Australian Architecture Forum - Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Computing

There has been alot of traffic and discussion regarding cloud computing over the recent months, and at the Australian Architecture Forum (AAF) event in August - Tim Rubin facilitated an Open Space Workshop that aimed to cover some of the main discussion areas:

• Impact of the Cloud on EA Agenda
• What is Cloud Computing?
  
• Why should Enterprise Architecture care?

Cloud Computing is often characterized by: Virtualized computing resources, Multi-tenancy, limitless capacity/scalability, Self-service, Dynamic provisioning, Pay-for-use pricing.

Much of the discussion generated by the attendees during the open space session was around some of the following points:

1. When Cloud Computing may be a fit - particularly around the profiles of applications, security and data, the sorts of commercial models that need to be considered and discussion around Infrastructure vs Application as a service models
2. How Cloud Computing differs from “old” approaches - eg ASP and Outsourcing etc
3. Does IT Matter - the diminishing role of the datacentre support team and impact on ongoing operation

The more that I delve into the topic of cloud computing, the more that I ask is

does cloud computing = outsourcing 2.0?

AAF - Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Computing

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Australian Architecture Forum - Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture

In August, Tim Rubin and I ran a couple of the open space breakout sessions as Part of the Australian Architecture Forum in both Melbourne and Sydney. The first being around Pragmatic Enterprise Architect, the second regarding Cloud Computing. Not surprising the interest and the inter-relationship between the 2 topics gathered alot of interest and open discussion.

In Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture, I positioned a quote that I like from Gartner, where they suggest that
Just Enough models should be created Just In Time to address the specific (Business Driven Requirements) - Gartner 2005

exploring this further, a lot of time can be spent building artifacts that have little or no impact on business outcome and as such we need to think carefully about how much is built out. I suggested the following 6 steps

1. Identify the Business Strategy and Objective
   
2. Establish an EA program/requirement
3. Define the "Future State" Architecture (Don't spend too much time dwelling and documenting the past)
   
4. Define the EA Roadmap (Linked to business benefits)
5. Establish EA Governance (ensuring measurement and attainment of business priorities)

The key to Enterprise Architecture is not the volume or the number of artifacts that you create, but the pragmatism and ability to action them!

Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture

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Light Bulb Interview - David Preiss - Part 3

Welcome to the part 3/3 of the Light Bulb Effect interview with David Preiss - Head of IT Strategy & Architecture for Superpartners . In this series I will be interviewing a number of influential Enterprise Architect's and IT strategists focused around 3 key areas:

1. Major Trends in EA Posted 29-April-2009
   
2. Working in the New Business Climate Posted 11- May-2009
3. Hot Topics for EA

Part 3- Hot Topics in EA

MC: There has been a lot of discussion around common 'Hot Topics'. What should organisations consider when thinking about "Green Computing"?
DP: Auto power off at night, Solid state hard disks, LCD screens, recycle, recycle, recycle, stop printing so much, there's many more- but I'm no green expert.

MC: How about the directions of "SOA"?
DP: There is still a lot of confusion in the industry about SOA. Most mid-large enterprises now have numerous elements of SOA in place; obviously some organizations are more mature than others. SOA Governance and SOA run-time monitoring will be high on the agenda of most CIOs as they chase control of their environments/consumption of services and the ability to calculate the unit-cost of their key transactions, both internal and B2B.

MC: What is your view of "Open Source"?
DP: Like most things it's about fit for purpose. Some of the religious fanaticism that comes around open source can lead to compromising situations, and remember very rarely is anything really "free".

MC: What are you thoughts regarding "SaaS/Utilty/Cloud and outsourcing/off shoring"?
DP: Saas will continue to be adopted quickly in non-business critical (Tier 2, 3, 4) applications, with slower adoption in Tier-1 applications. Cloud will be adopted more slowly again with many companies adopting a fast follower approach but waiting on other organizations to try it out first. Privacy issues will continue to remain as a blocker for some organizations entering the cloud.

Governance and management of off shoring arrangements will receive a larger focus in the years ahead and few companies will be really ready to have the skills, and infrastructure in place to do this well.

MC: What are other "Hot Topics" that you are thinking about?
DP: With the prevalence of off-shoring, there will be fewer application development jobs available in Australia in the short-medium term. These jobs serve as the training ground for many other roles; Architect, PM, Management, BA etc. What will be the feeder for these roles without this training ground, Uni places dropping and immigration levels dropping? Won't be understood until 2012-2017.

MC: What has been your 'light bulb' moment in EA Methodology/Governance?
DP: EA Methodology and Governance needs to be relevant and pragmatic but you must also have the support of your executive and company board for it to get traction within the enterprise.

David thanks for your open candor and contribution to the blog...

Light Bulb Interview - David Preiss - Part 2

Welcome to the latest Light Bulb Effect interview with David Preiss - Head of IT Strategy & Architecture for Superpartners . In this series I will be interviewing a number of influential Enterprise Architect's and IT strategists focused around 3 key areas:

1. Major Trends in EA Posted 29-April-2009
   
2. Working in the New Business Climate
3. Hot Topics for EA

Part 2 - Working in the New Business Climate

MC: A lot has been discussed regarding the new business climate how do you think today's Enterprise Architect needs to adapt?
DP: Enterprise Architects will need to be pragmatic, and look for innovative ways to lower cost, without a lot of upfront investment necessarily. Enterprise Architecture can sometimes be seen as theoretical and too far abstracted from the details of projects and real business processes. Enterprise Architecture can provide massive value when applied well but a lot of it is dependant on the skills/knowledge competence of the EA and what they bring to the organization. Both domain and technology excellence is required.

MC: So in the new economy how do organisations need to adapt?
DP: It's no different to what organizations should always be doing in the management of their IT. Employing tight fiscal management, and placing robust processes around the approval of investment into new IT assets. What many people forget is that the old saying was "Re-use before buy before build", not just "Buy before build".

MC: What considerations need to be made between CAPEX vs. OPEX when designing solutions?
DP: It's simple – make sure you've got enough OPEX to operate and run, whatever you bought with CAPEX – otherwise don't buy it!

MC: What advice would you give to a new IT graduate entering the industry in 2009?
DP: Go back to Uni and study law. No seriously make sure you are the best you can be. Opportunities will be limited and work ethic, a willingness to listen and learn will sort out who gets the good opportunities when the economy picks up.

MC: What skill sets should a new IT Graduate focus on?
DP: Make sure you get a solid technical grounding in mainstream application development environments; .NET and/or JEE and mainstream databases; Oracle, SQL Server or DB2 but don't only focus on that.

SOA/BPM/EAI tool-sets will be in high demand for some time to come and this work is likely to stay predominantly Australian based, more-so than bespoke application development which has less barriers to being developed offshore. There is still not critical mass in these technologies in Australia so there will be opportunities for high performers.

Focus on analysis and design skills, and develop your verbal and written communication skills as these stay with you as technologies/trends/use of off shoring changes the nature of projects and opportunities in the workforce.

There is a real shortage of good highly technical people managers in Australia, and the opportunity is there for those who want to forge a management career.

Good customer service in whatever you do!

MC: What changes have you noticed in the IT Eco-system over the last 5 years?
DP: The legitimization of Microsoft as an Enterprise technology would be the biggest that comes to mind.

• The consolidation of vendors and products in all areas.
• The prominence and buy-in to SOA.
• The proliferation of IT role-types and roles to provide focus on Business/IT alignment which has become by far the most important guiding principle over the past five years.
• Prominence of offshore delivery models.
  

MC: What changes do you envisage over the next 5 years?
DP: More vendor/product consolidation is inevitable. Google will diversify into other Microsoft controlled territories more and more and possibly surpass Microsoft's market capitalization. Key to this will be control of the "Office" applications on the desktop and pay for use revenue models on services which are free today but have become part of everyday life.

• More off-shoring of bespoke application development and especially system testing (but not UAT).
• More tools to support SOA environments and to support business operations and control of SOA.
• Likely to be more fixed-term IT permanent roles, rather than open-ended permanent roles or contracts as companies look to protect themselves against changing skill requirements as well as get better value for money than hourly contractors. A weakened IT labour market will drive this.
• Cloud computing will start to penetrate more as privacy issues are controlled. VoIP likely to get much more traction as reliability improves.
• IT departments must see themselves and act like they are part of the business, not abstracted from it in a client-service relationship.

Light Bulb Interview - David Preiss - Part 1

Welcome to the latest Light Bulb Effect interview. In this series I will be interviewing a number of influential Enterprise Architect's and IT strategists focused around 3 key areas:

1. Major Trends in EA
2. Working in the New Business Climate
3. Hot Topics for EA

This interview is with David Preiss - Head of IT Strategy & Architecture for Superpartners. David is a well respected member of the Architecture and IT Strategy community having worked in a number of industries including Financial Services, Defence and Telecommunications. The interview will be posted over 3 parts and I thank David for agreeing to take part and insightful responses which are his personal opinions and not necessarily the views of Superpartners.

Part 1 - Trends in EA and IT

MC: What do you see as the role of Enterprise Architecture as related to Business Strategy?

DP: Enterprise Architecture should provide the alignment and common language between business strategy and the planning of introducing, maintaining and retiring of enterprise IT assets.

MC: What is the role of Architecture Governance?

DP: Architecture Governance has three main functions:

1. Ensure that IT projects (and any other initiatives) are implemented in line with Enterprise IT standards and policies
2. Ensure that IT projects implement the architecture that they planned to implement during planning/business case
3. Monitor and report the success (or otherwise) of the architecture to meet the benefits qualified and quantified in the business case

MC: What are the Trends in Enterprise Systems?
DP: Consolidation is always on the agenda and will continue to be. I think there may well be a swing back towards having fewer, large applications in the enterprise and standardizing on one or two platforms rather than buying the “best of breed” in every category and ending up with umpteen different solutions from different vendors. The last ten years of the “best of breed” approach has not necessarily served all enterprises well with cost creep evident in application maintenance, hardware/software maintenance, vendor management, etc. Speed to market has been compromised as application architectures have become increasingly more complex over time.

Still a heavy focus on package solutions but organizations will look to put in “vanilla” solutions, with no customization – simplifying implementation and protecting the ever-important upgrade path. Vendor packages which are not truly configurable (parameterized)/extendable and require custom coding changes to the core will not be widely adopted.

MC: Trends in Infrastructure?
DP: Nothing that new here.

• Virtualization is a key trend. Managed Services vendors will need to be more flexible in their pricing arrangements as today cost savings of virtualization are diminished by a fee/logical VM model. Virtual Networks next.
• Green IT. Much more pressure will be put on organizations to reduce power consumption/carbon footprint, recycle etc.
• Cloud infrastructure will continue to develop but many companies are taking a watch and see approach – especially financial services where privacy and security of personal data is paramount.
• Telepresence – 3D virtual meeting rooms are of such a high quality now that they will replace the need for much interstate/international business travel.
• Mobility – The bandwidth/coverage we have in Australia now from Telstra on their network is the best in the world. This is going to mean that applications can always be “online”. Applications which go offline when laptops are removed from the physical LAN (and the synchronization issues that later occur with offline transactions) will become less and less common which will be a major advance for business processes across all industries.
  

MC: How about trends in Software/Hardware?
DP: As above.

MC: Networking and Telecommunications?
DP: As above.

End of Part 1

Light Bulb Interview Series - Jeff Kennedy - Part 3

Welcome to Part 3 of the the interview with Jeff Kennedy - from the University of Auckland. The 2009 Light Bulb Effect interview series will cover a number of influential Enterprise Architect's focused around 3 key areas:

1. Major Trends in EA - Posted 11-March
   
2. Working in the New Business Climate - Posted 16-March
   
3. Hot Topics for EA

MC: There has been a lot of discussion around common 'Hot Topics'. What should organisations consider when thinking about "Green Computing"?
JK: Green IT doesn't happen only in the data centres, and isn't limited to users powering down their machines during lunch breaks and at the end of working day. IT has a considerable responsibility to work with the business to facilitate new and more efficient styles of collaboration and mobility that limit the need for humans to travel around the world or across the city to work and make decisions together effectively.

MC: How about the directions of "SOA"?
JK: Anne Thomas Manes from the Burton Group triggered huge discussions with her recent "SOA is Dead: Long Live Services" blog article. For 2009, the all-singing-and-all-dancing enterprise-circus version of SOA is certainly dead. It is essential to recognise that SOA is a journey based upon the incremental adoption of brand-new and emerging patterns for design and reuse, and that SOA has changed the landscape to be one based predominantly around the challenges of integrating packages with one another, and that SOA has a value proposition that cannot be realised for years to come... but that it's going to be vastly worthwhile.

MC: What is your view of "Open Source"?
JK: Any organisation running open-source software must have the in-house skills to install, maintain, and support that software (and, preferably, to contribute directly to the ongoing development of the software involved). Often, the administrative tooling accompanying open-source offerings is considerably less capable than the commercial offerings, and the commercial offerings also tend to provide some sensible extensions that make more-difficult tasks easier to achieve. However, for high-performance basics, open-source and the more-formal community-source projects offer compelling arguments for adoption.

MC: What are you thoughts regarding "SaaS/Utilty/Cloud and outsourcing/off shoring"?
JK: North America has a very different set of expectations and experiences with Saas/Utility/Cloud than does, say, Australia and New Zealand. In particular, much shorter distances are involved between the client and the provider, and concomitant with those shorter distances is the benefit of being in the same, or at least a very similar, legal jurisdiction — the implications of laws such as those embedded in the Patriot Act don't travel the World with good fidelity. Enterprise Architecture has a strong role to play in balancing the needs of business against the demands upon and capability of local IT shops in order to see the right decisions being made in the face of "pay us USD$500 and you will be running live on the Internet tomorrow" offers from SaaS vendors. Unfortunately, many of these SaaS-style vendors offer only terribly-limited and terribly-proprietary API technologies to interface with their systems, and this makes the overall cost of ownership much, much higher than for locally-hosted enterprise applications that can
enjoy traditional in-house integration.

MC: What are other "Hot Topics" that you are thinking about?
JK: Most every application has a different representation of every interesting business object (e.g., person, department, country, employee, location) and the continuing new emphasis on the integration requirements needed to support the real-time enterprise are accompanied by a continuing new emphasis upon enterprise metadata to support transformations between application and business domains. Overall, the IT industry has some long distance yet to travel to provide the semantics and the tooling needed to translate metadata in and out of different representations of core business objects.

MC: What do you see as the most significant security issues that keep the industry awake?
JK: Although the commoditisation of the Enterprise Service Bus has gone some way to providing a capability to deal with this, there remains sufficient uncertainty, sufficient complexity, and insufficiently widespread expertise to secure web services reliably, interoperably, and consistently. SaaS raises new security issues about the possibilities and sensibleness of delegating risk and of protecting data at rest in completely-separated and invisible contexts. Finally, social engineering must remain near the top of the keep-awake list of concerns.

MC: What has been your 'light bulb' moment in EA Methodology/Governance?
JK: The historical roots of Enterprise Architecture were planted firmly in the traditional EA frameworks. While those frameworks remain useful, their role in Enterprise Architecture has changed from heavy and prescriptive to rightsized and guidance-based. Enterprise Architecture has become increasingly consultancy-based, and now seeks the creation of repeatable patterns on an as-encountered basis rather than on a map-and-determine-everything-up-front basis. Much less emphasis is placed today on the up-front population of traditional frameworks than once was, but the value of Enterprise Architecture remains based around documenting, communicating, and designing once-removed abstracted solutions to support sustainably the mission of the business.

End of Interview...

Once again, I'd like to thank Jeff Kennedy to give us access to his insightful thoughts and opinions...

Light Bulb Interview Series - Jeff Kennedy - Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of the the interview with Jeff Kennedy - from the University of Auckland. The 2009 Light Bulb Effect interview series will cover a number of influential Enterprise Architect's focused around 3 key areas:

1. Major Trends in EA - Posted 11-March
   
2. Working in the New Business Climate
3. Hot Topics for EA

Light Bulb Effect Interview
Part 2 - Working in the New Business Climate

MC: A lot has been discussed regarding the new business climate how do you think today's Enterprise Architect needs to adapt?
JK: Positioned as it is between the firmaments and the business, a solid Enterprise Architecture practice has become essential for businesses hoping to survive the tough new business climate. Bear in mind that this tough new business climate is going to start being alleviated by regrowth sometime in the next year or two. Under these conditions, best practice, modern, lean, consultancy-based, framework-light Enterprise Architecture has become completely non-discretionary because assisting enterprises to govern innovation, achieve reuse, promote solution patterns, and exploit new technologies is completely front and centre.

MC: So in the new economy how do organisations need to adapt?
JK: Percentagewise, most organisations spend relatively little on information technology when compared with the cost of labour, the cost of advertising, and the cost of sustaining the supply chain. Here, too, Enterprise Architecture has a huge role to play in identifying opportunities for cost optimisation and in exposing data, logic, and process from existing application assets. Enterprise Architects can also add considerable value in non-traditional domains, simply by bringing an architectural approach to understanding business opportunities.

MC: What considerations need to be made between CAPEX vs. OPEX when designing solutions?
JK: The CAPEX-vs-OPEX distinction is seriously challenged by the sensible rise of agile and iterative delivery methodologies over the acquiescence of forty-year-old waterfall-based methodologies. Waterfall-based delivery of business functionality constantly confuses the essential difference between requests for new features, bug-fixes, and business-as-usual maintenance. This confusion renders the CAPEX-vs-OPEX split meaningless in traditional waterfall-based delivery methodologies. Where there is a true OPEX payload carried by new business functionality (e.g., in association with maintenance-and-support agreements with vendors, or where a new solution requires additional operational staffing) then the OPEX clearly belongs. However, in an environment that is increasingly rooted in the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture, the concepts of reuse are very challenging to traditional models of project funding. Funding from a build-for-change-and-reusability perspective is conceptually very difficult to fund from a build-for-forever-and-single-beneficiary perspective.

MC: What advice would you give to a new IT graduate entering the industry in 2009?
JK: Get started as soon as possible, put your hand up for challenging work, think about the long term, and focus on being the best person there is at being who you are (else somebody else will come along and do a better job of being who you are, and you will be replaced). Most every commentator is offering 2009 as a hard and difficult year, but from the perspective of a new graduate coming into the industry at this time it is a brilliant opportunity-laden year for establishing a solid reputation and consolidating the skills earned through tertiary training.

MC: What skill sets should a new IT Graduate focus on?
JK: The number-one skills to focus on are not necessarily pure technical skills, but are instead based around problem-solving, qualities of communication, and a hunger to learn. Within the IT industry it is unusual to find a job that exercises one's training directly. It's much more important to have solid techniques for analysis, for creating and following patterns, and for designing and coding in increasingly well-socialised and increasing collaborative styles. Innovation, courage, and being full-architecture-stack capable provide the basis for an excellent career.

MC: What changes have you noticed in the IT Eco-system over the last 5 years?
JK: The rise of Service-Oriented Architecture and the rise of virtualisation are the greatest forces of change that have affected the industry in the last five years. The massive social networks based a, round platforms like Twitter and MySpace and the rise of mash-ups and their appearance in the enterprise also offer transformational opportunities.

MC: What changes do you envisage over the next 5 years?
JK: In the next five years there will be massive uptake in and improved models for local-to-the-enterprise and on-demand cloud-based computing. At all levels of the architecture stack there will be much-increased federation, with widely-supported formally-adopted industry standards. Notions of user-centric identity will become much more real, and much more.

End of Part 2.

Once again thank you Jeff. Keep an eye out over the coming days for Part 3: Hot Topics in EA soon...