What I've learned this semester in 532

While hopefully I have learned a lot, from many different areas this semester in this broad topic of a class, one all-encompasing lesson I have learned is that Enterprise Systems are much larger than I had once anticipated, but they are within our reach of understanding. While the specific topics covered were sometimes scattered and seemingly unrelated they all did relate in that large corporations and organizations need complex solutions like we talked about to serve their own and their customer's needs.

One of the best culmination points in class was after we had learned about some of the technologies that large companies used to see the groups that presented on "The architecture of Wikipedia", or of Google where we saw these scaling principles in use by today's technological giants. Because my group was assigned the topic of scaling a PostgreSQL server I was forced to think outside my typical LAMP environment and see the benefits of other products that were built on a different foundation but for similar reasons as the products that I was already using. This research helped me to expand both my knowledge and the selection of services that I could offer to potential clients.

Thanks to Dr Liddle's PHD work and his continued involvement with MDA we did spend considerable time on this concept that I had never been exposed to before. The idea of generating complex platform specific applications from detailed platform independent models sounds like a lofty goal, but compared to other innovations in efficiency today it sounds like a natural step of progress. After learning from both class and independent research about the concepts and actual implementations of MDA the idea does not seem too "pie in the sky" and I have considered building such an application to aid my own professional development.

As I work towards graduation and start my job with Ernst & Young's Business Risk Services group specifically performing internal and external audits on large companies in the Seattle area I'm sure I'll see many of these technologies in use. Coming from the Seattle area and more specifically Bellevue and Redmond where Microsoft has their global headquarters I was indoctrinated with the MS way of doing things, thanks to classes like Enterprise Architecture and others I have developed more of an open mind about the possibilities of technologies and languages. Microsoft will always have a place in the IT infrastructure of corporate America, but their presence is evolving and even shrinking in many companies so a foundation on just Microsoft technologies will not get you as far today as it could ten years ago.

All in all the experience as well as the knowledge gained in this class will better prepare me for both my professional career with Ernst & Young as well as my freelance career as a custom web developer. With people changing careers an average of five or six times before they retire I'm sure I'll have the opportunity to experience, and maybe even develop/design many different information architectures in many different industries. The foundation that I've learned not only in ISYS 532 but in the entire MISM program has prepared me to take those challenges and overcome them successfully.