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Whiteboard Event Invites Challenge
Five architects responded to the call: Design a clear, original, important concept in 10 minutes or less.
by Kay Keppler
Enterprise Architect Summit, May 23, 2005
If you had 10 minutes and a marking pen, could you make your point on a whiteboard to an audience? At the Enterprise Architect Summit, held May 22-24 in Key Biscayne, Fla., five enterprise architects tried.
Judges at the Whiteboard Invitational rated five short presentations on the basis of clarity of presentation, originality of concept, and the impact of enterprise architecture. Participants included Dan Foody, CTO of Actional; Tom Hite, CTO of Metallect; Andy Norris, director of enterprise architecture at Planet Technologies; Roger Sippl, chairman of Above All Software; and Peter Herzum, president of Herzum Software. The program was emceed by Mike Graber of Microsoft.
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Winning Whiteboard: Tom Hite's whiteboard won in originality of concept as well as in the overall competition
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Foody described a functioning SOA in terms of how you sliced the architecture. Affecting one element, such as the call center, will wind up affecting another element, such as the help desk, he said.
Hite said getting to the SOA was the issue. "Before there was SOA, there were legacy systems," he said, describing how legacy data would need to be incorporated and then how the SOA could be stretched into the future.
"Everybody's going to ask: What's it going to cost me?" Norris said. "How do you make judgments about value to a company's total cost of operation?" He demonstrated how you can assess real costs by looking at the architecture of the entire organization and assessing what the cost of adding one thing will do to the rest of the organization.
Sippl, the founder of Informix in 1980, described his talk as a session of "Great lies I have told" or "How to get money out of venture capitalists." He described the evolution of information silos, beginning with SQL as an algebraic engine, to today's architectural landscape. "We need a new algebraic engine," he said, "for businesses using business logic to manage customer data." He described a scenario of composite applications, using UIs, buttons, mobile PDAs, Web services, and workflow data.
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Tom Hite explains how to incorporate legacy data and stretch your SOA into the future
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Herzum, a last-minute replacement who answered the challenge just minutes before the program began, emphasized a component structure in architectural tiers. "You have to think about the applications and levels of information," he said. "Are they internal or external applications? Which one is the called and which is the caller? You have to untangle the web of dependencies."
The judges for the Invitational included Gurpreet Pall, senior director of architecture strategy, Microsoft; Toufic Boubez, CTO, Layer 7 Technologies; Terry O'Donnell, co-chair of the Summit; Gunther Lenz, program manager, Siemens Corporate Research; and Chris Haddad, practice manager, Burton Group.
In the subcategories, Dan Foody of Actional scored the highest for clarity of presentation, Tom Hite of Metallect did the best in originality of concept, and Roger Sippl of Above All Software won for impact of enterprise architecture. The overall winner was Tom Hite, who was awarded an HP PDA valued at $350.
About the Author
Kay Keppler is chair of Enterprise Architect Summit and editor of Java Pro.
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