We had a really successful Enterprise Architecture (EA) track at Innovate this year — June 2 thru 6, 2013; our best one yet!
EA Birds of a Feather session — EA Best Practices — we had about 80 people in the room. Standing room only.
We had 16 EA presentations, most of them by customers (we had even more, and had snuck some EA presentations into other tracks, but 4 customers couldn’t make it at last minute due to travel). All were Excellent presentations and we had an engaged, pretty full room of attendees in all sessions.
Recurring theme was essentially, Agile EA — quick and effective ‘just enough’ EA for effective planning. Gathering info and visualizing spreadsheets. Using reference models to see what you’ve got vs what you should have. Analytics and dashboards. Understanding what is going on an what you need to fund and costs associated. Communicating it. Don’t just do DevOps blindly. With EA you can see.
These customer experiences rhyme with our overall IBM DevOps story — a “continuous business planning” agile overlay.
With so many organizations faced with disruptive technologies (even Healthcare orgs being forced to open up IT to the cloud and mobile) there is an urgent need to PLAN how to attack these issues.
There was also an excellent VOICE (of the customer) session on Sunday. The new technologies that we are embracing in our EA roadmap, with Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) accumulation of data across tools, and SPARQL query to produce mashups of data, seemed to resonate with our customers.
Thank you to all of our customers and business partners who presented and for everyone who attended. We really enjoyed hearing your stories of how you are evolving your EA, and for your feedback. Great questions; great conversations.
To continue the conversation, go to the IBM Rational System Architect user group on LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2266144
To learn more, please go to: http://eablue.com/featured/2013/06/14/innovate-2013-great-ea-track/