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