So the Metropolis session went very well, even though it was being translated. We did what is called interactive translation – where I say a few sentences in English and then Quanzhan translated it into Chinese. It meant that we couldn’t cover as much material but we still made really good time – I did 52 slides (which is a significant reduction from the full 75 slides) in exactly an hour. The audience understood at least some of what I was saying – they laughed when I made a joke – but it really helped me to have the time to think about my next sentence while Quanzhan translated my last one. I was able to choose my words carefully in order to make sure the topics were covered as concisely as possible. I’m hoping the Data in SOA talk goes as well tomorrow. After I finish this entry, I have to working on cutting that presentation down to fit in an hour with translation.

After my presentation, I spent some time with an architect from China Mobile. I love conversations where a customer challenges me to codify my thinking – I learn from the customer as well as myself. He made a great point about architecting for an unknown future vs. engineering for the present. Sounds like a strong believer in YAGNI. While we were discussing SOA I was able to articulate something I knew but had never really expressed before. SOA is a means to an end, it’s not an end in and of itself. It’s a great way, but not the only way, to enable the flow of information across disparate systems. It’s also a great way, but not the only way, to enable more flexibility in the way we build systems. A key success metric for companies today is time-to-market. However, time-to-market usually refers to the time it takes to develop something the first time. In the future, I think the time-to-adapt will become even more important than time-to-market. Flexibility – you are gonna need it.

I’ll be honest, with a quick glance at WS-Enumeration and WS-Transfer I’m at what Don refers to as Stage 1. Especially WS-Transfer which appears at first glance to be CRUD for web services. Maarten talks about using CRUD only when you can afford it. My biggest issue with CRUD is that it assumes a trust relationship – that some other service is responsible for deciding when and how to CUD entities that I manage. I can’t imagine exposing an interface like that on any service I build.

But it is nice to see we’ve started publishing specs in easy to download PDF format.

I made it to Beijing yesterday with no problem. There was a car waiting for me at the airport, and one of the speaker managers met me at my hotel shortly after I arrived. They even provide a loner dopod SmartPhone for use while I’m here though I’m not sure who I would call. I went to the attendee dinner last night and on to a party for local partners. I spoke to a few people, including a gentleman from Digital China who reads my blog. It’s nice to be recognized at all, much less as an International Man of Architecture.

After dinner, I worked for an hour or so with the translator for my Metropolis session, Quanzhan. Quanzhan is from China, but he’s now a program manager in the Windows Server division at corp – his office is just on the other side of campus. He’s here doing presentations of his own as well as helping out as a translator. I’ve met at least one other Chinese person here who works in Redmond – I’m guessing presenting TechEd China provides a great way for these folks to visit home and also give back to the community they are from in some way.

Delivering these presentations via a translator will be an interesting challenge. I’ve never worked thru a translator before. Each session has it’s own unique challenge – Data in SOA is very technical while Metropolis is pretty abstract. I ended up cutting 20 slides from today’s Metropolis talk in order to ensure I have enough time to hit the important points. Presenting this way requires a truly conservative approach to word choice – even though my session is 75 minutes long, in reality I have closer to 30 as everything I say has to be spoken twice. I’m grateful that Quanzhan and I spent the time last night going thru the presentation even though we were both exhausted. I guess we’ll see how well the session goes today, but I think we’ll do well.

I’m sitting in the Kuala Lumpur airport – my flight to Beijing leaves in about half an hour. I didn’t get a chance to blog all day yesterday, so here’s a quick recap:

• I’ve run into a bunch of people who I first met at TechEd Malaysia 2002. In particular, Adrian and Rathi who both wanted to see pictures of Patrick. The big bummer of only spending two days here is that I didn’t get to do much more that the conference.
• After the sessions on Wednesday, I hung out with a bunch of the other speakers at dinner. Several of the RD’s who spoke at TechEd US also came to our Architect Road Rally and had a great time. Always nice to be told you threw a great party.
• Thursday started  with Gurpreet’s session on Architecture Vision & Direction. I didn’t think this session did as well as the EA talk the day before. Part of that comes from the fact the EA talk set a high bar, but some of it comes from the fact that the V&D talk wasn’t as polished. In contrast, I did much better with my Metropolis Thursday than the SOA Data talk on Wednesday. Maybe I just need one talk to get back in the groove – I usually think I do better in my second session.
• After our sessions, lunch, and hanging around in the cabana with some other attendees, Aaron (the local Architect Evangelist) drove Gurp and I around Putrajaya. Pat often points out when he presents Metropolis that you can’t bulldoze Boston just because the roads aren’t straight. However, you can build a new city about a half an hour away and move into it when it’s finished. That’s Putrajaya – the new administrative center of Malaysia.  It was stunning – huge and ultra modern. But it was also strange as it is completely underutilized, so far anyway. We also did a little shopping and I was able to find a few things for the family back home.
• Last night we had a regional architect dinner, where we got to hang out with a bunch of the local architects in the region. Lots of good discussion.

Next stop – China!

I just finished my Data in SOA talk for TechEd Malaysia. The room was very hot and the session was right after lunch – not exactly optimal conditions. I did OK – could have been better. Between time in hotels and on airplanes with nothing to do but code, I’ve written more in the last four days than the previous four months combined. I didn’t spend as much time as I could have reviewing the deck, so I guess I can’t say that I was utterly prepared. But I have delivered this talk many times and spend a significant amount of time thinking about the concepts and discussing them with teammates. BTW, this talk is now available as a whitepaper on Architecture Center.

This morning, Gurpreet delivered his Enterprise Architecture talk. I thought it was pretty good, esp. given that he wrote quite a bit of the deck on the plane to Malaysia. I had only seen him present once before when he was exhausted (hotel screwed up his room) and on pain killers (he fell of the stage and messed up his back). He was much better this time – he’s a great storyteller. He also had a few choice quotes I thought I’d share:

“We could spend the next month in this room talking about enterprise architecture and only just be getting started.”

“Don’t tie your ego to your design.”

“If you don’t do EA, you can’t do SOA.”

He spent most of his time talking general EA topics, with the remainder spent on MSFT incarnations of those topics, such as EASOT. What was funny was that when he showed me his deck, I thought the MSFT stuff play better with the audience, but it turned out the general EA stuff was great. For example, Gurpreet started by talking about the Winchester Mystery House, built by Sarah Winchester (of Winchester Rifles fame). This place is an architectural nightmare with stairs that lead into the ceiling and nearly half of the doors that open onto walls. It’s also over provisioned with 40 bedrooms, 5 kitchens and 17 chimneys. An over-provisioned architectural nightmare? Sounds like a typical enterprise.

He talked about the typical conceptual/logical/physical viewpoint of the enterprise with an interesting twist – the contextual level. This viewpoint is above conceptual in the model. To take his example, if a bank builds an online banking system, we’re all very familiar with the conceptual, logical and physical views of that system. The contextual view might be something like “We’re losing customers due to the fact we don’t have an online banking system.” I need to spend more time thinking about this, and how to map between these views, but I thought the contextual viewpoint was very interesting.

I really wanted to blog what Gurpreet claimed was EA’s biggest fallacy: that it doesn’t change. Because we’ve based the concepts of software architecture on building architecture, there’s this belief that you first design your architecture and then you build things to that architecture – i.e. like a building. For example, when I saw John Zachman present his framework, he was asked how one goes about implementing the framework. His response was something along the lines of: “Build all the layer one models, then build all the layer two models, etc. etc. etc. and then hit compile.” Obviously, that kind of revolutionary waterfall approach to enterprise architecture just won’t work. While buildings evolve and “learn”, they aren’t in a constant state of flux the way enterprises are. This is where Gurpreet made the comment about not tying your ego to a particular architecture – you have to realize it’s going to change.

I’m hoping that Gurpreet’s Architecture Vision & Direction talk will be equally good. Now, I just need to pester him into publishing this material in a whitepaper or blog or something. He’s presenting at Strategic Architect Forum next month, so I expect these talks will continue to improve.