IT-eye

“A small impression”
This November 22 and November 23 the Dutch Architectural Congress was held. A couple of colleagues of mine, including me represented IT-eye. This edition of the congress was special for us, because we were nominated for the Dutch Championship for ICT Architecture with our SOA case. Our IT architect Mike van Alst is responsible for SOA solution IT-eye implemented successfully for our customer. Mike wrote the architectural roadmap to SOA and presented it to the Dutch ICT Architecture board as well.

Together with nine other contributions IT-eye WON the Dutch Championship for ICT Architecture yesterday. It is a great honour for us to win this price and it is a confirmation as well that we are doing the right thing with ICT Architecture in combination with SOA.
In addition to the Dutch Championship for ICT Architecture the congress was very interesting. In two days I have heard a lot of information about ICT architectures, Enterprise Architectures, SOA, business rules etc.
The congress started with a lecture by Rob Cremer about trends in ICT and the speed of changes. It’s amazing to hear what today’s technology already can and will do in the (near) future. A lot of presentations hooked up on these topics and threw more light on different aspects.

For example Nokia gave a presentation about their architecture of the current and future cell-phone and The Open Group discussed TOGAF. A nice lecture was given by Prof. Frank van Harmelen, (VU Amsterdam) about the Semantic Web.

The second day I joined different SOA lectures. Some gave an impression of an SOA case which has been implemented for a customer, but, in my opinion, the most interesting lecture was about Value patterns and anti-patterns for SOA. It explained some patterns how to substantiate an SOA in a business case from a financial point of view. Furthermore which roles an IT Architect must fulfill and how to act within an organization to achieve or maintain the Enterprise Architecture. A couple of tips and tricks were given for this particular case.
Summarizing I can say that the two days congress brought me a lot of information, new topics on IT architecture and useful feedback which I can use in my projects directly. And of course, the cream on the pie, IT-eye won the Dutch Championship for ICT Architecture!