elemental links

Resolving centralization / decentralization tension with SOA?

Robert Swanwick pinged me about a post he wrote contemplating an organization's struggle to balance the tension of business unit independence and IT consolidation.  At the end of the post, Robert wonders aloud if SOA is an answer:

"However, the autonomous business units lived on. Because they are quite independent, they are constantly seeking to diverge in order to meet the specific needs of their customers. At the same time IT continues to work towards increased centralization. As you can imagine, this is creating some tension.

A service oriented architecture (SOA) with shared web services and appropriate SOA governance might be their salvation. If IT can control the main architecture and help facilitate the sharing of approved web services, this firm may be able to get the centralization they need while allowing for business units to meet their own customer needs.

Is SOA the way that this increasing tension might be relieved in many organizations? I doubt IT is going to give up working towards standardization and cost savings and I know that if business units feel their customers are not being served by what IT is providing, they are going to continue pushing for autonomy. If not SOA, how is this tension going to be resolved?"

Before I give my two-cents, let me issue the standard consultant disclaimer that in the absence of deep context on the particular situation, the best I can offer is educated conjecture.  In other words, "it depends".

On the IT side, a SOA approach can be used to rationalize application and information portfolios, therefore "centralizing" the software assets that instantiate common business activities and business information actions.  As well, these now common services (business and information) can be composed into interactions specific to each business unit by applying different processes, steps, rules, policies, interfaces, events etc.  So, from a purely technical point of view, yes, it is possible to balance commonalities (centralization) and variations (decentralization) with a SOA approach.

That said, the ability to achieve this outcome hinges on the given organization's maturity.  And to be clear, I'm referring to the entire organization, not just IT.  Some top-of-mind starter questions to asses organizational maturity:

• Do the various business unit owners recognize they have commonalities with the other business units?
• Is sharing (economy of scale) part of the culture?
• Are the business unit owners willing to collaborate, and able to agree, on standard definitions for those shared activities and information?
• Will the (economy of scale) benefits achieved be reflected in the business unit owner's performance?  Is there something in it for him/her?
• Is the organization experienced in IT Governance, particularly around the funding and prioritization of shared services?

If you answered "yes" to the majority of the above, then yes, consider a SOA approach to balance the tension of business unit independence and IT consolidation.  If you answered "no" to the majority of the above, understand that a SOA approach while not impossible, will be much much harder.  Read: increased time, money and organizational angst.

Assorted Links - November 14, 2008

Is it just me, or is tech reading/writing become increasingly tied to current affairs?  Here are some interesting links:

techPresident – Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?

The US CTO discussion is interesting. Some people/organizations are advocating that the CTO should focus "internally" -- cleaning up the Government's use of technology. Others, feel that the CTO should focus on the technology required for the US to regain competitiveness and be energy independent. While there is plenty of work to do in the former, I tend to lean towards the latter. How can we harness technology and encourage technology-based innovation to move the nation forward? For more views, click thru on the link.

Telcos: Don't mess up the Internet with regulation | Politics and Law - CNET News

With Administration change, Net Neutrality to be 2009 topic "The next Congress is sure to introduce Net neutrality legislation, a Democratic congressional staffer said Thursday. "With the Obama administration being extremely supportive of Net neutrality, we're quite excited we can actually get things done," said Frannie Wellings, telecom counsel for Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D)... Representatives from the telecommunications industry insisted they have a common interest in maintaining open networks since their revenues come from carrying bits--but say that they're OK with the current state of the law. New legislation, they say, is not the way to achieve open access--and could even have adverse results. The Federal Communications Commission's ruling against Comcast proved the commission's approach of reviewing possible Net neutrality violations on a case-by-case basis is effective, said James Cicconi, senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs for AT&T."

elemental links: Net Neutrality – An Important Topic for National Conversation

My Net Neutrality piece from Feb 2006. An attempt to frame the issue – how we got here and the positions of each side. I do offer my own opinion at the end, but my goal in writing the piece was to present the issue neutrally. With the intent to engage more people in the national conversation.

SAP and Microsoft, Watch Your Back - BusinessWeek

tech consumption shifts: "As the U.S. enters what appears likely to be a painful recession, a major shift is taking place in how businesses assess technology products. They're under terrific pressure to cut costs. According to a newly revised forecast from market researcher IDC, growth in U.S. tech spending will decline to 0.9% in 2009, down from a previous forecast of 4.9% growth. But rather than just slice budgets across the board, many companies are switching to a handful of new technologies that save them money...the downturn seems likely to hasten their adoption. Chief among them are software delivered over the Internet, known as cloud computing, such as Google Apps; so-called virtualization software, which allows companies to run multiple applications on a single server computer; and open-source software, which is created collaboratively by multiple companies and is typically less expensive than the traditional kind..."

Business Leaders to IT: You're Still Not Meeting Our Expectations - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

This part reads like good news to me. The business should own business process and information definition. "The Forrester study also revealed that business leaders want their own staff to become more knowledge about certain technologies and become capable of playing a bigger role in facilitating technology for themselves. For instance, 59 percent viewed it as a top priority for staff to garner business process analysis skills, 53 percent said the same about project management and 47 percent indicated a similar interest in information modeling. In addition, 43 percent wanted to know more about collaboration tool configuration and customization, which Forrester attributes to business use of wikis, blogs, conferencing and instant messaging. Essentially if the technology directly impacts a business unit, leaders want to be involved."

Mindjet Player Offers Portable Visual Collaboration Maps

This looks interesting... "The crown jewel in Mindjet's new release is easily the Mindjet Player, which allows users to take the interactive mind maps they created with MindManager 8, turn them into Adobe PDFs or Flash .SWF files. These files can be shared with anyone with a computer. Or, if you don't want to share the mind maps, you can publish them in blogs or embed them in Web pages. "The idea is that I could send a PDF to somebody, they could open it up and what they would see instead of just a picture of a map, a fully functioning MindManager map with all of the content and links to external information," Rasking said."

Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the discipline behind "Instant Success"

As I've mentioned numerous times, one of the great things about my job is I get to interact with lots of smart, interesting people and organizations.  But, odds would be that's not always the case.  Once in awhile, I find myself hearing about, or witnessing, a situation and I can't help but be astonished, and not in a good way. 

Inevitably, these situations -- failed projects, bloated budgets, redundant portfolios, spiraling technical debt, sinking delivery rates, flat-lined morale, general stasis -- can be attributed to a lack of discipline (business and/or engineering) augmented by a stunning lack of leadership.  Yes, that sounds harsh, but these are difficult times, and hiding from the truth only makes matters worse. 

Having (perhaps) recently been astonished, Rosabeth Moss Kanter's recent post, Instant Success Takes Time, caught my attention this afternoon.  Not because it describes a radical new management concept, but rather because it's a good, case study backed, call to business basics -- discipline, leadership and hard-work.  [emphasis is mine] 

""Instant success takes time" is one of my favorite sayings. New products, people, or ideas that appear to burst on the scene unheralded and soar to the top quickly have often been preceded by a long period of preparation, rehearsal, and trial-and-error experimentation.

One of the more mundane differences between perpetual winners and long-term losers among businesses, sports teams, and other organizations is that the winners simply work harder. As I learned from case studies and surveys for my book Confidence, winners are more likely to take the time to keep honing skills and testing ideas in preparation for change. That's not too dramatic or glamorous, but it's among the biggest differentiators.

In contrast, teams or organizations headed for losing streaks lurch from tactic to tactic without any apparent long-term direction. They lack discipline, do not always rely on facts before chasing fads, and panic under pressure."

Check out the full post.  Pass along as needed.  I certainly will.

Assorted Links: November 10, 2008

CIO's IT Budget Survey Results: July Jitters Turn to October Fear - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Interesting stats from a recent CIO survey. Yes, spending is being cut. Nice to see some discipline in the approaches, developing and executing contingency plans rather than reactive slashing. Click thru for the numbers... "The results of CIO's most recent survey on IT budgets, fielded between October 17 and 22, couldn't be more striking compared to results from our two surveys done earlier in 2008. As unfavorable economic conditions continue, more CIOs say they must shave IT budgets, according to our exclusive October survey of 243 IT executives..."

Kaskad is Dead, Long Live Kaskad | Colin Clark on Event Processing

Soon after Colin announced the port of Kaskad's surveillance system to the Coral8 CEP engine, he ported himself there. Colin is now the Executive Vice President of Financial Services at Coral8. Good luck Colin!

Forrester: How IT rides out the recession

I get the first point, but the majority of CIOs run operations well? Really? Why such a high portion of budget to maintenance then? Can't we do better? "One explanation for the relative immunity enjoyed by IT this time around, if it holds up, is that a lot more businesses "get technology" than in 2001, Cullen said. A majority of business leaders now view technology as a core component of their products and services (82%) and/or as a differentiator (72%) in addition to a vehicle for reducing the cost of business operations (66%). IT financial management has also changed. Since the 2001 recession, CIOs have learned to budget lean. The roughly 70% of IT budgets that goes to maintaining operations is managed well by CIOs, according to Cullen."

Sun offers OSGi app server

OSGi will be everywhere: "Sun today is offering its open-source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server Version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 release...the basis for the planned GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, also based on OSGi and Java EE 6 and due next year. "Glassfish v3 Prelude is our OSGi microkernel application server," said Paul Hinz, director of product management for Java enterprise systems at Sun. "OSGi allows you to have an architecture where you have a kernel that allows pluggable modules and each module can do different things," such as one that processes Ruby code and another to process Enterprise JavaBeans, Hinz said. OSGI provides a strategy to make application servers simpler and faster, said analyst Jonathan Eunice, principal IT adviser at Illuminata. It offers a smaller memory footprint, he said. "The idea is you don't load modules you don't need,"."

IT Project Funding: Less Is More - Susan Cramm

"project success declines dramatically as project size increases..Keys to fast-cycle delivery: * Executive leadership: Don't confuse sponsorship with leadership. * Clear definition of success: Use process measurements that impact financial performance and baseline them at the start of the project * Predefined kill switch: Take the emotion out of the decision making process by defining what defines failure, so that the project can fail fast and be restarted when conditions are more favorable * Small, experienced team: Wait to start your project until you have a seasoned project manager supported by a small team (less than 12) of full time, subject matter experts * Laser sharp focus on critical requirements: Avoid defining requirements by committee by using the success measurements to manage scope * Respect for the future and the past: Factor in the implications of existing business and technology plans while accelerating progress by leveraging legacy systems and existing infrastructure"

Dave Linthicum's Real World SOA podcast with me

Last Monday, Dave Linthicum and I chatted about SOA futures for his Real World SOA podcast series.  Being a gracious host, Dave allows his guest to pick the topic.  My choice was the future of SOA, not from an infrastructure perspective, but from a solutions perspective.  You could say, I'm thinking of the future of S-O-A as services, outcomes and assemblies. 

During our conversation, we touch on variety of topics including organizational issues (leadership, communication, education), portfolio management, business analysis, project managers, enterprise architecture platforms and -- you guessed it -- service design.

Check it out.  Thanks Dave!