communicating and engaging the stakeholders — engagement of course improves quality. Building the right levers in the architecture and solving the whole problem were some of the other key points that I noted down. More importantly the key message was as Architects, we have to go beyond drawing the lines and boxes to deliver the change, may be look to deliver things that can create an impact in 30 days balancing the short term and long term goals.
I got the stage for couple of minutes to update on the AEA Bangalore Chapter activities. My request to the attendees was to leverage the chapter for their own professional development – using that as a platform to share expertise, get answers to queries, connect with other professionals of similar interest and build the network. Hopefully will see more participation in the Bangalore chapter events this year.
On the security track, had multiple interesting sessions. Began with Jim Hietala of The Open Group discussing the Risk Management Framework. I’ve been attending a course on the subject. But this one provided a lot of insight on the taxonomy (O-RT) and the analysis part – more of taking a quantitative approach than a qualitative approach. Though the example was based on risks with regard to laptop thefts, there is no reason we can’t apply the principles to real issues like quantifying the threats for moving workloads to cloud. (that’s another to-do added to my list).
Then it was my session on the Best practices for moving workloads to cloud for Indian Banks. Talked about the progress so far with the whitepaper. The attendees were limited as there was Jason’s EA workshop happening in parallel. But those who attended were really interested in the subject. We did have a good discussion on the benefits, challenges and regulations with regard to the Indian Banking workloads and their movement to cloud. We discussed few interesting case studies. There are areas that need more content and I’ve requested the people who attended the session to participate in the workgroup. We are looking at getting a first draft done in the next 30 days.
Finally, also sat in the presentation by Ajit A. Matthew on the security implementation at Intel. Everywhere the message is clear. You need to implement context based security and security intelligence to enable the new age innovation but at the same time protect your core assets.
It was a Saturday well spent. Added had some opportunities to connect with few new folks and understand their security challenges with cloud. Looking to keep the dialog going and have an AEA Bangalore chapter event sometime during Q1. In that direction, I took the first step to write this up and share with my network.
Event Details:
The Open Group Bangalore, India
January 24-25, 2014
Sreekanth Iyer is an Executive IT Architect in IBM Security Systems CTO office and works on developing IBM’s Cloud Security Technical Strategy. He is an Open Group Certified Distinguished Architect and is a core member of the Bangalore Chapter of the Association of Enterprise Architects. He has over 18 years’ industry experience and has led several client solutions across multiple industries. His key areas of work include Information Security, Cloud Computing, SOA, Event Processing, and Business Process management. He has authored several technical articles, blogs and is a core contributor to multiple Open Group as well as IBM publications. He works out of the IBM India Software Lab Bangalore and you can follow him on Twitter @sreek.