Keynotes and Speakers for ITx 2018
LPS
Duncan Watson has been working in IT organisations in Wellington for over 30 years with the last 20 being in various Architecture roles for both vendors and clients including large Government organisations. He is currently working as an IT contractor as the Lead Solution Architect for IT transformation projects.
He has been a full member of the Computer Society (the precursor of ITP) since 1991, but the first presentation he delivered was back in 1985 on Speech Synthesis from his Masters’ research at Auckland University.
He gained Level 2 Architecture Certification with the Open Group in 2006, and CITPNZ in 2009. He runs several WordPress blog sites and develops Android apps for smartphones (22 apps with more 150,000 downloads). In his other spare time, he enjoys travel, hiking, and bird photography.
A Technical Reference Model (TRM) is an artifact used by Enterprise Architects to describe the IT standards, specifications and technologies in use by an organisation. It helps organisations keep track of the technologies and applications that are in use; it helps develop roadmaps and replacement strategies and is generally good practice for keeping the “house in order”.
It can be used to bring new starters up to speed, and when issuing an RFP or partnering with a new vendor the TRM provides immediate documentation covering all aspects of the in-house IT environment. Over the past 10 years, the speaker has developed Technical Reference Models and promoted their use in a number of large corporate organisations.
This has resulted in a streamlined framework based on the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) taxonomy, giving the widest possible coverage of taxonomic areas but a relatively straightforward presentation format using generic templates in Microsoft Word and Sparx EA. This allows the framework to be quickly adopted by other organisations.
The talk will also look at the practical issues of completing the TRM and keeping it up-to-date.
Whilst it may seem obvious that the Architect makes Architectural Decisions, anyone working on IT projects will realise that there are many types of decisions.
There are project decisions, decisions involving the business requirements, architectural decisions, and solution design decisions. There should be a clear demarcation between each of these categories, and thus who is responsible for making the decision, but in real-life situations it can often become quite confused.
This talk will attempt to clarify these different types of decisions, with a focus on architectural decisions; how they should be documented and resolved to the satisfaction of the IT team. he heuristics and cognitive biases around decision-making will also be discussed, as rational decision-making is important for getting it right.
The benefit of correct decision-making is a higher likelihood of success for the project.