Light Bulb Interview Series - Jeff Kennedy - Part 1

Welcome to the first interview in the 2009 Light Bulb Effect interview series. In this series I will be interviewing a number of influential Enterprise Architect's focused around 3 key areas:

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

The first interview is with Jeff Kennedy - from the University of Auckland.
Jeff has enjoyed a long involvement with information systems, from a background specialising in application integration and identity management. He is currently serving as Enterprise Architect within the Information Technology Services division at The University of Auckland. Jeff is convening this year's CAUDIT Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education Symposium, to be held at The University of Auckland in November 2009.

The interview will be posted over 3 parts and I thank Jeff for agreeing to take part and insightful responses.

Light Bulb Effect Interview
Part 1 - Trends in EA and IT

MC: What do you see as the role of Enterprise Architecture as related to Business Strategy?
JK: Enterprise Architecture has become mission-critical in its role as the transmission glue between business strategy and technology strategy. Although reports of the Enterprise Architecture function migrating from information-technology-owned homes to CIO-based or central-business-unit-owned homes are both overemphasised and irrelevant, the role Enterprise Architecture must fulfill today is much more business-oriented than ever before. Key drivers for this new business outreach include Service-Oriented Architectures, Business Process Management, the global recession, and the ongoing demise of Enterprise Architecture frameworks.

MC: What is the role of Architecture Governance?
JK: With apologies to Paolo Malinverno, it has become evident that governance craves governance, and the situation today sees many enterprise struggling to understand what behaviours and structures constitute governance, struggling with administratively overburdened governance structures, or relying upon technology-based point solutions to the overall governance requirement. Trendwise, governance ought best see out 2009 as a year of deliberate consolidation in which enterprises understand the nature of the governance they have in place today, the advantages and shortcomings of that governance, and what should happen next to foster real maturity in enterprise governance initiatives. There is a big difference between design-time governance (e.g., for business processes, web services, and for all other artefacts) and the broader-scoped governance that determines the shape of an enterprise's infrastructure, applications, projects, and business-services portfolio, though the two domains must be linked strongly.

MC: Trends in Enterprise Systems?
JK: Almost without exception, vendors of enterprise systems are adopting open standards and moving towards some form of Service-Oriented Architecture foundations for their products. The drivers for this vendor adoption include internal requirements to consolidate increasingly broad ranges of acquired product solutions and external requirements to integrate with business applications from homegrown or other-third-party provenance. We have yet to see the rise of micro-service architecture (in which vendors could license individual business services or pieces of end-user functionality rather than semi-monolithic enterprise applications), but the increasing adoption of BPM-related, Portal-related, and WSDL-(and-REST)-related standards will continue apace during 2009.

MC: Trends in Infrastructure?
JK: It remains unfashionable to predict the death of the mainframe on account of the rise of Intel-based virtualisation, grid computing, and cloud computing, but it is apparent that big-iron infrastructure offers a much less sustainable (and therefore a much less attractive) value proposition than it did until even quite recently. The price-performance balance on commodity-based infrastructure makes even the best mainframe-based virtualisation increasingly difficult to justify. 2009 is likely to see the first stages take hold of local cloud infrastructure replacing traditional virtualisation.

MC: How about trends in Software/Hardware?
JK: The market share of proprietary unix systems will continue to slide as the various flavours of open-source linux gain still-wider popular adoption. Sun Microsystems has had tremendous investment and inertia in SPARC, in Solaris, and in everything related to Java, and the future of Sun is bound up tightly in all of this. Perhaps the most significant force in this concerns the future of Java, particularly Java EE, as competing light(er)weight frameworks stake their claims against the long-term evolution of the Java API. Many vendors will migrate to bare-metal delivery packages for provisioning their software to customers.

MC: Networking and Telecommunications?
JK: IPv6 continues to be deployed quite quickly (because it's the way of the future and all the replacement-round operating systems and router kit supports it), VoIP continues to be deployed relatively slowly (because it's expensive to deploy), and Google's Android will displace the iPhone completely (maybe BlackBerry too).


End of Part 1.

Jeff, Thank you for your great insight. Keep an eye out over the coming days for Part 2: Working in the new business climate soon...