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: 

  • Facilitating is very important.  Where does that fit?  How best to improve?
  • What about “being influenced?”  Jim: “very important” and gave several examples of “influencing by being influenced”
  • What are the pitfalls of EA? Noted for discussion later.  Jim also noted “EA will fix it” - e.g. “starting out at level 5”, “EA has the answer”, “just creating documents = EA”,”Easy to over commit because so much needs to be aligned”, “picking a framework and implementing it in its entirety”

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.

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