Everchanging IT - Pervasive Technology

I have been working in the ever changing and evolving Information Technology (IT) industry for over 20 years and seen the rapid advancement and adoption of technology become so pervasive and mainstream that it is no longer the domain of information technology people.  IT was once restricted to the domains of research and development projects such as the oil exploration system written in C++ or the back office payroll and accounting systems written in Cobol/DB2/CICS that I started my career in were in the hands of professionally trained staff and educated users, this is no longer the case.

I started to write this on a flight from Wellington to New Zealand in Oct 2011 after watching the documentary "Front Page: A year inside the New York Times" directed by Andrew Rossi, that explores the perilous situation that the print media finds itself in as internet surpasses print media as the source of information and the impact it has on the traditional revenue source of cover price and advertising.  It got me thinking about how to capture the experiences that I have gained as well as the experiences of many of the friends and colleagues that I have worked with over the years to help shape where we are going...

Industry Trends Past and Present

The Information Technology industry is only 40 years old and is relative immature when you compare it to other fields such as mathematics, engineering, manufacturing and finance.  This is particularly evident when looking at the adoption of standards, approaches and governance and the race for technological superiority.

However there have been many so called inflection points that were hyped by as the solution and revolution of the industry.  It is important to spend some time and explore many of the solutions and technologies that have come and gone as it is the lessons learnt from these have driven the innovation to address the shortcomings and built on the previous capability for example:

• Computers: Mainframe to Mini to Midrange to PC to tablet
• Programming: 2GL, 3GL - procedural, 4GL - declarative, Object Orientation
• Word Processing: electronic typewriter to word star to Microsoft word
• Search Engine: Alta Vista to Yahoo to Google
• Information Exchange: EDI, batch processing, XML
• Integration: batch processing, service orientation
• Collaboration: inter office memo, facsimile, email, chat, Facebook, twitter ...
• Communication: telex, telegram, telephone, VoIP, SMS, Skype, facetime

Which brings us to today...  What are the top items and priorities for today's Chief Information Officer.

1. Information Technology Optimisation
2. Data Centre Optimisation
3. Cloud Computing

However what are the hottest consumer trends

1. Social Media and Collaboration
2. Online commerce and Analytics (big data)
3. Content Consumption : news, music, movies, television

This represents a significant mismatch between the agendas of many professional IT managers and the demands that consumers of information are looking for, not only in the context of the creation of products and services, but also in attracting and developing the next generation of knowledge worker.

So given that the past has been such a valid indicator of the future, what are the current shortcomings in the approaches and capabilities in today systems that we need to review to plan for the solutions that we need to provide in the future?

Keen to get your thoughts...

Database Consolidation - Oracle as a Service (OaaS)

Over the last few years my team has helped a number of key and strategic customers with how organisations with widely deploy stand-alone Oracle database environments find a more cost effective and efficient solution for the delivery of database services. 

More and more we see each corporate initiative or project acquires its own hardware & software and establishes separate hosting & support arrangements. Consequently, there has been (and will continue to be) a proliferation of servers and software that all fundamentally do the same thing - provide Oracle database services for applications to consume.

A more effective and cheaper way of providing Database Services is to "pool" several independent database servers together and produce an Oracle as a Service (OaaS) grid.  In this architecture, applications would connect to a single shareable instance of Oracle as they would any other Oracle instance. The business applications would be isolated from each other and explicit portions of Oracle processing power allocated to each one - a high-use application would be granted a large portion of processing power, a low-use application would be granted less. This provides Oracle customers with a number of realisable benefits:

• Higher availability; as all participating applications immediately benefit from automatic failover infrastructure.
• Cost savings; significant capacity for savings on hardware through better hardware utilisation and the use of cheaper commodity servers.
• Better service through centralised management; organisations can benefit from higher quality by leveraging a central team of database administrators.
• Reduced risk; the entire environment is managed, support is centralised and process, procedure and skills are standardised.

OaaS Design Pattern

The OaaS design pattern has been applied at a number of strategic customers that have delivered significant business benefit and is typically deployed as follows:

1. Construction of one, or more, clusters consisting of standardised commodity hardware components that hosts these shareable Oracle instance
2. Establishment of procedures for project & application support teams to engage with the Oracle shared services team and have their database applications hosted in this environment
3. Definition of a cost, funding & operational model for the shared Oracle environment and the organisations IT operations team.

Reasons to consider Consolidation

In the current economic climate, keeping recurring operational costs down is imperative. Consolidation will assist the reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) in several ways, including envisaged savings in hardware, software and hosting, as follows:

• Reduced administration. By standardising and reducing the number of servers, businesses reduce the complexity of the infrastructure they must administer. Fewer support staff can therefore manage the same service demands. This standardisation also facilitates the provision of 24/7 support using worldwide support resources.
• Reduced operational costs. Increase in service capacity and growth are achieved with better utilisation of resources. Typically, fewer servers are required, resulting in hardware and power savings.
• Reduced data center costs. Site space formerly used for IT services can be returned to the business, and existing facilities can be used more efficiently.
• Reduced data center hosting costs. Typically, hosting contracts are based on infrastructure under management - the less the infrastructure under management, the less the cost.
• Reduced revenue loss through higher uptime/availability. Consolidation reduces the cost of implementing high-availability solutions, which reduces revenue losses due to downtime.
• Improved service management. By standardising and reducing the complexity of service infrastructure, organisations facilitate more effective service management processes, tools, and automated system administration.
• Simplified contingency planning solutions. A simpler service infrastructure means that more services can be restored when a site failure occurs.
• Improved quality of service (QoS). Consolidation will facilitate improvement in application up-time and will deliver higher systems performance.
• Increased reliability and availability. Server consolidation makes it more economic to provide high-availability configurations and dedicated support staff. Organisations also benefit from implementing better storage management and service continuity solutions.
• Improved performance. Standardised systems deliver more predictable performance, and proprietary technologies such as data compression can improve query response times.
• Improved infrastructure agility. In uncertain times, flexibility and the ability to respond quickly to changing needs of the business can help to maintain the competitive edge. Consolidation results in a more standardised, centralised and dynamic infrastructure, which makes it possible for systems to be more responsive to change and to quickly adapt to business needs.
• Improved consistency. Consolidation improves interoperability, and makes systems more productive and easier to manage:
• Better integration. A consolidated platform provides for easier, and cheaper, systems integration, which improves data consistency and reduces the complexity of tasks such as extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations.
• Centralised management. Because consolidation facilitates centralised management, it becomes easier to implement standard policies across your systems.
• Reduced carbon footprint. With greater emphasis on sustainability, many organisations are striving to reduce the environmental impact that their activities have. Consolidation enables organisations to reduce their energy consumption by using less hardware as well as by using that hardware more efficiently.
• Improved resource utilisation. Most applications that utilise Oracle elect to provision a server/s with capacity that will exceed their maximum peak load. It is a global phenomenon that many database servers run at low utilisation rates. In a consolidated deployment model, idle capacity across this infrastructure can be reclaimed by reducing the total number of required servers while not affecting application performance or availability (although the extent of the envisaged savings need confirmation within each particular organisations environment).

OaaS – The way forward

Traditionally the type of application workload for the database was a key consideration in designing and configuring the environment as allocations for, and use of, resources can be very different depending on whether the workload type is Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) or Decision Support System (DSS). 

In October 2008, Oracle unveiled the Oracle Exadata family of products which simplifies the deployment of an OaaS platform.  The Exadata family of appliances are geared towards providing high-performance, ready to scale database processing capabilities specifically mixed applications workload (DSS or OLTP) and simplifies the first step in the Design Pattern, by providing a pre-configured standardised platform.

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

View more presentations from Marc Caltabiano.

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

View more presentations from Marc Caltabiano.

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...

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...

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.