I've Got a New Job!

This Monday I started to work as an enterprise architect for Storebrand, and my days as a consultant came to an end. The last ten years I have been in the consulting business - now I'm in the insurance and banking business. My reason for changing grounds are that I've for long wanted to increase the scope of what I'm doing. Consulting is largely project based, and you seldom follow a solution through its entire lifecycle. Another "limitation" of the project-by-project nature of consulting is that you seldom get the possibility to view the different pieces of software as a part of a larger ecosystem. Becoming an enterprise architect for a large enterprise give me more challenges on aligning business with IT, ensuring business agility through IT solutions and doing architecture on a strategic level.
All of this sounds very "enterprisey" and I've suddenly found my self with a shiny "ivory tower" title on my business card. Does this imply that Anders as turned into a non-coding architect and replaced Visual Studio with Visual Power Point? Will all my future blog posts be about "leveraging best-practices to maximize customer yield and increase ROI by the dozen"? Not at all. I've always viewed architecture as a sum of its parts. I do not search for the new silver bullet to solve all my technical challenges. I believe that success is determined by the quality of the components that make up the entire architecture. I won't be writing as much production code as I used to, but I will continue to work closely with the developers to ensure that the foundations for achieving our strategic goals are in place.
I've also chosen to get more involved with open source work to stay sharp. I've have been using many open source frameworks in my work, and the time has come for me to give something back to the communities whose work I've benefited from.

One major change is that I'll move back to doing more Java-based work. I used to do Java-stuff before I moved to .NET in 2001. My choice to "switch teams" then was that EJBs had made things too complicated and I saw .NET as an opportunity to leverage my "enterprise development" experiences to get a headstart with .NET. Six years later there have been substantial changes in both worlds, and the development approaches are well-aligned. From my point of view there is not a huge difference between writing Java code with Spring and Hibernate, and writing C# code with Castle Windsor and NHibernate. Still I won't become a head on Java-guy, I'll also do lots of work with .NET. One of the fun things of working with a larger corporation with heterogeneous systems is that you get this possibility.

I'd like to give a shout to my colleagues at Objectware. It has been great to work in a company with lots of talented people, it has been a pleasure working with you.