Track: Professionalizing the Discipline of EA
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 — 2.00 - 5.30

2.00 - 2.45 Approach to Design EA Practice to Support Architects throughout the Job Lifecycle In fast-paced and entrepreneurial organizations where architects are spread widely in a distributed model, practice design presents an interesting challenge. The distributed organization model can lead to inconsistency in designs and deliverables, reinventing of tools and templates across the board, more siloed approach in solutions, and reduced sharing. We started with the vision of promoting consistency to deliver quality solutions for the organization. To achieve this, we proposed a model in which the practice (Center Of Excellence) provides process (framework and methodology), service (participating COE member) and product (tools and templates) support to the architecture community throughout an architects‚ job lifecycle. Our definition of architecture community includes employees in architecture job family, architecture managers (managers with at least one architect as direct report), and architecture-interested team members including business consultants, business ! system analysts and engineering professionals. The model divides architects‚ job lifecycle into five well-defined phases- hiring, on-boarding into architect role, annual goal setting, on-going coaching and mentoring and job change. The support provided for each phase caters to the needs of the three subgroups of architecture community. We identified the customer value-add for each of the components of support package. We use surveys to get feedback from the community to recalibrate our service for continuous improvement. Every quarter, we plan and organize architecture forum, a day-long event where architects from across Nike LBS gather to share, learn and influence the architecture direction of the organization.The Architecture Forum is the best avenue to network with other architects, learn about what is going on in other areas of architecture, and find ways and opportunities to collaborate more. This is very much in-line with the Œsystems thinking‚ aspect of learning organizations, giving our team members the ability to comprehend and address the whole, and to examine interrelationships between the parts. Savi Sharma, CD&EA- Architecture Practice, Nike Savi is an Enterprise Architect with Nike. Her current areas of focus are design of Architecture practice discipline and enterprise standards. Savi has a doctoral degree in biophysics and has worked with Nike product data, data and information management, and data architecture. She is passionate about design, communication, and people leadership.

2.45 - 3.30 Case Study: Architecture Profession Maturity IT Architecture as a profession has come a long way since its recognition as an important practice supporting an IT organization. Maintaining the profession vitality requires continuously evaluating skills, capabilities and human resources development. Maturing the profession needs validation of those skills and capabilities by an external organization which brings a new level of authenticity to the way architecture professionals contribute broadly to an enterprise. In this session, you will learn the thinking behind incorporating The Open Group Architect Certification (ITAC) as part of architecture profession maturity at Nationwide, a large financial services company. You will learn about Nationwide's journey of encouraging a first group of architects to go through the certification process and achieving remarkable results. The session also covers what Nationwide is looking at to further mature architecture profession and capability. Sreekanth Kalluri, CTO, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Sreekanth Kalluri is Chief Technology Officer for Nationwide, supporting Nationwide Better Health, Nationwide Bank and corporate staff functions including finance, human resources, legal, compliance, marketing, information technology, and investments. He is also the architecture profession owner. Prior to Nationwide, Mr. Kalluri worked for IBM and Ernst & Young implementing solutions on a variety of platforms such as internet, client-server, and commercial packages, utilizing his experience in distributed computing, object oriented analysis and design, patterns, and frameworks. He has a master's degree in computer science and bachelor's degree in engineering.

3.30 - 4.00 Break

4.00 - 4.45 Benefits Realized from Accreditation of a Corporate Professional Development Program In 2008, Raytheon engaged The Open Group to perform an accreditation assessment of the Raytheon Certified Architect Program (RCAP). RCAP achieved accreditation in early 2009. This presentation will summarize the accreditation process, areas covered, program impacts, lessons learned, and value of an independent assessment of the program. Rolf Siegers, Engineering Fellow; Lead of Raytheon Mission Architecture Program (RayMAP) Rolf Siegers joined Raytheon in 1984 and currently leads Raytheon's companywide Raytheon Mission Architecture Program (RayMAP), a set of initiatives addressing architecture governance, assessment, process, training & certification, collaborations, reference architectures, and tools. Rolf is an Engineering Fellow, a Raytheon Certified Architect, member and past Chair of Raytheon's corporate Architecture Review Board, and co-leader of the Raytheon Certified Architect Program. Rolf has led several multi-disciplinary architecture teams for large-scale, software-intensive national and international systems since 1997. He is certified as a Master ITAC Architect (The Open Group), ATAM® Evaluator (SEI), and Software Architecture Professional (SEI). Rolf has previously presented at conferences for IEEE, U.S. Department of Defense, Object Management Group (OMG), International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), Integrated Defense Architectures, Software Engineering Institute (SEI), and The Open Group. Rolf holds bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Huntingdon College and is a member of IEEE and INCOSE. He resides in Dallas, Texas with his wife and three children.

4.45 - 5.30 Discussion: Professionalizing the Discipline of EA Moderator: Len Fehskens, VP Skills & Capabilities, The Open Group Len Fehskens is responsible for all activities relating to enterprise architecture architecture at The Open Group, including AOGEA, TOGAF™ and the Architecture Forum. Prior to joining The Open Group, Len led the Worldwide Architecture Profession Office for HP Services at Hewlett-Packard. He majored in Computer Science at MIT, and has almost 40 years of experience in the IT business as both an individual contributor and a manager, within both product engineering and services business units.

Return to previous page