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SOA Architect

Created on 03/13/2007 at 07:29AM by Anand Gopalan

SOA Architect is  premium resource these days. But organization tend to look for Long term specialists in a product suite mainly keeping implementation in mind. So the role of architect or a hired consultant typically get less emphasized after analysis and design phase of project

In order to stay alive with challenging technological advancements it becomes necessary to think about grooming architect potential resources and have them validate the analysis and design phases of the projects.

But this requires a long term vision and skills assesment. Though there will be temptation to think about the bird in hand which is deploying the key resources on to implementation, thoughts needs a realignment now about transforming some of them on to take the architecture guidance path. This requires lot of time and money in focusing their strengths and give an architectural flavor to it.But this can reap rich dividends , when you have them work across projects in providing consultancy that is when the groomed candidates tranform to Core Architects.

Let me explore this in the subsequent blogs as to how to embed the seeds of architect prospects into their organizational culture 

 

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Comments

Anand Gopalan says:

I am now developing these ideas in the form of an article focused on processes that should be in place for effective architect grooming in an organiztaion. I shall share the excerpts here as it develops

03/15/2007 at 10:49PM

John Schmidt says:

Your reference to the term "Core Architect" is interesting. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Is it just another term for "Enterprise" architect or "Business" architect?

03/20/2007 at 08:46AM

Anand Gopalan says:

Term Core Architect refers to someone who can act as a layer between both technology and business. They understand the expectations of the customer and be able to articulate their technology solutions in terms of business needs.The steps to reach there include
1. Work experience on multiple domains / verticals say Retail,health care,travel...
2. Onsite - Offshore Model over a period of atleast 2 years is desirable.
3. Clearly defined career path Project Management or Technology specialization. To be a core architect choosing technology specialization is must. In which there should be sufficient cross technology exposure say .NET,J2EE, in order to appreciate the merits of a particular solution and be able to map them to requirements on hand.
4.Keeping up with latest in technology be it Web 2.0 or SOA 2.0 apart from their consulting work. This comes in a variety of forms from the internet, particpation in blogs, participation in technology symposiums, writing whitepapers etc.

03/25/2007 at 09:45PM

Anand Gopalan says:

Another trend I am seeing these days, people attach the SOA keywords ( Designed SOA Solution, formulated SOA strategy etc) in their profiles, this seem to happen not just with experienced professionals, even someone with one or two years experience.
In my view there is no short cut to architect path, while I feel one should have atleast 5 years of experience behind in designing solutions, which need not be entirely on SOA, but should involve multitude of integration scenarios.
There is also a need to educate the professionals with an aspiration to design SOA solutions not just with SOA principles, but should provide with them with a history session on the evolution of SOA. Someone who has worked from DCE,Encina,CORBA,COM background is well equipped to appreciate the principles of SOA , open standards than someone who starts with EAI/SOA directly.So such case studies and Examples on non SOA based system is a must in any SOA training kit.
In my next post I shall share my thoughts on how SOA is killing creativity from a developer standpoint

07/16/2007 at 05:11AM