elemental links

Open Group Conference in Boston: 6+1 Secrets of Successful SOA; SOA Panel

Next Tuesday, I’m doing double-duty on the SOA Track at the Open Group Conference in Boston.  First, I’ll be presenting the 6+1 Secrets of Successful SOA.  Afterwards, I’ll be moderating a SOA Practitioner Panel.  The panelists are Awel Dico, Bank of Montreal, Mark Sternberger, Raytheon and Chris McCarthy, State Street Corp.

If you are attending the conference, please join us on the SOA Track on Tuesday afternoon.  Jeanne Ross is the Tuesday morning keynote.  You know I’ll be there!

Come to my session at IBM Innovate: Smarter Business Planning and Analysis: Business Architecture as a Foundation

Are you going to IBM Innovate?  The Rational Software Conference.  Then plan to attend my session on Wednesday afternoon!  I’m speaking with IBM’s Robert Shields on Business Architecture as a Foundation to Business Planning, Analysis and Change. 

My part of the presentation, combines themes and outcomes from the SOA Consortium’s EA2010 group, with my own business architecture and enterprise architecture work and point-of-view.  I’ve got something new I’m excited to share.

As always, expect a fair amount of business talk and definite traceability to business motivations. 

If the session is anything like the planning call Robert and I had in May, the session could end with a (positive) call for Enterprise Architecture revolution!

The details:

Session: EAM-2259: Smarter Business Planning and Analysis: Business Architecture as a Foundation
Date/Time: Wed, 9/Jun, 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Room: Dolphin - Oceanic 7
Co-presenter(s): Robert Shields, IBM, Senior Market Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Brenda M. Michelson, Elemental Links

Hope to see you next week! 

 

[Disclosure: IBM is not a client of Elemental Links.  However, IBM is a sponsor of the BPM/SOA Consortium and the Business Ecology Initiative, which are clients.]

How to create an unruly passenger in 3 easy steps, by a Jet named Blue

“Above all else, JetBlue Airways is dedicated to bringing humanity back to air travel. We strive to make every part of your experience as simple and as pleasant as possible. Unfortunately, there are times when things do not go as planned…”

I imagine when JetBlue’s Customer Bill of Rights was penned the “unplanned things” didn’t consider the actions of “Waldo”, a gate attendant at JFK. 

Last night, as I often do, I was traveling on JetBlue, thru JFK to Portland, Maine.  And, per usual, I was delayed for 2 hours from my departure city, Jacksonville, which made my connection at JFK tenuous at best.  But, hey this is business travel, right?  So far.

Once sprung from the inbound plane at JFK, I had 12 minutes to reach the Portland flight.  Again, nothing unusual.  That is, until I reached my departure gate.  Upon arrival, I saw the doors closed and a lightly populated gate area.  With that sinking feeling – this is the last plane out until 6:00 am – I approached the gate attendant. 

Our conversation:

Me: Did I miss the Portland flight?

Waldo: Yes, it just left.

Me: Is the next flight in the morning?

Waldo: Yes. But, all of tomorrow’s Portland flights are full.

Me: I need to get home.  Where can you send me?  Can I get to Boston?

Waldo: [Now smirking].  “Just kidding, your flight is delayed.”

Ok, so now I’m astonished by his sheer audacity and flagrant disrespect for me, the tired business traveler, his customer (read: paycheck source) just trying to get home. 

But here’s the thing.  At this moment, I have no rights, no recourse.  If I gave him a piece of my mind, or as a family member suggested, “flattened him”, I’d be in TSA detention while he was free to harass the next passenger.

So, I did the mature thing.  [One of us had to.]  Quietly told him that was a rotten thing to do, and walked away.  Once my blood pressure leveled, I tweeted to @JetBlue.  In fairness, I heard from them within minutes, asking for the flight number.  If they’ll actually track down Waldo, and slap his hand, I have no idea. 

And frankly, Waldo’s fate isn’t the point (or concern) of my post.  What I’d like is an amendment to the Customer Bill of Rights, one that recognizes that humanity starts with the actions of humans. 

To borrow from my former employer, LL Bean, “Treat your customers like human beings, and they’ll always come back for more.”

And the corollary, treat your customers like Waldo, and they’ll always fly someone else.  JetBlue, get amending.

@ Gartner AADI: Val Sribar on Enterprise 2013

Session Abstract: “IT has undergone major change, but the pace of change that lies in the immediate future has never been experienced. New platforms driven by cloud computing, new sources of infrastructure and applications solutions, the changing technology stack and resulting impact on skills will provide significant challenges to IT over the next five years.

• What will the enterprise of 2013 look like, and what will be the business drivers for IT change over the next five years?
• What changes in technology and sourcing of solutions will impact IT strategies?
• How will IT adapt to absorb the incredible changes that are on the horizon?”

Val starts by setting up what Enterprise 2013 looks like, he is sharing the dimensions, but wants the audience to score themselves in each area, from minor to extreme change. 

Factors:

Macro level: Calibrating Executive Table and Core Lifecycle Changes: New Leadership, Changes in Strategy, Business Processes, Business Information, Metrics, Core Lifecycles (product, supply, customer etc).  [I would say: how does the business architecture / business design change]

Changes to user base: more online, broadband, mobile, social.  User base on mobile side will be dramatically bigger than those working on computer. 

IT Changes: Alternative delivery and consumption models, ie, Cloud Computing.  How many layers will you shift to cloud?  Servers, middleware, applications, information services, business services?  Extreme version is shifting the build of your apps to the cloud.  Staffing and sourcing.  Disciplines spanning IT: SDLC meets ITIL.

Applications Changes: methodologies; who does the work; what environment & tools will be used (Application architecture: SOA, SODA, SOBA, WOA, CEP, context aware, composition, orchestration, assembly)

Val is talking now about bringing things together via roadmaps, matching business roadmap, IT roadmap and vendor/provider roadmaps.

Asking the audience, most folks scored themselves in the extreme change realm, some in moderate change, none in minor change.

In discussing strategies for moderate change, Val is suggesting:

1. “hollowing & retiring legacy systems” – pull out value, remove waste (duplication)

2. hybrids of internal, cloud and BPO. There is an integration center to this picture.  First integration center box was ESB, B2B gateway etc.  Now, that integration box is replaced with a Business Process Platform.  Val is not suggesting buying BPM from one vendor.  He is talking about bringing together services you need, for your change and portfolio, to integrate the business services and information.

Extreme Change Strategies – Application Perspective

Val has referenced Proctor & Gamble’s Open Innovation program.  Suggests adopting that type of model for Open Applications Innovation.  Your organization consume services from cloud, and “plugs” services back into cloud. “Leading companies will offer an external service portfolio … that can be leveraged in many clouds”.

Val has put up a slide of an External Services Platform Strawman for the Public Sector.  In the center are business services, such as SSN, Citizen Information, etc. The right is Aggregate Information, non-PII.  Left is user experience.  Bottom was infrastructure (I think, slide moved).

Application 2013: Advanced Business Process Platform: “serious about BPM”, “serious about CEP & BAM”.  Also, the world gets more simple.  Val is calling out Salesforce.com, Twitter, iPhone.  Talking about application’s capability vs. value.  Excessive capability reduces an application’s value.

Applications 2013: Governance and Behavior: Business Alignment + Engagement and Accountability.  Current maturity of organizations is very low, just around repeatable.  Needs to be level 4 (think CMMI) quantitatively managed.

Enterprise 2013: Seek – Model – Adapt

Key Disciplines

- Pattern Seeking

- Performance Driven Culture

- Transparency

- Optempo Advantage: CEP comes into play.  Ability to slow down, speed up, or change direction as needed

Bottom line: where will innovation happen, at externally facing points; advanced business processing will be from complex event processing, simplify your apps, improve your maturity.

Gartner AADI Next Week: SOA, Clouds, Events & Event Clouds

Next week, I’m attending Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration Conference (AADI) in Vegas.  I’ll be splitting my time amongst SOA, Cloud Computing and Event Processing sessions.  I haven’t built my agenda yet, but I’ll definitely be at the SOA Consortium end-user panels on Cloud Computing Use Cases and SOA Success Stories.

When possible, I’ll be blogging and tweeting from the sessions.  The conference twitter hashtag is #gartneraadi.

If you are attending and want to connect on SOA, Cloud Computing, SOA & Cloud Computing and/or Event Processing, please send me an email, or ping me on Twitter.