Under intense global competition during the past decade, businesses have had to sharpen their competitive skill or lose ground fast. Now there is increasing recognition that businesses have reached a plateau in terms of their ability to trim costs and improve performance based on management techniques alone. The next growth curve in business ability lies in working toward organizational maturity in the area of architecture.

There is a very exciting opportunity for companies with the strategic foresight to accelerate their organizational maturation in architecture at a faster rate than their trial-and-error counterparts. This is the most promising avenue for dramatic strategic advantage, as those who succeed in more rapidly establishing an architecture competency will be best-positioned for hyper-competition. These companies will be able to access all the power of size and the agility of the unencumbered, giving them a unique competitive position. 

But architecture competency is not just the competency of individual architects. Rather, the business has to develop architecture as a competency, and this entails a change in top-to-bottom processes as well as mindset. 

Bredemeyer Consulting specializes in helping businesses and individual architect's enhance their architecture competency (see ArchitectureAsBusinessCompetency.PDF). We have been training and mentoring software architects and architecture program managers for many years. We typically work with architecture teams, providing a tailored program of training and mentoring to accelerate the team's creation or migration of an architecture. We offer a variety of consulting services focused on improving architectures, and the competency of individual architects, architecture teams, and architect communities.

However, the frontier, as we see it, lies in helping both the management team and architects build the organization's architecture competency. In addition to our architect-focused programs, we also offer strategic management consulting and training. These programs concentrate on developing architectural strategy and identifying the need for, and leading, the organization, process, and culture changes associated with building business architecture competency. 

Most of our workshops are run in-house at client sites. Workshops and project-focused consulting includes:

• Strategy facilitation: IT strategy, architecture strategy, product strategy

• Architecture workshops and project facilitation:
  - Architectural Requirements
  - Enterprise Architecture
  - Solution Architecture
  - Software Architecture

Open Enrollment Classes

We offer a limited number of Software Architecture, Role of the Architect, and Enterprise Architecture Workshops for open enrollment each year.

Here is our current open enrollment schedule for 2006:

• Architectural Requirements Workshop

• Software Architecture Workshop: 
  This class covers our Software Architecture Decision Framework and Visual Architecting Process.
  - Chicago, IL, April 15-18, 2008

• Software Architecture Overview Seminar

We also offer the following classes. You can arrange to run these on-site at your company.

• Architecture Vision Workshop (1 day)
• Enterprise Architecture Workshop (4 days)
• Enterprise Architecture Seminar (1 day)
• Architectural Leadership Skills / Role of the Architect Workshop (3 days)
• Modeling Software Architectures Using UML and Action Guides (4 days)
• Software Architecture Fundamentals Class (1 day)
• Software Architecture for Managers Seminar (1 day)
• Architectural Requirements for Business Analysts (2 days)

There is a growing sense that systems architecture and software architecture can help us achieve our technical and business goals. The emergence of this new discipline represents the maturing of the software industry in both its technical and business dimensions. We are learning more about the technical aspects of large-scale software system development, and we are realizing what we must do to remain competitive.

Though this is a new discipline, we have considerable experience helping architects and their organizations transition to higher levels of architectural competency. The software architecture workshop integrates extensive real-world architecture experience, and we have been teaching software architecture workshops since 1996.

In the workshop, we approach the software architecture discipline from three primary points of view:

• architecture, answering the question: "what is software architecture?" and introducing architectural patterns, principles and mechanisms.
• architecting, that is the process of creating an architecture. The major emphasis of the workshop is on learning how to create, validate and update an architecture.
• architects, focusing on the role and responsibilities of the architect and positioning the architecture role within the organization.

Software architecture is the high-level structure of a system. It is at a high-enough level of abstraction that the system can be viewed as a whole. Components are identified and assigned responsibilities that client components can depend upon through "contracted" interfaces. Component interconnections specify communication and control mechanisms and allow component interactions to accomplish system behavior. At the architectural level, all implementation details are hidden.

In the software architecture section, we deal with:

• meta-architecture: the architectural vision, style, principles, key communication and control mechanisms, and concepts that guide the team of architects in the creation of the architecture.
• architecture modeling using the Unified Modeling Language (UML).
• architectural views: Just as building architectures are best envisioned in terms of a number of complementary views, so too are software architectures. In particular, structural views help document and communicate the architecture in terms of the components and their relationships, and are useful in assessing architectural qualities like extensibility. Behavioral views are useful in thinking through how the components interact to accomplish their assigned responsibilities and evaluating the impact of what-if scenarios on the architecture. Behavioral views are especially useful in assessing run-time qualities such as performance and security. Execution views help in evaluating physical distribution options and documenting decisions.
• architectural patterns: structural patterns such as layers and client/server, and mechanisms such as brokers and bridges.
• key architectural design principles including abstraction, separation of concerns, postponing decisions, and simplicity, and related techniques such as interface hiding and encapsulation.
• system decomposition principles and good interface design.

The architecting process incorporates a technical process and an organizational process. The technical process includes steps and heuristics for creating a good architecture. However, a technically good architecture is not sufficient to ensure the successful use of the architecture, and the organizational process is oriented toward ensuring support for, and adoption of, the architecture.

The technical process section is the principal focus of the workshop, and covers:

• Architectural requirements: how to elicit and document functional (i.e., behavioral) requirements and non-functional requirements (i.e., system qualities including run-time qualities such as performance and reliability, and development-time qualities such as evolvability/extensibility and reusability).
• Structuring: how to use architectural modeling to decompose the system, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and document the system using different views.
• Evaluation: how to assess the system in terms of the system requirements.

The organizational process section covers:

• Sponsorship: how to gain the support of all levels of management affected by the architecture
• Leadership: how to create and lead the architecture team
• Consulting: how to assist the developer community in their use of the architecture to ensure its successful adoption and appropriate use

Since the architect role is relatively new in most organizations, there is often uncertainty among hiring managers as well as the architects themselves around the role and responsibilities of the position. This section relates the responsibilities and associated skills and attitudes of the architect to the architecting process. The Workshop on the Role of the Architect goes into more depth on this topic area, and focuses more on building the non-technical skills associated with the architect role.

The workshop leader, Dana Bredemeyer, has over 20 years experience architecting, designing and developing software systems, including 16 years with Hewlett-Packard. He developed Hewlett-Packard's internal Software Architecture Workshop, and continues to be its principle instructor. He has provided architecture consulting and training to architects, architecture teams and their management at the project, organization and business unit levels, and has helped teams develop software, firmware and system architectures for products, product families and information systems. Dana is currently co-authoring a book on software architecture for Prentice-Hall.

Architects and senior system design engineers will benefit most from this workshop. Managers of architecture teams will also benefit. Engineers interested in the architect career path will gain value, especially if they have enough experience to know the importance of modeling in system design and to appreciate the role process plays in engineering large-scale, complex systems.

Exercises form a large component of this four-day workshop, which is oriented toward building skills rather than simply exposing students to new concepts. Also, case studies and stories from our experience are used to integrate real-world lessons into the workshop.

Workshops are run in two forms: open enrollment and onsite. The cost for open enrollment workshops in the US is US$2300.00 per student. Class size is limited to a maximum of 16 students.

Though we offer a limited number of open enrollment workshops throughout the year, our preference is to bring Software Architecture Workshops onsite to train groups of architects within a single company. This allows us to tailor the workshop to the particular needs and background of the organization or architecture team. To arrange onsite architecture training, call Bredemeyer Consulting at (812) 335-1653.

Extensive system design and development experience.

More and more organizations are creating the role of software architect, recognizing that creating and deploying an architecture demands special talents and focus. The WorldWide Institute of Software Architects (WWISA) was created just last year to help launch software architecture as a professional discipline. Though this is a new field, we have been working with and studying world-class software architects for a number of years. Based on this experience, we have identified a number of critical domains within which the architect works.

Clearly, the role has a core technical aspect to it, but this is only sufficient to create a good architecture. To create the right architecture, the architect also needs a good sense of strategy--understanding business strategy and being able to translate that into a compelling technical strategy. And that is not sufficient to ensure that the architecture is successful. First, it requires organizational politics to gain and sustain the support of the management community throughout the architecture’s creation and deployment to the developers. In addition, to ensure the architecture doesn’t simply gather dust on the engineers’ bookshelves, architects need to act as consultants to the engineering community, helping them to understand the architecture and the rationale behind it. Lastly, architects need to be strong leaders, aligning the organization behind a powerful vision that motivates and guides.

This workshop offers such frameworks and models, as well as stories from our real-world experience to help you understand the role, responsibilities and skills of an architect. It also helps you to build skills with experiential exercises in areas that, as engineers, we typically do not get much opportunity to hone. These include:

• leadership skills such as creating and communicating an architectural vision;
• consulting skills such as interviewing architecture stakeholders, leading architecture reviews, and taking criticism constructively;
• political awareness building such as understanding organizational networks and influencing; and
• strategy skills such as building technology roadmaps and scenario analysis.

The technical aspects of the architect role, such as system and requirements modeling are introduced in this workshop, but covered in depth in the Software Architecture Workshop.

Be aware that there remains a role to be played by senior engineers who continue to focus on technology fairly exclusively. If you are not drawn to the more interpersonal aspects of the architect role, you may prefer to give technical input to the architecture team rather than become an architect. It is essential that architects be talented at and enjoy working with a variety of different stakeholder communities, from customers to management, marketing, development, testing, and so on.

The locations for upcoming open enrollment classes are:

- Indianapolis, IN, March 28-30, 2006. 

This workshop is targeted to practicing architects whose experience has taught them that architecting is not just a technical endeavor, but a social, political and strategic one as well. It would also be helpful if you have been newly assigned to the role of architect and are in the process of working out what your responsibilities are and how to succeed at them.

Exercises form a large component of this highly participative four-day workshop, which is oriented toward building skills, not just exposing students to new concepts. Skills are motivated by a story or metaphor, demonstrated, practiced by the class, and followed by class discussion. The lecture-part of the workshop is limited, and focuses on the conceptual frameworks and models which are grounded in real-world experience.

We prefer to bring Role of the Architect Workshops onsite to train groups of architects within a single company, since this allows us to tailor the workshop to the particular culture of the organization. To arrange dates and pricing for onsite architect training call Bredemeyer Consulting at (812) 335-1653.

Desire to learn the non-technical skills associated with architecting.