Ian Robinson

Business Architecture Foundations of IT

Many organisations today are frustrated by success: their rapid, ad hoc growth has resulted in a “tube map” systems estate that is costly to operate, and which inhibits business agility.

In this talk, I show how an organisation can take its first steps to resolve this impasse by teasing apart strategy and execution. I discuss how our models of what the business does and what it's trying to achieve influence the progress of large software initiatives, and describe a number of practices and activities that together create a useful representation of a firm's operating model - one that can be used to identify, prioritise and plan strategic IT investments, and guide the evolution of the systems estate in an incremental, sustainable fashion.

Hydras and Hypermedia

Do you know what your enterprise apps get up to in their time off? Fighting fantasy, pick-your-path, hypermedia-driven, RESTful Web application adventures – of course.

With techniques drawn from the forthcoming O'Reilly book REST in Practice, this session challenges the notion that REST is suitable only for simple CRUD-based data services, suggesting instead that the Web’s architecture provides everything we need to model and implement sophisticated business processes in Web-based applications.

The Counterintuitive Web

The Web doesn't care for your finely-honed application architecture principles - for your orthodox tell-don't-ask, information hiding dictums, separated concerns, and guaranteed and reliable delivery strategies. It's an irresponsible place, where exposing your data, polling for results and making your errors the client's problem are considered acceptable behaviour. If it wasn't so successful, it'd be dismissed as an architectural clown.