Sorry it’s been so quiet around here. And I just had a meeting with a few days ago with Sara Williams where we talked, among many other things, about the need to blog regularly…

I’ve been heads down on final TechEd prep. I’m fairly certain that I’m the only track owner who is also presenting. I know I’m the only track owner who is also doing a track general session. If you keep a close eye on the list of breakouts, you’ll notice that I’m not only presenting ARC 402 (Data in SOA) but I’m now also presenting ARC 300 (Metropolis). Unfortunately, Pat had to cancel his trip to TechEd at the last minute for personal reasons. So, in addition to all the normal last-minute billion details that a track owner has to deal with (most of which would have slipped thru the cracks with out the help of my trusty cabana cohorts Ed and Richard – thanks guys!), I’m also putting the finishing touches on my own session and having to prepare to do Pat’s. I’ve presented Metropolis many times before, most recently last week at the P&P Summit, so presenting ARC 300 isn’t a huge deal. However, we did have to cancel ARC 303 and are still figuring out if we can cover ARC 302. I’m bummed about that, but we’re going to try and get that material recorded at TechEd Europe next month for inclusion in the Architecture Strategy Series.

Even without ARC 302 & 303, we still have a great track. One thing we really tried to do is cover all categories of architecture. Most of our track covers application / solution architecture, but we also have several sessions on infrastructure architecture. I’m really looking forward to ARC 404 – Managing SOA Using Existing Platforms. We had a bit of a crisis on this session a few weeks ago, but we took care of it and the session looks great. I’m guessing lots of people will be interested in “how Microsoft is internally managing Services using current Microsoft technologies”. ARC 304 (Bridging the Gap) and ARC 403 (Defense in Depth) also cover infrastructure architecture and should be really good. We’re also have a session on Business Architecture. ARC 301 (Service Oriented Business Architecture). It’s really interesting to think about how SOA is going to affect the business as well as the application architecture.

See you in San Diego!

Update: for ARC 302, we’re going to have a Metropolis Discussion where we can talk about the Metropolis overview as well as drill down on how applications learn and how data interoperates (i.e. the combined contents of the original ARC 302 & 303 talks). I’ll be moderating and several members of my team will be on hand, but we’re hoping to listen as much as if not more than we talk.

TechEd is almost upon us – just over one week to go. We had our last track owner meeting yesterday. I’m chasing down speakers for slides (I actually have some already!) and figuring out what seems like a million final details for our track cabana. In addition to the great sessions, we’ve got some cool stuff happening at TechEd this year. Some I can’t quite talk about yet (watch this space) but I did want to remind all TechEd attendees about the Architect Road Rally happening Sunday night, after the precons. Space is limited and subject to first come, first served registration, so register right away!

Since this blog is now being syndicated on Architecture Center, I thought I should repost links to a recent pair of entries I wrote entitled “Is the Middle-Tier Endangered?” and “The Endangered Middle-Tier, Part 2“. The basic premise of the posts is that as computer hardware gets faster and service-orientation aims to carve our course-grained applications into finer-grained services, the value of running the business logic on a separate tier diminishes greatly. Add an improved programming model to the database (such as the CLR’s addition to SQL 2005) and I feel that, eventually, it will make more sense to run the services in-process with the database instead of on a separate tier. We’re not there yet – in addition to continued hardware improvements, we need a major improvement to the overall management infrastructure – but I think it will happen. The question is, do you think it will happen?

There are a wide variety of web pages to get movie times information. How about web services? My wife and I went to see a movie on Saturday (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – loved it). On the way there, we got worried we weren’t going to make it in time. I figured I’d check if there was any other movies starting a little later in case we didn’t get there in time. Of course, I have my new Smartphone, so I wanted to use it. This turned out to be much more difficult than it should have been.

MSN Mobile entertainment section was useless – lottery and horoscope only. There don’t seem to be many sites tuned for smartphone access. TV Guide has a smartphone site - in case I want to check what’s on TV while I’m out?

I want a program that downloads local theatre movie times into my phone. Not too much to ask. In fact, I’d write it myself and give it away if there was a simple source for the data. However, for all the movie time sites, I can’t find a web service or even a source for the raw data.

Is there a movie times web service that I just don’t know about? If there isn’t where do the movie sites get their movie times data and how can I get a copy?

I just finished reading this great book on architecture. It talks about governance, optimizing ROI, the importance of precision measurements, the opportunity found in inefficiency and how that inefficiency is often perpetuated by “conventional wisdom” that needs to be overcome or even disregarded in order to realize the opportunity.

You just have to get past the baseball on the cover.

The book is Moneyball and it about the Oakland Athletics, one of the best teams in baseball despite having the second lowest payroll in the game. The author, Michael Lewis, chronicles the A’s 2002 season when they won 103 games and had a winning percentage second only to the Yankees, who spend literally three times as much on players than the A’s can. The A’s are successful because they precisely measure the contribution of individual players and exploit the inefficiency of how players are valued by other teams. In the process, they make decisions that fly in the face of “traditional” baseball, but you can’t argue with the fact they’ve been to the playoffs four years in a row. You could say, the Oakland A’s have been architected to win.

I found the methodology that the A’a use to determine a player value facinating. Where other teams value batting average and RBIs, the A’s care much more about on-base and slugging percentage. The reason? The A’s have figured out that on-base and slugging are much more important to the team’s success. Obviously, batting average and on-base percentage are related stats, but they aren’t identical and that difference leads to an inefficiency the A’s can exploit. Players who get lots of walks have lower batting averages but higher on-base percentages and are typically undervalued by the market.

We’ve seen similar inefficiencies from valuing the wrong attributes in our industry. For example, early on in the web era, there was little understanding of the importance of scalability over performance. As a consultant in the late 90′s, I often saw systems designs that optimized performance at the expense of scalability. It took a long time for people to realize how much more important scalability was. It didn’t help that scalability was harder to measure and was often counter-intuitive. Throwing away objects between method calls? What lunatic came up with that idea? Of course, MTS turned out to be a big success and defined the processing model we still use today.

Today, everyone has pretty much figured out the value of scalability over performance. The question is, what will the next opportunity be? Or, to use the A’s terminology, what are people overpaying for?