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...