Enterprise Architecture
A Simple DIagram Showing Everything

Often architects receive requests for ‘simple diagrams showing everything’.  However one man’s diagram is often another’s dog’s breakfast and the tools used to create, manage and distribute these diagrams do not scale well beyond a few architectural practitioners.  Much the same can be said of hard won detailed enterprise architectures that reach critical mass and then die on the dusty shelves of surviving managers.  

The University of Auckland is taking a different approach making use of wikis for capturing architectural documentation with particular focus on visualisation. This talk will debate the practicalities of capturing architectural documentation today, demonstrate the tools and approaches used so far, and give a taste of some of the research the University of Auckland’s Computer Science department is doing with semantic visualisation.

Tim Chaffe has worked in IT for 25 years, initially as a DBA, later branching into architecture and service development. A great part of his career has been spent in large telecommunications operations as a Technical Specialist dealing with new technologies and the changes they enabled. As an architect he finds he is part salesman, part technician and part teacher. He has worked at the University of Auckland for the past six years and finds universities to be vibrant and interesting 'organisms'.

Speaker profile last updated 12th November, 2008