2008 Renaissance Dinner

Last night I attended the annual Renaissance Dinner at the Graham Hotel in Port Melbourne. This is a tradition started several years ago by Peter Stubbings aimed at getting a number of like minded IT professionals together to share a meal talk about their experiences and generally have a good time. The people in attendance represented a pretty broad cross section of the industry including IBM, Oracle, SAP, Ingres, Oakton, Unico, Business Objects to name a few.

What was encouraging was the relative upbeat mood regarding the economy, although this did get a little heated when economics and politics started to cross. The general feeling is that we have been trading off a boom cycle for quite a while, and given that we live in one of the only developed economies with a budget surplus and sound economy going into this Global Financial Crisis there is a good chance we can buffer the storm.

Time will tell...

Cloud/Grid/Utility Computing

I was reading Micheal Specht's blog Cloud/Grid/Utility Computing what is it & must you have it? and It got me thinking, it is true that the various buzzwords that the industry offers up can sometimes be confusing, however, maybe it would help if we boil it down to bare essentials.

When Micheal and I caught up recently we had a long discussion that centered around these decisions being horses for courses - what is the best architecture for your application? Try to see through the buzzwords - whether it be cloud, utility, or SaaS or whatever. What is the underlying architecture and most importantly can it deliver for your respective application on the following criteria to the degree that you need:

1. Performance
2. Business Continuity (i.e., back-up and recovery)
3. Security, privacy and compliance
4. Service Level Agreements
5. Business Integration and processes
6. Affordability

That is what is important. What the solution is ultimately called is not important as long as you are getting the computing resources you need, when you need them at a price point that suits.

10 Strategies for Doing Business in a downturn

I was having a conversation with Michael Counsel (Senior Director, APAC Solution Engineering) regarding what advice he would give organisations in the current economic down turn. The view was first and foremost that organisations need to “stay in business”, but what he highlighted was 10 key areas that every organisation should evaluate in this difficult and uncertain economic climate:

1. Acquire Market Share - The number one strategy is making sure you continue to not only maintain and grow market share in your revenue generating business areas or revenue centres, but look for opportunities to acquire market share in new markets during the downturn. Get more customers and in wider markets provided you can sustain supply costs.
2. Look for Acquisition Opportunities - The downturn will drive some companies to the wall. Many become bargain priced for acquisition. If you have the means, this can be an outstanding strategy which can turn medium to large players into corporate giants when the market rebounds.
3. Opportunity to Fix Business Process - Loaded processes are hard to change in confident times and less efficient pieces are hidden in the profit margin and good revenue you enjoyed. This is an ideal opportunity to take what you knew needing fixing in a business process…and fix it. You will not only profit from the operational savings in the downturn, but the increased margin when the market rebounds.
4. Automate the Commodity Operations - Convert commodity operations which require human labour into automated business processes and services. You will need to be careful not to inadvertently wrapper a differentiating or competitive advantage process inside a commodity automation initiative.
5. Offload High Cost/Risk Customers – Analyse and understand your customer base and work out which customers are costing you money. Off load these to your competition
6. Double Investment in Innovation - The worst mistake you can make is cutting innovation in your business. Work out what differentiated you before the downturn and will still be in effect when the market picks up. Harness creative talent in your organisation to adjust and adapt quickly at the next upturn. Organisations that increase their competitive advantage and differentiation have been proven to get earlier and more rapid revenue growth in the next upswing.
7. Watch Your Suppliers - Remember in downturn, your key suppliers may go out of business and Supply chain response time can be deadly on the recovery if you are looking to rapidly get product to market. This time may present an opportunity to vertically integrate and make sure you can meet production levels on the way out of recession. Which in turn build that platform for greater profits
8. Re-platform your IT Operations - Use the opportunity to re-platform IT infrastructure to lower cost platforms and commodity computing. Take an inventory of existing applications and decommission, consolidate and virtualise where possible. Take the opportunity to rebuild and modernise key pieces of infrastructure which creates long term resilience and connectivity, while also improving functionality. Organisations should be vigilant on maintaining software and hardware currency by upgrading disks, servers and software on regular timeframes - not doing this can have disastrous medium to long term impact as outlook improves.
9. Adopt a Shared Services Strategy - Find ways to lower the cost of operations for commodity or corporate services that help you run your business, eg ERP/Back office processing. These are generally not the core business/revenue generating systems. You should attempt to share these operations with other business units or functions in your organisation.
10. Insource Your Key Systems - Outsourcing and Managed Services are good when you want to trade risk for premium pricing and is especially valuable in confident markets in equilibrium. Invest in the future of the business by insourcing the key (revenue) system operations so you can inject knowledge into the future talent pool and have creativity inhouse. Having the revenue systems under your control means rapid response without waiting for a third party.

Whilst some of these seem obvious, the key to success is the leadership and strength to pass the microscope over the organisation and take the opportunity to evaluate the current situation, and develop a plan that provides short-term operations cost savings whist laying the foundation and roadmap to prosperity when the market rebounds

Mike Counsel can be contacted michael.counsel@oracle.com

Actionable Architecture

I read following blog Architecture as diagrams is an anti-pattern where the it is positioned that the creation of diagrams an only a visualisation or representation of architecture.

I could not agree more that the key for successful architecture as to assist in the implementation of strategy. As mentioned in the blog,

It is the misguided belief that the creation of diagrams is architecture. They are a representation of architecture. For architecture to be useful it must be actionable. A diagram is not actionable, it is a visualization. The specification relating to the blob on the diagram is actionable - you can build it, deploy it, assess it, review it. A colored blob on a diagram is next to useless.

I have seen too many examples of organisations that focus on creating artifacts relating to current and future states, but under invest in the development of the roadmaps to make the transition. This step of making the architecture actionable is the difference between using visio and driving buisness change and transformation.

Comments on Change Management

In Micheal Specht's blog post Change Management and Technology Implementation he discussed how change management has been one of the most underrated and overlooked components during technology implementation

In my experiences, I have seen organisations time and time again look for short term $$$ savings by cutting project costs through reduced investment in project and change management.

This sort of skimping on leads to the following situations:
1. Poor scoping of the project
2. Mis-alignment of expectation for key users and stakeholders

The results are generally the same… Poor technology adoption, heavy re-work and sometimes re-implementation.

It is important that Change Management and in particular how the system/technology will impact users must be considered way before the first product is installed. Technologists left to their own devices will continue to implement solutions and products that meet project deadlines on the surface but not achieve the business objective, users expectations and more critically provide a positive ROI.

Without supplementing technology adoption projects early with disciplines around project and change management Technology (particularly large IT lead) projects are doomed to fail.

eDiscovery and Information Lifcycle Management

This week I attended a customer event around the impact of eDiscovery for the legal community. The key note presenter was Dr Bradley Schatz who is the Director of Forensic Technology from Vincents

eDiscovery extends the current incredibly time consuming and expensive paper based discovery process for litigation used by the legal fraternity. eDiscovery extends this to potentially include all corporate electronic records including information stored on:

• Corporate Transactional Systems (Finance, HRMS etc.),
  
• Messaging (email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki's, voice etc.),
  
• Native Files such as (word, ppt, PDF, video and audio) stored on various resources such as file servers, laptops, handheld devices (mobile phones and iPods), USBs, external stroage.

The process of eDiscovery described by Dr Schatz incluses 2 new steps Preserve and Process from the traditional approach to be:

1. Identify - strategies to locate relevant infromation (online, backup storage, etc)
2. Preserve - the integrity of the information (ie if on a cycled backup tape copy before it is destroyed)
3. Collect - de-duplication and near duplication of documents into a central location for analysis
4. Process - into searchable images or native electronic copies
5. Review - the content for relevance and priviledge
6. Produce - the material for the other side

Given the relative cheap cost of storage and the broad sources of "relevant" information, some organistaions have had a tendancy to hold on to as much data as possible, potentially resulting in incredible high cost in the event of litigation. The establishment of a well though out Information Lifecyle Management strategy and policy that defines security, catorgorisation, destruction of information and eDiscovery use cases is critically important. This can not only save money in the event of a Freedom of Infomation (FoI) request or litigation, but could also save significant storage and Data Centre costs and operational costs.

Greening the Datacentre - Part 1

The moment Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signed the Kyoto Treaty and soon after establishing the Department of Climate Change, it signaled that all industry in Australia including Information Technology had to do its bit to address global warming challenge.

1st July 2008 marks the beginning of mandatory reporting of Greenhouse Gas emissions for corporations that:

• emit > 125 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases or produce/use > 500 terajoules of energy each year; or
• have operational control of facilities that emit > 25 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases or use/produce > 100 terajoules of energy per year
  

Lower thresholds will be phased in by 2010-11 which is expected to cover around 700 medium and large corporations in Australia. Source: NGERS Overview Fact Sheet

This has data centre operators and managers thinking about how consolidation of hardware can “cool” their data centre by lowering the power consumption via a reduction of hardware usage, which in turn requires less floor space, cooling etc.

However consolidation must go beyond virtualisation of hardware and move toward addressing the duplication of data, processes and business applications. The first step Hardware and Data centre consolidation is both obvious and easy, as incremental increases disk and CPU utilisation - through consolidation and virtualisation – will ultimately reduce your carbon footprint. However exponential benefits are achieved when a broader IT consolidation occurs to remove the duplication of:

Data – via database consolidation, data compression, data normalisation and de-duplication and ultimately Master Data Management and databases of record (dBOR)

Process - can be split into 2 logical areas

• Operational – reducing and eliminating redundant processes around the management of application data and operations such as HA, DR, backup and recovery

• Business – Rationalise duplicate business system process and automate as many manual processes as possible.

Application – to rationalise and de-commission legacy applications through the standardisation of business functions, potentially delivered through shared service functions.

Whilst I have not collected empirical evidence, my view is that addressing Data, Process and Application consolidation will significantly reduce Greenhouse emissions beyond just hardware consolidation and virtualisation and furthermore provides greater financial benefit.

What is all the fuss about Enterprise Architecture?

Isn't Enterprise Architecture just business analysis on steroids? This is a question posed to me on quite a few occasions. The best description of the importance of Enterprise Architecture was given to me by the MD of Oracle NZ Peter Idoine when he succinctly described it as follows: “The role of the Enterprise Architect is to intervene for the benefit of mankind”

So what does this all mean?

Early simplistic definitions of Enterprise Architecture described the role to better align technical projects with business needs, however the complexity and main stream focus of IT today goes way beyond this and Enterprise Architecture should consider all of the environmental factors associated with an organisation in the same way that a manufacturing company would do so when procuring and provisioning a new production line.

To put it simply, Enterprise Architecture is where business capability (financial and market goals) and technology capability (products, vendors, and functionality) are tied together with organisational capability (people or process) to drive an ongoing strategy or desired outcome. The whole concept of the Organisational Capability is often forgotten and overlooked when companies review, select and procure new IT systems leaving themselves with a new expensive system modeled on old archaic processes!

This is where Enterprise Architecture “intervenes” to identify the linkages between the strengths and weaknesses of the project, program or strategic initiative beyond the current requirement and provide guidance and direction on how these factors tie together.

One small step for Enterprise Architecture one giant leap for mankind…