In my last post, I talked about the movie The 300 Spartans and the lessons it held for Architects about doing the right thing, courage under fire, looking for alternatives etc.

My Cousin Vinny (Year of Release: 1992; Director: Jonathan Lynn; Our Architect: Vincent Gambini, played by Joe Pesci; Architect's Character: Lawyer handling his first case for his cousin).

‘My Cousin Vinny’ is the story of a lawyer who finds himself defending his first cousin on the charges of first degree murder in his first ever trial. He has no experience as a lawyer and has never even attended the court as a lawyer, is totally unaware of the process or the protocol. He learns on the fly, makes silly mistakes on his first case, is excited by the trivial stuff, but makes a solid come back using his fundamental skills and saves his cousin from an almost certain seat on the electric chair.

Current issue of the New Scientist magazine has a very interesting cover story on “Seven reasons why people hate reason”.  Now, that is a guide I would have loved to have alongside during some rather difficult stakeholder engagements, when I couldn’t stop thinking “If only they could be reasonable…”.

In my last post, I talked about the movie Swades and the lessons it held for Architects about giving back in the form of teaching budding architects, publishing papers etc.

The 300 Spartans (Year of Release: 1962; Director: Rudolph Mate; Our Architect: King Leonidas, played by Richard Egan; Architect's Character: The Greek king of Sparta who is up against a stronger Persian army)

‘The 300 Spartans’ depicts the invasion of Greece by the Persian army and the role of King Leonidas, the king of Sparta, known for its proud, bold and courageous army. The story deals with a number of issues – the role of the senate, the mammoth scale of problem at hand and the values of a team, in this case of a state.

 A very common occurance is to use a lot of buzzwords.  I once encountered an architect who said "issue A and issue B are orthagonal".  He meant A and B are independent of each other.  Architecture patterns too - be they singletons or facades - can be confusing explanations to IT management and customers.

In my last post, I talked about the movie Padosan and the lessons it held for Architects about observation, analyzing the non-obvious, taking care of your team, knowing your priorities etc.

Swades (Year of Release: 2004; Director: Ashutosh Gowarikar; Our Architect: Mohan Bhargav, played by Shahrukh Khan; Architect's Character: A Music Director by profession, US-based research scientist with NASA, of Indian origin).

‘Swades’ is a story of Mohan Bhargav, a research scientist with NASA. He has Indian origin but is settled in the US with a nice job and comforts of life. He makes a trip to India to see his grandmother when leads him to a village. During this trip, he gets a firsthand experience of life in rural India and how far behind they have been left from the ‘progress’ made by towns of the world.

In my previous post, I talked about the extending role of Enterprise Architects at services firms into Marchitects. This ‘selling’ of architecture services is no different from what our peers in client organizations undertake too.

Enterprise Architects, many of whom report into a CIO/CTO organization are also under continual pressure to ensure that the organization derives an optimal ROI from their IT investments, which means they need to ‘sell’ the value of robust, scalable architecture, planning and roadmaps to their stakeholders, some of whom may be focused on the tactical: ensuring that the quarterly targets are met, budgets balanced and operational challenges addressed. Even the ‘strategic’ focus may sometime involve reacting to external trends (read between the lines: it is the economy, slowdown etc)

In my last post, I talked about the movie Remember the Titans and the lessons it held for Architects about leadership, change, how to get people from diverse backgrounds to work together etc.

Padosan (Year of Release: 1968; Director: Jyoti Swaroop; Our Architect: Guru, played by Kishore Kumar; Architect's Character: A Music Director by profession, Guru always has a solution for all problems and never lacks innovation)

This is one of my favorite movies. It is witty, sharp and outrageously comic. Our architect is the character of Guru (Vidyapathi) played by the legendary Kishore Kumar. Guru has a flock of 4 friends that he is really close to and is always available to them in the role of an advisor, a psychiatrist and above all a friend. He has solution for almost every problem that you can throw at him. Most of his solution look awkward, but they all work beautifully! The outline of this movie is how Guru helps his friend, Bhola (played by Sunil Dutt), who has no knowledge of music, to capture the heart of a dame, Bindu (played by Saira Banu), who is obsessed with music.

While reading Andrew Manning’s blog entry on “Enterprise Architects: Time for more job titles?”  I began thinking about a barbeque I attended at a friend's place few weeks ago where colleagues and peers had gathered. It was interesting to observe that folks who had gathered were finding it hard to pick on neutral topics beyond the day’s weather and the difficulty in maintaining the lawn, using the host’s backyard as a case-in-point. It was not hard to see why.  A few were from the ‘sales’ side of our business – account managers, engagement leaders and the like – and others from the consulting side - IT architects and consultants. And not surprisingly, it was the few Marchitectects in our midstwho were trying to find an icebreaker.

In my last post, I talked about the movie Lagaan and the lessons it held for Architects about selling ideas, negotiations, leading change etc.

‘Remember the Titans’ (Year of Release: 2000; Director: Boaz Yakin; Our Architect: Coach Boone, played by Denzel Washington; Architect's Character: Chief Coach of the first mixed race football team) is set against the time of segregation. Then the Government abolished segregated schools and gave the right to all students to enroll in any school. The movie focuses on one such school - T C Williams High School in Virginia which has been educating white students but has now opened up to black students too. There is an atmosphere of tension and apprehension on all sides. In the midst of all this turmoil, Coach Boone lands up as the head coach of the school’s new football team.

A couple of things sprang to mind as I skimmed through the report:

Tools are rarely the main reason for unsuccessful EA activities. There's the commonly quoted phrase "a fool with a tool is still a fool" (and can add "a fool with a tool can do more damage more quickly").

In my previous post, I talked about Henry Fonda's role in 12 Angry Men and the lessons it held for an Enterprise Architect. Let us switch from Hollywood to Bollywood. Consider the movie Lagaan (Year of Release: 2001; Director: Ashutosh Gowarikar; Our Architect: Bhuwan, played by Aamir Khan; Architect's character: Peasant, captain of a novice cricket team).

Lagaan highlights some aspects of an Architect's job - selling ideas, negotiation, leading change etc.

None of us are new to the entertainment value of movies. They can make us laugh, cry, ponder, put us to sleep, wake us up and can entertain. The use of movies for the purpose of education is not new either. In fact, there is a special genre of movies with educational values, meant for different audiences.

Recently, I was in a discussion with my mentor. We started talking about challenges faced by the new age architects. Gradually, the conversation drifted from these challenges to the amazing world of movies. Soon after that conversation, I was conducting some training sessions for budding architects. The opening act for this training was titled – ‘The Role of an Enterprise Architect’.  While preparing for that workshop, I related it back to the conversation about movies and what lessons can we architects learn from them

Movies (from Hollywood & Bollywood) can offer good lessons to architects and in general provide a good overview about role of an architect.

Back to the EA conference which mostly starred Gartner VPs and Analysts, the whole conference was about Business Architecture (BA), EBA, SOA and Information Architecture.