April's Agenda: Advanced Analytical Architectures

The next Columbus Architecture Group meeting will be on Tuesday April 6, at 6:00 p.m., at ICC, 2500 Corporate Exchange Drive, Suite 310, Columbus, OH 43231.

Advanced Analytical Architectures

The age of advanced analytics is upon us. Today systems are delivering AI results in real life systems. The integration of advanced analytical technology into line of business applications requires special considerations. As such, an analytical technologies can be set for “stun or for kill” when inserted into an operational environment. Analytical technologies generally consume base information, composite/augmented information, derived information, and real time information and then synthesize everything to direct workflows, decision support activities, or predictive logic. Getting this right is sometime more daunting than it would otherwise seem. This session will review analytical technologies such as rule engines, neural networks, decision trees, and more and will describe how they can best be integrated into a larger application. Additional consideration will be given to testing and validating these architectures.

H. Michael Covert

H. Michael Covert is currently a founder and Managing Director of DesCovRē Consulting LLC, a regional IT consulting firm specializing in Corporate Performance Management, Business Process Management, Technology Optimization, and the usage of advanced analytics in a business environment. Mr. Covert served as the Vice President of Performance Management for WHITTMANHART, Inc. based in Chicago. Prior to this role Mr. Covert served as the Chief Operating Officer of Infinis, Inc., a regional business intelligence consulting company based in Columbus, OH. Infinis merged with WHITTMANHART in 2005. Mr. Covert has over 30 years of experience in a variety of business and technical roles and is skilled in all aspects of business operations and business development, including sales and marketing. He is a specialist in business oriented analytics, specifically the areas of risk management, profitability analysis, financial management, consumer marketing, and governance and regulatory processes. He is also an experienced specialist in operating systems, networking, middleware, performance and tuning, capacity planning and software development methodologies.

Prior to assuming his current role at Infinis, Mr. Covert was the Vice President of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer for Columbus-based Alta Analytics, producer of data mining and visualization software. During his four years with Alta, he was responsible for overseeing the research and development, technical support and management information systems departments. As CTO, Covert served as the primary technical architect on several analytical and data mining products. In 1999, Alta won the Industry and Technology Council of Central Ohio-sponsored Top C.A.T. award for technical achievement for its product called NETMAP™ for Financials. In addition, Covert has served in technology management roles for Claremont Technology Group (now COVANSYS) where he was the Director of Advanced Technology, Banc One (Now J. P. Morgan Chase), Goal Systems and Chemical Abstracts Service, all Columbus-based companies. Covert earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Honors and Distinction from The Ohio State University. While there, he received the Putnam Scholar in Mathematics Award for placing in the top 1 percent in the United States in mathematics. Mr. Covert currently serves on the board of directors for The Wellness Community (a cancer outreach center) and for TeamDynamix, Inc. (a software development organization with IT governance products), and was previously a member of the Columbus Technology Council Advisory board.

March Meeting Announcement

Apologies, this was supposed to go out last week, but there was apparently a clog in the Inter-tubes and I was out of the country and didn’t see that it wasn’t published. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Note: This meeting will be at ICC, NOT Quick Solutions. Please note the new address below.

Topic: The Economics of Cloud Computing

Return on Investment is key for large and small organizations in these risky times. A key mitigator of ROI risk is the avoidance of capital expenditure on IT infrastructure. While traditional Application Service Provider style hosting services do fit this bill, there is a new service on the horizon that has key benefits over the ASP model - cloud computing. Cloud computing leverages virtualized resources to isolate the developer and user from details of the infrastructure, while spreading infrastructure capital expenses over a large number of hosted applications. Bill will discuss the realities of hosted applications, including the current popular ASP models, and compare them to cloud computing. There will be an overview of cloud computing architecture and strategy. He will end with a comparison of various commercial cloud services, including Google AppEngine, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.

Speaker: Bill Sempf is an enterprise architect. In 17 years of professional experience he has participated in the creation of well over 200 applications for large and small companies and managed the software infrastructure of two internet service providers. He is the author of Visual Basic for Dummies (2008 and 2005) and has contributed to numerous other publications. He is a graduate of The Ohio State University with a Bachelor's of Science in Business Administration and has several professional certifications.

Where: ICC , 2500 Corporate Exchange Drive, Suite #310 at Tuesday March 2nd at 6:00 PM

ICC would like to get a preliminary headcount for the meeting. Please take a moment and let them know if you’ll be attending by clicking this link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B92KZBP

February Meeting Announcement

Topic: The Profession of IT Architecture - A discussion for Architects, Aspiring Architects and IT Managers

The role of Architect really lit up the job boards over the past 6-7 years. Unfortunately the title is rather ambiguous with the variations such as, Application Architect, Enterprise Architect, Systems Architect, Domain Architect to name a few. What are these varieties? How can you create a career plan to move into and around the profession? How can IT leaders structure their departments to take advantage of the role and provide growth opportunities for their associates?

In this discussion we’ll look at what the profession of Architecture really is. We’ll look at the various segmentations and levels of IT architecture and look at what skills are more important for the various roles.

The objective of this discussion is to provide some clarification on the profession of IT Architecture. Professionals will be able to use this information to work more effectively in their existing positions, or craft career goals in the Architecture profession. IT Leadership will see how to structure organizations to tap into this field, reducing risks and opening up new opportunities. Additionally leaders will be able to offer more specific goals and objectives for those architects they manage. This is an informative discussion for anyone working in or around the IT architecture profession.

Speaker: Christopher Grant is a Sr. Architect with an MBA and nearly 15 years of experience in the technology field. He has lead technology efforts in a wide variety of organizations, large and small, ranging from real estate to retail. Christopher has studied a various Architecture styles and frameworks including Zachman and TOGAF and has sat on multiple Architecture Boards and contributed to various Centers of Excellence. Over the years he has worked in a variety of domains ranging from internal business systems to externally facing eCommerce systems, in a variety of technologies from Java and Microsoft to ColdFusion and PHP, Flash and Flex.

Where: Quick Solutions, 440 Polaris Pkwy, Suite #500 at Monday February 1st at 6:00 PM

December Meeting Announcement

The next ColARC meeting will be Monday December 7th at 6:00 at the Quick Solutions office 440 Polaris Parkway, Suite 500.

Steve Andrews will be speaking:

Solution Management Architectures: Beyond The Code

Once a software solution moves beyond a single project, a single developer, or a single environment, larger issues such as versioning, building, and deploying the code come into play as the number of developers and environments grow. In this session we'll take a high-level look at version control structuring, branching and merging methodologies, multi-environment configuration management, and build structuring.

Steve Andrews is a Team System MVP and INETA speaker, and has been working as a developer for more than 9 years. During this time, he has designed and developed applications in such widely varying areas as trust accounting, medical information management, supply chain management, and retail systems. Steve is also a MCTS, ICSOO, and community fanatic.

November Meeting Announcement

The next ColARC meeting will be Monday November 2nd at the Quick Solutions building at 440 Polaris Parkway, Suite 500 in Westerville at 6:00

This month we will be having a fish-bowl meeting. As last months meeting topic never actually got discussed at all, we'll hold it over. The topic is "Has development become too complicated?"

This is the second month of the ColARC membership drive. For those playing at home, we ARE NOT on track to get the required 150 total entries by February to give away the XBox. It's not too late, we can still catch up! There is an XBox on the line here folks, so be sure to bring some new people with you!

Next ColARC meeting, Monday Oct 5th

Sorry for the late update...

The next ColARC meeting will be Monday October 5th at the Quick Solutions building at 440 Polaris Parkway, Suite 500 in Westerville at 6:00

This month we will be having a fish-bowl meeting. The topic is "Has development become too complicated?"

Remember, this is the first month of the ColARC membership drive. There is an XBox on the line here folks, so be sure to bring some new people with you!

Big News About the September Meeting!

September is looking to be a pretty great month to come to at ColARC meeting...

First off, due to the holiday we are moving the meeting back a week. The September meeting will be on Monday the 14th at 6:00. Location is the same: The Quick Solutions Office at 440 Polaris Pkwy. Suite 500 in Columbus. For people coming from the south, I hear Cleveland avenue is a faster that I-71, which can get a bit clogged around 270 during rush hour.

Secondly, we have a very special guest this month. Jim Holmes will be coming up from Dayton to give his presentation on leadership. Jim gave this talk at the Kalamzaoo X Conference and more recently at eRubycon. This is a MUST SEE presentation and if you missed it at either of those event, you need to come see it now!

Lastly, we will be unveiling the ColARC membership drive. I don't want to give too much away, but you'll be getting a chance to win some pretty cool stuff!

Hope to see you all there!