• Blog
  • About
  • Archives

elemental links

brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Archives for April 2010

BREAKING NEWS: Event Processing Symposium 2010 – Now Appearing Everywhere!

April 27, 2010 By brenda michelson

Interested in Event Processing?  Travel budget non-existent?  Disappointed to miss out on event processing luminaries at the Event Processing Symposium?  No problem!

You asked.  We answered.  On June 7, 2010, the Event Processing Community will run the first Event Processing Symposium as a free, virtual conference.

The virtual conference features event processing luminaries, early adopters and experts:

•    W. Roy Schulte, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
•    Opher Etzion, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society
•    Christopher Bird, Chief Architect at Sabre Airline Solutions
•    Paul Vincent, CTO Business Rules and CEP, TIBCO Software
•    Colin Clark, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Event Processing, Inc.

Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence.

Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.

Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers via question and answer segments, and follow-on community discussion.

Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Community.

Visit the program website for more information and to register.

 

[Disclosure: The Event Processing Community is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Filed Under: event driven architecture, event processing

BEI Overview Presentation: Answers to Top 4 Business Ecology Initiative Questions

April 20, 2010 By brenda michelson

The following is cross-posted from the Business Ecology Initiative blog. Not only does it answer BEI questions, but also (indirectly) explains my “quiet period” in late March.

At the end of March, I had the opportunity to present an Overview of the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) to two important constituencies. The first group was a cross section of BEI and BPM/SOA Community members. The second group was the OMG Board of Directors. The presentations answered four questions:

  1. What is Business Ecology?
  2. What is the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI)?
  3. What is the relationship between OMG’s Practice Area Communities and BEI?
  4. What is the relationship between OMG’s Practice Area Communities and Technical Standards Communities?

Obviously, for individuals already involved in BEI, portions of the first two sections were familiar. However, as our community grows, it is important for everyone to have a shared understanding of what Business Ecology is, and is not, the value of Business Ecology adoption, and the purpose of BEI. The short answers:

1. 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.

2. What is the Business Ecology Initiative?

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.

For the longer answers to questions 1 and 2, see this Business Ecology: Optimization for Innovation post, and/or, the presentation deck on slideshare.

3. What is the relationship between OMG’s Practice Area Communities and BEI?

Starting with the founding of the SOA Consortium in 2007, OMG has been actively managing and promoting Practice Area Communities. In general, these communities, or CoPs, are advocacy groups comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors, dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption, of specific, key business-technology strategies, by the Global 1000, major government agencies and midmarket businesses.

Currently, the OMG has four Communities of Practice (CoPs). Two, BPM/SOA and Green CIO are established communities. Two, Event Processing and Cyber Security, are newly forming.

Each of these CoP topic areas – BPM/SOA, Green CIO, Event Processing and Cyber Security – are enablers of Business Ecology. [see diagram] Thus, the CoPs are Practice Area Communities of the BEI. By federating the Practice Area Communities under BEI, members can benefit from, and contribute to, a common Business Ecology body of knowledge, including a federated practice collection.

4. What is the relationship between OMG’s Practice Area Communities and Technical Standards Communities?

Since the BEI and Practice Area Communities (CoPs) are managed by OMG, we receive this question a lot. The Practice Area and Standards Communities have common interests and do interact. However, the CoPs have NO role in standards creation. As well, activities of the CoPs are not bound by OMG standards.

The interactions are as follows:

  • Practice Area Communities may consume OMG standards
  • Practice Area Communities may surface the need for new OMG standards
  • OMG Task Force members (standards creators) may solicit requirements from Practice Area Communities
  • OMG Task Force members (standards creators) may provide standards information and education to Practice Area Communities
  • Practice Area Communities and OMG special interest groups (not standards creators) may share topical interests

The full presentation deck, including details on the individual CoPs, is available on slideshare. Please note, as a result of community discussion, the Business Ecology Context diagram used throughout the presentation was revised. The most recent version is above, not in the March 23, 2010 slide deck.

If you have any questions on Business Ecology, BEI or the CoPs, please let me know.

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

Filed Under: business ecology

McKinsey Agrees: Outcome of EA is Change-Friendly Capability Delivery

April 13, 2010 By brenda michelson

McKinsey just published a new report, Why business needs should shape IT architecture, which speaks to taking a new approach to Enterprise Architecture programs.  An approach that is business-driven, capability centric, and change aware.  In other words, McKinsey echoes my mantra, “The ultimate outcome of enterprise architecture is change-friendly capability delivery.”

My ego aside, the McKinsey report is very good.  It sets the context for Enterprise Architecture Management, provides a CIO checklist for revolutionizing Enterprise Architecture Management, and walks through an example of EAM revolution at a diversified global investment bank. 

From my perspective, the most important point on the CIO Checklist is the first one:

“Focus on transformation.  Educate leaders at the highest level to help them understand that EAM is about change management and not simply a new IT initiative.”

Ultimately, the goal of your enterprise architecture program is to enable your organization to adapt to, and introduce, change.  Challenge your thinking with the following.  How can your architecture, or architecture program, be ‘intrinsically adaptable’?

Returning to the McKinsey article, the case study has many good insights.  I’m calling out two here.  For the rest, read the article.  [Emphasis is mine.]

The first is the use and business payback of capability analysis:

“Place business capabilities at the center

The bank’s merger history meant that the current organization comprised very different corporate cultures and a portfolio of independent IT fiefdoms. Unifying and improving the underlying group architecture became the EAM program’s primary objective. To achieve it and avoid past problems, the CTO conducted a series of workshops in which he brought together architecture teams from all the business units to develop an architecture that would not only support local needs but also serve as an optimal solution for the company at large

A well-tuned EAM effort concentrates on a core set of business capabilities, such as payroll, payments, or automated statement processing, where efficiencies and improvements can have the widest and most lasting impact. As a first step in the reform campaign, the IT department mapped the bank’s current state, charting the jumble of platforms, hardware, software, and network applications in use at the time. To winnow them, the department needed to understand the key requirements for each business line.

The new approach redefined the application architecture by using business domains, which regrouped the bank’s IT—data, processes, and applications—according to the business capabilities each business line needs. The chosen domains ranged from client services and product management to transaction processing, HR, and legal. The product-management department, for instance, must be able to examine account information on an integrated basis to see how well a given product is being received in different geographies and customer segments. It must also access credit, deposit, and payment data to calibrate margins, set pricing, and fulfill its reporting obligations. Within the overall product-management domain, subdomains for accounts, credits, payments, and settlements were established to consolidate, house, and manage those programming requirements efficiently.

By using domains and subdomains as building blocks, the architecture team reorganized the bank’s architecture around core capabilities, pooling shared applications and carving out any remaining requirements that needed customized support. To the surprise of the banks’ leaders, of the 100 or so domains the team identified at the outset, only 20 percent required applications specific to business lines. The rest—core functions such as settlements, payments, and central IT—were shareable. Rather than having different systems for securities processing in each business line, for example, one domain could centralize and maintain a standardized program for all business units. This approach freed developer and support-staff time for other high-value initiatives. The simplified framework cascaded downward through the entire architectural framework, allowing for a more efficient use of infrastructure.”

The second is EA communication techniques, and therefore, EA sales success:

“Make change sustainable

A good EAM program uses plain business terminology to guide the development process and create a sense of business ownership. Otherwise, the program may confuse or, worse, alienate the business audience that its changes are intended to support. In the case of one bank unit, an initiative to develop a new payments environment was rejected by the board leadership. Marking the culmination of a three-year effort, the proposal contained 300 gigabytes of detailed architecture information. Despite that bulk, the presentation lacked the one thing that would have made the project intuitively understandable to top managers: an executive summary telling them the overall program goals and laying out the financial and nonfinancial benefits.

Determined to correct the problem, the IT team put aside the small print and binders and turned to simplified graphics that highlighted key management questions. Managers in the bank’s payments businesses had been uneasy about restructuring domestic, regional, and cross-border transactions, so the IT team described the new architecture design’s business benefits in a succinct executive summary. Using a simple before-and-after graphic, the team showed how a fragmented architecture with over 200 different payments systems could be streamlined into a more integrated, cross-border IT environment…Now that everyone was on the same page, the merits of the program could be discussed robustly, and it won the board’s approval.”

As you pursue your own EA work, consider your role in business change.  Is your EA a change catalyst, or change impediment?  If it’s the latter, how will you revolutionize your EAM?

Filed Under: business-driven architecture, enterprise architecture

Event Processing Symposium 2010: New Featured Speakers

April 13, 2010 By brenda michelson

The Event Processing Symposium is starting to look like the “who’s who of Event Processing”.  Joining Roy Schulte on the program are Colin Clark, Chris Bird, Opher Etzion and Paul Vincent.  The sessions:

  • Smart Systems and Sense-and-Respond Behavior: The Time for Event Processing is Now by W. Roy Schulte, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
  • Analyze, Sense, and Respond: Identifying Threats & Opportunities in Social Networks, by Colin Clark, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Event Processing, Inc.
  • Case Study: Event Distribution Architecture at Sabre Airline Solutions, by Christopher Bird, Chief Architect at Sabre Airline Solutions
  • Event Processing – Seven Years from Now, by Opher Etzion, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society
  • Events, Rules and Processes – Exploiting CEP for “The 2-second Advantage,” by Paul Vincent, CTO Business Rules and CEP, TIBCO Software

Check out the EP Symposium website for session details and registration information.

Event Processing experts and practitioners, there is still time to submit an abstract.  See the call for participation.  Or, just email me.

 

[Disclosure: The OMG is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.  I am the Event Processing Symposium 2010 Program Chair.]

Filed Under: event driven architecture, event processing

Cloud Computing Environments, Events & Event Clouds: Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

April 7, 2010 By brenda michelson

Here we go.  Event Processing and Cloud Computing are natural allies.  Events can be used in the monitoring, notification, and adjustment of cloud computing environments (CCE), and in the monitoring, notification, adjustment of, and in response to, the business capabilities running on those CCEs.   As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I believe event-based data integration will be critical to information, and therefore, business synchronization. 

In addition to being an event generator, and responder, cloud computing can also be a highly efficient, scalable, event processing platform.  For proof, just ask my friend Colin Clark at Cloud Event Processing.

So, it’s with no surprise, but great expectations, that I’m noting the beta release of Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).  From the Amazon service page:

“Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon SNS provides a simple web services interface that can be used to create topics you want to notify applications (or people) about, subscribe clients to these topics, publish messages, and have these messages delivered over clients’ protocol of choice (i.e. HTTP, email, etc.). Amazon SNS delivers notifications to clients using a “push” mechanism that eliminates the need to periodically check or “poll” for new information and updates. Amazon SNS can be leveraged to build highly reliable, event-driven workflows and messaging applications without the need for complex middleware and application management. The potential uses for Amazon SNS include monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, mobile applications, and many others. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.”

From the SNS Functionality Overview, the service appears to be cloud based publish-subscribe:

  • “Create a topic: A topic is an “access point” – identifying a specific subject or event type – for publishing messages and allowing clients to subscribe for notifications.
  • Set policies for your topic: Once a topic is created, the topic owner can set policies for it such as limiting who can publish messages or subscribe to notifications, or specifying which notification protocols will be supported (i.e. HTTP/HTTPS, email). A single topic can support notification deliveries over multiple transport protocols.
  • Add subscribers to a topic: Subscribers are clients interested in receiving notifications from topics of interest; they can directly subscribe to a topic or be subscribed by the topic owner. Subscribers specify the protocol format and end-point (URL, email address, etc.) for notifications to be delivered. Upon receiving a subscription request, Amazon SNS will send a confirmation message to the specified end-point, asking the subscriber to explicitly opt-in to receiving notifications from that topic. Opting-in can be done by calling an API, using a command line tool, or – for email notifications – simply clicking on a link.
  • Publish messages / send out notifications: When topic owners have updates they wish to notify their subscribers about, they publish those messages to the topic – which immediately triggers Amazon SNS to deliver this message to all applicable subscribers.”

Of the features list, “scalable” caught my attention:

“Scalable – Amazon SNS is designed to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding applications, allowing applications to publish an unlimited number of messages at any time.”

Largest and most demanding? Tweets, market data, click-stream, blue mussels, Internet of Things … 

Amazon’s SNS is a springboard to industrial strength event processing and the active information tier.  As I said, “here we go”.

[Cross posted from Elemental Cloud Computing, because it’s Event Processing too.]

Filed Under: active information, cloud computing, event driven architecture, event processing

Next Page »

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

(BIO)

  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Recent Posts

  • Experts Sketch
  • PEW Research: Tech Saturation, Well-Being and (my) Remedies
  • technology knowledge premise
  • The Curse of Knowledge
  • better problems and technology knowledge transfer

Recent Tweets

  • “…where the process of drawing itself can take us. We can follow a suggestion, a squiggle, shadow, or smudge, and s… https://t.co/oRg0x2LoXG November 30, 2022 5:05 pm
  • On the waiting list for Post, join me (on the waitlist) via https://t.co/U8wYK707f6 November 24, 2022 4:17 pm
  • Meet the longtime librarian being honored at the National Book Awards : NPR https://t.co/S44VQeJg83 November 13, 2022 2:51 pm
© 2004-2022 Elemental Links, Inc.