More TechEd goodness... the Iron Architect contest

Going to TechEd and want to flex your Architect muscle? Then enter the Iron Architect contest. If you are registered for TechEd this year you are eligible to enter. The Iron Architect contest is a simple contest that, given a scenario, you provide a solution. Easy huh? Here’s the question:

Bob is the CIO of a large financial institution called Contoso, based out of New York – but with many regional offices throughout the world.  Through a number of mergers and acquisitions, Contoso has itself built up a large number of CRM systems – ranging from Excel spreadsheets that contain customer information, Access databases, SQL databases – right up to large implementations of Siebel and other CRM systems.  At the last IT audit, Bob was told that a total of 52 different sources of CRM data exist in the enterprise. 

These CRM systems store information about customers the bank is working with – namely contact information, appointment data and activities (e.g. logs of telephone calls).  No CRM system shares the same schema for a customer, and some of the CRM systems also have duplicate records (for example, one customer may be represented twice on different CRM systems).

Bob wants to fix this.  He needs to harmonize the disparate CRM systems and deliver a unified experience via the tools that the traders use every day – namely Microsoft Outlook and Windows Mobile 2005.

As chief software architect, Bob has hired you to architect a system that will harmonize the customer data, resolve the conflicts, scale across multiple regions, and create a user experience that fits into the lifestyle of the employees. 

Submissions must be entered via the submission form on this blog. The more creative the better.

Submissions will be judged on;  Leadership, Strategy, Communications, Lifecycle Process, Organizational Dynamics, Technology Depth, Technology Breadth

First prize is a free Architect certification (valued at $10,000). (Winners must go through application process for the certification program and be accepted in order to receive the paid certification).

So get your Architecture caps on and head on over to the Iron Architect contest site. The submsission form should be up soon.