Ever wanted to get a quick overview of business functions in an organisation SAP have done a great job with their Business Maps; worth checking out http://www.sap.com/solutions/businessmaps/index.epx
Experiences in the life of an Digital Leader, navigating through ups and downs of technology landscape. These are my personal thoughts and do not reflect the views of my employer.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA)
Not that we did not have enough acronyms to confuse us CISCO goes ahead and creates another one. I was doing some background research on an article published by the CIO magazine "The Rise of Service-Oriented IT and the Birth of Infrastructure as a Service", when I came across SONA. Quick search on CISCO website showed standard marketing hype and nothing more CISCO SONA Stuff . What I was looking for was some sort of reference architecture on how CISCO saw all this working. I like the concept just that so far it appears like a half baked stuff created by marketing.
From a concept point of view if the network can become application aware, for example in a branch office if the link goes down the network can cache till head office comeback on line and things like that will be a big boost for SOA as application then don't have to worry about implementation of reliable messaging and so on.
If anyone has more info on SONA or Infrastructure as a Service I would be really happy to hear it.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Business Process Architecture and SOA
Recently I had the pleasure of presenting at the BTELL Conference on Business Process Management on the topic of Business Process Architecture and SOA. Fortunately the talk was well received and did raise interesting point. Subsequently the organizers have asked me to come back and give a similar talk with more architectural focus at their upcoming Enterprise Architecture Conference. For those of you who missed the earlier conference should try and make it to this one. It is well worth a look and quite a few industry leaders in the EA space will be there. Check out the web site at this URL http://www.btell.com/content/eac07/
If you do decide to make it do look me up.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Changing of the guard
For the past couple of years everyone from Gartner to Harvard Business Review has been talking about corporate agility, where lack of the same can kill organisations. Following In the IT press SOA has been promised at the panacea for all the ills and somehow delivering the ultimate agility to the organisations. All this hype got me thinking about why there is so much demand for agile organisations.
From an Organizational history point of view large organisations (from banks to car manufacturers) where able to mass produce goods at a higher quality and lower price point than there smaller competitors (mom and pop shops). For many years this was a great thing and lots of small businesses either became bigger or absorbed into lager organisations and some went belly up.
With the advent of Internet, and efficient global logistics (UPS, FedEx and so on) cost of advertising and distribution dropped and world became flatter. Consumers got fed up with mass produced items (there are only so many IKEA coffee tables you could buy) and started to look for customize products. They wanted something different, something tailored to their needs (home loans tailored to their needs, furniture customized to their flat). An entire market emerged to satisfy this trend and slowly it is becoming the norm rather than the exception. In such a market large organisations are asked to produce items with greater variety and lower quantity per batch. Such a shift does require some fundamental shift in thinking and many organisations have successfully made the transition.
In such a rapidly changing environment large organisations finding there huge investment in IT infrastructure preventing them to move rapidly. IT investment which once was a competitive advantage for these organisations is proving to be a disadvantage, smaller competition with no legacy infrastructure or lumbering mainframes to support are able to adapt to the changing consumers needs at a much faster rate. The question that emerges is what value IT really adds to an organisation’s revenue or profitability. McKinsey recently did a study in Europe where they looked how much value IT spends was adding to the bottom line of the organisations. The graphics below is straight out of their report and I am including it without their permission for which I apologize.
From the study two things were found;
- IT spending varied between 10 to 30 percent of operating costs.
- Higher levels of IT spending didn't increase the effectiveness or efficiency of the business (banks that appear to get the most business value from IT spend up to 40 percent less than the weakest performers).
The four quadrants above represented following aspects of IT spend.
- Effective business enablers, achieve the greatest business efficiency and effectiveness, from a relatively low level of IT spending.
- High IT spenders pay out about 13% of their operating revenue on IT but don’t see the desired impact on business efficiency and effectiveness.
- Heavy IT transformers, spend about 15 % of their operating revenue on IT, mainly for specific business transformation projects.
- Efficient IT executors spend just 10% of their operating revenue on IT but haven't achieved a high level of operating efficiency.
The above study if definitely interesting as I then wanted to compare how Australian Banks would fare in such a scenario, banks are interesting as they are quite intensive users of IT and have made significant investment in the same for past couple of years.
The challenge was finding the right information as I did not know anyone in the banking industry. The journey started by gathering publicly available information I.e. Annual Report which outlined how much they spent of IT or Communications. Mind you as I am no Balance Sheet expert, I may have well got my figures mixed up (at least I would have them consistently mixed up). Following graph is a summary of what I found.
The above figures are based on 2005 annual reports and represent a total IT spend of AUD $3.5 Billion of AUD $24.4 Billion operating expense. One thing that emerges is Australians don’t spend nearly as much compared to their European Competition. Commonwealth Bank and Westpac both have large outsourcing models in place, hence have a limited discretionary spending. Bank of Queensland may appear to be out there, which could be due to their large BPO contract which gets added in as an IT cost. A word of caution at this point please do not fall into the simplistic metrics trap as the figures don't really represent business value being added by IT, I am using it as a mechanism to compare entities and if their size has any relation to money they spend on IT.
If we look at the above numbers from an innovation perspective it appears large IT spend does not guarantee innovation. Smaller players like Bendigo Bank are able to offer services like two factor authentication for their web client while the bigger ends are still struggling. In the last couple of months innovation has become the buzz word and everyone is looking to IT for innovative ideas that will transform the business.
The question then emerges is innovation the domain of big players with huge R&D budgets or can smaller players outmaneuver their bigger rivals. History has proved otherwise smaller startup have been able to innovate and bring new products to market and capture a bigger slice of the market. Other have been able to open up totally new markets where none existed before Google and YouTube are prime example. If smaller players can be more adaptive and innovative will it change the model of corporations as we know it. Will this mean we are going to see smaller more nimble players banding together and forming virtual entities yet retaining their autonomous sub parts? ...........till next time.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Architects
Not having blogged for sometime it feels a bit strange to do so again. Last few months has been hectic between the birth of our second son, and a few projects coming off the boil simultaneously (one of sensitive nature restricting what I can blog about).
Someone recently asked me what do I look for if I am hiring architect, the question caught me off guard as I had never given it much thought. In the past I have interviewed lots of Solution Architects, hired a few good ones and a few not ok ones. The problem with interviews is it is such a luck of the draw, despite the best intentions there are no guarantee of outcomes. Having said that I wanted to pen down what I thought made a good enterprise/solution/software/architect.
Architects in our information age have a unique position they sit between the business and technology acting as a bridge between competing domains. This role has become even more important as role of IT has changed from being Automating Business to Information Management and finally Business Transforming (Information Paradox). The other paradox with architects role is even though they play such a crucial role very often they have no power to direct things, other than to influence from the sidelines. Often when IT projects turn bad CIO have been know to turn to their Architects (Enterprise or Solution) and ask them where were you when the rot started (on the sidelines watching the project go downhill).
From my personal experience and what I have seen in others to be successfully architects one need to have equal parts of following professional traits.
Salesman: to be able to sell the concept to other members of the team and stakeholders. Basic sales skills are important to firstly empathize with others and understanding what they are truly looking for.
Preacher: As an architect one needs to believe in something and have the ability to appeal to others emotional core. When things don't go as planned every one in a software project team have a tendency to turn to the architect who had initially articulated the vision. During such trying times faith in ones ability should be unfaltering. The down side of being too much of a preacher are the flame wars we are so often familiar with "Linux is better than Windows", "RUP is better than SCRUM", "UML is the only modeling language the world needs".
Thinker: This is perhaps the most important ability of an architect, the ability to solve complex problems either by abstraction or separation of concern. This is the trait which gets discussed the most when talking about architects so I wont waste any more time or space.
Dana Bredemeyer and Ruth Malan in their article "What It Takes to Be a Great Enterprise Architect" describe US Constitution as a form of Enterprise Architecture and James Madison the first Enterprise Architect. They outline similar skills I have outlined above and include a few more (domain expertise, political acuity, strategic ability, and leadership skills).
Having said all this an architects job is never easy they have to often juggle multiple dimensions and competing priorities with the responsibility to articulate a solution which balances all these dimensions and then communicate it to diverse group of stakeholders. James M Butler in his book Technology Blueprints: Technology Foundations for High Performance Companies defines a form of psychosis that afflicts architects when these forces goes out of balance. Following are his list.
"Dimensional Myopia: Focusing too tightly on resolving certain dimensions of the problem space while being unaware of or choosing to ignore others
Evolutionary Vertigo: Refusing to ever commit to an approach, tactical or strategic, based on a perception that the solution spaces are changing too rapidly, thus resulting in a lack of traction
Molecular Paranoia: Working 23 hours a day to mentally maintain for real-time access all details along all dimensions and scanning all news sources for any external influence for fear of missing any single detail, relevant or not
Reverse Acrophobia: Clinging only to the highest levels of abstraction and avoiding reality-based grounding while apathetically assuming that the engineers can and will do all the heavy lifting"
I have seen Dimensional Myopia especially among architects who come from a specific stream background (I.e. Data Architects tend to see the whole world as a database). As an software architect it is important to have well rounded experience, preferably some in non IT space (manufacturing, finance and so on). Recently reviewing someone's architecture I came across Reverse Acrophobia; in this particular case solution was at a level of abstraction where reality was a problem. I am not going to comment on Molecular Paranoia as sometimes I suffer from that affliction :-).
Recently I came across a beautifully quote from Chris Bangle Chief Designer at BMW where he says "Engineers make the world happen. The role of the designer is to give them focus." In the world of IT Architects play the role of designers and software developers, hardware engineers, network engineers make it happen.
As a final word have a look at this article http://www.cio.com/archive/030105/blueprint_sidebar_five.html
Sunday, October 08, 2006
VS2005 and SOAPExtensions
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Companies get the systems they deserve
Jim Crookes, Chief Architect at BT has observed,
“Companies get the systems they deserve. A company's systems estate is a result of its culture, organizational history, and its funding structures. Coherent, well integrated systems will only ever exist in companies that value coherence and integrated service.”
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Just when you thought VB6 was dead
More details here, have fun. Would be interesting to see how this technology is received and pans out.
http://blogs.sun.com/herbertc/entry/project_semplice_visual_basic_for
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Business architecture
When doing Enterprise Architecture for any organisation, most people tend to start from bottom up. They would map out the infrastructure architecture (more or less what assets they have), application architecture and may be their information architecture. What often gets left behind is the business architecture, fundamentally what is the organisation trying to achieve and does all its assets support that objective. The key to achieving this is to have a solid understanding of what business motivations are what are its strategy and then map it back to its applications and infrastructure, while maintaining all the relationships that exist between all the entities.
Just trying to visualise (Business Strategy to Function to Application and finally to Infrastructure) the scenario will send most people into a head spin, often we try to visualise the complexity using Visio or PowerPoint. These are good presentation tools but lack the depth when it comes to modelling dynamic relationships. This then leads to simplifications and the risk of abstracting the reality away just so we can fit it into the modelling tool of choice.
In next couple of weeks I will try and blog around this concept and how it then translates into SOA (Business Services vs. Web Services).
Another blog from inside Microsoft Word 2007 Beta as you can see I am loving this.
My first Word 2007 Blog post
This is a test blog to see if I can publish from right inside Word 2007 Beta.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Excellent Enterprise Architecture Books
Adrian being more experienced than I am (having been Chief Architect for 3G at Vodafone in UK), has written a simple book on the EA framework that he has developed during his career. I would recommend it to anyone considering some light reading on the topic.
Book Details:
"An Enterprise Architecture Development Framework: The Business Case, Framework and Best Practices for Building Your Enterprise Architecture" : by Adrian Grigoriu
Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1412086655/sr=1-1/qid=1154835650/ref=sr_1_1/104-0229407-0975133?ie=UTF8&s=books
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Some changes for good in my life
Couple of months back I got a firm offer from Oakton to join their Enterprise Strategy and Architecture team as an Enterprise Architect. I did accept the offer and for past one month have been working with them. Having said that I am still passionate about technology and Microsoft .NET so will continue to blog about that including SOA, and some new areas around Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture and what ever else that catches my fancy :-) .
Monday, February 13, 2006
Agile dev end of life, Waterfall is back
One of the guys at work sent me the link after I had been pestering everyone why Agile is so cool....
:-)
I found the following really funny and will resonate with all Architects.
"If designs are ruined by execution details, then we should divorce designs from execution. Implementation is harmful to designs! Implementation ruins the elegance, beauty, and symmetry of designs. The problem is execution; and so it is execution that must be eliminated. As a community of designers we need to insist that our designs remain unexecutable!"
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Every thought what would happen if Amazon and Google were to merge
Have a look at this http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/ might change your perspective at things.
I remember at the last Code Camp in Wagga Wagga someone (an un-named person :-) ) said, "I don't buy books any more, prefer to read blogs instead" think about that after seeing this movie....I am already seeing in my profession what I call Bloggitechture (Software Architecture by blogs ).
By now I think I have pissed of quite a few people so let me stop now.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Ever wondered how much your blog is worth
http://www.blogshares.com/newgraph.php?type=price&large=true&blog=http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Future Shock and our daily lives
For those who know me, will know my fascination for the book Future Shock written by Alvin Toffler. He was recently in Sydney Australia and said the following in his interview with Australian Financial Review.
"The issue is not jobs but creating value, creating something that someone else needs," he says. "Whether you get that through a regular, paid job, whether you do that as a freelancer, or whether you do that as a group that forms itself for a purpose and then folds up its tent."
Everyday we worry about the fact where our next job is going to come from, how will Indian outsourcing engine will effect us. Yet we continue along creating value for our customers and employers hence remaining employed. Fundamentaly I think the day we stop creating value will be the day we slowly start moveing towards unemployment.
His other thought that interested me the most was "It a period in which wealth is now mobile and we can reverse the tyranny of distance because value is so often based on intangibles and weightless products. ". Which is so true did I write a kilo of code today :-) or how many kilos of software did Microsoft ship this month.
Anyway I am eagerly waiting for his new book "Next May, Toffler publishes his latest book, Revolutionary Wealth (Alfred A. Knopf), about the way we are making money and will continue to make money in the knowledge economy. " April 25th to be precise.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375401741/103-2029315-9912650?vi=ossnet-20&n=283155
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Saturday, January 14, 2006
Chatty or Chunky Interfaces
One such Architecture that I had the privilege of working with was Oracle Forms running over internet. Forms sends every user click back to the server for processing, this results in very bad user experience over slow connections and sometimes database corruptions. Let me just say I don't work for that organization anymore and all the issues I had predicted at design time are croping up now. Oh well all you do is say if your boss does not listen and you know it is going to be a disaster polish up your resume :-).
Ingo in the following article really sums up the issues involved with chatty interfaces. Fundamentally if you have an application in production using chatty interface, better start working on improving the speed of light :-).
Pasted from <http://blogs.thinktecture.com/ingo/archive/2005/11/08/LatencyVsBandwidth.aspx>
Latency vs. Bandwidth – Developers vs. Einstein
One piece of The Ultimate Wisdom which is quoted quite often is that "chatty interfaces kill the performance of a distributed application". But actually, it's not the chatty interface which kills it - the really limiting factor is instead one of the handful of unchallenged physical constants of this universe: the speed of light. But let me come back to this later.
Whenever something - and this can be something non-physical like a stream of bytes or a huge chunk of extremely physical rocks - needs to move, you can choose between a set of different alternatives in the way you transport it: You can transfer as much as possible in one go, or alternatively, you could take multiple round trips with smaller amounts of your payload. When you're a teenager moving out of your parent's house, you will quite likely just pack your stuff into your and your friend's cars and just hit the road, going back and forth a few times just to get out as quickly as possible. Years later, after you bought and sold the right stock at the right time, you might instead hire someone to move everything from your 8 bedroom home in one state to your new mansion in a different state using just one big truck and trailer. (Unless of course, you had special help with your choice of stocks, in which case somebody will move you with a rather small car to a rather small room in your final roundtrip for the next 15 years.)
Is Bigger Better?
Despite the fact that reducing the number of roundtrips usually decreases the complete processing time, the usage of smaller units of transportation also has a few advantages: you can for example unpack the first boxes and start using their contents while the rest of your flat is still being sent in smaller packages. That’s what we ended up calling streaming. (My wife would now point out the fact that somebody in our family always managed to be out of the country whenever the two of us moved. That’s what we ended up calling slipping away. Unless you are my wife, in which case you would have use a slightly more explicit term.)
You also get the benefit of being able to use the smaller self-contained packages which might arrive out of sequence. In computer systems, this is sometimes implemented by only returning a small response (let’s say only the header information) as the answer of a synchronous request while returning the detailed information asynchronously using a message queuing system. In real life, I tend to implement this during my regular commuter flights: no matter whether or not my checked bags are delayed or re-routed, I will always have my computer, a power adapter, a toothbrush, and clothes for the next day in my carry on luggage. Especially when traveling via CDG or LHR.
The Speed Of Light – Or: In Doubt, Assume Bandwidth
But in any case: the general recommendation is that chunky interfaces are better than chatty ones. This suggestion is based on the belief that, in doubt, you should assume high bandwidth but not low latency. And this belief in turn is grounded in one ultimate fact: the former can be bought with money – the latter can’t.
I’ve been online since 94. At that time I used a 1200 baud modem to connect to the Internet via terminal dial-in to a Unix box. For me the WWW was Lynx, but that’s a completely different story. At that time, I could send a ping from Europe to the US in about 1200 milliseconds. Today, I can roundtrip the same ping in about 120 milliseconds. But today, I can download the full 3629.6 MB of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite in approximately 6 hours from a random hotel room. This is coincidentally what I’m doing right now which triggered the writing of this article.
The Long Walk
If I would have done the same thing back in ’94, it would have taken roughly 367 days to transfer the 3,805,911,450 bytes with approximately 120 bytes per second, including start/stop bits and hardware compression. Just to put this into perspective: let’s assume that your hotel room is at the point on this earth which is the farthest away from Redmond. (The fact that penguins will be the only neighbors on this small island might make you think again about the likely roots of the Linux mascot.) If you would have received divine help to walk over water towards the Microsoft HQ, something interesting would have happened: With a swift pace of 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per hour for 12 hours a day, you would have finished the roughly 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) on the earth’s surface in 333 days (23.7 fortnights) which means that you would have had your hands on Visual Studio about a month earlier than your friend who started the download at the same time when you left the island.
Now, of course, this would not have helped you too much as you would have had to wait two more years for a DVD player to become available 1997.
But I think that it’s really interesting to see that the end-to-end bandwidth increased by 1468 times within the last 11 years while the latency (the time a single ping takes) has only been improved tenfold. If this wouldn’t be enough, there is even a natural cap on latency. The minimum round-trip time between two points of this earth is determined by the maximum speed of information transmission: the speed of light. At roughly 300,000 kilometers per second (3.6 * 10E12 teraangstrom per fortnight), it will always take at least 30 milliseconds to send a ping from Europe to the US and back, even if the processing would be done in real time.
That’s why most people recommend chunky interfaces instead of chatty ones to optimize for higher latency instead of smaller bandwidths: The latter will be solved automatically; the former only if you prove Einstein wrong.
posted on Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:38 PM
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Found a solution architect
Welcome aboard Aaron.
Friday, December 16, 2005
CTP of Enterprise Library and download issues
Start RANT
1. I have been desperately trying to download the CTP version of Enterprise Library and for some reason it keeps on asking me to join the Project. I don't want to join the project just give me the library such that I can get on with it. (BTW if any one has ideas on how I can get my hands on the CTP it would be appreciated).
2. I have been looking around for the ODP.NET (Oracle's data provider) implementation for DAUB (Data Access Application Block) and not been able to find anything. I am sure someone out there has written this. I hate to write the provider and then find out it was already available. Any hints most appreciate :-)
End RANT
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
WSE 3.0 and MTOM
For now I have decided to move on if any of you find a resolution do let me know, if I find it will post it here.
The raw messages is below that is sent to server
"POST /VisitorDataService/VisitorService.asmx HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MS Web Services Client Protocol 2.0.50727.42)
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SOAPAction: "http://www.shajisethu.com/schemas/VisitorService/getVisitors"
Host: sethu.homedns.org
Content-Type: multipart/related; type="application/xop+xml"; boundary=--MIMEBoundary632701497681437264; start="<0.632701497681437264@example.org>"; start-info="text/xml; charset=utf-8"
Content-Length: 1424
Expect: 100-continue
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
----MIMEBoundary632701497681437264
content-id: <0.632701497681437264@example.org>
content-type: application/xop+xml; charset=utf-8; type="text/xml; charset=utf-8"
content-transfer-encoding: binary
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----MIMEBoundary632701497681437264--"