Architects are Aliens

After the preconference by JISC, today the conference for architecture practitioners had it's kick off. It's the 22nd conference, what sounds like a long history on this subject. But the conference is held 4 times a year so that explaines it.
The first keynote was by Steve Kirby from SAP. He had the privilege to launch TOGAF 9 (the open group architecture framework) in Europe. He told us that a lot of TOGAF 9 is origanally from SAP EAF (enterprise architecture framework). Not all people on Twitter agreed on this.
Next to the SAP-selling-story we had a spotlight on Archimate. This was also a launch-presentation (of the modelling language Archimate).
The presentation on certification didn't attract my attention.
The final session of the morning was a panel discussion on 'Resisting Short term thinking'. It was an interesting discussion with a lot of viewpoints. To my opinion the following was interesting:
- in these economic times it's even more important for an architect to clearify to the business what is the added value of EA
- it's all about short term values, the 'big program' is dead
- architects should talk 'business', they have to know how descisions are made
- don't wait for the business to make to plans, but anticipate and help the business to define their plans
The afternoon I spend on the stream on business analysis.
The start by Ron Tolido sounded promising. He talked about trying to define a open methodoloy for business analysis.
I also liked the presentations by Nigel Green (author of'the book on communication 'Lost in Translation'). Nigel stated: there is no divide between IT and business, but only a communication problem. He introduced the VPEC-T model (values, policies, events, contenct, trust) with five ways of looking at a business information system.
Finally we had a workshop by Ann Rosenberg on Business process management. This was not what I expected. I guess the presenter had a lot of knowledge, but I didn't manage to get a grip on her story.

After the last workshop we went for the evening program on which I may come back later on.

And today was also my first day on Twitter, what a great invention. I will come back to Twitter as well (vanpopta, #ogadc)