The first 3 sins are related to pricing and profit margins, the 4th is “slaughtering tomorrow's opportunity on the altar of yesterday”, and the fifth is feeding problems and starving opportunities:

“-- The last of the deadly sins is feeding problems and starving opportunities. For many years I have been asking new clients to tell me who their best-performing people are. And then I ask: "What are they assigned to?" Almost without exception, the performers are assigned to problems -- to the old business that is sinking faster than had been forecast; to the old product that is being outflanked by a competitor's new offering; to the old technology -- e.g., analog switches, when the market has already switched to digital. Then I ask: "And who takes care of the opportunities?" Almost invariably, the opportunities are left to fend for themselves.

All one can get by "problem-solving" is damage-containment. Only opportunities produce results and growth. And opportunities are actually every bit as difficult and demanding as problems are. First draw up a list of the opportunities facing the business and make sure that each is adequately staffed (and adequately supported). Only then should you draw up a list of the problems and worry about staffing them.

I suspect that Sears has been doing the opposite -- starving the opportunities and feeding the problems -- in its retail business these past few years. This is also, I suspect, what is being done by the major European companies that have steadily been losing ground on the world market (e.g., Siemens in Germany). The right thing to do has been demonstrated by GE, with its policy to get rid of all businesses -- even profitable ones -- that do not offer long-range growth and the opportunity for the company to be number one or number two world-wide. And then GE places its best-performing people in the opportunity businesses, and pushes and pushes.”

Drucker concludes the piece:

“Everything I have been saying in this article has been known for generations. Everything has been amply proved by decades of experience. There is thus no excuse for managements to indulge in the five deadly sins. They are temptations that must be resisted.”

So, I have to ask, is your IT leadership indulging in the fifth deadly sin?  Is enterprise architecture, typically staffed with top performers, focused purely on problems?  Or, do they resist temptation, by investing some top talent in opportunity?

“Encourage Enterprise Architects to “Feed Their Brains.” For enterprise architects to stay on top of their game, they need to continuously explore, stretch their boundaries, and sometimes, just sit and think. Recognize this is part of the deal. Be patient when the areas they explore don’t have an obvious connection to your business or technology plans. Trust their instincts.”

In a recent Wired article, Clive Thompson calls out recent brain science research that suggests, “daydreaming can actually be useful”:

“For years, brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition. But recent studies have found that we lose concentration shockingly often. A 2007 study by Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time. And this suggests that daydreaming can actually be useful — because if it were such a bad thing, it’s unlikely that we’d do it so often.

Why do our minds wander? Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.

Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage. “Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. “You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.”

Indeed, Schooler suspects that research like his explains why so many “aha” moments occur when we’re drifting — like Archimedes in the tub.”

Thompson goes on discuss how these findings, if proven correct, should lead to a redesign of the way we work:

“How about designing software that optimizes daydreaming? For example, one problem with drifting is that we’re often unaware we’re doing it. We can hit upon a cool idea but never even realize it. Imagine an app that randomly pings you to see if your mind is wandering — and if it is, lets you record what you’re thinking about.”

While I’d rather not be pinged out of my daydreaming, err deep thinking, I found the follow-on point to be key:

“…a way to strip away the crud of daily work and learn what your brain’s real priorities are.”

Imagine that, the positive, sustainable, business impact of enterprise architecture, once the crud is stripped away.

Cheer up, Sleepy Jean.
Oh, what can it mean.
To a daydream believer
And an architecture team.

[With apologies to John Stewart, composer of Daydream Believer.]

From the SOA Side

The immediate benefit of combining SOA and Cloud Computing is time.  Reaching out to the cloud for business or technology capabilities, allows SOA initiatives to compress time to value. 

In the longer term, the benefits include improved collaboration, customer satisfaction and business growth.  By offering SOA based business capabilities to the cloud, businesses can improve interactions with business partners and existing customers, and/or generate new revenue streams.

From the Cloud Side

The immediate benefit of cloud computing is financial.  Delegating workloads to a pay-as-you-go cloud computing environment eliminates upfront capital expenditures, and allows organizations to pay only for utilized capacity, therefore spreading out operating expenditure. 

Workload appropriateness for cloud computing is tested against technical and business characteristics.  Minimally, from a technical perspective, the workload is evaluated in terms of usage, performance, latency, service level needs, codebase, execution environment and dependencies.  From a business perspective, the workload is minimally evaluated in terms of business critically, core functionality and data sensitivity.

Organizations with portfolios comprised of large scale, monolithic, tightly coupled applications face “all or nothing” decisions when evaluating cloud computing candidates. Despite passing a technical profile test, a monolithic application that contains core business functionality and/or sensitive data will probably fail the overall cloud candidacy test.  This represents a lost opportunity, especially if the core functionality and/or sensitive data only comprise a small portion of the overall application.

Organizations with portfolios based on well-defined services, with solutions assembled using service oriented constructs, are better positioned to take advantage of cloud computing’s financial benefits.  Instead of making decisions at the application or suite level, you can make decisions at the business capability level. 

For example, a monolithic order capture application might fail the cloud candidacy test due to the business criticality of the order process, or customer data sensitivity.  However, portions of the order capture application, such as product catalog, recommendations and promotion capabilities may be perfect cloud candidates.  If the order capture solution is service-oriented, or minimally, the product catalog, recommendations and promotions capabilities are delivered as services, then those capabilities can be delegated to a cloud computing environment, therefore realizing capital and operating cost savings.

From Your Side?

As I said at the top, this a brief take on the benefits of combining SOA and Cloud Computing.  I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 

• Are you seeing other benefits? 
• Is the thought of reworking your application portfolio untenable? 
• Is the price of not reworking your application portfolio even worse?

[cross posted from elemental cloud computing]

The opening cloud watch items are a mix of business and economics, and data, contracts and legal issues:

• Bessemer’s 8th of Cloud Computing and SaaS: Leverage and monetize the data asset
• Workload Metrics: Business Transactions per Kilowatt?
• Microsoft Exec: Customers Embracing "Cloud Computing" <– But whose?
• GigaOm: 10 Open Source Resources for Cloud Computing
• Lawyers, Clouds and Warrants
• McKinsey to CIOs in ‘New Normal’: Rethink Procurement…
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Cloud Computing is Relevant for (mostly) everyone
• Joyent is First in China: Launches Commercial Cloud Computing Platform

From Elemental Cloud Computing, there several ways to follow the cloud watch.  The Current Cloud Watch section on the homepage, the Cloud Watch tab of the Recent Posts navigation element in the sidebar, the Cloud Watch tab of the site navigation, via the Cloud Watch or Full Site feeds and email, and on Twitter. 

Whenever I explore or explain a technology construct, my natural inclination is to pick up a pen and draw.  The resultant diagram typically contains domain, interaction and mind mapping elements.  Despite the non-standard output, these diagrams help me delve into broad and/or complicated topics, and communicate with practitioners.

My exploration of cloud computing is no exception.  As I was researching cloud computing, I created the following “cloud-o-gram” diagram.  Rather than (yet another) definitional or architectural diagram, the cloud-o-gram is my interpretation of the cloud computing space.

[Click on diagram to enlarge]

As you will quickly notice, my interpretation varies from the typical “as-a-service” stack model.   This comes from looking at the space with the lens of an enterprise architect.  Enterprise architects start with abstractions rather than products.   Abstractions allow for a broader viewpoint and are more accommodative of change.  Given the emerging nature of cloud computing, change is inevitable.

Over time, Elemental Cloud Computing will explore each area of the cloud-o-gram in depth, including representative software, hardware, service and practice offerings. 

For this introductory post, I want to provide a quick walkthrough of the cloud-o-gram.  Before that though, I should probably comment on the name, “cloud-o-gram”.  Simply, I needed a name that would in no way connote definition, architecture or design. Cloud-o-gram fit.

Cloud-o-gram Overview

Recently, consumers co-opted the term “cloud” to refer to any application or information service that runs elsewhere.   This is a point of confusion since the consumer view is independent of the service provider’s use of cloud computing technologies, techniques and practices.

For clarity, the cloud-o-gram refers to the term cloud in quotes, in recognition of the colloquialism, and introduces a more precise, successor term, “cloud computing environment” (CCE).  The diagram illustrates this via the dotted line from the yellow “Cloud” box to the blue “Cloud Computing Environment” ellipse.

The cloud-o-gram has four inter-related areas: cloud computing offerings, cloud computing environment, cloud computing environment offerings and customer-provider agreements.  

Cloud Computing Offerings

Cloud computing environments and the services offered in those environments are the most prominent cloud computing offerings.  However, as the cloud-o-gram indicates, the cloud computing space is much broader. 

Referring to the diagram, the cloud-o-gram includes five categories of cloud computing offerings, illustrated as yellow and green rectangles emanating from the yellow Cloud Computing Offerings ellipse. 

Each category is named for its relationship to the cloud computing environment (“cloud”).  These include offerings “for the cloud”, “about the cloud”, “on the cloud”, “of the cloud”, as well as the cloud computing environment itself.

The “of the cloud” and “on the cloud” offerings are colored green to show these are both cloud computing offerings and cloud computing environment offerings.

A brief description of each cloud computing offering category follows.  Referring to the diagram, the offerings are listed clockwise, starting at the top.

Cloud Computing Environment:  A cloud computing environment (CCE) is the end result of applying technology, architecture and engineering practices, along with operating, security, policy and economic models, in a manner that optimizes for resource sharing, elasticity (scale), automation, self-service and pay-as-you-go.

Rather than chasing cloud computing environment descriptors – public, private, virtual private – the cloud-o-gram calls out the underlying aspects, such as physical location, owner and target markets.  This allows for a wide range of cloud computing environments, such as a government agency CCE designed to provide services to other agencies, a CCE that specializes by industry, or even a CCE that specializes by workload.

For the “Cloud” (CCE):  Offerings for the CCE include all of the hardware, software, standards, practices and services to build, use, manage and secure a cloud computing environment.  Many of the wares in this category are not unique to cloud computing, however each contributes to the existence and success of a CCE.

About the “Cloud” (CCE):  Offerings about the CCE include all the software, services, practices and standards concerned with delegating management control of business information and workloads to external parties.  Facets include assurance, compliance, billing and metering, and brokering. 

Cloud Computing & Cloud Computing Environment Offerings

On the “Cloud” (CCE):  Offerings on the CCE are applications, software, information, services or processes services deployed onto, and therefore accessed from, a cloud computing environment.  Typically, these offerings provide agency, business or consumer capability, rather than technical capability.   

Of the “Cloud” (CCE):  Offerings of the CCE are technical capabilities exposed via service interfaces, which are consumed during the development and/or delivery of agency, business or consumer capabilities.  These technical capabilities provide infrastructure (IaaS) or platform (PaaS) services.  Examples include compute, storage, data management, integration, orchestration, and application development.

Customer-Provider Agreements

A critical component to the success of cloud computing is the customer-provider agreement.  The agreement must provide legal protection for both parties, clearly spell out the financials and terms of service, and protect the information assets and IP of the customer.

While some equate cloud computing agreements and governance to corresponding SOA practices, that is an understatement.  Cloud computing adds the dimension of one, or several, outside parties and therefore the contract and governance practices must incorporate outsourcing concerns and be legally enforcable.

Next Steps

As mentioned in the opening, this post is an introduction to the cloud-o-gram, in its first public release.  As the cloud computing space evolves, so will the cloud-o-gram.

Over time, Elemental Cloud Computing will explore each area of the cloud-o-gram in depth, including representative software, hardware, service and practice offerings. 

If you have questions, comments or suggestions regarding the cloud-o-gram, please leave a comment, ping this post, find me on twitter, or drop an email.

Copyright Notice: Elemental Cloud-o-gram is a copyrighted work of Elemental Links, Inc.