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.