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...