For those CIOs who have puzzled over how to layer social networking into business applications and to connect social platforms with back-end systems, Microsoft would seem to have solved a big problem. The route between a vision for a socially enabled workforce and the integration required to actually do that is paved with hard decisions. And now here comes Redmond — with SharePoint, Office, Project, Office 365 in tow — ready to take on the integration riddles. And with Microsoft at the controls, Yammer’s recent decision to build a connector to SAP systems could shift into super high gear.

But as I was reminded this morning by Rob Koplowitz, the Forrester Research analyst who covers social platforms, Yammer’s strategy with regard to other vendors has been agnostic, not orthodox. Yammer has provided connections on the back end to competitors like Salesforce.com, and on the front end, it has met the user on the user’s device of choice. And so the question for CIOs was, and still is, where to make their bets to make social business a reality. Is Microsoft solving a big problem or laying a trap for IT? In a user-first, bring-your-own-device era, will IT be seen as advocating for monopoly over monopsony?

“Microsoft has a pattern of liking Microsoft devices first and best,” Koplowitz said. CIOs need to watch whether Microsoft adopts Yammer’s agnostic approach to endpoints, mobile in particular. Last week we were abuzz with news about the Microsoft tablet, he said. Now comes their social news. “I hope they don’t connect the dots.”

When an audience member asked Kundra to clarify remarks suggesting that “enterprise architecture was secondary, maybe even tertiary” to the IT discipline, Kundra responded:

“My view is, absolutely architecture is secondary. And the reason is because I am confronting the truth as is, not as I wish it were,” said Kundra, who left his post in August for a fellowship at Harvard.

What idealists get, he contended, are ERP implementations like the one he found as the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the state of Virginia. The $30 million project was funded by taxpayer money — and had nothing to show but paper two years into the project. “I kept pushing the person [in charge of the project], ‘What did we get, what did we get, what did we get?’ And ultimately it ended up being this book.”

Everybody has lost their way in enterprise architecture, Kundra said, especially enterprise architects. “They focus on documenting the current state or what the future state should be. By the time they are done with their architectural artifact, a new technology has already killed whatever they are working on,” he said.

Zachman, the inventor of The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture, delivered an equally rapid-fire presentation (and with way more jokes), promoting the need for enterprise architecture frameworks. The 76-year-old Zachman argued that the extreme complexity of technology coupled with the extreme rates of change in the information age have made architecture more essential than ever to enterprise computing. IT has always been between a rock and a hard place in designing systems that align with the business. “Hey you guys, we’re never going to be able to produce implementations that are aligned with what you’re thinking about until we have a way to transcribe what you are thinking about,” he said.

IT people confuse building systems — the manufacture of IT products — with architecture. But if the current state of IT has proved anything, it is that anyone can build and run enterprise systems — bolting products upon products as technology and business needs change. Enterprise architecture is about drafting models for systems that will be integrative, flexible, interoperable, reusable and aligned with the enterprise. For people who confuse building and running systems with enterprise architecture, Zachman had this warning: “A cloud is in your future.”

His Zachman framework, more accurately called ontology, is akin to the periodic table. It is a schema or classification that requires architects to answer what, how, where, when and why, and thus to describe what they intend to build — before they build. “You get flexibility by separating the entities, and you don’t build until you are ready to build.”

Kundra made a polite nod to the guru of the Zachman framework, stating that he and Zachman were in agreement that architecture must not become “dogmatic.” Kundra comes at enterprise architecture from a business perspective. “But I have huge disdain for architects and the practice of architecture where all you are producing is paper that nobody ever reads.”

By the way, Kundra did not get off scot-free, fielding several questions — and pointed criticism — on the government’s track record on security during his reign. Who says rubber chicken events have to be bland?