I’ve finally prepared my slides from when I presented at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007, so just thought I’d finalise by covering the day and getting the slides online…

I have to say it was a great day – Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of my favourite disciplines and getting to present on the subject for the conference was something I’d looked forward to since the previous years event.

The conference was hosted in Paris, at the Paris Hilton, just off the Sienne – it was hosted by the Open Group, and I was kindly asked to present by John Spencer, the recently retired Director of The Open Group’s Architecture Forum, and once I was there I was warmly welcomed by Allen Brown, the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Open Group.

As you can probably guess I’m very passionate about EA, in fact any (almost all) of the methods and techniques for getting a contextual, “Big Picture” view of an IT / IS estate ecosystem (what I like to call ‘Macro IT’) – and I’ll be writing a little more about some of these methods in latter posts.

As an industry we’ve been pretty successful to date about understanding and evolving the knowledge and experience around both Infrastructure and Applications. What we’ve been much less successful at, and I believe that it’s due to demand (and compromised by time to deliver), is understanding how these technologies, are put together as systems in a holistic manner, and how those systems themselves co-exist in Enterprise IT eco-systems (and to an extent how they compete with each other as ‘functional’ entities).

Last year when I presented at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2006 (hosted in London), my slides were much more visual, and focused on how EA was being used at Sun, they were well received, but the comments afterwards were that they were too ‘high level’. So this year I decided to focus much more on Case Studies where we had been involved with Customers EA programmes. The change in direction must have worked because I got a half room standing ovation – the first I’ve received of that size (circa 200 there – I was still on a high about it for at least a couple of weeks).

Because of this there are two version, one with my speakers notes attached and one without – I’ve also created a ‘blog post from the slides (including the speakers notes) which I’ll put online tomorrow.

Last years slides are also available (“Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference 2006”), and are also on the ‘Architecting the Enterprise’ web site.

Related Links:

• Presenting at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007
• Just back from speaking at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007
• Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007 (this post)
• Enterprise Architecture @ Sun Microsystems