IT Architecture  - Why, What and How

A 2 Day Seminar

This two-day seminar describes the role of architecture in the IT system life cycle. It gives you the essentials of architecture concepts and methods.

Good and efficient IT-support is a cornerstone of most enterprises today. IT-systems must be able to adapt to changes to the business processes and the introduction of new products and services. New technical opportunities and platforms will require upgrades to existing systems and the contribution of new ones. This is a never-ending game. The challenge to the IT- professional is to balance and anticipate all these requirements and to provide a technical infrastructure and application portfolio that is both flexible and cost effective. It has long been known that the IT Architecture is key to achieving this goal. In the last years we have seen an increasing interest in IT Architecture. The architect is now an accepted role in system development and also in the overall IT-planning process. The adoption of component technology and Internet distribution has made this role both necessary and complex. A good understanding of the role of architecture when building effective IT-support is necessary for IT-professionals in any position, from CIO to developer.  There is also a strong connection between the architecture and the development process. A good architecture makes life much easier for the project manager.

• Assess the need for architecture work in your organization
• Understand the role of the architect in the development cycle
• Understand the connection between architecture and the development process
• Get familiar with the architecture terminology and methods
• Understand the architecture principles and building block in distributed component based systems
• Recognize the most popular architecture styles, patterns, and specifications
• Add an architecture view to your IT-strategy
• Plan for architecture driven development
• Assess the value of components and reuse
• Formulate the appropriate requirements for selecting an architecture

This seminar will give you an overview of software architecture, what it is, why it is needed and how it influences system qualities. It will provide you with an understanding of terminology, principles, and methods so that you can assess and influence the way your organization approaches software architecture both on the system and enterprise level.

Why is an IT Architecture important?
Complex distributed systems need stable architectures to be able to adapt to changing requirements and environments. Why the architecture gives this effect and how it can be achieved will be explained.

Moving to a component based architecture
Quite often IT-systems duplicate fundamental business properties. Component based architectures lead to increased sharing of common resources. The seminar will show how to define business components and how the transition to a component based architecture can be achieved.

The role or the architect
The IT-architect plays essential roles in most of the phases in system development. The different types of roles will be explained as well as how to organize for efficient use of architects.

Architecture and the development process
The architecture will influence the way a project can be run in many ways. A well decoupled architecture makes it much easier to allocate work to teams. Agile processes handles architecture somewhat different from the traditional methods but it still plays an important role. The seminar will explain the connections between architecture and the process and give a brief overview over the place of architecture in some process models

Understanding the fundamental principles
Good architectures are simple and easy to understand. They are based on sound principles and utilize well-known patterns and styles. The seminar will explain the basic principles, styles, and patterns and how to use them.

Finding the right requirements
The architecture influences system qualities like performance, reliability, and modifiability. Finding the right set of requirements is therefore an essential part of the architecture development process.

Evaluating an architecture
Commercial systems come with their own architectures. How an externally provisioned system fit together with the existing in house systems depends to a large extent on how the architectures match.  The seminar will explain how architecture assessment can be used to find out how well an architecture fulfills the requirements.

Architecture in the system life cycle
A system has a life cycle and so has its architecture. Enterprise wide architectures have a longer life span than the architecture of individual systems.

This is a seminar for IT managers and project managers who want to find out the essentials of IT Architecture and how to approach this very important part of the software business. User representatives participating in specification work need to be aware of the importance of architecture. People working in other roles such as requirements gathering, QA, testing, and operations will also find this seminar useful.

Why this interest in IT Architecture?
Change, integration, time to market, security, reuse, life cycle, …

What is IT Architecture?
Components, views and perspectives, levels of architecture

The role of the architect
Organizational and project level,
Skills needed

Architecture and the development process
Connections and dependencies.
How architecture is handled in some important process models

Building an effective enterprise architecture
From business processes to software system operation
Business models and components
City plan

Technical and application architecture
Infrastructure and business functionality
Component based and service oriented architectures
Distribution
Middleware

Architecture Styles and Patterns
The architect’s workbook
Useful paradigms
Frameworks

Lars Wiktorin Lars is a senior consultant specializing in analysis and structuring of complex IT-systems. He has been active in the profession for more than 30 years and has held positions as developer, systems engineer, analyst and researcher within several companies including IBM and Ericsson. He has taken active part in the development of the OO methodology Objectory, later becoming RUP. Lars has for several years lectured at university level. He is the author of several books and reports on subjects such as reverse engineering, OO, and reuse. Since 1999 he has developed and been responsible for the IT architect education programme at the Swedish Computing Society which has attracted over 400 delegates to date.

Bengt Asker Bengt has been working in leading positions within the software and hardware Swedish computer industry since the late 50’s. (Datasaab, Saab-Univac,  Nokia, Ericsson).  Lately, he has written a number of reports for the Association of Swedish Manufacturing Industries on different trends in the software industry, several of them on IT Architecture. Bengt is one of the main teachers in the architecture education programme presented by the Swedish Computer Society.

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