The Open Group Architect Practitioners Conference Seattle

Last week I had the opportunity to attend The Open Group Enterprise Architecture conference in Seattle. The three day conference had some excellent presentations from practicing architects, from which I’d like to highlight a couple of key items that peaked my interest and comment on specific sessions that I had the pleasure of attending.

Key Items of Interest:

• Enterprise Architecture is a discipline, not a profession. It requires an active engagement of many practices within an organization to be effective and for an enterprise architect to be successful he/she must possess an excellent combination of both soft and hard skills.
• As a practicing architect, I know that we must learn how to explain Enterprise Architecture (EA) to non-technical executives or stakeholders within an organization without using the word architecture or technical, complex conceptual models because key stakeholders might not be able to translate or appreciate them the same way as we do. These models are fine for us to analyze the situation, but one shouldn’t use analysis content to communicate with business stakeholders.
• As always the keynote speakers focused their energy on “converting the converted” by presenting on the value of a mature EA discipline yet offering very little insight on how to get there. I found the keynote speakers were good enough to validate my own thinking on how EA can help generate business value but the breakout sessions were most informative on practical ways to move forward.
• If you are a non-technical person reading this blog and would like to learn how to deliver value to your organization through improved information management and flow, I highly recommend that you look into attending the next Open Group Conference, future events can be found by visiting the The Open Group site www.opengroup.org.