Manju's Blog.....

The 3 top burning issues for IT departments today

2011-04-24T01:21:00.000-07:00

Recently, there was this question posed in one of the linkedin groups, (I thought of sharing my response in this blog) -

What are the 3 top burning issues for IT departments today?

My take (in no particular order).

1. Enabling the enterprise to go after new revenues. IT has thus far optimized the enterprise - streamlining & automating business processes, thus enabling the enterprise to operate efficiently. Though there are incremental values yet to be realized in optimization, there is bigger role for IT to play in increasing business. For example - consumers are more tech savvy than ever. Proliferation of 'always connected' lifestyle a.k.a mobile devices along with Social networks making headway in consumer spending habits. Suddenly the enterprise is looking for IT to help navigate this change.

2. IT today sits on a 'data' treasure trove (note: I deliberately used 'data' instead of 'information' :-) ). Mining this data and gathering useful business intelligence is a challenge. Most large enterprises lack an effective enterprise data architecture and governance. IMHO, this is one of the bigger challenges in large organizations with many 'legacy' systems. Technology is not the issue here (we have had technologies like ETLs, DWH, MDM etc.,). The challenges lie in data stewardship, governance, and basically the culture of the enterprise.

3. In addition to these strategic priorities, IT does have an important role of 'keeping the lights on' function. While this takes a very chunk of IT budget, every IT department faces the challenge on how to free up resources from pure 'lights on' task to invest in strategic priorities. Outsourcing, cloud technologies are few options. While outsourcing and related management has matured, Cloud (Virtualization, *aaS) is still emerging (vendor management, security, integration, SLA, etc.). There are big opportunities here for System Integrators here. In other words, the challenge is how to reduce the operating cost for keeping the lights on without degrading SLA and invest the savings towards strategic objectives.

Voice of the Customer : Love to engage 'Virtually'

2011-04-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

Blame it on technology, consumers no longer prefer the 'personal touch'. Customer Satisfaction goes down every time they have to engage with the enterprise in person. Internet and lately applications on smart phones are enabling more ways for consumers to perform their business. Here are some examples -

Internet and eBusiness enabled online shopping, online banking, bill pay etc.
Lately, banking applications on smart phones allow consumers to deposit their checks without visiting a branch or ATM
Streaming video has almost shutdown video stores
Self serve kiosks, self checkout in grocery stores

This bodes well for business too, reduced labor overhead. The challenge for enterprises to find the right sweet-spot, so they won't delineate their customers. Every consumer facing vertical will have to deal with this challenge differently. While retail (esp. media), can completely go online (or require near zero direct physical interaction with the customer), it is different for hospitality or healthcare verticals (will have to check in into the hotel room, or use hospital services at some point). A challenge for enterprises is to make this physical and virtual interactions seamless. IMHO, this trend is an important input while formulating longer term IT strategies.

Another Arguement for Blackberry to go Android

2010-08-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Follow up from my earlier post (Blackberry, Nokia and Android) , now from eWeek - BlackBerry Smartphones Should Use Android: 10 Reasons Why

SmartPhones - History Repeating ?

2010-07-31T22:23:00.000-07:00

Windows or Mac - is the OS choice for personal computing. (yes, there are many variants of Linux, but their share is minuscule). Over the years, Microsoft Windows supported by many different hardware vendors (albeit on standard hardware platform) gained dominance against the more 'reliable' and 'user friendly' Mac OS. While Mac OS maintained its Niche with a single vendor delivering integrated Hardware and OS and single digit market share, Microsoft Windows thrived on commodity hardware. IMHO, Google has similar opportunity with Android OS.

Agreed, iPhone has the first mover advantage and successfully built a huge critical mass with the app store. Android is following closely and closing the gap. The other Smartphone platforms - Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian are out of the race for dominance, and it would not be surprising if they get clubbed in the "others" category.

Google, in addition to providing SamrtPhone OS, is also providing many compelling cloud based services (like, email, office tools, calendar etc.) to complement and extend SmartPhone features.This, in my opinion is a big change from the past PC evolution days, and plays into the present technology trends.

Following the PC model, I think it is time for Google to partner with hardware companies and define standards similar to the PC mother board, PCI, USB etc. so smartphone hardware can be commoditized and Android OS being the standard.

If not anything else, Silicon Valley being a late entrant in the Mobile handset technologies has stolen the thunder from other established players.

Blackberry, Nokia and Android

2010-07-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years Nokia and RIM (Blackberry) have been loosing market share and also consumer mindshare. Its no secret most people either want a iPhone or an Android device. They choose the alternate either because of cost or their 'Corporate Standard' is the Blackberry. While Blackberry is holding on to its corporate market, Nokia seems to be eroding. There have been many 'iPhone Killer' hype from both Nokia and RIM, none have succeeded so far.

Motorola, which was almost out of the handset/SmartPhone race found a new lease of life, thanks to Android. I think it is time for Nokia (and RIM) to seriously think of making Android based handsets. Yes, there is history and large market share for Symbian, but it may be time for Nokia to hedge its bets. Same with RIM, yes Blackberry is a great email device, but browsing sucks. I think its time for RIM and Nokia to come out of the 'innovator's dilemma' and look for emerging alternatives.

What's wrong with Oralces's "One Vendor - Integrated Stack" Story

2010-05-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

Oracle has been touting the benefits of an integrated technology stack, and the associated benefits for IT departments, in terms of cost, integration and management headaches. While this looks good, is it practical? You get an "integrated stack" only after Oracle makes an acquisition and actually integrates the products/technologies from the acquired company. Oracle Fusion is work in progress for many years, can IT departments wait for an Integrated Technology Stack to materialize from a (single) vendor? Moreover where does this Integrated Technology Stack end? For ex. before Sun acquisition, it was Integrated Middleware Software. Now it is an Integrated Middleware Appliance and maybe few years from now may also include storage, network, Firewalls and other security components in an integrated stack.

There will always be time lag between when you need a technology solution and when you see it as part of an integrated stack. case in point, over the last few years enterprises have been investing to deliver many applications on the mobile (smart phone) platforms. To realize the productivity gains, IT departments had to implement solution now, and not wait till a solution emerges from their one stop technology vendor. I am sure many Oracle IT shops implemented mobile solutions from Sybase. Now Sybase poised to become part of SAP and no similar viable mobile solution from Oracle yet. Its anybody's guess Oracle will acquire few niche mobile platform players in the coming years and possibly integrate their solutions into their larger application portfolio. When that happens, can IT shops that have already implemented Sybase mobile solutions, start over using Oracle's integrated product?

In my opinion, even if one does not look for best for breed software solutions, they still cannot rely solely on a single vendor for all technology needs, simply because the vendor nay not (yet) have the technology needed.

How do you validate the security of a Cloud Provider?

2010-05-12T16:48:00.000-07:00

Few months back, there was a discussion in linked-in group (Cloud Security Alliance), regarding "How do you validate the security of a Cloud Provider?" I listed my thoughts around this.

You need to evaluate security from various aspects -

Identity and Access Management - who gets access to you data and how it is governed
Data - How do you secure data moving between your enterprise and cloud provider
What are policies at the service provider for handling your data. In a multi tenant env. how does the provider ensure your data does is available only to valid users of your organization. What are backup and recovery practices
What policies are in place at the service provider for managing the data center.
Certifications by 3rd party auditors
Data Escrow - this is very important, a copy of your data is available and is in a format that your company can use in case the service provider goes out of business OR relationship with the vendor goes sour.
Periodic auditing and logs review to verify your information is being handled the way it is supposed to be handled
The list goes on.... :-)

The general hope/idea is cloud providers should be able to implement better security practices due to their scale. I had blogged on this topic sometime back, check http://www.gmanju.com/2010/01/saas-security-concerns-for-enterprise.html

Your Corporate Email in the Cloud

2010-05-11T19:59:00.000-07:00

Of late there has been tremendous interest (at least in press and vendor space), for "Email as a Service". This is good news for cloud enthusiasts. Of course it makes all the economic sense for outsourcing corporate email to service providers, especially for SMB's. For large corporations with tens of thousands of users, it may or may not justify purely on cost.

Information Week recently published a good article around this (Link). Large IT vendors like Cisco and Microsoft have joined this race. Many large corporations and even government entities with few thousands of workers have outsourced their email to cloud based service providers.

Chances are most sensitive & confidential information are being emailed within the corporation, hence trusting corporate email to an external service provider is a great leap in the comfort level of corporations. This is a big mindset change since I blogged over two years back regarding "SaaS - Security concerns for Enterprise Adoption".

Nintendo and Apple - Disruption in Gaming

2010-05-09T23:32:00.000-07:00

Few weeks back I had blogged about "Disruptive Changes in Media Delivery". Today I came across this news that Nintendo has designated Apple Enemy of the Future. This is interesting development, and Nintendo has rightfully recognized Apple as its future competition.

Case for Native Mobile Applications

2010-04-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Other than games, some popular Native applications are for News (CNN, etc) and Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). These category of native apps tend to live on the user's device longest. In both these cases, there is lots of dynamic content that the user is really interested in. Additionally, most popular non game native applications deliver user experience or features that cannot be delivered (easily) from a web application. Most often they use some device specific feature. Below are few examples -

Applications that need device specific features or those that can run stand-alone (without need for network connectivity) make perfect use cases for native applications.

Native Mobile Applications and Enterprise IT

2010-04-14T17:49:00.000-07:00

Of late I am looking into delivering applications onto mobile devices and I am intrigued by the popularity of native applications. Essentially you can deliver applications onto mobile devices either as a "Web Application" or a "Native Application". Web application are those that you access from the web browser and Native applications are those that you need to download onto your device and execute it locally on the device. As such any website can be "mobile web application", albeit not user friendly considering the device limitations, hence most popular websites have a mobile version.

Native applications definitely have an advantage, wherein they can locally access device specific features - like CPU/Graphic intensive apps, GPS, microphone, etc., work offline without network connectivity, and deliver cool features. However I am surprised by many Enterprise/e-business applications that are native and offer the exact features that can be delivered by a web application. Would you want to download applications from Amazon, Ebay, Sears, Safeway, Macy's, Nordstrom and every other merchant you shop with, onto your mobile device? You never do this on your PC/Laptop, you simply use your web browser to access these merchant web sites. But still many companies do offer native mobile applications doing exactly what their web counterpart does (maybe add some glossy user interface).

IMHO, Native mobile applications driven by web services on the backend is architecturally very similar to traditional client server model. After all, the reason web applications became popular was to overcome many management issues associated with client server model, especially managing clients. Now, this issue is compounded by the shrewd number of different mobile client devices - iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Plam etc. compared with *mostly* windows on the traditional desktop.

Enterprises taking the native mobile application route will have to pay a heavy price down the road having to support multiple devices (and multiple versions of operating systems and devices). Though there are few development platform vendors trying to simplify development efforts, it still is a costly proposition.

Games make a perfect use case for a native application. They are CPU and graphic intensive, take advantage of device features like accelerometer, camera, etc., and can work completely offline. Its not surprising the most popular native applications are mostly games.

Disruptive changes in Media Delivery

2010-03-24T13:58:00.000-07:00

My neighborhood Hollywood Video rental store is going out of business. Earlier, maybe a year or so back my closest Blockbuster video rental store also shut its doors, and now there are reports of Blockbuster filing for bankruptcy. This made me think of all the other businesses that have been adversely impacted by new technologies.... more so due to these businesses not adopting these emerging technologies and changing consumer behavior. Anything that can be downloaded over the network, there is no need for a brick & mortar store selling the physical media with the same content. Blue-Ray might have won the battle against HD DVD, but my guess is it will ultimately meet its demise soon from online downloads. Hey, we get very good quality (almost DVD quality over DSL bandwidth) streaming videos from NetFlix already.

Music Record stores have already disappeared. Next in the line would be Video Games and maybe books.

An interesting disruption in the video games area, I am not sure if this is a general trend yet. Since my kid got a iPhone touch, the WII usage has dropped significantly. Many games available on iTunes store that are mostly free (or almost free) are pretty entertaining and can satisfy the gaming needs for a sizable gaming population. It makes me think twice to put almost $50 for the next console video game. Could this follow the "Japanese Cars in the US markets", where Japanese introduced small & cheap cars that established US automobile companies did not care, and slowly moved up and spelled trouble for US auto companies. Maybe Nintendo should expand its gaming franchise onto mobile platforms now. Report: iPhone Games Poaching Revenue From Sony, Nintendo

Just few recent examples for why it is important to keep tabs on emerging technologies and altering your business strategy, an area where IT can influence corporate business strategy.

From blogs.sun.com to Blogger

2010-02-26T16:29:00.000-08:00

I have moved my blog posts that I had created over the last 2+ years to this new location at blogger. (Hey, I got my own domain www.gmanju.com :-).

As you may have guessed, I am no longer employed at Sun Microsystems. I have moved into Healthcare IT. As a disclaimer, it is safe to say my blog posts (both past and future) are my own views and not that of my employer.

I hope to continue blogging on IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture and Emerging Technologies and its applications in IT.

Thank You

IT Evolution - Progression towards Cloud Computing (Part III)

2010-01-15T14:51:00.000-08:00

(Earlier blogs in this series - Part I and Part II)

Part III - Cloud Computing
A good definition of cloud computing can be found from many sources, so I will spare myself from coming up with my own definition .

In my opinion, the following two trends in IT Management and Technology development set the foundation for cloud computing -

Technology developments in managing large scale web applications, like rapid & dynamic provisioning, virtualization, etc.
- SLAs took precedence over where or how application or data resided in the data center
IT's Increasing reliance on Service Providers

Realize benefits of using shared resources - resources of Service Provider being shared by many of its clients and hence reduces cost
Vendor Management as a core competency of IT

The above trends will contribute for greater acceptance of cloud computing going forward.
The technology developments mentioned above were adopted in the in-house data center, giving raise to the term Internal Cloud (a.k.a Private Cloud). External Cloud (a.k.a Public Cloud) is delivered by vendors, and popularly known as SaaS, PaaS, Iaas (or 'X'aaS).
While IT can play a vital role in corporate business innovation, it is abundantly clear this is not going to happen by IT spending most of its time and resources managing commodity technology stack. (Nicholas Carr's books "Does IT Matter" and "IT Does'nt Matter" are good reading in this area) Cloud computing provides an opportunity for IT to get away from from mundane tasks and focus on what really matters.

Embracing Cloud Computing
So how does IT deliver using cloud computing? unless absolutely necessary, leverage service providers. Based on this thought, we can envision the following categories of applications -

Developed and deployed in house

Highly specific and customized business processes - this category would not be serviced by service providers (as their value is in reusing across many clients) and hence are to be developed and deployed in house. (Ex. Stock trading application where every fraction of a second matters)
Highly regulated data/information that has to stay in house

Developed in-house but deployed at Service Provider (Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service)

Specific business processes that provide competitive advantage (Ex. An organization has differentiated itself on a highly complex and proprietary Inventory Management or supply chain process)

Generic Applications ( Software as a Service)

Generic processes that are similar across enterprises and do not provide much competitive differentiation (ex. many HR processes like payroll, benefits management etc., some productivity tools)

The below picture is a shot at how IT services could be delivered with adoption of cloud computing.

Adopting cloud computing, while simplifies much of IT operations, introduces a whole lot of management issues to IT. Ex. how to keep track of the information assessts that is now spread across many service providers where IT has no direct control? Integration and Security challenges, etc. In my next post I will address some of these newer challenges to IT.

Part -II : Emergence of outsourcing

2010-01-15T14:47:00.000-08:00

(This is a continuation for earlier blog Part I )

Part -II : Emergence of outsourcing

In the last few years, much of the mundane tasks were outsourced. Vendors with specialized skills for vertical tasks like network maintenance, helpdesk etc., emerged and with their specialized skill sets could perform these tasks better (well, for most part). As outsourcing model evolved, even entire application development and support tasks were outsourced. Vendor Management became a key discipline within IT. The focus shifted from understanding and implementing technology in-house to get the technology implemented from service providers. The picture below shows outsource providers participating in providing IT Infrastructure and developing applications, and importance of Vendor Management within IT.

With this model, vendor employees were provided access to corporate network (either physically or remotely). Remote connectivity and access control became significant so vendors have access to just what they need t perform their job and not the entire corporate information network.

Some generic processes like HR benefits management were outsourced in its entirety, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) gained prominence. Related IT applications were developed and hosted by the vendor. Vendors realized scale by reusing the same applications and shared resources across many of their clients. Internet and related technologies helped realize this.

In my opinion, outsourcing and BPO set the trend for cloud computing (both for internal and external clouds, I will address this soon in the next installment of this series) . Enterprises relied more on external service providers and Vendor Management became a key IT management skill.

In the next installment, I will write on my thoughts on how technologies that make what is now referred to as cloud came about.

IT Evoloution - Progression towards Cloud Computing (Part I)

2010-01-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

(First part of a series of blogs to explore IT evolution and movement towards cloud computing)
Here is my take on how IT can embrace and benefit from cloud computing. Before going into the details on cloud computing, just want to set the stage by providing a very high level overview on scope of IT itself. Traditionally, the role of IT is to provide underlying technology infrastructure to execute the organization's operating model. For this, IT would be responsible to build the underlying infrastructure for -

Organization's data, network and voice requirements
Applications implementing business processes
Client devices and user productivity tools that enable users to perform their job efficiently

Additionally IT is also responsible for protecting the organization's information resources. The image below shows the traditional scope of IT at a very high level.

Notice all the supporting infrastructure that IT has to maintain. Business engagement is mostly at Applications and user experience level (client devices and productivity tools like office tools, email, collaboration tools, IM etc.). So, what is the issue with this picture?

Business Engagement in this model is mostly tactical, as IT is spending most of the resources (70-90%, according to some studies) on maintaining the infrastructure and cannot involve strategically with the business. IT is preoccupied with "keeping the lights on".

Businesses have to adapt quickly to changing market, competition and other external forces. For this, the underlying business processes may have to change. As most of these processes are implemented by IT applications, the expectation from business partners is for IT to be agile.Added to this, rapidly changing technology also takes IT resources to update the infrastructure.

Over the years IT has been moving in the direction to meet business expectations, Enterprise Architecture, Technology standardization, Governance, PMO etc., are all steps towards making IT more agile. Additionaly, IT is also looking to free up resources, by offloading much of mundane tasks to specialized service providers.
In the next part, I will expand on outsourcing and later cloud computing. In the final part, I look at how IT is a organization can benefit and involve more strategically with business.

IT - Business Alignment (Part II)

2010-01-15T14:44:00.001-08:00

Continuing my previous blog on IT-Business alignment, in addition to IT being pro-actively engaging the business, business teams also have a responsibility to be technology savvy. Afterall, every LOB within the enterprise is touched by technology someway or the other. (Remember Porter's Value Chain analysis, technology spans across the genric value adding activities of the enterprise, referenced in my earlier blog).
By technology savvy, I do not mean business teams to understand SOA or SaaS or Virtualization or any simillar IT jargons. At a minimun they should be aware of how technology impacts their business and setup their processes and organization structure to make best use of the technology.

To summarize, IT and businesses should maintian ongoing partnership and not base on a per project basis. It should be talking more in a language that business folks can understand (revenue impact, customer retention etc. rather than geek speak). Note, the role of Enterprise Archiects is to play a key role to bridge this IT-business communication gap.

IT - Business Alignment

2010-01-15T14:34:00.002-08:00

IT-Business alignment is often cited as one of the top priorities for IT, this is true for organizations across the board. It makes me wonder why IT so "mis-aligned" with business? after all we do not hear terms like "manufacturing aligning with business" or "finance aligning with business" etc.

Recently, I had an opportunity to meet few fellow enterprise architects from various large companies at a conference. Casual talk turned into a discussion on IT - Business alignment issues and how business does not understand IT etc. One of the architects made a good comment - "why do you see IT and business separately, last time I checked paycheck for both IT and business folks come from the same source". I found this comment pretty amusing and it made a lot of sense.

So, what is the cause for this mis-alignment and how IT can better align with business (since, IT is a supporting activity it cannot be the other way around). Every business vertical domain, Finance, Supply chain, Manufacturing, Accounting, Marketing etc., has professionals trained in this domain (ex. MBA in FInance, APICS, etc.). Generally, most IT folks are trained exclusively in technology. The disconnect starts from here. Fresh technology graduates, look for implementing or working on perceived cool technologies, weather it provides business value or not. A reason for IT-Business mis-alignment - IT professionals are not trained in business and do not have adequate business knowledge.

Historically, businesses organized their operations based on siloed vertical functions like finance, manufacturing etc. However business processes spanned across these silos, and the touch points often were the cause for in-efficiencies in operations. With IT automating existing processes, while there was dramatic increase in productivity, it also amplified the inefficiencies. Another reason for IT-business mis-alignment - automating inefficient processes. Newer practices and technologies like BPM, EA modeling emerged mainly to address these issues.

Another important issue for IT is to deal with is changes from both sides - technology and business. Capacity planing for IT is a challenge and without good synergy, it is hard for IT to anticipate what is coming down the pipe. This is another major cause for the mis-alignment. The list goes on......

For better IT-business alignment, IT should proactively engage with the business (among other things). Most often, IT engagement is top down - business sees a hole in existing IT system and provides a set of requirements for IT to fix/implement it. For better synergy, IT engagement should be proactive rather than reactive. Some steps towards this direction, IT should anticipate system changes based on wider corporate goals and get engaged with LOB owners, maybe a meeting once a quarter (or semi-annually) to discuss current state and also learn planned strategic business direction from LOB owners, share planned IT investments, technology innovations that would benefit these business owners and solicit feedback. Use this knowledge for proactively updating IT infrastructure.

Another important step for IT professionals is to step into the shoes of the actuall business users, meet external customers whenever there is an opportunity. This will help us in IT understand business pressures and beter serve the needs of the business.... and hopefuly put an end to IT-Business (mis)alignment talks.

Co-opetition and IT Security

2010-01-15T14:34:00.000-08:00

Recently I was reading an article from CIO Magazine (In Tough Economy Chrysler looks to IT to Trim Expenses, Improve Business) and following snippet caught my attention -

"In product development and sales, it appears no partnerships are off-limits. In April, Chrysler signed a deal with Nissan whereby the Japanese manufacturer will supply Chrysler with a version of its subcompact sedan, and Chrysler will give Nissan a version of its full-size pickup. And in July, the American automaker inked a deal with China's Chery to build small cars in Asia that Chrysler can market globally."

Essentially, Chrysler is partnering with two of its competitors hoping all three companies benefit. A classic example of Co-opetition.
This is the current business reality - increasing reliance on partners and it resonates with our own experience also. This business trend poses greater challenge to IT, not just in integration but also security. A recent study by Verizon (2008 Data Breach Investigations Report), found 39% of security breaches were attributed due to partners. Thus, it is extremely important to have robust security in place and Identity Management plays an important role in managing partners. Managing partner users and granting access to just the required resources is a big challenge and would require good systems and practices in place.
Identity management systems should be able to quickly provision and de-provision users, as we are now dealing with not just our own employees, but also employees from "few hundred" partner companies. Identity Federation (ex. SAML), is designed to delegate user authentication resposnibility to the partner's company. In other words the partner company would be the Identity Provider for its employees.

The trend towards Virtual Enterprise (adopting cloud, SaaS, BPO's etc.) adds another dimesion to the complexity for managing partners.......... that's for another day.

Going Green ... and Kids

2010-01-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

If you have kids, you must have seen the goody bags handed out in kids birthday parties. Most often, the stuff are useless (If you do not know what I am referring, try googling "birthday goody bags"). Usually, they go straight to trash, if not will go to trash the same day!.

While on one hand, schools are teaching kids the importance of going green, on the other hand many learning opportunities, ways they can do their share for the good of the environment is missed. Imagine, the goody bag toys - mediocre quality, shipped all the way from China, distributed to stores all across America and goes straight to trash. Its disheartening, at best.

The other day, my pre-schooler made an art-work project in her school. They made a Zebra - using Oreo cookies crumpled in yogurt. Unfortunately, since I had volunteered to help out that day I had to witness the sheer wastage. Almost all the cookies and yogurt that was supplied to the class was thrown after the "art-work". How can the kid realize the value of food when they are made to waste like this? I'am saddened to think a big chunk of children from not so improvised countries hardly get to taste a cookie and here we waste it in the name of art work. I hope schools stop using food for their artwork.

Do you still need an office?

2010-01-15T14:32:00.001-08:00

Technology has been drastically changing the workplace. Consider this, why would anyone have to go a certain place to work? Maybe, it has been a practice historically to go to a work location to work. Think about this

In the good old days, farming was the main source of economy. One had to go to the Farm to work. The small percentage of population that were traders had to physically haul the goods to various markets to hawk them. Thus these markets became their primary physical work location.
Fast forward in time to the industrial revolution and manufacturing sector became major employers. Here again, the factories became the primary physical work location.

Over the last few decades, Services sector has emerged as the largest employer. This trend is well documented here (Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century). An interesting change with services is, it no longer required a fixed physical location to deliver many of the services. Unless, the job involved a front end retail center or a restaurant or similar sectors, there was no need to have the notion of a central physical office from where the services were to be delivered. Think about it, why would an insurance agent or a Mortgage broker or a travel agent needed a physical office? I personally have never been to any of these offices or met these professionals, though I have been their customer for many years. All transaction happen over phone, fax and mail. But we still have physical offices for many professions that can get by without one, could it be because of the historical trend that one has to go to a physical location to do their job (farm, factory, office, market, etc.)?

Combine this trend with drastic advancement in technology has made working remotely both possible and affordable. This has also enabled businesses to engage services from all corners of the world and leverage labor cost arbitrage. Essentially, the physical office footprint is shrinking for many enterprises, they are becoming more virtual (or Virtual Enterprise). These trends have placed increased responsibility on the IT department. IT now not only have to support the remote worker, but also provide connectivity for processes spanning across the enterprise. This, along with regulations around data protection, privacy poses new and greater challenges to IT. Information Security is more important than ever for the virtual enterprise.

Extended Enterprise

2010-01-15T14:31:00.003-08:00

A good reference to the activities in an enterprise is the Value Chain analysis
by Michaeal Porter. Notice Infrastructure and Technology Development
spans across the generic value-adding activities of the enterprise (see
diagram). Each of the generic value-adding activities in the enterprise extends beyond the traditional enterprise boundaries forming an extended value-chain.

An Enterprise today is far different than what it used to be a few years back. It's not just the business processes or value chains that extend beyond the boundaries of the traditional enterprise, even Technology and the Infrastructure extend out of the enterprise boundaries. Internet technologies, SaaS, Cloud Computing, Business Process Outsourcing have all amplified this trend. The actors in the enterprise are no longer limited to its employees. Partners (suppliers, resellers, service providers) have taken a bigger role within the enterprise. Extending the enterprise boundary across partners, service providers, distribution channels and even customers is referred to as the Extended Enterprise.

Extended entrprise pose challenges to IT. Traditional "Firewall Fortress" is no longer applicable. The core IT infrastructure is spread beyond the Enterprise, and may not even be owned or managed by its employees. New security, data privacy, identity management and integration challenges have to be addressed.

With this background, I intend to blog on chanllenges and strategies for IT in the extended enterprise context. I would love to hear your comments and experiences in this area.

PaaS - Platform dependent risks

2010-01-15T14:31:00.001-08:00

Last year I had blogged on the risks associated with PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings that are platform dependent - i.e, create an application on a PaaS platform and it runs only on that vendors platform. (link - PaaS and Platform Dependence). Well we see the impact now. Coghead a PaaS vendor is closing shop as of Feb. 19, 2009. Coghead users have till April 30th to implement alternate solutions. While they can download their data, the applications they have created is all gone.

This should serve as a warning for users to think twice before they bet the farm on a proprietary PaaS solution, irrespective of how large or small the vendor is. The Coghead experience reiterates the need for PaaS platform based on open standards, where we can move the application to another vendor or bring it inhouse.

Enterprise Architecture

2010-01-15T14:30:00.001-08:00

"Enterprise Architecture" is a pretty overloaded term. As such, "Enterprise" is pretty overloaded in the IT world. We come across terms like Enterprise Class Software, Enterprise Application, Enterprise 'this', Enterprise 'that', etc..without a common widely accepted standard to define an Enterprise.

So what is an Enterprise?, most commonly we refer Enterprise as an organization with many sub-organizations like departments, subsidiaries. Enterprises can be large, like a fortune 500 company or the federal government. Enterprises can be small, the corner gas station can be somebody's enterprise.

Enterprise Architecture is all about how the Enterprise works. Every Enterprise has a common purpose - to provide maximum value to its shareholders (or stakeholders). For an enterprise to work efficiently towards this common goal, every part of the enterprise should work like a "well oiled machine". The larger the enterprise, the more complex this becomes, and is is only possible when every component of the enterprise and their interactions with other components is well defined. This definition is the Enterprise Architecture.

Enterprises can never be static they need to adopt to internal and external forces. Some examples of these forces are market and competitive pressure, changing tastes/requirements of its customers, changes in regulation and compliance, capital market pressure etc. Having a well defined Enterprise Architecture enables an enterprise to be more agile and respond quickly to adopt to these forces. By well defined, I mean documented or modeled.

So, what has Enterprise Architecture to do with IT?

IT implements the operating model of the enterprise, it spreads across the departments to implement the organization's business processes in IT systems. IT has the view of how every component of the Enterprise works. Hence a large part of the Enterprise Architecture can be documented by IT. However, IT as an organization cannot define the Enterprise Architecture, it can only document it.

Within IT, more often we see the scope of Enterprise Architecture getting narrowed. Its pretty common to see a model of IT implementation being referred to as Enterprise Architecture. Usually, these architectures define the software systems, data models, Server and hardware deployments, network architectures and a well defined processes to review any new implementation to ensure adherance to architecture and technology roadmaps. In my opionion this amounts to IT architecture and IT operating model rather than Enterprise Architecture. Ofcourse, IT architecture has its own importance in the Enterprise but it is not the Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture is all about the business processes that create value (or server the purpose of the organization), the underlying IT systems that implement these processes and the people that interact with these processes.

Enterprise Architecture should encompass contribution from both IT and business. It also sets the foundation for IT-Business alignment. In future blog posts, I plan to writing more on Enterprise Architecture, IT Startegy, IT-Business alignment etc. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this posting.

PaaS and Platform dependence

2010-01-15T14:29:00.001-08:00

What bothers me with many Platform as a Service (PaaS) implementations is the platform dependence. Do not get me wrong, I like PaaS concept and also the benefits it provides. However many PaaS implementations today are proprietary, meaning applications developed on a particular vendor platform can only be deployed on that vendor's platform ONLY.

If you are an Entrepreneur, why would you want your product dependent on a single PaaS vendor platform? by this you are not only restricting your customer base, but also dependent on the PaaS service provider for your own survival. If the service provider goes out of business or drastically changes the terms/cost you would go out of business. Similarly, for in-house IT applications, a proprietary PaaS platform is a risky bet. Its easy to get seduced into using a PaaS platform for implementing quick short lived solutions. However, we all know "that temporary stop gap solution" expected to be in place for a few months is still being used and built upon after few years!., so do your homework before diving into implementing something on PaaS. Ask a basic question "If I do not like the service provider or if the service provider cannot meet the SLA's can I move my application onto a different Service Provider or bring the application in-house?".

Only PaaS based on established open standards can deliver vendor independence. In my opinion, vendors that deliver PaaS based on open platforms will enjoy success in the long run.