HSG at Remix

On the 1st of October, my colleague Mony and me attended the Remix in Vienna. Key note speaker was Simon Guest.

In his key note, the guest star from Redmond spoke about hats. A hat represented a role in a team. He talked about designers, developers and architects. Although his colleague Sam Guckenheimer would probably add some more hats, such as the hat of business analyst or project manager, this model was a sufficient framework to differ between people, who tend to think how a solution should look like, people who are concerned what should be done under the roof to get the things done and those who are have the big picture and think more on an enterprise level.

So far so good, but talking about concerns of those roles, there was one baseline that was an essential for me in this key note. “A software architect, whose job (among other things) is to make sure that the solution must meet corporate requirements, must care to find a way to get the solution into the cloud.” Probably, even harder, some may interpret it as “as a good architects, someone knows that cloud computing is the technology of the future, the architect shall care to get new applications to this new technology as soon as possible.”

Well, Simon Guest, of course did not say it exactly in that way, but if I take the last statement, some people may find it appropriate, others will consider it provocative. (not considering the typical IT guy who tends to formalize his criticism in rather not so decent way). A lot of cloud computing technologies, no matter whether it is Microsoft Azure or one its competitors, are in its early stage. Why shall an architect devise cloud strategies for solutions needed today with technologies that will be able tomorrow? We do not know yet how long it takes to get this new technology to perform well and secure.

My answer is not “Yes, he can!”, my answer is “Yes, he should!” – An good architect is responsible for current company requirements, as he at the same time must be an evangelist for new technologies. We must not expect marketing managers, aales representatives, accountants or the company’s janitor to think about technical innovation. They all have a valuable job to do. We can probably ask them to understand the basic ideas of a philosophy such as cloud computing and to understand the difference between this and other approaches. But we will never get them to say: “Hey dude, this cloud computing stuff is awesome. After browsing through some whitepapers, doing some hardcore handsonlabs session and using the reflector to analyse the depths of the code, I agree this is the technology of the future, so let’s stuff some projects with it…”

It is the job of the architect to make sure that new technologies may get introduced into a company. Maybe someone should not start with the most crucial stuff in the company… But if nobody really cares about new technologies, you never get the chance to be ahead of your competitors. And in the end, this does matter…

So, all software architects or IT heads unite! Fight for your right to get new technologies!

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