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2013 Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit – Day 3

2013-12-05 08.36.25

Disruptive Fun

The keynote speaker this morning was Ze Frank, the Executive VP for BuzzFeed. He talked about the 3 major disruptions in his life and how they got him to where he was. The cool part about this keynote is that he was able to take his learnings from the media world and apply them to IT and essentially say that the core fundamentals that every company deals with are the same. He shared some beautiful and hilarious stories from his journey and overall it was a great talk. If you ever have a chance to listen to Ze Frank I would definitely recommend it, he is a very insightful communicator that you will have a great time learning from.

Ten Essential Principles of Modern Application Architecture

This session was a great wrap up to all the things that I heard over the course of the summit. The basis was a service oriented architecture, then from there you can build the quick delivery context aware applications that we need to move towards amidst the Nexus of Forces.

Summary

Overall, I thought the summit was a great conference and I learned a lot of things I can take back and begin to push the implementation of at our company. I wish though that others from my company had been here, especially from our integration group.

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2013 Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit – Day 2

2013-12-04 05.27.32I expected some nickel and diming when I came to Las Vegas but then I realized that nickels and dimes were too cheap…The picture to the left is what my gym was on Day 2 of the Gartner AADI Summit 2013.  I had been told that there was a fitness center available but packed some in room workout capabilities into my suitcase just in case. I was right, the hotel wanted to charge me $25 a pop to use their “Resort” every time I wanted to workout. Thankfully, I packed my yoga gear and DVDs so I was able to get my workout in nonetheless without paying the extra $25.

You didn’t come here to read about my workout though, here’s the good stuff!

UX Design and the Enterprise Architect

Who doesn’t want a little User Experience (UX) with their coffee? This was a really good session centered mainly around the paradigm shift that is coming/in process. “UX is the looming relevance challenge for IT organizations.” How true this is and how irrelevant are so many of our IT organizations. The speaker talked about the paradigm shift that is needed. He mentioned that you can’t just stick lipstick on a pig when it comes to UX. UX has to be the first part of the process and that is the fundamental problem with IT, we are engineers/developers first so we want our processes to be engineer/developer focused. However, when it comes to UX, design has to come first and it is not just aesthetics. It is fundamentally how your users interact with your apps. One key takeaway that I took from this session was with the fracturing of the UX between iOS, Android, & Windows Modern UI it is impossible to use a cross platform UX that fits with every platform so he recommended developing a corporate UX standard that would be standard across your apps and hold true to that UX framework to simplify your development.

Atlassian: How to do Kick-@$$ Software Development

Aside from the proliferation of the term Kick-@$$ (which the speaker tastefully warned the audience about at the opening of his session) throughout the length of this talk (to the point that I finally copied the text to my clipboard and just hit ctrl+v every time I needed to use it in my notes it was happening so often) this was an extremely good session. The premise of the talk was that in the movie Kick-Ass (I haven’t seen it) the main character decides one day that he is going to dress up as a super hero and fight crime…the first time he does though he is brutally beaten up and stabbed and it is not until he forms a team around him that he really starts to Kick-@$$ so to speak. Complete with the full getup (minus the mask – to which the speaker relayed to us that it is not smart to wear a mask in a casino :-), the casino had guards waiting for him at the elevator before he even made it from his room) the speaker lamented the early days as a software developer where he felt he would go out and save the world with software but just ended up feeling beat up and stabbed.  He then talked about Agile and its adoption history and how we are moving into a post-Agile world and companies are struggling to figure out how to deliver software more and more quickly in this new environment. He then talked about the 4 main ways that Atlassian does Kick-@$$ software development:

  1. Build Kick-@$$ things
  2. One Kick-@$$ team
  3. Kick-@$$ Collaboration
  4. Kick-@$$ Automation

Overall, this was a great talk with a lot of cool takeaways the biggest one for me being how intently focused they were on being a development shop more and not growing their non-development staff in leaps and bounds, but enabling their developers to do the testing, support, & design roles by bringing in a few experts that trained their developers how to fulfill those roles.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

This session was hilarious, though terribly named. Sir Ken Robinson gave an extremely engaging talk about talents and creativity and how they affect our ability to create and re-create our lives and the paths we take. Two key quotes I have from this session are “Whatever you woke up worrying about this morning…get over it! How important can it possibly be in the grand scheme of things.” and “Talent is often buried deep, the challenge for leadership is to create conditions where talent will show itself.” If you are interested, I would recommend watching his TED talks, he is a very engaging speaker and his views on education and the reform it needs seem to be very good.

HTML5 and the Journey to the Modern and Mobile Web

This was a really good background session on what HTML5 was as well as what it isn’t along with the common misconceptions surrounding HTML5. I could tell that both presenters really knew what they were talking about. One key takeaway came during the recommendations section of their session when they said, “If your team has not yet done so, learn HTML5 and CSS3 and emerging modern Web tools.”

Microsoft: Delivering Revolutionary Modern Business Applications with Cloud, Data, and Devices

This one was a good presentation on what is available using Windows Azure for a public cloud provider especially in conjunction with on premise solutions. A key takeaway here is that Microsoft wants to be your cloud provider and they are doing everything they can to make themselves the vendors of choice including giving you options to host non-Microsoft products on their cloud and having easy integration from the cloud to on-premise solutions giving you a truly integrated hybrid solution.

Architecting and Developing Secure Applications

This was a pretty meaty session for 4:30 in the afternoon, but it was a great one! He started out by saying that writing secure applications is a major paradigm shift for so many developers because what they don’t know CAN hurt them. He laid out 3 key issues then expounded on them. The 3 Key Issues were:

  1. Why should enterprises place an emphasis on application-layer security?
  2. Which application security testing solutions can help enterprises develop secure applications and how will these evolve?
  3. How should organizations take a 360 degree comprehensive approach to application security?

I have a ton of notes for all the different sections, but if I were to recommend a starting point for anyone, look at the slide deck (see session title link), then go download the 360 degree approach white paper.

Summary

Overall, it was a really good day with a lot of information. I am almost to the point that I am on brain overload, but I think I have enough left for day 3 🙂

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Functions

2013 Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit – Day 1

2013-12-03 10.49.05I am currently in Las Vegas, Nevada for the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI). One of my goals for this year with my boss is to get outside the Microsoft bubble that I have been living in for the last several years and expand my horizons. We both thought this conference would be a good fit for that goal. I intend on blogging about this conference similarly to the way I blogged about Microsoft TechEd back in June (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, & Day 4). Before I get too far though, I would like to make a comment about Vegas itself. Vegas is one of those places that I never had any desire to go to. I will say though, from a macro view, the place is beautiful, the grand hotels & casinos that you see as you drive onto the strip are absolutely breathtaking. The picture at the top of this post was taken as I stepped out onto a balcony during an intermission between two sessions. I will probably post at some point about my thoughts when you get up close with Vegas but the short version is that people just seem sad and it breaks my heart.

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on my personal thoughts on Vegas because that is probably not why you are reading this post. So on to the Summit. On to the sessions that I attended.

Developing a Mobile Development Strategy

This session was a good first session to attend. The speaker went through and laid out all the steps, pitfalls and the things to think about as an enterprise is building their mobile application strategy. One of the key points he made that I thought was great was that you don’t want to just replicate your desktop/web apps on the mobile device. You want to as the question “What does mobile enable me to do that I couldn’t do before? How does it fundamentally change the business process?” While this seems fairly intuitive, you would be surprised at how often the business asks for a desktop replacement app on their mobile device and it is our job as IT to help them figure out and articulate what features they really need on the  mobile device. Another key point that he brought up that I wholeheartedly agree with is that you need to develop a User Experience (UX) practice within your organization and he brought this home with the question “How many times have you had to take a training class for a mobile app?” Your mobile app user experience (and all your applications for that matter) should be intuitive and easy to use. The final point he made that I want to emphasize before moving on is that testing is integral to a sound mobile application development strategy.

Gartner Opening Keynote: Making the Nexus Real

I have never been a big fan of marketing speak and buzzwords. I am much more a fan of speaking plainly and getting to the point. Prior to yesterday, I didn’t really know what the “Nexus of Forces” meant. I didn’t waste too much time figuring out what it was ahead of time because I knew a group like Gartner would make it painfully obvious what it was. I was ABSOLUTELY right, I think I heard the term “Nexus of Forces” at least 300 times yesterday. To be brief the forces involved are Cloud (another buzzword I hate), Social Computing (usually just said as Social), Information, & Mobile. What makes the Nexus is that these forces when combined enhance and build upon each other in such a way that they amplify each other exponentially. Overall, the keynote was really good, marketing jargon and buzzwords aside. I think I could have listed to Daryl Plummer all day long. He is a fantastically engaging speaker that really knows what he is talking about. The keynote went through several case studies of companies that had successfully harnessed the Nexus of Forces to propel their business forward.

The Impact of Nexus Forces on Your Application Strategy

The key emphasis in this session was that your current application strategy is going to have to change. We are no longer living in the environment where software will live unchanged for decades. You MUST change! This was my first introduction to the Pace-Layering Strategy for your applications. The short and simple is that you divide your systems into three layers Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, & Systems of Innovation. The Pace part of it comes down to the pace at which those things change or are thrown away. His last takeaway similar to some of the others that I heard was that we as IT need to switch from project to product (app) thinking.

Successful Applications Demand Selfish Software: Only the Paranoid Survive

This was probably my favorite session of the day…his main point was that as IT we need to shift our focus from delivering projects to delivering applications. If you deliver projects you are judged by on-time, on-budget, & met functional requirements (all of which shift in the name of the project) and end up delivering an application that the users can’t stand and all the features that they would actually want were pushed to “Phase 2” which we all know never happens. Instead, we should  deliver selfish apps (not applications) that meet the user’s requirements. The features of selfish software are:

  • Black Belt Defensive Coding
  • Self-Diagnostic
  • Self-Testing
  • Self-Monitoring
  • Self-Reporting
  • Self-Healing (eventually)

The other piece of information that I really liked was that he redefined “Legacy” software as software that is hard to change. I liked this new distinction of legacy.

Town Hall: Enterprise and Application Architecture Best Practices

This was a great session for me as the Application Architect for Phillips 66. When I took the role I took it knowing that it was a very amorphous/undefined role and that between my supervisor and I we would be determining what my role included. After hearing this session, I was greatly encouraged by the fact that the path that Mike and I have laid out for me and my role seems to be the right path…I seem to be doing the right things. The particular interaction that I felt particularly encouraged was in regards to how Solution (Project/Technical) Architects and Application Architects should interact and overlap which we seem to be doing right at Phillips 66.

Trinity Millennium Group: Getting to Cloud – From Legacy to Agility

This session was probably my least favorite and I probably should have left early…I really didn’t get much out of this session. It was another rehash or what Legacy 2.0 was and how their company upgrades applications for their customers.

Gartner Keynote: Business Outcome-Driven Enterprise Architecture: A Quantum Leap in Delivering Value

Even though I don’t currently operate in the Enterprise Architect role within our company, I am part of our companies EA infrastructure so I wanted to hear what EA was supposed to be or rather what it should be. This session was a very good session to attend for this information and I recommend that anyone in the EA role within their organization review the slide deck and if available watch the video.

Summary:

Overall, this was a great first day. You can’t expect every session to be riveting and life changing, but I did learn a lot from the first day and am looking forward to Day 2. Other than the snafu with the conference organizers not ordering enough lunches for everyone this was a very good day.

[I was one of the people who missed out on lunch but found out too late to do anything about it so I went 12 hours between meals…makes for a very crabby Architect, let me tell you and is probably part of the reason I fell asleep during the Trinity Millennium Session :-)]