Ben Sommer is a senior consultant with Systems Flow, Inc, where he helps organizations dramatically improve their competitive advantage through the practical, effective application of best practices in enterprise architecture and software development. His career has spanned network engineering, systems administration, and software development - running the gamut from tools to automate network and systems tasks, to web-based CRM applications, to Identity Management and Provisioning systems, to real-time music synthesis applications. He is the principal author of the open source development framework - myco. His industry experience includes education, education finance, interactive marketing and banking.

Ben is currently consulting at Citizens Bank, providing architectural leadership for strategic IT projects. Self-taught as a technologist, Ben is a trained composer and musician. He holds undergraduate degrees in Music & Philosophy from Hartwick College, and a graduate degree in Music Composition from UMass-Amherst.

Presentation

Investigative Architecture - Making Sense of your Enterprise
A foundational skill for an architect is the capability to rapidly assess and document "as is" and proposed solution architectures. The challenge lies in the typical state of enterprise knowledge regarding the systems - a myriad of internal and external informations sources at all levels of quality and completeness. Critical to rapidly converting this sea of information into useable knowledge requires a repeatable, structured approach for gathering information from internal stakeholders and documents and performing focused research for publicly available product and industry information.

This instructional session aims to present concrete techniques and structured rules of thumb to make sense of your technology enterprise. We will walk through a case study in order to illustrate the techniques.

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