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brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Archives for January 2010

Forrester: Don’t be an IT-hater, be a Business-IT Integrator

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I’m cross-posting my latest from the new Business Ecology Initiative blog.  As you know, “Business-IT Integration” is one of my soapbox items.

In a recent post on the Forrester Blog for CIOs, Sharyn Leaver writes an inspired response to Susan Cramm’s 8 Things We Hate About IT.  As outlined in CIO Insight, Cramm’s “8 Things” focus on the following business-IT relationship issues:

  1. Service or Control?
  2. Results or Relationships?
  3. Tactics or Strategies?
  4. Expense or Investment?
  5. Quickness or Quality?
  6. Customization or Standardization?
  7. Innovation or Bureaucracy?
  8. Greatness of Goodness?

In her post, Leaver refers to the above as ““8 Beaten-to-Death Clichés” about IT-business relationships”.  However, her point isn’t directed at Cramm, but rather the situation that business and IT executives and professionals continue to inhabit.  As a way out, Leaver offers some good observations and actionable advice.  Her first two points relate to organizational design:

  • “Tension between IT and line businesses is designed into organizational structures. Hard-wiring organizational lines into centralized IT “shops” assigned to business units or combinations puts IT unwittingly into a self-perceived servant relationship with business units. No doubt in recent economic downturn years, increasing centralization of IT has resulted in a cementing of “us” versus “them” — where as federated and decentralized structures preserve some of “us” within “them” and align attitudes and goals accordingly. HR, Accounting, Facilities, and other centralized services all struggle with balancing acts of meeting the needs of those they service.
  •  Preserving a request-fulfill relationship institutionalizes disappointment all around. Missed expectations and unhappiness result from a “take a number” approach to queuing up service requests, ranking them according to some criteria, estimating fulfillment time, and attempting to deliver in the face of numerous “Look over there!” distractions. Again, breaking up some of the IT resources into the business units for dedicated and local work would help. CIOs should read and absorb Forrester’s BT model for operating IT.”

From a Business Ecology perspective, we refer to these design shifts as Business-IT Integration:

“Business-IT Integration is the organizational model for business and information technology convergence.  This model promotes collaborative strategy, planning, architecture and execution; shared decision-making, business-tech savvy personnel and service delivery at the point of value generation.”

Similar to Leaver, we are not saying immediately or completely decentralize IT, nor are we calling for an end to enterprise-level strategies and resources, but rather, that a new model is required.  A model that supports near-term needs as well as business vitality over time, balancing current conditions, optimization and innovation focus areas, resource allocations, and longer-term business motivations, capabilities and outcomes.

As Leaver points out, the time of lamenting needs to end, it is time to take action.

To gather other actionable ideas, I plan to read Cramm’s book.  A related read I highly recommend is Weill and Ross’ IT Saavy.  For the all important peer interaction regarding Business-IT Integration, consider joining us in Jacksonville FL, March 23-24.

If you can’t join us in March, but have some ideas, success stories, or warnings you would like to share, please leave a comment, or drop an email.

 

[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

100-day Cloud Watch Update: Surveying the Cloud Computing Surveys for Adoption Trends

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As I mentioned on the 12th, I’m dedicating 100-days worth of research sessions to explore “enterprise cloud computing considerations”.  My first topic is adoption trends:

  • What are organizations doing, or planning to do, with cloud computing?
  • What types of cloud computing environments are being used, considered and/or ignored?
  • What industries are leading and lagging adoption?
  • What use cases are being fulfilled, in part or in full, by cloud computing offerings?
  • What are the major drivers and expectations?

I’m starting by surveying the cloud computing surveys.  Certainly, I expect to see security noted as a big concern, and operating expense versus capital outlay as a driver.  In fact, I’ll cover each of those points in later days, as business risk and economic considerations, respectively.   What I’m looking for in my survey of the surveys are observations, trends and even predictions, beyond the headlines.

The first (wildly time-consuming) thing I did was narrow down the body of work by date, source and depth of available information.  My curated list of surveys/papers:

Next, I began working through the list.  Given my background and primary readership, I started with the enterprise architecture focused research.  My observations to date:

As well, I posted a few other Cloud Watch items:

This week, I’ll continue working the above list.  If a finding in any of the above strikes you as important, surprising, or ridiculous, please share. 

Speaking of ridiculous, did you see the over zealous reaction to Gartner’s recent 2012 prediction?  First, the prediction:

“By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.  The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.”

For days afterwards, Twitter and the Industry Press were full of “Gartner says: 20% of businesses will be fully in the cloud by 2012”.  Of course, when you read past the first sentence, you’ll see Gartner is really calling out different ownership models: “However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.” 

I’m not disagreeing with Gartner’s prediction or the critical point on how a re-allocation of funding can support optimization and innovation.  What I am saying is beware the hype.  Read past the headlines.  As Gene Leganza points out: “[to be a trusted business advisor] architects must have a thorough understanding of the facts, subtleties, hype, and misinformation surrounding cloud computing…”

 

 

Follow the 100-day Cloud Watch on Twitter.

Business Ecology: Optimization for Innovation

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As I mentioned in my 2010 plans, one of my projects this year is writing and advocacy for the OMG’s Business Ecology Initiative (BEI).  This morning, we launched the new Business Ecology Initiative blog, and I published the following overview post on Business Ecology, the Business Ecology Initiative and Business Ecology enablers. 

As you read the post, you’ll notice several themes common to my on-going writings (soapboxes), which is why getting involved with the BEI is a no-brainer for me.  The original post follows.

What is Business Ecology?

Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

As the world economy emerges from a painful recession, organizations are confronted with the challenge of retaining bottom-line diligence, while pursuing market sustaining and gaining innovation. 

For many organizations, the answer lies in harvesting savings and trapped value from existing processes, resources and capabilities.  To accomplish this, organizations are turning to Business Ecology. 

Business Ecology is not a one-time fix, but rather a management philosophy concerned with business vitality over time, balancing current conditions, optimization and innovation focus areas, resource allocations, and longer-term business motivations, capabilities and outcomes.

An important enabler of Business Ecology is the use of technology beyond automation. Business Ecology practitioners employ technology to identify, measure, model and drive business change. 

Business Ecology adoption and execution requires a cross functional team, comprised of business and information technology professionals. Key team capabilities include business process thinking, business performance measurement and analysis, financial analysis, IT architecture, portfolio management, service delivery and iterative project management.

Successful Business Ecology initiatives adopt the principles and values of Business Technology.  The team communicates with each other, sponsors and constituents in a common, business based language.  Measurement is defined and reported in business terms.  Funding and governance decisions and mechanisms reflect a shared resource, investment portfolio approach.

As Business Ecology teams progress, technology and business savvy is exchanged, fostering a greater understanding of each other’s challenges, skills and tools, which leads to a break in the longstanding, constraining, business and IT divide.  A byproduct of successful Business Ecology is business-IT integration.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO), given his/her unique position to view business processes, resource consumption, and technology portfolios across the organization, most often champions Business Ecology adoption and execution.  C-level executives, including the CEO, CFO and COO, sponsor Business Ecology initiatives.

What is the Business Ecology Initiative?

OMG, via the Business Ecology Initiative, leads the drive towards Business Ecology. 

The Business Ecology Initiative provides education, advocacy and member programs to enable organizations to achieve Business Ecology success, employ Actionable ArchitectureTM, and carve a path to business-IT integration.

Actionable ArchitectureTM brings transparent business methodology to the definition and delivery of common IT infrastructure, platforms and services.  Emphasized business attributes include quality, efficiency, compliance, agility, value, effectiveness, ease of use, sustainability and business goal traceability.

Business-IT Integration is the organizational model for business and information technology convergence.  This model promotes collaborative strategy, planning, architecture and execution; shared decision-making, business-tech savvy personnel and service delivery at the point of value generation.   

What enables Business Ecology?

Techniques: LEAN, Six Sigma, BPM, Value Chain Analysis, Actionable ArchitectureTM , Business Technology, Agile, Modeling, Simulation, Business Measurement, and Sustainability Analysis

Technology: SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing, Event Processing, Analytics, Master Data Management (MDM), and Open Standards

Measurement Models: Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM), Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM)

People: C-level executives, business and information technology professionals, who embrace the philosophy of Business Ecology

 

[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Julian Hyde in ACM on In-Flight Data Processing with Streaming SQL Technology

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Julian Hyde, chief architect of SQLstream, and lead developer of Mondrian, has a great article in Communications of the ACM on Data in Flight.  The article provides an overview of streaming query engines, demonstrates simple queries using a clickstream example, compares streaming query engines to relational database technology, discusses the advantages of streaming, and concludes with additional streaming applications, including CEP.

On streaming query engines vs. relational database technology:

“The streaming query engine is a new technology that excels in processing rapidly flowing data and producing results with low latency. It arose out of the database research community and therefore shares some of the characteristics that make relational databases popular, but it is most definitely not a database. In a database, the data arrives first and is stored on disk; then users apply queries to the stored data. In a streaming query engine, the queries arrive before the data. The data flows through a number of continuously executing queries, and the transformed data flows out to applications. One might say that a relational database processes data at rest, whereas a streaming query engine processes data in flight.”

On CEP and Streaming, Hyde states:

“Application areas include complex event processing (CEP), monitoring, population data warehouses, and middleware. A CEP query looks for sequences of events on a single stream or on multiple streams that, together, match a pattern and create a "complex event" of interest to the business. Applications of CEP include fraud detection and electronic trading.

CEP has been used within the industry as a blanket term to describe the entire field of streaming query systems. This is regrettable because it has resulted in a religious war between SQL-based and non-SQL-based vendors and, in overly focusing on financial services applications, has caused other application areas to be neglected.”

Hyde concludes his article as follows:

“Streaming query engines are based on the same technology as relational databases but are designed to process data in flight. Streaming query engines can solve some common problems much more efficiently than databases because they match the time-based nature of the problems, they retain only the working set of data needed to solve the problem, and they process data asynchronously and continuously.

Because of their shared SQL language, streaming query engines and relational databases can collaborate to solve problems in monitoring and realtime business intelligence. SQL makes them accessible to a large pool of people with SQL expertise.

Just as databases can be applied to a wide range of problems, from transaction processing to data warehousing, streaming query systems can support patterns such as enterprise messaging, complex event processing, continuous data integration, and new application areas that are still being discovered.”

If you are even remotely interested in event processing, active information strategies and/or stream processing, I highly recommend reading Hyde’s article.

100-day Cloud Watch: Enterprise Cloud Computing Considerations

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To date, I have applied a wide lens to my cloud watching to get a good feel for the entire space.  As a result, I published my "cloud-o-gram" and numerous posts on developments, perspectives and conversations that caught my attention.

For the start of 2010, specifically the next 100 days, I’m going to narrow my cloud watching lens to enterprise cloud computing considerations.  My plan is to apply 2 – 5 research sessions to each enterprise consideration and publish my findings along the way, via elemental cloud computing cloud watch entries and blog posts.

At the end of my list, or 100-days, whichever comes first, I’ll summarize my findings in a research report. 

Reviewing my current calendar, the 100th research day is May 21.  Like all good (former) developers, I’ve buffered with Saturday mornings.

In additional to my standard categories and tagging schemes, I’ll use the “100-days” category and “enterprise considerations” tag.

My starting list of enterprise cloud computing considerations follows. 

Enterprise Cloud Computing Considerations

  • Adoption Trends: Cloud Computing Environment (CCE) Models, Industry, Use Cases
  • Business of IT: Funding Models, Governance, Outsourcing and Contracts, Metrics and Scorecards (Internal, Alliance), Billing & Metering (Payment)
  • Business Risk: Assurance, Service Level Agreements, Control, Risk, Security, Legal, Compliance
  • CCE Readiness: Interoperability, Portability, Standards, Reliability
  • Data: Location, Safety, Quality, Consistency, Accessibility, Reconciliation, Format
  • Economics: Fixed Duration, Cost of Capability over Time, Value (Financial, Time, Innovation, Sustainability)
  • Enterprise Portfolio Implications: SOA, ITIL, Existing Vendor Viability & Focus, Application Package Transformation
  • Enterprise Readiness: Software Design, Software Licenses, People, Process, Data/Integration
  • Marketplace: Suppliers, Capacity Availability (Supply & Demand), Pricing
  • Rouge Adoption: Civilian Development, R&D
  • Use Case Selection: Workload Selection, Business Capability Selection

While I don’t plan to attack the list alphabetically, my first research area is adoption trends.  If you have additions to the enterprise cloud computing considerations list, or perspective to share on any listed item, please leave a comment, send an email, or ping me on Twitter.

 

Follow the 100-day cloud watch on Twitter.

 

[cross posted from Elemental Cloud Computing.]

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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