Architecture in Action @ LAC 2008

Over the last few days I have been at the LAC 2008 which proved to be very interesting and inspiring. The LAC conference is 10 years old this year which resulted in several gifts (books!) for the participants.

Day 1 started with a very interesting talk by Daan Rijsenbrij, presenting his perspective on (the history and future of) enterprise architecture. What struck me particularly was the fact that he argued the case for distinguishing architects from engineers. I couldn't agree more. I also followed a series of 3 presentations on the value of architecture. No big news there, yet interesting to see the case studies that were presented. Unfortunately I missed the last plenary session due to other obligations.

On day 2 we saw several interesting presentations  by Jan Truijens and Frank Baldinger. I rather liked the critical attitude they have towards what architecture is, what the value of architecture is, and how we should teach architecture to students and practitioners. My persional opinion is that architecture is still in its infancy and that it will take a few more years before we as a community have shared understanding of our field. After that it will take another while before people in the boardroom understand what we're up to. A lot of challengies lie ahead us.

It was interesting to see that many LAC-participants share this idea. There was a lot of talk about the relation between architecture and strategy, the value of architecture for business and so on. Hopefully the debate on this topics will make it to the architecture community at large and therefore lead to interesting publications on the web and in print.