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March 8, 2010

Cloud Computing Congress in London next Tuesday

Posted by Robin Meehan under Cloud Computing
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cloud computing congress 2010As blogged earlier here, myself and Smart421’s Managing Director will be attending this event at Olympia next week. I’m looking forward to it and so I’ve had a more detailed look though the agenda to see what catches my eye. As always, the customer-presented sessions should be good. A speaker from Morgan Stanley is presenting “a practical guide on Cloud Computing for your business” and I’m keen to hear a financial services perspective from a customer as this is one of the markets Smart421 operates in. There are also customer presentations with speakers from the Royal Mail and SportingIndex.

In the afternoon there are some sessions discussing data security, backup, recovery etc and how they relate to a cloud computing deployment model which I’m hoping will get into specifics and real-world experience in this area – it’s a key concern for customers and the industry still has lots to do to convince customers in this area, despite the general feeling from the cloud service providers that they have data security “sorted”.

Towards the end of the day there is some discussion of “opinions and feedback from CIOs across Europe” which could be good, and a panel session about the future of cloud – I’m not sure if anyone really knows the answer to this given the immaturity of the marketplace, but it’ll be an appropriate wrap-up to what I’m sure will be an enjoyable day.

 

March 4, 2010

SOA for batch

Posted by dentysan under SOA, Uncategorized
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My current client has posed an interesting challenge: they have an SOA architecture and want to leverage it in some of their batch activities. Now, while SOA and batch may not jump out as obvious bedfellows, it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable to want to take advantage of an existing SOA investment. How do you process hundreds of thousands of records whilst reusing those lovely enterprise services you’ve spent so much cash creating – and do it in a performant way?

As you might expect, some reasonable concerns have begun to surface. But my client is currently taking a mature approach to the problem: while some of the team think there may be a problem, we don’t have numbers to prove it. And so, we’re going to get the numbers and let that inform our response.

So the point of my post is not to say what we found out, but rather the explore the intellectual space. After all, while SOA isn’t perhaps a natural candidate for batch, I must admit to being a little disappointed by the alternatives. How can you do SOA batch without dropping SOA? Well, I think there are some options. (Which I’ll cover in just a second, below.)

Having been through some of them, I feel a mixture of happiness with a twinge of disappointment. On the positive side, there are a few options that offer benefit, with varying degrees of cost. On the negative side, there’s no switch that’s going to make SOA performant without investment. In some ways, perhaps I’m asking SOA to address a use case it really isn’t intended for but I’m not so defeatist – clearly SOA batch is not out of the question. It’ll be interesting to see how this area develops – if enterprises are to extract their maximum value from SOA, then batch is a unique use case that cannot be avoided.

  1. Pare down the per-record process to a bare minimum. Rather than calling a single heavyweight service to do everything, perhaps part of the work can be carried out per-record, leaving the rest to be dealt with in the background. One could perhaps even take this to the extent of only performing validation in the per-record loop – a read-only SOA validation service isn’t completely out of the question. It is a necessary part of the implementation in any case.
  2. Make the services themselves a bit more batch oriented. Make the services accept 1..* records to work on, and supply them, perhaps 100 at a time. This really cuts down the round-trip time, at the expense of necessitating a bit of forethought in service design. But it’s an easy pattern to understand, and potentially one that could be retrofitted to an existing service layer if the ESB can be moved close enough to reduce the round trip overhead, or the implementation and interfaces changed slightly.
  3. Have a two stage process that validates the input, prior to processing the content, and decoupling them. The idea would be to perform a quick first pass (perhaps even not leveraging SOA at all), and then loading the known valid data into SOA in the background. Ideally, the validation step catches enough problems to make the remainder that fail at run time a not inconceivable problem to deal with operationally.
  4. Stick with SOA, but go for less heavyweight components. For example – in our case, we are using a BPEL engine to do the load and orchestration, but that could be switched out for a ESB only orchestration. A bit more fiddly, but doable.
  5. Some times, things can be done in different places. (In our case, actually they can’t, but I’ve seen this enough times to mention it.) For example, if part of the job is aimed at ensuring data wasn’t corrupted or truncated in transit, there are approaches to dealing with this at the network or transport layer that mean the service layer can be freed from such a menial task to do the heavier lifting.
  6. Process things in parallel, and leverage the spare capacity in your system. So, this only applies if there is capacity that can be used. But if you have it, then perhaps more of it can be dedicated to the batch processing at certain times (overnight or in quiet times). This can require some deep reconfiguration of the platform, perhaps to leverage multiple queues with differently performant configurations, but it is only configuration.
  7. Partition your environment, so that no matter how much you throw at batch, the rest of the system remains responsive and available. This is more of a environmental deployment approach, but if you can do it, it’s another option that doesn’t require re-development.
  8. Make your services batch oriented, but also take advantage of SOAP with Attachments and stream your data. Not something that can be done without effort. But if your payload has a few hundred thousand records in it, and you can avoid the overhead of a request/reply for each record, the saving could be significant. However, I don’t know of many tools that could take advantage of this without some clever implementation.
  9. In some situations, it might be possible to redeploy components so as they are co-located. It is clearly not always going to be possible. But if it is, and if the overhead associated with the across-the-network trip is a significant contributor to the problem, then this could really help.

And if I find out what the answer is, I’ll come back and let you know!

 

February 21, 2010

Enterprise Architecture – a pragmatist’s view.

Posted by Jamie Milne under Consultancy, Enterprise Architecture
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Middle-out?Following a long stint at one of our largest clients, mainly working on Service Management transformation and a review of their Enterprise Architecture capability, I moved into the role of Business Design Authority at a smaller, more dynamic client in October last year.

This is a great opportunity for me to use all of the experience I have gained in my 15 year career to help the client develop a more structured approach to understanding and documenting strategy, processes, structures and requirements. The client has clear business objectives including significant growth within current markets, entry to new markets, improving consistency and effectiveness of their processes and doing all of this in a controlled and sustainable manner.

We could have come in and tried to impose a rigid top-down architectural approach. We could have focused on the lowest level requirements for their new core business system and worked bottom-up. But neither of those would have worked in isolation.

So we’ve taken a middle-out approach. Sort of. What we have actually done is to be pragmatic in helping to make sure that progress is being made against key business milestones and deliverables, whilst bringing in more rigour and structure to the way that things are done. For example…

We’ve confirmed that the strategy, principles and business objectives for the next 5 years are clearly understood and communicated.

We’ve worked with key stakeholders to define and document a new product that will allow the client to enter their key new market segment. We’ve taken this product definition and assessed it for impacts throughout the organisation – what changes to areas such as people, processes, information and technology are needed in order to sell and service the product? And now we’re delving into the detail of each of these areas to ensure that there will be “just enough” capability in place to be able to meet the immediate needs of the business – but in a way that can be scaled quickly as demand for the product increases.

We’re looking at existing processes and have brought in a method and templates for process documentation from “Level 1″ right down to “work instructions” where necessary.

We’ve mapped the entire Application Landscape – a few larger/core systems in a sea of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. And we’re working on a strategy that will gradually bring more of the “sea” under tighter control, whilst keeping some of the existing flexibility and adaptability. We’re also looking at how and where the applications can be hosted to best meet the needs of the business.

And yes, we’re also keeping a careful eye on the detailed requirements for the new core business system and elsewhere – because, as we all know, the devil is always in the detail.

I could go on. But you get the idea. It’s about doing whatever adds value NOW, but with an eye on a more structured, sustainable, strategic future. It’s about saying what you’ll do and doing it. It’s about keeping the communications channels open so that the whole organisation can find out what’s going on, how this programme of change will help them and how they can help the success of the programme.

And it’s about having some fun along the way!

 

February 16, 2010

Cloud Computing Congress Europe coming up

Posted by Robin Meehan under Cloud Computing
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cloud computing congress 2010You could spend your entire life attending cloud-related events at the moment, so you have to be selective. The next one I will be at (with Smart421’s MD also) is Cloud Computing Congress Europe at Olympia in London on 16th March. The list of speakers, sponsors and exhibitors looks good and relevant.

One of the things that attracted me to it is that the sponsors and speakers are all quite different to the ones at the previous cloud event I attended with minimal overlap, so we should get a different take on the topic. Specifically I’m interested to hear from RackSpace (as an antidote to the AWS-centric world of IaaS), get an update from Martin Bellamy on the G-Cloud initiative, and listen to Kenneth Verlage from DHL as they are one of our customers. It is interesting to note that Magic software are the main sponsor – I had a call with them last week where they indicated that they were making a real push to raise their profile, as they feel that their brand awareness lags behind their true market footprint.

 

February 4, 2010

Gartner Local Briefing: Control is an illusion – is Gartner in good company?

Posted by Richard Latham under Business Change, Consultancy, Enterprise Architecture | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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Brian Burke, Research VP at Gartner speaking at a Local Briefing event in London on 2nd February 2010, was talking about the flatter horizontal organisation and which means that control is much more difficult to exercise these days.

I think that control has always been a difficult idea.  The thought that one of us can control the actions of others is scary.  By and large we submit to the control of others because it is in our benefit to do so, either for individual gain or for the collective good.  The idea that the Enterprise Architecture (EA) team have control over the Strategy, the execution of Strategy, or are responsible for the upholding of the principles against all comers is an old fashioned illusion.

Governance comes high up the list of wants of all Enterprise Architects (if only we could make ….), but the control and the power to control is illusory.  Enterprise Architects need to make it in the interest of others to conform to the strategy, the principles and standards.

The EA team only wield power by virtue of the willingness of others to follow and for others to perceive that it is in their best interest.  For some people the collective interest is not sufficient.  They perceive that their own self interest can be best served by going against the collective interest and they will do so.  One of the tricks is to line up individual self interest with the collective interest.

The flatter organisation and the reduction in command and control management is also mooted as a significant trend and change.  Of course, when it comes to command and control, Seddon was right to draw the connection between leaders such as Ohno, Ford and Sloan as examples of command and control implementers (Seddon, 2005 p.9) and also right to recognise where all this came from in the first place: Taylorism and scientific management , as highlighted by the prominent management consultant John Seddon (2005 pp.199-202; Greenberg and Baron, 2008 pp.12-13).

Would it be reasonable to say that the higher performance comes from pull rather than push as well as a workforce engaged in the life of the organisation?  Systems thinking means engaging the workforce in decision making in stark contrast to creating “management factories”. For example, putting variety back into the production line and devolving decision making to the workforce.

Systems thinking should enable organisations to move from satisficing to higher performance.  Also, it fits with the notion of open systems based organisations and those that are “learning” based.  Organisational culture, therefore, becomes a key determinant, alongside, it has to be emphasised, good people management and an acknowledgement of how the architecture of enterprise-wide computer systems help to bond an organisation together.

Author Peter Senge loves to talk of ‘learning organisations’ but even he acknowledges this is very hard to achieve.

Senge (1995, p.21) asserts “deep beliefs are often inconsistent with espoused values in organisations. The organisation might espouse an ideal or ‘empowering’ people, but an attitude that ‘they won’t let us do it’ prevails. Thus, even though espoused values change, the culture of the organisation tends to remain the same. It is a testament to our naïvete about culture that we think we can change it simply by declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.”

The most effective organisations have always been those that are managed by co-operation rather than dictat (although modern-day disciples of Machiavelli’s The Prince may dispute this: see this paper for a discussion).  It is now even more obvious that this is the only way to manage.  The armed forces (a model of command and control) manage by the willing co-operation of their participants (the troops).

To claim, therefore, that Enterprise Architects can no longer rely on the command and control type of organisation is to deny the political skills of the previous CIOs and Chief Architects in gaining respect for their opinions and actions for their plans.

In the context of EA the power of veto is illusionary without the respect and support from peers, as once exercised, the power dissipates rapidly when unpopular decisions are forced through.

The soft skills that are required by IT architects are formidable, if the architect is to play their part in the shaping of the solutions or the organisations, they need the full set of soft skills, just as Gartner research director Chris Wilson pointed out.  It is not a new set of skills though, as Chris Wilson says “to be qualified as the best paid snake oil salesmen we had better be equipped to facilitate, persuade and sell and sell and sell.”

Way back in 1987, Beckard and Harris came up with a valuable contribution to help us all to get a handle on organisational transitions. Their ‘change equation’ still holds the road today. I’ll leave you to work the numbers for your own situation.

C=[ABD] > X

C=Change

A=Level of dissatisfaction with the status quo

B=Desirability of the proposed change or end state

D=Practicality of the change (minimal risk and disruption)

X=“Cost” of changing

You might be thinking that this still leaves Enterprise Architects in a dilemma, but hey – what’s new there? It’s precisely why Enterprise Architecture should be entrusted to the professionals.

References

Beckhard, R. and Harris, R.T. (1987) Organizational Transitions: Managing complex change 2nd edn. Reading, MA, Addison Wesley

Greenberg, J and Baron, R.A (2008) Behavior in Organizations 9th edn. Upper Saddle River, NL, Pearson Education.

McGuire, D and Hutchings, K. (2006) ‘A Machiavellian analysis of organizational change’ Journal of Organizational Change Management 19 (2) pp. 192-209 DOI 10.1108/09534810610648906 Also available at http://teaching.fec.anu.edu.au/MGMT7030/McGuire%20and%20Hutchings%20-%20Machiavellian%20Change.pdf [accessed 02 February 2010].

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control: a better way to make the work work 2nd edn. Buckingham, Vanguard Education.

Senge, P., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R, and Smith, B. (1995) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook London, Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

 

February 4, 2010

Gartner Local Briefing – Hyperconnected enterprises – aspiration or desperation?

Posted by Richard Latham under Cloud Computing, Consultancy, Enterprise Architecture | Tags: , , , , |
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Leading analyst Brian Burke talked persuasively about Hyperconnected enterprises in his presentation “Return-to-Growth Strategy: Architecting the Next-Wave Business Model” at the latest Gartner local briefing on Enterprise Architecture in London this week

Gartner’s view is that organisations are becoming more horizontally structured and more interconnected with other organisations and with their customers. To such an extent that the hyperconnected organisation will be unable to deliver without its connections.  I suspect that this is part of the continual evolution of businesses such as adoption of Just-In-Time and the exploitation of e-commerce.  Is the vertically integrated organisation a dinosaur?  Are there any left? Some of Smart421’s clients are actively pursuing strategies of horizontal integration and removing their vertical integration.

It all makes sense; changes in the environment create opportunities to be exploited, so it is natural that the Internet and fast reliable and cheap communications will be fuelling new ways of not only doing, but creating businesses.  The explosion in software services and cloud computing, which is just around the corner will accelerate this trend.  In fact it may well be that these two developments will drive much of the growth in the next economic cycle.

Brian Burke was also talking about “emergent strategies”, that is those strategies that happen outside of the corporate strategies – strategy on the fly if you like.  Gartner are suggesting that the emergent strategies are becoming more important, diminishing the effect of the more ponderous corporate strategies.  This is a wake up call to organisations with centrist attitudes.  The more distributed the organisation, the more distributed the strategies and governance need to be.  The British found that out some 200 years ago, a lesson learnt from the colonies.

What EA needs is a strategy to deal with and adopt the emergent on-the-fly strategies.

Luckily for me ticking off all the new and emerging ideas from Brian’s presentation, I found that Smart421’s EA proposition and in particular the “Sustainable EA” stance ticks all of the boxes for the hyperconnected organisation complete with an agile strategy to deal with on-the-fly strategies.

Hyperconnected organisations also reminded me of a project that I first heard about from a colleague at Smart421 on the subject of Linked Data. The project is being run out of the University of Southampton. What is particularly interesting is that Messrs Berners-Lee and Shadbolt are looking very carefully at this whole area.

 

January 30, 2010

WebSphere Integration User Group Meeting

Posted by R Featherstone under Business Process, SOA | Tags: , , , |
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This week I attended the WIUG meeting at IBM’s South Bank. The meeting was a half day event consisting of a Connectivity Stream with presentations on the new features in MQ V7 and Message Broker V7 and a Business Process Management Stream with presentations on BPM and Business Rules.

The Connectivity Stream was the more popular by at least a factor of five but I was interested in the BPM stream and was hoping to gain a little more clarity around the plethora of offerings IBM have in this space and I believe Business Rules Management Suites have a lot to offer as organisations get further down their SOA journey.

The presentations were interesting, both presenters were experts with their subject matter and as it was a small group it was very informal and interactive. I won’t regurgatate the presentations, which I believe will be posted on the WIUG site soon but here are my thoughts following a couple of days to reflect.

IBM’s BPM suite is still slightly confusing. Although I know that Process Server, Dynamic Process Edition and Business Services Fabric are essentially Process Server based bundlings and FileNet is for document centric business processes, it’s not clear where Lotus, Lombardi and Business Space fit into the equation. I guess clearing this up is going to take a little more effort on my part but it would be nice if the guys at IBM had a clear route map.

As well as extracting the Business Rules from your process IBM are talking about Composite Business Applications. The policy about which task is executed next in your process is extracted making it possible to dynamically alter your business process at runtime based on factors such as the channel servicing the request, the platinum status of the customer making the request etc. This higher level of abstraction will allow you to simplify your business process into its core tasks extracting the complex if, then else decisions that don’t form the meat and veg of the process itself.

ILOG BRMS looks pretty cool in action and I look forward to the guys coming into the office next month to talk to our WebSphere practice.

I need to look into Business Space, this came up in both the BPM and BRMS talks and I don’t know anything about it (yet) and also look into BlueWorks BPM again (when I first looked at this a while back it didn’t work – turns out it doesn’t work in IE yet).

For me the most important point of the day was policy extraction from business processes. With a SO approach it becomes much easier to implement business processes by plugging services together. When you’ve got that sorted just make sure you haven’t moved the inflexibility of the past into a higher layer. Look for opportunities for reuse, simplification and policy extraction throughout your model / design.

 

January 19, 2010

BCS Enterprise Architecture meeting – Maximising Business Sponsorship

Posted by Robin Meehan under Enterprise Architecture | Tags: , , , , , , |
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Samuel HolcmanThis evening I attended this BCS EA specialist group event at the IET building in London. The presentation was given by Samuel Holcman from EACOE, a US-based EA consultancy/training/certification organisation that are trying to break into the UK market. Consequently the presentation was a bit of a sales pitch and didn’t feel very “BCS-like”, but as always with these things whilst most of it was the usual familiar EA messages, there were a few interesting little snippets that I picked out.

I must admit to being pretty restless during the first 40 minutes (!) when Sam went over the usual intro material – definition of EA etc. Everything he said was sensible. But how many times can you have the basic interrogatives of the Zachman framework explained to you before you start to glaze over? I appear to have reached my limit anyway! To be fair, there was some interesting historical new ground covered when he was describing the pre-Zachman seminal paper days in IBM during the tenure of Dewey Walker.

Then he launched into the “Maximising Business Sponsorship” material. I was expecting the discussion to be about how to get the business excited about the possibilities of EA, why is it important to them, and how to keep that excitement/engagement alive over an extended period of time etc, but Sam focused on the initial EA engagement really and how to maximise business sponsorship during those early days. In our experience this is not the problem – not saying that it’s easy, but it’s keeping it going over the long term that is tougher. We were discussing this afterwards and someone proposed an interesting theory – that “organisational memory” is about 3 years long (related to organisations’ regular personnel changes and re-orgs), and so in that time period anything older is forgotten and tends to then get performed again (such as EA initiatives). The people you dealt with 3 years ago have all been replaced and moved on, and they didn’t tell their replacements which cupboard the corporate data model was put in…

His key message was that business engagement/sponsorship requires 3 things:

  • A clear methodology and defined roles/responsibilities for the EA effort. In a discussion afterwards with my BCS colleagues the general conclusion was that business guys generally won’t want to know the method you are using (in detail at least), but will want to be reassured that you have one, i.e. you’re not making it up as you go along. The method outlined by Sam was TOGAF-esque in nature – as we know there’s only so many ways of skinning that particular cat.
  • “Human consumable” outputs. Sam outlined some sensible practices and rules of thumb here for “consumability”. However I was pretty amazed when he said that all the outputs they produce are either in Visio or Excel. I like the idea of outputs being in a business-friendly format, but maintaining them in Visio? If you needed just to rename something used in more than on diagram, then…er…oh dear. Please… :)
  • Traceability. Now, I initially thought he meant traceability from corporate goals->strategy->divisional goals->divisional strategy->projects, or something similar – but maybe I jumped to that conclusion as that is one of my areas of work at present. But he meant traceability of everything (corporate goals etc) to the actual source document section that they were harvested/discovered from. This is new news to me and seems like a lot of work (and implies a kind of “plough through hundreds of documents to discover the enterprise architecture”-type approach), but I can see the benefits. It draws out and provides direct evidence for conflicts in the views between business stakeholders and also demonstrates that nothing has been “made up” by the EA team.

All in all, I’m glad I attended. It’s always a bit of a hassle to go to an event like this after your day job but Sam provided good sensible reminders of the EA basics (e.g. eat your own dog food, start scope small and build on success, communications strategy is key, have a method, timebox for frequent deliveries etc) and also threw in some good provocations to keep me interested. Thanks!

 

January 4, 2010

Enterprise Architecture needs to get on the front foot

Posted by Robin Meehan under Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture | Tags: , , |
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spaghettiThe adoption of cloud computing means the business community is becoming more and more able to procure IT-based services without “troubling” their IT department. This has always been a perennial problem – and we’ve all worked on projects where the solution has been selected by the business with the subsequent problems that this can cause (not inevitably though – it is arrogant of the IT world to assume it “knows best” when in fact the business community typically has a far deeper understanding of the challenges it is attempting to solve).

Cloud computing has brought a huge variety of SaaS offerings to the table that the business can select from and procure “invisibly”. Business teams can now work around perceived frustrations of working with their internal IT/EA team – avoiding that pesky product due diligence, that annoying testing phase etc.

It’s an oft repeated truism that EA teams need to engage better with their business community, but the key point is that this is becoming even more essential. EA teams need to be on the front foot and work in close partnership with their business customers to identify new opportunities, issues etc before the solutionising happens. Sitting back and expecting stakeholders to “come to you” is going to be a less and less successful strategy over time, leading to an enterprise architecture that is not architected or even influenced by the EA team, but is at best passively documented by them… “Oh, so that’s what we’ve now got is it?”…and consists of an unplanned hotchpotch of poorly integrated and overlapping SaaS solutions (aka Enterprise Spaghetti 2.0).

 

December 23, 2009

Browser wars – take #2

Posted by Robin Meehan under Cloud Computing | Tags: |
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GoogleChromeAdvertI remember the browser wars the first time round – but I don’t ever remember seeing a billboard advert for Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape. So when I saw this ad for Google Chrome at a mainline railway station recently, it’s clear that things are really hotting up.

Erik Sherman argues that it doesn’t matter who wins the new browser war, but for Google to be taking billboard space – that must imply that they see it as an important market to be chasing, unless it’s just a company vanity thing, we must beat Microsoft etc. But given that Google don’t have a history of being dumb, I’ve not writing off the importance of control over the browser market just yet.

One thing is clear from this advertising – this time the battleground includes both the domestic and enterprise arena, so it’s not just a geek thing this time round. If IDC are right, and Windows 7 is the last “big” OS release from Microsoft, then the logic is “he who controls the browser, controls access to cloud-based services”, with online office applications being a key combat area.

 

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