System Architect
Eberhardt Rechtin "Systems Architecting: Creating & Building Complex Systems"
[The central ideas of the 'heuristic approach' to architecting complex systems] come from asking skilled architects what they do when confronted with highly complex problems. The skilled architect and designer would most likely answer, 'Just use common sense.' .. A better expression than 'common sense' is contextual sense - a knowledge of what is reasonable within a given context. Practicing architects through education, experience, and examples accumulate a considerable body of contextual sense by the time they're entrusted with solving a system-level problem - typically 10 years.
Story of a ship called Vasa.
In the 1620s, Sweden and Poland were at war. Wanting a quick end to this costly war, the king of Sweden commissioned the building of a ship called the Vasa. Now, this was no ordinary ship. the requirements for this ship were unlike any other ship of that time; it was to be more than 200 feet long, carry 64 guns on two gun decks, and have the ability to transport 300 troops safely across the waters into Poland. Time was of the essence, and money was tight. the ship architect extrapolated on his prior experience and set out designing and building the Vasa. the ship was eventually built to specifications, and when the eventful day came for the launch, the ship proudly sailed into the harbour, fired its fun salute and promptly sank to the bottom of the ocean.
Martin Fowler Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Atul Gawande Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
True success in medicine is not easy. It require will, attention to detail, and creativity. But the lesson I took from India was that it is possible anywhere and by anyone. I can imagine few places with more difficule conidtions. Yet astonishing success could be found.. what I saw was: Better is possible. It does not take genius. It take diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.
Good architecture
- embrace the budget and time constraints of the customer
- perform all work that makes the architect effective, not just the work the architect enjoys
- committing to the process/methodology
- accepting responsibility
Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans
On Dwarves, Elves, Wizards and Kings
In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, Randy Waterhouse explains his classification system for the different system for the different types of people he meets.
Dwarves are hard workers, steadily producing beautiful artifacts in the dark loneliness of their caves. They exert tremendous forces moving mountains and shaping earth, and are renowned for their craftmanship. Elves are elegant, cultured, and spend their days creating new and beautiful magical things. They are so gifted they don't even realize that other races view these things as otherworldly almost. The wizards are immensely powerful beings almost completely unlike all others, but unlike the elves, they do know about magic and its power and nature, and they wield it with supreme effect. But ehre is a fourth type of character that Waterhouse alludes to but does not mention speficically. The kings are the visionaries who know what must be done with all of these different characters.
An architect is a king of sorts. the architect must be familiar with all of these characters, and ensure that the architecture has roles for all of them. An architecture designed only for one will attract only that one character to the project, and even with the best dwarves, or elves, or wizards, the team will be severely limited in its reach if it can only approach problems in one way.
A good king will lead all types through a quest, and help them work together to complete it. without the quest, there is no vision for the team, and it ultimately becomes a partisan mess. Without all the characters, the team can only solve one class of problem, and is stopped at the first barrier impassable to that solution.
The architect crates the quest with all the chracters in mind. The architecture then becomes a guide for finding tasks for the different chracters to perform while learning about one another. When a project ecnounters difficulty, the team will already know how to approach solving it because the architecture gave them the oppportunities to grow into a team.
Architect is a social act and the material theater of human activity - Spiro Kostof
A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart. - frank lloyd wright
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines. - ibid
Architects believe that not only do they sit at the right hand of God, but that if God ever gets up, they take the chair. - Karen Moyer
In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight. - Henry Watton
No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder. - John Ruskin
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. - ibid
Bharti's $750 mn IBM IT deal touches $2.5 bn mark7 Apr 2009, 0111 hrs IST, Joji Thomas Philip & Deepshikha Monga, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: India's largest private telecom company, Bharti Airtel's 10-year $750 million outsourcing deal with IBM has touched the $2.5 billion mark
as of March-end 2009, a top executive familiar with the deal told ET.
This week, Bharti and IBM are set to kick off celebrations in Delhi to mark the half-way tenure (five-year mark) of this first-of-its kind IT outsourcing deal.
Riding on the success of this deal with Bharti, IBM had also signed similar outsourcing deals with Vodafone and Idea Cellular last year, worth $1.2 billion and $900 million, respectively. In February this year, IBM also announced an IT outsourcing deal with Malaysia’s leading operator Maxis. Executive familiar with this partnership said that the Maxis deal was too, similar to the ones IBM has with the Indian operators.
"The Maxis deal is estimated to be worth around $300 million and was largely handled by the IBM's Indian team that had handled similar projects here," explained an executive who tracked the development. Additionally, leveraging its partnership with Bharti, the US-based software major is in talks to extend this IT outsourcing model with Africa's largest telco MTN in a deal that is estimated to be worth about $2 billion, this executive added.
In 2004, Bharti and IBM had expected that the IT outsourcing deal would yield revenues to the tune of $750 over the 10-year period. But, projections proved to be widely underestimated as Bharti experienced record growth over the last couple of years. The growth is best understood if we consider the figures.
Bharti had about 6 million mobile customers when the deal with IBM was signed in 2004, but the telco’s subscriber base has reached over 94 million at present. Bharti is also adding close to 3 million new customers per month, equivalent to 50% of its subscriber base in 2004.
IBM has bagged and executed several telecom projects globally over the last two decades, but until recently, it was involved only in three end-to-end IT infrastructure transformation projects, all of which were in India. The Maxis-deal, the latest addition to the IT’s major’s kitty is a clone of its deals here.
Bharti, which recently launched mobile services in Sri Lanka, has outsourced all its IT requirements in the island nation to IBM. It also handles the IT operations for Jersey Airtel, a subsidiary of Bharti which offers mobile services in Channel islands in Europe.
Last year, IBM’s BPO arm in India bagged a six-year contract to provide voice and back-office services including customer service, collections, and customer retention for Bharti’s premium customers. After that Bharti and IBM also signed a $150-million deal under which the software major would handle all IT operations for the telcos’ direct to home (DTH) television and Internet protocol TV (IPTV) services.
Beyond IT outsourcing, Bharti and IBM have also put together an unique model and invested $100 million to build a service development platform (SDP ) to tap increased revenues from value-added services. In fact, Bharti has already roped in over 200 companies including Infosys, Indiagames, Mobile2Win, Versa, Symbiotic, Pyro, Hungama and OnMobile amongst others on its service development platform (SDP ).
Bharti’s SDP, which is the first-of-its-kind in India and perhaps even globally will allow these 200-plus companies to develop and offer services related to content, messaging and applications to all Airtel customers across services such as mobile, landline, broadband services or DTH service.
Bharti Airtel’s director, technology and customer service Jai Menon is of the view that over 1000 companies from India and abroad, which also includes individual developers, are likely to partner its SDP by 2010.
