It is often said that the difference between architecture and design is one of scale. Architects are concerned with "big" design and "big" integration. As developers become architects and architects become enterprise architects, the systems they design become ever bigger and more complex. But does big necessarily need to mean complicated?

In this talk Dan argues for a new appreciation of simplicity, using examples from systems analysis, enterprise integration, build and deployment, and provides strategies to help you extract the simple essence from complex situations and problems, and to distinguish the simple from the simplistic.

"I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Keywords: simple, simplicity, alternatives, complexity, risk, essence, thinking tools, de Bono, NLP

Target Audience: Architects who think there must be more to life than UML and SOA, and that ESBs, portal servers and even J2EE might have been a massive fraud...