IASA

Our courses will not be perfect when first released.  Do not fear, as this is intentional!

If we pushed our subject matter experts to create perfection right away nothing would be accomplished.  Part of the reason for this is that chasing perfection is a fool's dream.  Another part of the reason for this is that many of our topics, such as Business-Technology Strategy Rationalization have not been written about before (to any significant extent).  In many cases, we are breaking new ground by explicitly codifying some of our common skills.  This situation, though helpful, carries a little bit of risk: our authors can be wrong.  The specific risks of incorrectness and incompleteness of our skills set demands that IASA responds by making sure that you, our future students, get to have your say.  We will mitigate these risks by:

• Associating discussion and chat forums with each course topic in order to support feedback channels and documentation of differing points of view
• Managing a formal feedback process for every course through the ATC, or Architect Training Council
  
• Managing formal review and change processes for all courses
• Subscribing to "deliver quickly, deliver often" philosophy of course development which will be very similar to the way we develop much of our software.  All students will be notified of changes and improvements to the courses they have previously taken.  These changes will probably be triggered by the feedback we receive from you, the architecture community, who are busy every day putting the skills we teach into actual practice.

In other words, our courses are being built to change!  After taking a course, and especially after you have attempted to put any principle, rule or algorithm into practice, you will have access to course authors and your peers in order to voice your success and failure stories.  Knowledge gained from your experience may very well be reincorporated back into our courses and trigger re-releases as appropriate.  If we accomplish nothing else after the first release of our courses, we hope to start and maintain structured conversation and meaningful debate around every skill topic "toolbox."

Over time we will learn more about ourselves and the work we do, we should expect that this change activity will calm.  This will take a few years however, so in the mean time be prepared for Interesting Times!

"To become competent, you must feel bad"—Hubert Dreyfus

If our lives were perfect, if we were perfectly content and if all were right with the world, would we bother to learn much?  Would technology advance if we didn't need it to solve problems of health, strife, or even the sometimes overpowering urges of human curiosity?  We learn because something is wrong, somewhere, and we need to fix the problems before or within us.

Why are you looking to learn more about architecture?  Where does it hurt?  Write me your answer at Nicole.Tedesco@Tectura.com.

The medium of e-Learning is not a medium most of us architects are familiar with.  We tend to be familiar with in-person lectures, in-person teaching and mentoring dynamics, article and book writing, PowerPoint presentations, impromptu speeches and even tele- and video conferencing.  What we tend not to be prepared for is the asynchronous medium of the "online course."  In an e-Learning situation:

• Like article writing, you will reach countless people whom you may never meet or have the chance to talk with to clarify your points
• Unlike article writing, you are providing more content.  In this respect, it is more like book writing.
• Unlike book writing, you have opportunities to engage the attention of the student in different ways
• Unlike book writing, you have opportunities to reinforce knowledge in unique ways
• Unlike article or book writing, you will engage your students in multiple media including text, audio, animation and perhaps even video
• Unlike public speaking, in-person teaching, mentoring or real time conferencing, you do not have the ability to judge whether or not a student's attention is waning
• You must invoke predictable "rhythms," or a predictable pace that matches the typical student's expected attention patterns
• Unlike public speaking, and somewhat like mentoring, you must develop the feel of a "personal" connection between the teacher and student (who may never meet)

In some respects, developing e-Learning content is similar to developing an episodic series for television.  The design of a series constrains each script to predictable rhythms, predictable characters, predictable plot devices and so on.  Scripts are first written to conform to the series' "brand," then footage (content) is developed with actors, locations and props, then a post production phase is executed to iterate on editing, media mixing and reshoots if necessary.  The benefit of these constraints are that once the viewer is "hooked" on the series' format, it becomes easy for them to absorb the story lines in the future hence lowering the "barrier to entry" of reengagement.  Like a good television series, a good e-Learning series is like salted peanuts: you can't have just one!

Not many architects have been prepared to develop episodes for a specific television series.  Hence, the challenge I find myself facing today as I help our course authors develop a consistently high quality training product.

Oh, boy!

A multidimensional trick lies before us in terms of creating a quality training curriculum and a starter set of matching courses:

• Our members (and possibly other potential students) must feel that the courses are valuable additions to their professional portfolio.  Each course must introduce valuable skills that can be practiced immediately (even if some of those valuables skills are "soft").
• The employers/customers of our members must feel that their employees/vendors have received valuable training that will produce real ROI, even if said ROI is best characterized as "tough to measure" (like those ever-so-important "soft" skills).
• We who are creating the curriculum and seed course market will need to meet our own internal goals, which include creating a training system that will be helpful not just today's members but to members of years hence.  Can the system respond as quickly as possible to market changes and the increasing expectations and sophistication of IASA members?  Can it evolve?  Can it improve?  Will IASA members feel personally vested in the success of the program enough to ensure the system's health, vibrancy and relevance over time?
• Will members (and other potential consumers) feel the system is an adequate and necessary part of a system of objective measures of the degree of one's career growth, and will they consider it fair and objective?
• Will the system make a significant contribution to the practice of IT architecture in general?
• Will all who be involved in the system's creation, from the program management geeks, to the subject mater experts, to course designers, course authors, web component developers, and to the students themselves, feel that they had been part of the creation of something unique and wonderful?  This is not necessarily a requirement per se, but after all we profess to be architects, no?  Do we not crave the creation of the new?  Do we not strive to make a difference?  This is my personal wish, and a wish I know I share amongst all who have been participating thus far.

Perhaps we are indeed "thinking big," but we are architects.  This is what we do.  We also acknowledge that, as human beings, we do not know everything.  The magic that we will be required to perform in order to execute the above tricks of darring-do is not all known to us.  This is why we need your help.

Write to me with your thoughts, your suggestions and concerns at Nicole.Tedesco@Tectura.com.

What have I got myself into?

The idea of building out an entire curriculum of architect training courses is daunting...

What?

Architect an application or two?  Architect an infrastructure?  Create awe-inspiring monuments to humanity in the form of the world's most efficient enterprises, ever?  Child's play, those are!  Compared, that is, to participating in one of the coolest projects ever initiated specifically for the benefit of IT architects.  Our goals are nothing short of enabling the development of a brand new profession, improving software quality everywhere and, of course, saving the world.

Seriously, 2008 promised to be a heck of a year for me.  My husband is buying me extra caffeinated drinks whenever he visits the grocery store, helping me to stock up for the Big Year.  IASA has estimated a build-out of about 80-ish foundation level courses for the first year, in addition to about 8-ish second-level courses as a preview of what we will be building in the 2009.  Imagine that, 80 + 8 (-ish) courses in one year!  Sure, we will be releasing them incrementally over four heats throughout the course of the year, but still...Sure, there will be many educators available for course authoring, administrative help, training designers, no shortage of helpful members and enabling sponsors, but still...

In the end, it will be all worth it.  I am sure that my sleepless nights, wondering if this course author or that will deliver their respective courses in time, wondering if online enablers will be ready when the associated course are released, wondering if our members are happy in the end, will reward me with the knowledge of not only a job well done but perhaps with the knowledge that I would have helped in my own way to change the world—if, at least, just a little.

Welcome to the Training Program website. This site describes the Architect Training Program, an initiative to formalize the architect skillset.