The Value of Pattern Analysis in IT Architecture design work.

Christopher Alexander, an architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects around the world. Once he said - “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” Of course, he said this about building and towns. But this is true for any design work that includes IT. We see this quote in many IT architecture articles and books. It is true for our everyday life, in music, in creating mold, so on and so forth. In architecture design methodology the value of pattern analysis is tremendous. In designing IT Architecture from scratch or to redesign an existing system the pattern analysis can save tremendous amount of time and money. In service oriented architecture design work we often decompose business process to its coarse grain level to identify a service. When identifying and naming each business process service we are following design pattern concept. Most of the time we do not call it a pattern analysis, but we do pattern analysis. Making pattern analysis as a separate step like use case design modeling or component design modeling, etc., we can get enormous benefit. True value of creating once and use multiple times can be optimized through Pattern Analysis. It gives a structural approach to create right number of services for your architecture design work. Implementing pattern analysis while doing architecture work and how to get maximum value from this work is one of our unique capability. For detail information please contact me.

Virtualization is incomplete if you do not do provisioning, because they are complement to each other.

Workload management, virtualization, and provisioning work together and enterprise can be benefitted by considering provisioning and workload management services at the same time when undertaking a virtualization effort. An architect must include provisioning and workload management services when they are architecting virtualization. Most company focused only on server virtualization as their virtualization endeavor. But the enterprises cannot get the maximum value of optimization through only virtualization, that too only server.
Virtualization improves the utilization of IT resources, information, people assets because it allows you to treat resources as abstract entities, accessing and managing those resources across your organization more efficiently, by effect and need rather than physical location. Virtualization provides ways to abstract physical resources so they can be accessed as a pool of logical resources. Enterprise Architect needs to provision Server, Storage, Network, and Web Services virtualization when undertaking any virtualization effort. Focusing on a single component can be expensive; implementation can be done in various stages but overall architecture design need to be considered taking a holistic view while designing Enterprise Architecture.
As I mentioned earlier virtualization provides ways to abstract physical resources, but if you do not optimize your resources real value of virtualization cannot be realized. Policy-based orchestration is about providing an end-to-end IT service that is dynamically linked to business policies, allowing the ability to adapt to changing business conditions. Having each individual element of an IT system respond to change is a great start, but in the end, to truly be an on demand business requires orchestration of the automation of multiple elements of the systems so that the entire IT infrastructure is responding as it should to changes in business policies or conditions. For example, if a customer’s order entry application suddenly experiences a surge in load, just allocating more CPU may not be enough; it may also need additional storage, more network capacity, and even additional servers and new users to handle the increased activity. All of these changes must be orchestrated so that the dynamic allocation of multiple resource elements occurs seamlessly.

Orchestration enables data centers to move from just-in-case provisioning (providing enough resources to fulfill peaks in IT infrastructure demand, which typically results in low resource utilization) to just-in-time provisioning: automating the infrastructure and executing configuration changes in a repeatable manner, eliminating human execution errors. A typical example of a data center running three applications, in which one application needs additional resources to attend to user demand, while the other two have enough or even extra resources allocated to them. Traditional, manual provisioning practices do not make it practical to move resources from one application to another to meet short-term peaks in demand. Instead, we engage in what we call the just-in-case provisioning cycle: If you look carefully, virtualization and provisioning are complement to each other.

Benefit of virtualization and provisioning flows ultimately to Workload Manager. workload Manager and system provisioning work together. System Provisioning monitors workload across a set of provisioned devices. Enterprise Workload Management (eWLM) is one example of a monitoring technology that provides a basic infrastructure for monitoring and managing a collection of heterogeneous distributed servers.
Workload Management refers to any subsystem that provides functionality to distribute workload across resources within a system or across systems within a network. Within a system, these are usually provided by operating system services, and manage processor, I/O and memory resources according to task priority, resources requested, available resources and other scheduling rules. Higher level OS facilities (e.g. LPARs, Process Resource Managers) may also be available to limit and/or dedicate specific resources to specific tasks or task environments.

A successful EA design should encompasses Workload Management, Provisioning and Virtualization.

Business Resiliency in today's IT World

Business resilience has moved us from the sense of reacting and then recovering from an event to becoming impervious to the event. Business continuity focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three components – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – these 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 directly help the bottom line.
An offensive resilience posture also consists of three components, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these components 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 encompass business as well as IT Operations and it can be thought of as spanning six discrete layers: Strategy, Organization, Process, data/application, technology and facilities/security. Please contact me for more information.

Right delivery channel strategy that includes HW/Devices, SW, Architecture, and Technology can help to reduce enterprise IT cost.

Software license fees are going up every year, managing assets is also getting expensive. Most enterprises are not looking into their cost of delivery channel. I would like to focus here on delivery channel. For large enterprises, this is a substantial cost and need attention. Enterprises need to have a right client strategy to optimize and control cost. Client is a part of the delivery channel of an Enterprise Architecture. It encompasses, the Software, the Hardware and the delivery devices like desktop to notepad, PDAs, smart phone, near field communication devices, and many other hand held devices that are used to support end users day to day work. Creating enterprise client strategy needs major work and it is time consuming, as we are having so many options. We have so many software, and hardware to be selected from substantially large array of products and also from multiple vendors like Google, Microsoft, IBM Lotus, and open source products just a name a few. We need to create a client strategy, as well as road map that will support immediate need of the enterprise, as well as be able to accommodate future need. Enterprises need to serve multiple channels/users. Policy and governance model for each channel are different. Today’s enterprises typically support Business to Business, Business to Customers, Business to Employees, and Business to Agents channels. Selection of right platform with right software need to be designed based on use case definition for each channel along with the other modules that an EA design needs. Finding out the pattern and common functions for each LOB is very critical. Implementing collaboration functionality among and within the channels is becoming challenging, as one has to select right products set. Carefully architecting and developing right strategy will help to keep the cost down (License fees, TCO, asset management, etc.). I see this as a major architecture endeavor for any organization. Initial investment can help cost savings in down the road. Implementation of control and policy may be a nightmare. Right strategy, right policy will definitely reduce cost, will increase productivity, and boost innovation. Now the question is how to determine what amount of budget need to be allocated for this initiative?

IT Strategy and Roadmap

Enterprise IT covers a large area therefore to develop an IT Strategy one can take a holistic view or a specific component or number of components at a time. Whatever one’s approach may be one need to address all the components of an enterprise IT Environment at some point. In this article I will try to explore the IT Strategy development and the focus will be on an enterprise IT environment. According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary a strategy is an adaptation or complex of adaptations that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success. A careful plan or method. Therefore, Information Technology Strategy or IT Strategy should have some target or goal that one or an enterprise try to achieve. Therefore, we need to establish an achievable goal or goals carefully. It makes more complicated when we add dynamic nature of today’s information technology. To make it simple, let’s eliminate dynamic factor of the information technology and establish goal(s) using current technology which support agility. Please contact me for detail information.

Business Intelligence solution from The SME Consortium

Our Business Intelligence (BI) offering unlock the business value of the information for competitive advantage. Recent study shows key challenges to the most organization are management cannot trust their information because of silos information, or provide miss information due to volume and variety they are having, or reading wrong information at least once a week due to dynamic nature of the business. Our BI and financial performance management (FPM) solutions are complement to each other and solve these issues. BI and FPM offering help enterprise to optimize their business successfully across the enterprise with detail focus on all line of businesses. Implementing Business Optimization needs lifecycle approach. We support our clients in their performance management journey by enabling BI and FPM. We help clients in starting from departmental BI applications through enterprise BI capability to coordinated decision making process. Our solution assists our clients to select the right products which are relevant to finance, sales, marketing, customer services, human resources and operations. It helps our client to answer all their questions related to enterprise performance through delivering information via multiple tools and channels that include scorecards, dashboards, reports, analytics, and tools for planning, forecasting and budgeting.

IT Optimization should focus beyond

In an IT Optimization initiative most enterprises focus only on their hardware infrastructure that deals only on computing resources, like servers, storage and some time they consider network. But to get maximum benefit out of optimization program, enterprise should go beyond infrastructure computing resources boundary. IT optimization predominantly an IT Infrastructure in a simplified environment that aligns with the enterprise’s business goals. It makes the IT environment interoperable, integrated and automated for greater efficiency, productivity and IT service quality. Optimized IT infrastructure primarily built on virtualization, automation and provisioning technologies along with system management and process management. Virtualization technology helps users to have a logical view of a complex heterogeneous IT environment. In a well implemented optimized IT environment, IT infrastructure should be able to support required business services through pool of virtualized resources that include servers, storage, and network along with operating systems, system management software, middleware and applications enablement software. Virtualization is one of the key solutions for optimizing the IT Infrastructure. Optimization should enable and should provide following benefits by:

• Aligning IT execution with the needs of the business to ensure delivery of high value, modular solutions that rapidly respond to ever shifting business drivers.
• Improving ability to deliver services to the business by automating IT management processes
• Improving resource utilization and response time through a common pool of shared resources, including virtualized resources
• Enabling IT infrastructure to respond to solution’s changing capacity needs
• Utilizing proven methodologies and technologies to speed implementation of IT initiatives

It should also benefits business management by:

• Providing an IT infrastructure that effectively supports the requirements of the business.

In a nutshell enterprise should get the most of any investment. Before investing in additional resources they need to be sure their current environment is as efficient as possible. Enterprise should be able to allocate effectively their excess capacity to where and when they need to respond to changing business needs. Businesses often over-provision on a per application basis or silo basis. Manual processes for managing and allocating all these diverse resources has serious impact on IT staff productivity. IT Optimization should eliminate these constraints.