April 2009 Open Group Conference In London, to introduce TOGAF 9.

I never participated in an Open Group Conference before and to be honest did not look to deeply into Togaf before hand. From that point of view the conference was helpful, to obtain a more indepth view.

There have been two sets of presentations. One where framework related and one showed off experience.

Personally, I was most impressed by the Credit Suisse Case Study by Tarmo Ploom (VP at CS). Their SOA platform development, with a strong functional and technical model - using MDA/Model Driven Architecture for SOA, seemed so very advanced. Bleeding edage I dare say. I will be most interest in following their architecture transformation.

The other presentation and even so more discussion, I really engaged with was with a collegue from Deloitte in the US - and if it would have been a competitor I would have equally mentioned it. The discussion centered around Enterprise Architecture and Business Planning in the year 2019.

Essentially, 2019 will be the state where the business planning and IT Planning reports to combined Chief Strategy Officer. A very valid point. I see in many companies for instance, Operation and IT joining and a 3rd group focusing on process and functional break downs for staff and IT Products.

The framework discussion was to some degree unfortunate, as there are two camps of people: 1.) TOGAF is all I need to know as architect, 2.) Experienced architects just seeing it as a high level guideline.While TOGAF - and other fraemworks - provide a good basic frame to define conceptional, logical, and physical architecture it however does not "teach" how to be an architect.This is experience, which drives this.

On top there was a discussion around Business Architecture. A new component to be introduced. I think the approach to govern the business with an IT centric framework will have partical issues in most companies. I think business have a strategy or don't, but they definitely keep changing it fairly quickly (especially nowaddays). This may prevent us being successful in regulating business folks.

Just my two cents.

See here additional information on the Opengroup and the event, which introduces TOGAF 9 in Europe.