Where is your showreel?

If you're in the film business, you have an entry in IMDB and probably a showreel, but for us working in the private sector with consulting, this is not as easy.

I've been a consultant for more than thirty years, and I'm normally not allowed to talk about my clients or any details of what I've done in public. In some cases, even my managers don't know what kind of project I'm in.

If you are a software developer, you can publish code that is open source. Either in a commercial project or as a side-hobby. But if you have other roles, it's hard to show your best side in the sun. It's less tangible and we often work in groups together with others. As an Enterprise Architect is it even harder to show what you have done or the benefits with your work. What I see from others are often theoretical essays or promotion of tools & frameworks. Very litte of how they do their work or examples of real stuff. I partly understand why.

For whole my career, I've been trying to improve how people work, with IT. Very practical, not so much about theory. However, you need theory to be able to solve complex problems, but it's not the main point. If you are an Enterprise Architect, IMHO, you must be able to do work in real projects.

I begun blogging at disruptive architecture to share my experiences from the changing enterprise and trying to give typical examples, based on generic client stories. The EA-case study was the next step. In this series of articles I show the real architecture for my film production company and how I think. Another example is Agile city planning in small scale, where I use architecture thinking combined with agile m1ethods at a model railroad layout.

You may laugh at these to examples as they are not big company architectures. Fine with me. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback. I'm waiting to see you publish something real. Until then I rest my case.

A very obvious comparison of LinkedIn and horse riding is, when you're in the saddle, the only thing that matters is your performance.

(Yes, I'm on IMDB and I have published open source code.)