Wit Wonghanchao's Weblog

วันอังคาร ตุลาคม ๓๑, ๒๕๔๙

Flooding

Last couple of weeks I flew back from CEC2006, an internal engineering event, to find out that my house is flooding. The level of water is high above my knee at street level, so cars cannot move in or out. If I want to go out, I have to use a small boat and paddle from my house to main street.

Fortunately, I work at Sun that has working environment to support employee to work from home. So event I struck in my house, I can still working.

When I said working environment, I do not mean just IT infrastructure, e.g. network, security card, but also great colleagues and boss that gave full support and understanding.

Many thanks to our great team.

วันศุกร์ ตุลาคม ๐๗, ๒๕๔๘

What is an IT Architect

Do you have problem introduce yourself to customer as an Engagement IT Architect? May be not yet. But I do. So, I like to share some idea here.

I normally response to customer differently depend on his role.

For technical staff:
"I'm a presales helping on architecting the right system"

For technical manager:
"I help on solving customer needs/problems by identifying target IT architecture, existing IT architecture, doing gap analysis, and come up with solution accordingly."

For technical director, CIO:
"Helping customer to map their business drivers into target IT infrastructure. Offer help on IT Master plan" All are in the same line as mapping customer requirement into practical solution (processes, services, products).

The formal definition of IT Architect is still in early phase. I think it is quite waste a time try to define it because there are many level of architect and term architect itself is very over used.

Here is IT Architect as mention in OpenGroup TOGAF (http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/)
The role of the architect can be summarized as to:

• Understand and interpret requirements - Probe for information, listen to information, influence people, facilitate consensus building, synthesize and translate ideas into actionable requirements, articulate those ideas to others. Identify use or purpose, constraints, risks, etc. The architect participates in the discovery and documentation of the customer's business scenarios that are driving the solution. The architect is responsible for requirements understanding and embodies that requirements understanding in the architecture specification.
• Create a useful model - Take the requirements and develop well formulated models of the components of the solution, augmenting the models as necessary to fit all of the circumstances. Show multiple views through models to communicate the ideas effectively. The architect is responsible for the overall architecture integrity and maintaining the vision of the offering from an architectural perspective. The architect also ensures leverage opportunities are identified, using building blocks, and is a liaison between the functional groups (especially development and marketing) to ensure that the leverage opportunities are realized. The architect provides and maintains these models as a framework for understanding the domain(s) of development work, guiding what should be done within the organization, or outside the organization. The architect must represent the organization view of the architecture by understanding all the necessary business components.
• Validate, refine and expand the model - Verify assumptions, bring in Subject Matter Experts, etc. in order to improve the model and to further define it, adding as necessary new ideas to make the result more flexible and more tightly linked to current and expected requirements. The architects additionally should assess the value of solutionenhancing developments emanating from field work and incorporate these into the architecture models as appropriate.
• Manage the architecture - Continuously monitor the models and update them as necessary to show changes, additions and alterations. Represent architecture and issues during development and decision points of the program. The architect is an "agent of change," representing that need for the implementation of the architecture. Through this development cycle the architect continuously fosters the sharing of customer, architecture and technical information between organizations.