I made it to Beijing yesterday with no problem. There was a car waiting for me at the airport, and one of the speaker managers met me at my hotel shortly after I arrived. They even provide a loner dopod SmartPhone for use while I’m here though I’m not sure who I would call. I went to the attendee dinner last night and on to a party for local partners. I spoke to a few people, including a gentleman from Digital China who reads my blog. It’s nice to be recognized at all, much less as an International Man of Architecture.

After dinner, I worked for an hour or so with the translator for my Metropolis session, Quanzhan. Quanzhan is from China, but he’s now a program manager in the Windows Server division at corp – his office is just on the other side of campus. He’s here doing presentations of his own as well as helping out as a translator. I’ve met at least one other Chinese person here who works in Redmond – I’m guessing presenting TechEd China provides a great way for these folks to visit home and also give back to the community they are from in some way.

Delivering these presentations via a translator will be an interesting challenge. I’ve never worked thru a translator before. Each session has it’s own unique challenge – Data in SOA is very technical while Metropolis is pretty abstract. I ended up cutting 20 slides from today’s Metropolis talk in order to ensure I have enough time to hit the important points. Presenting this way requires a truly conservative approach to word choice – even though my session is 75 minutes long, in reality I have closer to 30 as everything I say has to be spoken twice. I’m grateful that Quanzhan and I spent the time last night going thru the presentation even though we were both exhausted. I guess we’ll see how well the session goes today, but I think we’ll do well.

I’m sitting in the Kuala Lumpur airport – my flight to Beijing leaves in about half an hour. I didn’t get a chance to blog all day yesterday, so here’s a quick recap:

• I’ve run into a bunch of people who I first met at TechEd Malaysia 2002. In particular, Adrian and Rathi who both wanted to see pictures of Patrick. The big bummer of only spending two days here is that I didn’t get to do much more that the conference.
• After the sessions on Wednesday, I hung out with a bunch of the other speakers at dinner. Several of the RD’s who spoke at TechEd US also came to our Architect Road Rally and had a great time. Always nice to be told you threw a great party.
• Thursday started  with Gurpreet’s session on Architecture Vision & Direction. I didn’t think this session did as well as the EA talk the day before. Part of that comes from the fact the EA talk set a high bar, but some of it comes from the fact that the V&D talk wasn’t as polished. In contrast, I did much better with my Metropolis Thursday than the SOA Data talk on Wednesday. Maybe I just need one talk to get back in the groove – I usually think I do better in my second session.
• After our sessions, lunch, and hanging around in the cabana with some other attendees, Aaron (the local Architect Evangelist) drove Gurp and I around Putrajaya. Pat often points out when he presents Metropolis that you can’t bulldoze Boston just because the roads aren’t straight. However, you can build a new city about a half an hour away and move into it when it’s finished. That’s Putrajaya – the new administrative center of Malaysia.  It was stunning – huge and ultra modern. But it was also strange as it is completely underutilized, so far anyway. We also did a little shopping and I was able to find a few things for the family back home.
• Last night we had a regional architect dinner, where we got to hang out with a bunch of the local architects in the region. Lots of good discussion.

Next stop – China!

I just finished my Data in SOA talk for TechEd Malaysia. The room was very hot and the session was right after lunch – not exactly optimal conditions. I did OK – could have been better. Between time in hotels and on airplanes with nothing to do but code, I’ve written more in the last four days than the previous four months combined. I didn’t spend as much time as I could have reviewing the deck, so I guess I can’t say that I was utterly prepared. But I have delivered this talk many times and spend a significant amount of time thinking about the concepts and discussing them with teammates. BTW, this talk is now available as a whitepaper on Architecture Center.

This morning, Gurpreet delivered his Enterprise Architecture talk. I thought it was pretty good, esp. given that he wrote quite a bit of the deck on the plane to Malaysia. I had only seen him present once before when he was exhausted (hotel screwed up his room) and on pain killers (he fell of the stage and messed up his back). He was much better this time – he’s a great storyteller. He also had a few choice quotes I thought I’d share:

“We could spend the next month in this room talking about enterprise architecture and only just be getting started.”

“Don’t tie your ego to your design.”

“If you don’t do EA, you can’t do SOA.”

He spent most of his time talking general EA topics, with the remainder spent on MSFT incarnations of those topics, such as EASOT. What was funny was that when he showed me his deck, I thought the MSFT stuff play better with the audience, but it turned out the general EA stuff was great. For example, Gurpreet started by talking about the Winchester Mystery House, built by Sarah Winchester (of Winchester Rifles fame). This place is an architectural nightmare with stairs that lead into the ceiling and nearly half of the doors that open onto walls. It’s also over provisioned with 40 bedrooms, 5 kitchens and 17 chimneys. An over-provisioned architectural nightmare? Sounds like a typical enterprise.

He talked about the typical conceptual/logical/physical viewpoint of the enterprise with an interesting twist – the contextual level. This viewpoint is above conceptual in the model. To take his example, if a bank builds an online banking system, we’re all very familiar with the conceptual, logical and physical views of that system. The contextual view might be something like “We’re losing customers due to the fact we don’t have an online banking system.” I need to spend more time thinking about this, and how to map between these views, but I thought the contextual viewpoint was very interesting.

I really wanted to blog what Gurpreet claimed was EA’s biggest fallacy: that it doesn’t change. Because we’ve based the concepts of software architecture on building architecture, there’s this belief that you first design your architecture and then you build things to that architecture – i.e. like a building. For example, when I saw John Zachman present his framework, he was asked how one goes about implementing the framework. His response was something along the lines of: “Build all the layer one models, then build all the layer two models, etc. etc. etc. and then hit compile.” Obviously, that kind of revolutionary waterfall approach to enterprise architecture just won’t work. While buildings evolve and “learn”, they aren’t in a constant state of flux the way enterprises are. This is where Gurpreet made the comment about not tying your ego to a particular architecture – you have to realize it’s going to change.

I’m hoping that Gurpreet’s Architecture Vision & Direction talk will be equally good. Now, I just need to pester him into publishing this material in a whitepaper or blog or something. He’s presenting at Strategic Architect Forum next month, so I expect these talks will continue to improve.

After spending Monday morning exploring Shunjuku, I had meetings and dinner with the local architect evangelists followed Tuesday morning by a meeting with the local evangelism lead. (which was in turn followed by a flight to Kuala Lumpur which is why I’m not posting this until now). In my first year on the job, I focused on the “basics” which included helping improve Architecture Center and handling the TechEd Architecture Track. As part of that focus, I spent little time worrying about globalization issues. Not that they aren’t important, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to handle it. Now that we have worked through the basics, plus it’s now “we” and not just “me”, we can start to have some focus on better globalization support. For example, there’s a Japanese Architecture Center that needs to have the same content as the MSDN site. Machine translation may have come a long way, but there’s still longer to go. Given the massive number of characters in eastern languages, machine translation to English works pretty well – here’s the Japanese Architecture Center in English (translated by Babelfish). However, translating to Japanese (or other eastern languages) is much much more difficult.

Like several other MSFT subsidiaries, Japan has someone responsible for broad reach architecture – i.e. architect with a lower case “a” – so we spent most of our time discussing plans and figuring out how best to leverage each other. I was really impressed how deep these guys were on Software Factories and modeling already – they had a session on Software Factories at the TechEd Japan last week!

Now I’m in Kuala Lumpur for TechEd Malaysia. I’m presenting the Data in SOA talk today and Metropolis tomorrow as part of the Architecture track. I had breakfast with Software Legend Tim Huckaby who I met the first time two years ago at TechEd Malaysia. My teammate Gurpreet just showed me the deck for his Enterprise Architecture talk he’s presenting in about 30 minutes. He’s also doing a presentation tomorrow on Microsoft Architecture Vision & Direction. The EA deck is pretty good and the Vision & Direction talk is something he’s been working on for several months, so I’m looking forward to seeing both of these. We’re working on the next release of The Architecture Strategy Series and I’m thinking these talks should be included.

Since I had the morning off, I spent it wandering around Shinjuku, the part of Tokyo where the MS Japan office is. I was looking for presents for my wife and son, but couldn’t find anything. Experience tells me that I’m a poor judge of clothes for Julie plus with the diet she’s been on and the foreign sizes there’s little chance I’ll pick out something that she likes or that fits. Too bad, as this is like heaven for women’s clothes shopping. I went to four different department stores, and each had floor after floor of ladies wear. For example, the Odakyu department store has 14 floors, of which 6 are dedicated to ladies wear. Other departments get a floor or less. I did find a cute shirt for Patrick, but it was around 8,000 yen, which I was told was $76 US. Seems pretty steep for a shirt he will only wear a few times before he out grows it. 

I did have more shopping luck (for me at least, not for Julie or Patrick) at Yodobashi Camera. Their slogan is “Total Multimedia Life” and let me tell you they are not kidding! If it uses electricity, they have it. From computer equipment to media players to digital and video cameras to pro music gear to home appliances – eight floors of geek paradise to put Fry’s to shame. I picked up a compact USB 2.0 hub and a Wireless 54G card for my laptop – grand total about $50 US. I know I could get these in the states, but the place was so cool I had to get something. And unlike the US, they had racks of hubs to choose from. Literally, they must have had 30 different models of compact USB 2.0 hubs in different shapes and colors. The one thing they didn’t have that I looked for was a tablet PC. Hey Scoble, what’s up with that?