New Year Wish Tag 2007

A new blog tag to share the New Year Wish List.

Wish you all HAPPY NEW YEAR !!

My wish list for new year -

1. To improve my leadership and negotiation skills
2. To maintain work life balance in New Year.
3. To visit at least two new places and make at least ten new friends.

No rules for number of New Year Wishes and number of bloggers to be tagged. I am starting my New Year Wish Tag with my favourite bloggers

Todd Biske, Sam Lowe and James McGovern

Hope and Wish to receive support from them. One more wish ;))

Blog Tagged

Todd Biske tagged me. Thanks for giving me chance to join the bandwagon.

I love the blog-tag idea of Jeff Pulver. See the simplicity of idea. I feel simple and powerful ideas are best to catch fire and create positive impact.

Five things to share about me -

1. I had done my Masters from IIT, Roorkee, India in Chemical Engineering. I started my career in well known Telecom Company. After working in Telecom R&D and pre-sales, I switched to Financial Company. Suddenly, SIP/IMS jargon changed to Buy/Sell Mutual Fund. Obviously, few underlying things remain same like UML, J2EE and patterns/concepts.

2. I never studied during my school days (Lucky to survive in school). Things dramatically change afterwards and now I never want to stop learning.

3. I am married and have one little cute daughter.

4. I enjoy travelling. I have been to few beautiful places in Europe, Middle East and Far East.

5. Few projects in which I was involved were Product development for Telecom Billing, ESB for Telecom industry, Prepaid Service on VoIP/SIP, Persistence Framework and many more. My latest interest areas are SOA, WS and Agile. I do lot of consultancy, reviews and governance.

Time to tag five interesting people - Jeff Schneider , Gregor Hohpe , Anne Thomas Manes , Bhagvan Kommadi and Scott Mark

In last, Wish you all MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR

Does I deserve to be called an ARCHITECT ?

When a IT professional deserves to be called an Architect? I am trying to list down few attributes of an Architect. I am not trying to find specific attributes for product, business, information, technical, software, specialist, application, system architects and whatsoever.

Its a fare trial to find out generic attributes, when a software professional is mature enough to be called an Architect.

1) When everyone around is in hurry to find the solution. Architect understands the problem first, its origin and future roadmap. See things from 10,000 ft. Afterwards, comes up with solution with blink in his mind. Its time to build consensus around the solution.

2) It is not based on number of years of experince. It is based when you start thinking at abstract level with very ambiguous information. You don't complain that information is not enough to take decision and try to dig it out.

3) He keeps track of emerging technologies. Understand when they are ready for enterprise.

4) He follows process and influence others to follow process. Believes in quality of work.

5) He is capable of taking difficult decisions on behalf of others and have courage to own it.

6) Able to understand, create and communicate the solution to team in their language (most of time UML/patterns).

7) He understands the concepts and principles of loose coupling, high cohesion, abstraction, encapsulation, information hiding, polymorphism. All these are independent of technology used in project.

Nuke in the arsenal of Enterprise Architect : SOA

Architecture skill demands continuous improvement. Its a journey not an end. Architect should be able to enhance his skillset as and when job demands.

It is predicted that SOA will reduce the overall IT expenses in enterprise. It means time is right to build SOA skill and campaign for SOA adoption in enterprise .

I love analogies to explain my point, compare SOA with a nuke in arsenal of EA. Not every country in world has Nuke, still they survive and most of them have ambition to develop one in future. Furthermore, same nuclear technology can boost the country economy or can destroy it. Depends how it is handled. Advise is to handle SOA with care.

Software Selection

As an Architect oftenly one would evaluate different presentation technologies, reporting tools, application servers, databases, open source components, ORM, CM tools and a lot more.

Most of time selection depends on perception of team instead of facts available. Try to evaluate the options by leaving behind all perceptions. It is not difficult to find the best fit for your requirements.

We could look into the Software selection through three main aspects - Functional requirements, Non functional requirements and Strategic requirements. Every requirement has its own weight. Combination of all these scores finally help to select the software.

But sometimes it is difficult to start Software selection. For a same requirement, there can be multiple COTS and FOSS available. One may need to start with Elimination technique first based on main requirements. Narrow down the number of options. Go into Evaluation stage. And finally selection happens.

Few techniques which helps in evaluation are conducting POC's, going through case studies, finding references, identifying gaps between requirements and features available in COTS/FOSS and cost analysis covering licenses, software, hardware, customisation, implementation and maintenance costs.

Need of Architecture - Winchester House

INPUT
38 years of construction
147 builders
0 Architects
No architectural blueprints

OUTPUT
65 doors to blank walls
13 staircases abandoned
24 skylights in floors
160 rooms, 950 doors

Above example shows the importance of Architecture in every project

Strategy to solve Performance Issue

Is it possible to solve the all performance issues at any level with same strategy?

Let's outline the strategy -

1. Understand the big picture. Understand flow of information in system.
2. Perform profiling of system. Even you know the most probable reason, still prefer to do profiling. It is not mandatory to use profiling tools. Even sometimes log works out fine.
3. Analyse profiling data. Come up with bottlenecks.
4. Define the strategy to resolve bottlenecks.
5. On the basis of gravity and number of bottlenecks, assign person/team or multiple person/teams on bottlenecks/task.
6. For every task do the baselining of performance statistics.
7. Resolve the task. Most of time try not to change business process. Instead go for network, database and servers tuning. May recommend vertical scaling.
8. Recommend change in business process as long term resolution.
9. Again generate performance statistics. Compare with previous one and be happy.

Why to think just big enough on inception ?

Most or almost all projects/products look limited in scope at inception. Slowly and steadily ground reality becomes clear. And comes the stage when it is required to reanalyze, redesign, refactor and start complete makeover of architecture. In simple words, how to limit the scope, how to define boundaries, how much variations actually need encapsulation, how many indirections really solves some non existent problems. Depends how big one can think. Think Big in pragmatic manner !!

Lucky Blog

Hip Hip Hurray !! First comment from James McGovern. Future looks bright. Thanks a lot. Hope to achieve first mission on dawn of new year'07.

How to select EA Tool ?

Corporations across the industry are recognizing value of Enterprise Architecture. It provides Enterprise wide streamlining/aligning of Business and IT. It reduces the overall cost of IT in long term. As EA group matures, it needs to handle more and more information on daily basis. At this juncture different EA tools available in markets becomes useful.

As this arena is still not considered mature enough to handle all the requirements of EA teams.

Few hints about selection of EA tools -
1) Identify all the information which is to be managed.
2) Identify stakeholders and users within enterprise
2) Go through market survey done by Gartner, Forrester and IFEAD etc.
3) Interact with vendors to understand the landscape
4) Prepare mapping of EA requirements and features available in EA tool
5) Frameworks and methodologies supported by EA tool
6) Last but not least check cost and vendor support

Above is not extensive list, but good enough to start the search.

Mission and Vision of this Site

Vision (Long term)
As url name suggests - EA Group : A EA community site to collaborate and learn from each other experiences.

Mission (Short term)
1) To get listed on most of Enterprise Architect sites like James McGovern, James Tarbell, Sam Lowe, Brenda Michelson etc
2) Add lot of interesting things, so that it becomes worth visiting it.

What is Enterprise Architecture ?

Every complex problem is composition of simple problems. Similarly, Enterprise architecture consists of Business, Application, Technology and Information Architectures. Understand one at a time and relationship among them, it will make the big picture clear.

Another way to understand complex problem is try analogy. Consider an application architecture analogous to single building architecture. On the same lines, Enterprise Architecture is analogous to whole city architecture.

Let's start sharing knowledge

Afer years of thinking, finally today is a auspicious day to put my thoughts on paper. What can be better way than to start sharing thoughts with world? Blogs have become a powerful tool to share experiences and to interact with world.