I sat through four session yesterday – two keynotes and two informational presentations. My favorite of the four was the session on Business Architecture by Jack Calhoun, CEO of Accelare. I can’t summarize it effectively, so I won’t try. However, one of the key points I took from the presentation is that the architecture of the business is evolving away from an organizational-based model towards a capability-based model. That’s fascinating because business capabilities are a natural match to technology services. Jack made a point that SOA isn’t going to be successful if it’s just as new technology mechanism – it also needs to enable to business models. He also introduced a term I had never heard before – “chaordic“. The term chaordic is a combination of chaotic and ordered and is used to describe the dynamic organization of complex systems (like enterprises). It was coined (I believe) by Dee Hock, former CEO of Visa who wrote a book on the subject called Birth of the Chaordic Age. Yet another book to add to the tall stack that I’m still working through.
This morning, I ran a breakout on Refactoring Your Best Practices. I didn’t bring much presentation material to this session since I’m not sure we do a great job of this. Actually, we (i.e. Microsoft) do a pretty good job capturing best practices, but we’re less effective at reusing those practices. One of the reasons we’re not great at using these practices is because it’s very hard to capture the context of the best practice. The breakout session was awesome. We had a variety of experiences represented, from a company where best practices have become rigid rules that must be followed blindly, even when they stop making sense, to a company that has a “Chief Methodologist” who runs a group of architects who build best practices the way that other groups build products. I thought that the project-esque approach was fascinating. One of the implications is that we need to capture baseline information about the practices, so we can tell if we’ve improved as we refactor. All in all, it was a great discussion. I think everyone got value from it as we decided to “keep the conversation going” on email after the event.
The second morning session was a Q&A with Bill Gates and Eric Rudder. This is one of the high points of this event for the attendees. He was asked about a variety of topics, but the one that caught my attention was Bill’s opinion of blogs and if he is planning to start his own soon. Not surprisingly, he was very positive about blogging but made no commitment to starting a blog anytime soon. He’s said he didn’t want to start a blog unless he had the time to make a commitment to blog regularly. Of course, that’s exactly what has happened with Eric’s blog. However, in his defense, Eric made a great point – one of the reasons he started his blog to encourage the employees in his division (Servers & Tools) to blog. I’d love to see Bill and Eric blog, but I think it’s the rank-and-file Microsoft bloggers that are really making a difference in the community.
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