Successful colaboration strategy

How to increase employee productivity and grow business is the biggest challenge to the CEO, CFO and CIOs in today’s globally integrated business environment. Complex global economy, diverse types of users and usage are making these tasks more challenging. If we look closely, we will see collaboration technologies optimize human side of the processes. It also shortens processes cycle time. Most important of all it makes the human resources more productive and help to control cost. There are four types of users namely knowledge workers, task workers, power users, and data entry. Knowledge workers and task workers get maximum benefit out of collaboration. Enterprises are deploying collaboration tools to Partners, Customers, Knowledge workers, and task workers. Collaborative tools shorten processing cycle as well as unblock processes. It removes error through group activities, it also increase participation to an activities at global level. Overall it generates better business outcome. It drives overall growth of an enterprise, creates a culture of innovation, and helps to control cost. An open platform for collaboration should be built using flexible and open programmability technology. A successful collaboration must develop efficient means of working, it should create a culture of innovation, and helps innovate through collective talent. Collaboration also leverage and preserve tacit knowledge, establish strong relationship with business partners and customers. It should be an accelerator to business growth and control cost. Collaboration solutions can be categorized in to three areas: Collaborative environment, Collaboration enabled business processes, and role based portals. Successful integration of team collaborations, portals, messaging, communications, and social networking are the key to the successful implementation of collaboration. If we consider each collaboration capability component as a service and use service oriented architecture approach and select right products and delivery models to a business that best suited for them then it will add real value and will be considered as successful implementation of a collaboration strategy for any firm. Product agnostic thinking is the key. There are many products and tools available in the market place. It requires right approach and right viability study.

Third dimension in developing strategy

Strategy is the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal according to Merriam Webster dictionary. In any organizations there are multiple business areas and each business area will have multiple line of businesses, therefore when we are talking about strategy we need to know goals for each line of businesses (LoB) along with that of Information Technology.  Each LoB will establish their own goals based on the market situation, market trend, and most of all how to position themselves at competitive edge. These LoBs goals are also need to align with the overall enterprise’s business goals. The establishing a strategy is a true art of devising or employing plans or stratagems towards the goal of the enterprise and can be accomplished by using a holistic approach. Therefore understanding company’s goal, vision, and mission is an essential step in developing IT strategy that can fulfill overall enterprise’s goal. Most consulting companies have created practices /offerings and developed competency specifically to support their clients in developing a strategy. Each firm has their own techniques and method to establish strategy. Most of us consider relationship and alignment of Enterprise Strategy with Enterprise Architecture, but the most critical piece I see missing everywhere, which I call the third dimension, the Technology Outlook or the new technology. We consider where the enterprise is today and where they want to go. Based on target architecture we design a blue print and road map without considering the third dimension that is technology outlook, new technology that will affect the future business. How do you know how much your today’s architecture decision will affect due to continuous evolution of new technology? The biggest challenge I see:

(1)    Integrating Technology outlook into Strategy development 

(2)    Strategy that will satisfy today’s need and will accommodate tomorrow’s new technology.

(3)    How will you synchronize and integrate Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Technology Architecture,  future technology, and potential new computing model in this innovative dynamic new business world

(4)    How will you deliver strategy while protecting client’s investment and without reworking on any component of the framework that you develop using this strategy.

(5)    SOA implementation strategy that can support future technology.

We need a pattern based approach that can satisfy all these questions and factor-in all five challenges.

For technique paper and approach please contact me. I will be happy to discuss further and will provide you the intellectual capitals that I have created for strategy and road map development.

Technology outlook a paradigm shift

We are in the midst of transformation phase of information technology. Enterprises are shifting their focus on digitizing their enterprise. As the economy goes more and more digital managing the value created by the digital economy becoming more and more challenging.  We see emerging mobile financial services, mobile banking services using non-banking infrastructure like the merger of super telecom technology with banking services. Enterprises are becoming more and more dependable on data, as the data transforming enterprise to smarter decision. Enterprises are digitizing their enterprise to increase service quality as well as increase in revenue growth. Definition of IT transformation has changed to digitizing enterprise. Cloud Computing has transformed the old IT architecture into new paradigm. Near Field Communication (NFC), Unified Threat Management (UTM), next generation firewall, Cloud computing, web services, and Service orientation immensely contributed to this new business process landscape.  This is not new news, but most enterprises are started realizing the value of new generation information technology.       

It is very clear that the technology is blending with the business to support dynamic nature of the new economy.  The mobile web is now matured, the rise of social networking, globalization and the availability of global resources as well as the onset of real time data streaming and access to information are changing the traditional datacenter concept. These are all becoming interconnected and the advancements in technology are driving this at a greater speed. One new approach that is helping to address these issues is Cloud computing. We see this trend as one that will greatly change the way people acquire, deploy and manage IT services. 

Therefore the scope of IT Strategy and road map has been extended. The following picture depicts the logical view of the new landscape of enterprise information technology services and delivery model. This highly integrated, flexible, real time interaction, and catalyst for rapid innovation are enabled by architecture design style and cloud computing infrastructure.

Physical consolidation, virtualization of server, storage, network along with right provisioning and workload management technologies can be leveraged to accomplish an optimized and efficient underpinning cloud computing infrastructure. Therefore, augmenting existing strategy and road map may suffice to fulfill the current transformation need. But delivery channel and web component need significant architecture work. That includes social media strategy, collaboration, governance for the new added fabric, and security. For detail approach and how to create a measureable and actionable road map for this transformation please contact me. I will be happy to provide you all relevant artifacts and reference materials that can be used as a framework and reference architecture model.     

Business and Technology become more and more entwine...

Correctly speaking, IT is aligning with other Line of Businesses of an enterprise to achieve IT’s contribution level to the overall enterprise objective. IT is just like any other Line of Business. Remember Business is not IT’s customer. "Business is a customer of IT" is an old concept. To make simple I will refer IT LoB as IT and other LoBs as Business.

Business and Technology become more and more entwine. IT is trying to align with the business, but it is become more and more challenging, because enterprises are expecting IT to take lead in IT and Business convergence process.

So, we need to focus on business side design and processes. While analyzing the business issues, it is essential to tighten the linkage between Technology and the Business, specifically integrating the IT with business to support today’s business need.  The dynamic nature of the business implies rapid change.  For business leaders, the impact of change is profound.  They must contend with an increasingly diverse set of emerging competitors, an unpredictable socio-economic environment, and an increasingly demanding and fickle customer set.  In addition to all of these challenges, they must meet the expectation of financial markets that their organization will deliver consistent growth in profitability, despite the dynamic environment in which they operate. The characteristics of the IT operating environment must create superior competitive capabilities and will be able to focus on defining and managing their differentiating capabilities. The environment needs to build flexible business and technology structures to allow IT infrastructure to be more responsive to market changes – and do so at lower costs in near real-time.  This can be accomplished by creating enterprise architecture using TOGAF framework. It will be most effective, proven and efficient approach. We will discuss starting from Business Architecture, Phase B of TOGAF.

Most enterprises have representative business processes and design, but elaboration of corresponding business architecture may not exist. It will be appropriate if the enterprise adopt a two prong approach. Implementing such architecture will create competitive advantages for the organization and enable it to realize operational efficiencies and overall improvement. Careful orchestrated Enterprise Architecture design will pay back. Business Architecture is not a waste in a project. A typical business reference model (BRM) uses a three tiered hierarchy with Business Areas at the highest level, followed by Line of Business and finally business sub-function.  One should review business process and design when working on each tier of BRM and design a cohesive Business Architecture. Designing Data Architecture using Data Reference Module in conjunction with Business Architecture will pay off in the long run. Analyzing Business context for data categorization and analyzing data element for data structure need business architecture documents as input. Compromising BA documents is not a good idea. Go to Basics… Business Architecture, Data Architecture, and together with Use Case documents can help to create an underpinning system that will pay back and truly eliminate the complexity. Following picture depicts the flow of BA, UML diagram, and then uses these artifacts as an input to Information architecture. For detail explanation and white papers please contact me.

Business Architecture Components

Reference use: Open group and TOGAF . 

So, you design cloud infrastructure using SOA design style and adopt web service as your preferred implementation model

Figure 1

Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architecture, and Web Services, all are here and these three are the major contributors to the new IT Trend.  Cloud computing is emerging as a big market opportunity. Vendors are coming up with various products and solutions to acquire market share in the Cloud computing. Now we have many options to select a cloud computing vendor based on our specific needs. According to a recent report top ten vendors, who are providing cloud computing services and products are listed in this site. They can enable your cloud infrastructure through providing services, products, and solutions. But you should make your own decision where and how you want to move forward with new IT trend. In this article I will focus on cloud computing, SOA, and Web Services to provide some food for thought in decision making process.

Many enterprises are already started investing and some are in planning phase. Biggest challenge is how to implement these technologies or transform existing infrastructure and operating environment into new paradigm of computing model. How to do the transformation of existing infrastructure? In this column I will first explore what SOA, Web services, and Cloud computing are? Is there any synergy among them? How they fit with each other? Then we can create a strategy to adopt SOA, Web services, and Cloud computing to transform existing IT environment into new generation of computing model. It is important we must know what they are. So, we will be able to make right decision.

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is a design style and it is existed for some time.  Design style is always built upon a set of principles which governs its characteristics and use. SOA has the following characteristics: encapsulation, modular, loosely couple, separation of concerns, composability, and single implementation. Does it sound familiar?  Is this not similar to object oriented design? Is not SOA an evolution of object oriented design?  Answers to all these questions are “YES”. Therefore, SOA is not new to IT Architecture domain, rather, evolution from object oriented model. Like any other design style, SOA also benefited from the lessons learned from its predecessor design style.  SOA style of design offers several benefits to an enterprise, like it can reduce product development life cycle, increase business responsiveness, and agility. These business benefits are tremendous in today’s dynamic business environment and new economy.  IT community also benefitted through SOA adoption. As SOA design style helps to build services once and use multiple times, it promotes process consistency. SOA design style standardizes integration and reduces solutions complexity.  Therefore, SOA is a design style that provides benefits to both business and IT Communities.

Web Services is a technology that follows the SOA style of design. SOA and its underlying principles have existed longer than Web Services. Web service is the instantiation of service oriented architecture, it use open standard, interoperability, and asynchronous implementation of decoupled systems.  Therefore, it is a preferred technology choice for implementing SOA. On the other hand there are many web services implementations that are not SOA, like connecting two heterogeneous systems directly together. Web services have three components, Service requester, Service provider, and Service registry. They perform Bind, Publish, and Find functions.

In my previous article I discussed cloud computing in detail. Infrastructure service is most critical in cloud computing environment. It can help enterprise to scale up to massive capacities. Elastic characteristic of cloud computing can provide on-demand resource provisioning. This eliminates over-provisioning when used with utility pricing. It also removes the need to over-provision in order to meet the demands of millions of users. All are achieved at infrastructure and middleware services layer. Underpinning technologies enable all these capabilities. Cloud computing benefits to small and medium-sized businesses who wish to completely outsource their data-center infrastructure, or large companies who wish to get peak load capacity without incurring the higher cost of building larger data centers internally. This is a very important decision point.

So you create cloud infrastructure using SOA design style and adopt web service as your preferred implementation model.  Now the most challenging part is decision. We have many scenarios, many data points to consider, which is the right for your company? So on and so forth. Each components of the logical view (Figure 1) of the new IT environment need proper evaluation. Many questions need to be answered.  Making right decision is the key to the success of your target Enterprise Architecture.

   

Inside cloud computing

Recent study by Yankee Group revealed, by 2014 cloud computing will be $42B market. Much is being talked about cloud computing. Some people believe even today, it is hype, because it uses already established computing technology, others think it is disruptive trend representing the next level in the evolution of the internet. Few years back in Web 2.0 Expo a question was asked “What is cloud computing?”  The answers were captured and uploaded in the YouTube by Joyent, very interesting video. We learn cloud computing definition from users’ perspective; it delivers services to the consumers in a simplified way. As an user you do not need to know how you are getting the service. But the enterprise adopting cloud computing model need to know the detail about: cloud computing architecture, what are the requirements, how to develop, how to implement, what are all benefits, so on and so forth. Here I will look into the basics of cloud computing from a very high level.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides somewhat more objective and specific definition as depicted in the following picture:

Let’s focus on Cloud computing characteristics, we see, cloud computing architecture has two distinct domains that enable cloud computing.  They are Infrastructure, which is comprised of Network, Server, Storage, and Software. Infrastructure  which will provide on demand self service capability, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured services.  Network component of infrastructure will provide broad network access. Other domain is the end user, who will use the cloud services.  

Infrastructure – On demand Self service: IT Infrastructure needs to provide secured computing resources 24X7 with five nines availability, and should be resilient to enable cloud services. A virtual platform is ideal to provide computing power.

In the Cloud computing era business resilience has moved us from the sense of reacting to recover from an event to becoming impervious to the event. Business continuity focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three building blocks – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – that are widely recognized as vital ingredient for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not help the bottom line that will support cloud computing environment and overall business growth.

Three further building blocks that support an offensive resilience posture, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position in the cloud environment – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these building blocks can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside.

Business Resilience should encompass:  continuity, availability, security, recovery and scalability spanning and supporting six discrete layers to support on demand self service for greater QoS to the end users.

IT Infrastructure – Rapid scaling: Scaling an IT infrastructure means managing the performance and capacities of each component within the infrastructure. The basic objectives of scaling a component/system are to:

• Increase the capacity or speed of the component.
• Improve the efficiency of the component/system.
• Shift or reduce the load on the component.
• Improve overall customer experience

Increasing the scalability of one component, the result may change the dynamics of the entire site service; thereby it is moving the bottleneck to another component. The scalability of the infrastructure depends on the ability of each component to scale to meet increasing demands. So we need to take a holistic view of the IT Infrastructure that include server, clustering, network, storage, workload, and understand the application environment.

Infrastructure: Resource pooling is more about computing resource management to support 24X7 and 99.999 availability. This can be accomplished by adopting virtualization technology. Server, storage and network virtualization can support computing resource requirement more efficiently, but to have optimum computing resource and cost/performance perspective it is essential to do right provisioning by adopting just-in-time approach. Remember most virtualization solutions are not efficiently provisioned and adopt just-in-case approach.

To enable measured service an utility computing services require. The utility computing system (also referred to as a utility system or simply a utility) is a system that can automatically create and manage multiple utility computing services (utilities services, for short) on a shared infrastructure.  The infrastructure consists of pool of hardware resources, such as servers, storage, and network appliances, as well as software resources, such as operating systems, middleware, and applications.

Utility computing services is the “pay-as-you-go” model.  To implement this model, one needs a flexible way to meter the services and resources being used. The UMI (Universal Management Infrastructure) architecture, designed to provide common functions that are needed by most, if not all, of the utilities in a utility computing system, includes a critical metering function.  The architecture of the metering system is hierarchical and highly flexible.  The metering service architecture should include how UMI's metering service function is used in the context of utility computing services, for collecting and storing metered data, computing service metrics (which are useful to the data-consuming applications), and feeding the metrics to various consumer modules (e.g., for accounting and billing).

Infrastructure: Broad network access can be accomplished by augmenting existing typical resilient network topology, like point to point connections, mesh configuration, ring configuration, various  fiber  transport to support failover, through newer trend like Yankee Group’s Anywhere IT approach.   

 We need to do lot of work to support the cloud computing model at infrastructure level. Eliminating detail foundation work may deliver Cloud computing for the enterprise faster, but at some point need to take a holistic look and assess the total need to support cloud computing. I am creating a detail approach and reference architecture to enable enterprise cloud computing for our clients. Please contact me for the artifacts. Before closing this article I would like you to think … how SOA, Web services, and Cloud computing fit together? 

Merging EAI, EII, and ETL initiatives can add more values and it is economical

Last August I discussed about enterprise application integration to address CEOs challenge and pain points.  Simplification and Sustainability were the two major concerns for most CEOs in 2010. I think this issue will remain for the next couple of years until enterprise IT environments are fully integrated.  We need to have a single virtualized platform that provides the technical underpinning of the system.  This should be architected from the ground up as a modern, open, web services, services-oriented platform.  The platform sits on top of the existing infrastructure investments and provides one single solution for any business person. Therefore, the magic word is Integration. Adopting right techniques for the integration will be the key to success in the new economy. Platform requires providing universal capabilities to deliver targeted information to knowledge workers, decision-makers, and other business folks in the organization whenever and wherever they need it.  These capabilities enable users across the organization so that regardless of where individuals sit.

Now the challenge is how to make the architecture simple. Most enterprises are struggling to simplify their IT Infrastructure, too many applications, too many systems. Some of them may be redundant. They are not integrated. At the same time business areas trying to unlock the business value of the information for competitive advantage. Business Executives are facing tremendous challenge the information they are getting cannot be trusted because of silos information, or provide miss information due to volume and variety they are having, or reading wrong information due to dynamic nature of the business.  Therefore most IT Organizations are facing three major issues:

(1)    Applications need to be integrated at enterprise level

(2)    Information need to be integrated and consistent throughout the organization

(3)    Information must be trusted across the organization

The best way to approach these issues to look into all three problems are at the same time. Because if we visualize a typical information architecture framework we see three unique services we need in the information integration layer to deliver trusted information on a single glass pan and among others services they are:

(1)    Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) service,

(2)    Enterprise Information Integration (EII) service,

(3)    Extract Transform and Load (ETL) service,

and their unique capabilities in combination address those issues.

For application-to-application integration EAI will provide message-based, transaction-oriented, point-to-point or point-to-hub brokering techniques, EII will provide optimized & transparent data access and transformation layer providing a single relational interface across all enterprise data, and ETL will help set-oriented, point-in-time transformation for migration, consolidation, and data warehousing. The common thread “Transformation” related to data may confuse us. But all three are unique and we need to have all three to create a robust platform to address integration of applications, to provide trusted information, and to provide require business intelligence. This will create a robust foundation for Business Intelligence service.   Looking only to integrate applications is not the right approach to solve BI issue. Furthermore if we think about the use case for EAI, ETL and EII, we will find they define what they do with the data, how they move it and where, and the structure of the entities they work on. Only EAI or only EII or only ETL cannot support CEO’s objective or solve CEO’s pain points. Moreover you will miss the opportunity to explore EII and ETL scope, and improving the data quality at enterprise level.  For detail approach and road map please contact me.