Jim spoke about leading as an Architect in the opening afternoon session
Jim told story culminating in ‘self-awareness’. Starting with bonking and a quest for a coke and ending at a beer pub with his wife and a 2-year-old going ‘rawr rawr rawr’ and finally a woman-to-woman look and an I’ know” comment.
Jim then moved into an IT leadership speech, well documented with slides.
I-time and group discussion of 2 or 3 leading activities. One group talked about education to cause ‘focused discontent’. Another group mentioned listening as a leadership skill.
Jim resumed his slides, then drew a leading/managing/doing triangle to show how to visualize the breakdown of time for a person, then resumed his slides.
I-time: Competency quiz. What are you strong in? What one thing should you work on?
Back to slides. Geek competencies are often leadership competencies.
Questions at end:
Parking lot discussion:
Case studies of education of stakeholders or raising the views and thinking process of lower-level archs: several examples of successful collaborating with stakeholders were given.
There was a discussion of architecture working with Agile development with no clear consensus as to the best way to work with it. Jim showed a slide with different rates of innovation lined up with levels of enterprise-ness - systems are more stable as the support more of the enterprise.
Discussion: how to architect for appliance-endpoints (phones, pads, etc). One answer was “we manage the data - access and security - and don’t worry about the endpoint.
There was a question about how to manage data on disparate end-user devices downloaded to those devices so they can function when offline. Much discussion with no consensus answer.
A question was asked about an elevator speech for an enterprise data architect. Jim showed an example of class attribute elements at UW. Someone pointed out that Enterprise-level archs also have strategic goals, such as governance and improvement of quality and accessibility of data.
A question was asked if data descriptions were tied to consuming processes. Jim answer: not now.