Last week

The past week we the enterprise IT architects in the company met up for discussions, seminars workshops etc. First physical meeting in a long time, This was a good week, stimulating and inspiring not that often you have the chance to sit down and discuss IT architecture in details. However when IT architects meet we most discuss process management and IT technique per se, and there I have some problems. I’m very sceptical to work processes out of experience, very seldom processes developed for others are followed by the ‘others’. One wise V.P. of IT once told me ‘be aware ot the *process phantoms” (his words), they can screw up anything’. Processes or rules of thumb for yourself or your colleagues is a completely different matter though. Although I’m an IT architect I’m a bit out of my comfort zone when we go deep into architecture. I tend to focus on a bit more mundane matters or ‘Das problem an sich’, take a problem and solve it, then create a framework around successful solutions, work my way up instead of the more common IT architectural ‘top to down’ pattern. I do not think my reversed way is better or worse it’s just another way, unfortunately this thinking is not in line with my colleagues, which sometimes rejects my proposals with ‘Surely you're joking’, but no most of the time I’m serious. One such example I avoid delta loading, full load integration is much less error prone and less complex, anyone can set up self healing full loads in no time, the same cannot be said about delta loads. Yes full loads also complicates some architectural patterns like ‘pubsub’ but that is another topic. Most things we discussed is a bit ‘off topic’ for me, I’m more in the ‘business’ part than IT techniques we discussed.

Most of us architects are involved in an Active Directory split of grand proportions due to the split of the company, right now we are migrating 15.000 people around the globe to a new AD, and this is just the first part. According to Microsoft noone have done such an extensive AD split before. I have a peripheral role in this AD project, I created a mail dispatcher sending mail instructions to people before and after migration. I can see other uses of the mail dispatcher, so I will try to productify it. That is the way I operate.

Next year as an architect I hope to work on packaging development environments, IoT, Business Intelligence, manufacturing automation  and a lot of other cool things. But for some reason I most of time end up working on other things than I planned. And I have a meeting with a swedish master data management user group coming up later this month, something I look forward to, we use to have a good balance between practical matters and master data management per se.