Topics Range from APIs to Digital Transformation
GLENS FALLS NY AND FREMONT CA, July 24, 2014 – Intellyx and EITAGlobal today announced that they are jointly producing a four-Webinar series featuring industry expert and thought leader Jason Bloomberg. The topics include Agile Architecture, Dynamic APIs and Schemas, Digital Transformation, and Enterprise Architecture.
For more information or to register, please follow the links below.
Agile Architecture Challenges & Best Practices
August 19, 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Dynamic APIs and Dynamic Schemas: The Secrets of Building Inherently Flexible Software
September 23, 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Digital Transformation: Cutting through the Hype for True Business Value
October 9, 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Why Enterprise Architecture is Completely Broken and How to Fix It
October 28, 2014 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Full Descriptions of Each Webinar
Agile Architecture Challenges & Best Practices
August 19, 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Overview: For simple projects, developers can often work together to hammer out the design of their application as part of the routine within every sprint. When applications are more complicated, typically because they involve multiple distributed components, integration with legacy assets, or must run in a Cloud environment, then architecture becomes essential.
The challenge, then, is to take an Agile approach – lightweight, team-driven, and focused only on the task at hand. It’s important to allow the team to drive architecture, but still have architecture specialists who bring a higher level of design expertise to the project. The challenges then become avoiding “ivory tower” architecture, creating the minimum viable architecture, architecting for scalability, and soliciting stakeholder participation in the architecture. However, to build inherently flexible software, it’s important to architect for future, as yet unknown requirements via change cases that describe the flexibility required. The secret to architecting for future requirements without overdesigning the software is to build the appropriate declarative abstract models into the software.
Why should you attend: Many fans of Agile development see architecture as contrary to the principles of Agile. In reality, most Agile projects need architecture, especially in the enterprise. And yet, adding architecture to an Agile project doesn’t make the organization any more agile. This Webinar unravels the challenge of Agile Architecture and lays out an approach for achieving technology-enabled business agility in the enterprise.
Areas Covered in the Session:
- Incorporating architecture into an Agile project (Scrum, for example)
- Building inherently flexible software
- Team responsibility for architecture
- Deferring commitment on design decisions
- Resolving the overbuilding paradox
- Scaling Agile for the enterprise
- Coding for a declarative model
- Supporting abstract models in software
- Services and application assembly
Who Will Benefit:
- Software architects
- Software developers
- Scrum Masters
- Project managers
- System Architects
- Solution Architects
- IT managers
- CIOs
- QA personnel
- DevOps personnel
Dynamic APIs and Dynamic Schemas: The Secrets of Building Inherently Flexible Software
September 23, 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Overview: The central technical challenge for Agile Architecture is how to achieve functionality and performance without having to trade off flexibility. The context for these central patterns of Agile Architecture is the concept of architecting at a dynamic level of abstraction above the logical level of contracted APIs and data schemas.
At this dynamic level, there are the central patterns that are essential to resolving the fundamental compromise of distributed computing:
- Dynamic Coupling. Tightly coupled interfaces require detailed knowledge of both sides of a distributed computing interaction, and any change on one side might break the other. Contracted interfaces introduce loose coupling, but at the expense of a static interface. With dynamic coupling, interface differences are resolved dynamically at run time.
- Dynamic Schemas. Neither the WSDL files that specify Web Services, nor the URIs, HTTP verbs, and Internet Media Types that specify RESTful APIs adequately contract the message semantics for any interaction. Dynamic schemas abstract all semantic metadata in a consistent way, relying once again upon the integration engine to resolve these dynamic schemas for each interaction at run time.
- Extreme Late Binding. SOA registries ended up doing little more than resolving endpoint references at run time, similar to the way DNS resolves domain names – in other words, they provided late binding. Such late binding adds some flexibility to an interaction, but typically at the expense of performance. Today, however, dynamic coupling and dynamic schemas enable any client to discover at run time all the metadata it requires to interact with any endpoint, without sacrificing performance – what we call extreme late binding.
Put these architectural principles together and you have an approach for building inherently flexible software, even in a complicated distributed computing environment.
Why should you attend: The central challenge of distributed computing is how to get your various distributed bits to communicate with each other properly. Since those distributed components are typically heterogeneous, we must somehow come up with a common means of establishing interaction among components everybody can agree on. Yet, once we do that, we’ve necessarily compromised on flexibility, because changing how our components interact is a difficult, complex endeavor. This problem pervades the entire history of APIs, from remote procedure calls to Web Services to RESTful APIs and everything in between. We must somehow contract interfaces in order to abstract the underlying functionality, yet the very act of introducing such contracts is a compromise, since the interface itself now lacks flexibility.
Areas Covered in the Session:
- Review of Web Services and RESTful APIs
- Limitations of contracted interfaces
- Challenges of document style services
- Challenges of custom media types
- Meta, Dynamic, and Logical abstractions
- Data, metadata, and code at the Meta level
- Working with abstract models
- The role of the business agility platform
Agent-Oriented Architecture - Capabilities vs. Affordances
- Implementing dynamic coupling
- Implementing dynamic schemas
- The role of extreme late binding
Who Will Benefit:
- Enterprise Architects
- Integration Architects
- Software architects
- Integration engineers
- SOA specialists
- Software developers
- System Architects
- Solution Architects
- IT managers
Digital Transformation: Cutting through the Hype for True Business Value
October 9, 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Overview: We’ll cut through all the hype and provide clear, actionable insights into the important technology trends of the day. We’ll discuss the motivations for digital transformation, as well as the risks and benefits. The focus of this discussion will be on business agility, which breaks down into responsiveness, resilience, and innovativeness.
We’ll connect these agility drivers to real-world business problems like regulatory compliance, expanding to new markets, gaining market share, and dealing with innovative competitors. Then we’ll connect the dots between agility drivers and technology trends to discuss what is hype and what technology approaches can provide real value today. Finally, we’ll discuss the existing legacy environment and how to approach tactical modernization initiatives as part of a long-term digital transformation initiative that is both business-focused and practical.
Why should you attend: It seems that Digital Transformation is a hot topic in every board room these days. There are so many new technologies out there – Cloud Computing, Mobile, Big Data, to name a few – that every enterprise wants to join the Web scale party and transform their organizations. The challenge, however, is the existing IT department has their hands full keeping the lights on running all the legacy technology that’s been there for years. In response, many organizations are hiring Chief Digital Officers to drive digital transformation initiatives separate from the CIO. This move is a bad mistake, as the enterprises who will succeed with their transformation initiatives are the ones who successfully leverage the best of their legacy. There are no shortcuts – digital transformation is hard work, and risks abound.
Areas Covered in the Session:
- Digital transformation
- Modern technology trends, including Cloud Computing, Mobile Technologies, and Big Data
- Business agility
- Responsiveness, Resilience, and Innovativeness
- Connecting agility drivers to technology decisions
- Separating technology hype from reality
- Dealing with the legacy mess
- Tactical, business-driven legacy modernization
Who Will Benefit:
- CIOs
- Business executives
- IT Managers
- Enterprise Architects
Why Enterprise Architecture is Completely Broken and How to Fix It
October 28, 2014 10:00 PDT/1:00 EDT
Overview: Just what an Enterprise Architect is actually supposed to do is curiously still up for debate, more than 25 years after EA’s invention. Common to most definitions is the notion that such architects must drive business transformation in their organizations. The focus should be on digital transformation rather than documentation. EAs need a more active role in architecting the enterprise. Unfortunately, EA is often synonymous with the practice of documenting one person’s viewpoint of their company’s IT.
In reality, EA is about the skillful manipulation of an enterprise’s structure and behavior within a complex environment. Frameworks, in fact, have become more part of the problem than part of the solution, since they seek to break down the enterprise and its problems into their component parts, rather than treating the enterprise as a complex adaptive system, like a living organism. Once EAs understand that the enterprise is a complex system where business agility is the desired emergent property, then the activities appropriate to the role of EA begin to fall into place. They must report to the CEO, COO, or CFO, not the CIO. There must be an executive mandate for digital transformation that calls upon the EA team to drive. And EAs must be directly involved in governance – not the stodgy, morale-killing governance of the past, but a modern, automated approach to governance that drives flexibility.
This new approach to EA focuses more on solving business problems than on extensive documentation, and takes a data-driven approach to business transformation. Today’s forward-looking executives seek digital transformations of their organizations – technology-enabled business transformation that requires a more agile approach to architecture than traditional EA has offered in the past. The field of Enterprise Architecture must itself transform into a new, Agile Architecture in order to drive digital transformation effectively in today’s increasingly wired world.
Why should you attend: In the years since John Zachman originated the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in 1987, EA has achieved a surprisingly paltry level of success. Yes, Enterprise Architects have used various frameworks and other tools to document how their organization operates, often with meticulous detail. But to what end? The cost savings and responsiveness benefits that EA has purported to deliver have been few and far between. Stories of stalled or misdirected EA initiatives vastly outnumber bona fide examples of EA efforts leading to measurable business value. What gives? And how do we fix the problem?
Areas Covered in the Session:
- What Enterprise Architecture (EA) purports to be and what it really is
- The challenges with modern EA frameworks like TOGAF, FEAF, and Zachman
- EA as driver of business transformation
- Complex adaptive systems
- The enterprise as complex system
- Business agility as emergent property of the enterprise
- Modern, automated governance
- Data-driven business transformation
- Agile Architecture approach to EA
Who Will Benefit:
- CIO
- IT Manager
- Enterprise Architect
- Line-of-Business executive
- Line-of-Business manager
- Systems architect
- Project Manager
- Business Analyst
- Chief Data Officer
- Data Scientist
- Data Analyst
- Chief Digital Officer
About Intellyx
Intellyx is the first and only advisory, training, and industry analysis firm focused on Digital Transformation through Architecting Agility™ for the enterprise. The brainchild of Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner and President of ZapThink for twelve years, Intellyx brings a refreshing and provocative perspective to IT-enabled business agility.
Business Agility – the ability for organizations to respond to change, and to leverage change for competitive advantage – is on the must-have list of every business executive. Yet practical steps for achieving agility in today’s enterprise have been largely out of reach.
Information Technology should be part of the solution, but far too often it’s part of the problem. Siloed applications. Complex middleware stacks. Layers of legacy – all barriers to agility. Intellyx’s revolutionary new approach to architecture, the Bloomberg Agile Architecture Technique, cuts through these barriers and lays out a practical, implementable approach to achieving business agility in any organization.
About Jason Bloomberg
Jason Bloomberg is the leading expert on digital transformation through architecting agility for the enterprise. As president of Intellyx, Mr. Bloomberg brings his years of thought leadership in the areas of Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture, and Service-Oriented Architecture to a global clientele of business executives, architects, software vendors, and Cloud service providers looking to achieve technology-enabled business agility across their organizations and for their customers. His latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution (John Wiley & Sons, 2013), sets the stage for Mr. Bloomberg’s groundbreaking Agile Architecture vision.
Mr. Bloomberg is perhaps best known for his twelve years at ZapThink, where he created and delivered the Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) SOA course and associated credential, certifying over 1,700 professionals worldwide. He now runs the successor to the LZA program, the Bloomberg Agile Architecture Certification Course, around the world. He is also a contributor to Forbes Magazine, a frequent conference speaker and prolific writer.
Mr. Bloomberg’s previous book, Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2006, coauthored with Ron Schmelzer), is recognized as the leading business book on Service Orientation. He also co-authored the books XML and Web Services Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 2002), and Web Page Scripting Techniques (Hayden Books, 1996).
About EITAGlobal
EITAGlobal is a specialized offering from NetZealous LLC, a technology and business process solutions and services company registered in Fremont, CA. it is a provider of premier trainings in the IT industry.
EITAGlobal’s strategy is focused on making trainings effective and relevant by bringing Experts and participants across the table. Accordingly, a large part of its trainings comprises live, in-person seminars and Consulting.
EITAGlobal gives high importance to physical interaction between the Expert and the attendees. It believes in the philosophy that learning is facilitated best when the Expert is present at arm’s length to interact with and have issues and pain areas clarified.
EITAGlobal’s seminars are a logical outcome of the experience its parent company, NetZealous LLC has imbibed while organizing seminars in their other lines of business in various domains of the continuing professional education industry.
Media Contacts
For Intellyx:
Jason Bloomberg
617-517-4999
jason@intellyx.com
For EITAGlobal:
Matt Collins
matt@eitaglobal.com
510-584-9663
