The Full Kernick

Carefully exceeding the mandate

2012-07-09T01:01:00.000+01:00

It strikes me that many enterprise architecture groups are stuck in IT departments desperate to break free from the shackles of solution architecture and talk to the business yet hampered by a constrained job description, limited by their own leaders' perceptions and invisible to leaders beyond IT walls. So often I hear people talk about their practice of enterprise architecture as though the bonds have been broken. On deeper questioning, however, it becomes clear the mandate under which they are operating remains unchanged. I cannot help feeling that these groups are simply delusional. I wonder too how they continue to deliver on their restrictive mandate as they must be spending a large amount of time doing things for which they have none.

There is no easy answer on to how to draw an enterprise architecture group out of the shadow of IT. I suspect the answer is different for every group and every organisation - as is the nature of cultural change. My suggestion is to ensure you pay attention to deliver the things you are tasked with and be intentional (I mean really develop a plan for it) about nudging those around towards a different view of the your true value. I don't believe this is an enormously difficult task if approached in the right way and with the right set of skills. I believe this because I believe in the value of architecture at the enterprise level.

Who is accountable for application sprawl?

2012-06-26T00:37:00.002+01:00

In my last post I mentioned application sprawl. In many organisation, like self replicating nano-bots, the list of applications that enables the business to function increases uncontrollably. The IT organisation tries to bring some order to this chaos with limited success.

We try demand management techniques, which may be designed to help people to stop and think but are largely seen as barriers to change,dampeners on the springs of agility. We enforce standards, erect governing bodies and create IS Strategies (aligned with business strategies, of course). Despite all this effort there are still the exceptions justified by "my case is special"; and let's not open the can of worms that is self-built solutions - those excel spreadsheets, access databases and (heaven forbid) the unauthorised use of free services on the web.

This is application sprawl, and it exists to some degree or another in every organisation large enough to have an IT department (and probably many that don't as well).

Who is accountability for this sprawl? In the end it is the holder of the purse strings who fail to understand the implications of their decisions, the leaders who create the culture that nurtures this behaviour and the watchmen who understand what is happening and fail in their task to open the eyes of others. In my experience ongoing, open discussion, developing a mutual understanding (often teasing these out through interrogation) of the motivations, showing pragmatism not dogmatism and playing the long game (not winning every battle) is the most effective approach.

In the end, this is not a tug-of-war between IS and "The Business"; this is about recognising an issue that affects the bottom line of the organisation and working together to resolve it.

The need for an application inventory

2012-06-24T14:28:00.000+01:00

Application Sprawl is an ever present reality for enterprise architects. Is it the role of EA or the IT organisation to constrain this sprawl? Does such constraint hamper business innovation? Or is the limitation in agility a worthwhile price considered against the long term consequences of an unmanaged, unconstrained application portfolio? Is application rationalisation a reality or is the way we look at platform services creating an illusion that is simply masking sprawl of a different sort?

It is logical that platforms of shared capability or components that are reused will be cheaper to operate and maintain than duplicated capabilities – especially those built on different technologies. Killing two birds with one stone increases return on investment receives little argument. This is as true of technology as any other aspect of the enterprise; or life - the TV in my kitchen doubles as a computer monitor. However, shared platforms simply create another container for more applications. Is a dashboard less of a business application than a web application simply because it is hosted on a BI platform and not an application server? To be absurd you might reduce the whole data centre to one application.

In order to manage something you must first quantify that thing. Or, to put it simply in the context of business applications, you need an inventory of the applications you are managing. This may sound simple, even trite; but it is much more difficult to achieve. In part because there are different viewpoints of the landscape, and each would create a different list. Of course, I will contend that the business view is the most important. And, of course, there is the temporal layer – the inventory past, present and future. Add in the complication of solutions created without the centralised oversight – those access databases and excel spreadsheets – and the task resembles the proverbial herding of cats.

I have lost count of the discussions I have been in attempting to answer the question: “What is an application?” You need to sort this out within your organisation, and capture specific meanings that you will attribute to terms like Systems, Subsystems, Components, Applications and Solutions. I will expand on this in a future post on business context; for now we may agree simply that there are many ways to count the components in your application landscape.

So, do you think it is as important as I am suggesting? How do you go about creating an inventory of applications?

Consumerisation trundles on

2011-11-21T20:19:00.001+00:00

A friend just posted a link to "Client4Cloud: Desktop Transformation to Universal Clients" that got me thinking again about the whole consumerisation thing. Quick context: I haven't read the book, although I've just skimmed the sample, so I'm not saying anything about the content or message of the book - simply that it's appearance on my facebook stream of news has prompted this post.

Here's one scenario that has always seemed to me to be a barrier to consumerisation; at least for now. Let's assume we deliver a virtual desktop to our workforce and allow them to bring in their own device (laptop, ipad, whatever). One of the employees comes in today and says his laptop is broken. He's taken it in for repair and it will be a week, so he's a bit stuck and can't do his job. Whose responsibility is it now that he is unproductive?

Of course, there are loads of ways around this. We could have a stock of loaner laptops to dish out in times such as this. However, it just all starts to look rather untidy. We're still managing kit, which consumerisation was supposed to get away from. I'm sure it works better on a small scale with a workforce in the 10's; but scale this up to thousands and I just don't see it.

The flip side is give everyone a laptop that is not locked down, controlled and inflexible. Use virtualisation to deliver the standard set of tools and isolate it from the user-play-area in which enables the employee to make a productive tool for her to do her work.

The world has moved a long way since the early days of machine and then application virtualisation. I haven't really kept a close watch on this area for a few years, but I'm about to do another round. It will be interesting to see what's changed while my eyes have been diverted on other things.

Managing Requirements

2011-11-06T01:30:00.002+00:00

I just posted these thoughts on managing requirements on G+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103322217256114006757/posts/5ZBmgU1umq7

Sailesh wrote an interesting post on requirements here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115629371379295233882/posts/7sTEwaUA6Cj.

I agree with him that management of requirements is so important, but a challenging thing to do and not helped by the tools we have at our disposal. Nevertheless, manage them we must and I organise the requirements I come across into Business strategy, Functional requirements and Deficiencies.

Strategy/Vision is perhaps not strictly speaking a set of requirements. However, as change can arise directly from strategic initiatives I capture them as requirements, although I might equally create functional requirements derived from strategy elements.

Functional requirements are things that we would like to, but are currently unable to do. This might be launching a new product or reducing travel through the use of video conferencing. Deficiencies capture requirements that address things that aren't quite right in the way the business operates or in the applications, data or systems we use.

I intend (but don't always succeed because the model isn't complete) to trace all functional requirements and deficiencies back to a source: either business drivers (captured as strategy requirements) or business process or technology.

I am using Sparx EA to model requirements along with the conceptual model I have been building of the business process and application landscape. As Sailesh points out, the tools available aren't great, but manage requirements we must... so a man's gotta do... I'd love to know how others have tackled this challenge.

Managing the Mix

2011-10-09T20:36:00.001+01:00

I presented a 5 year plan to the board last week. One aspect of the presentation that seemed to resonate really well was an adaptation from the Pragmatic EA Framework's Enterprise Debt. However, I re-badged the terms Remedial, Tactical and Strategic as Deficient, Temporary and Permanent.

I found the term Remedial a bit ambiguous - is it a remedy or in need of a remedy? The intent is 'in need of', but to avoid confusion I chose deficient. We live with deficiency in all aspects of our lives - I have a headache, but I soldier on; the handle on the toilet is wonky, but it still flushes OK so I leave it be; we are a headcount down in our department; our systems don't integrate. Some deficiencies obviously more severe than others.

To address deficiencies we find a remedy, which can either be temporary or permanent. I prefer this to tactical and strategic, largely because tactical has become associated with quick, dirty and cheap, and strategic with expensive and (potentially) over engineered - at least they have in my mind.

So the distinction I draw is whether the remedy will no longer be used, replace by a different solution, at a planned point in time, or one with no foreseeable event that will trigger replacement, even if a desirable replacement exists. Many solutions are built with every intention to replace them, but that replacement never comes - hence the emphasis on a known point in time or triggering event.

Putting this into the presentation gave the roadmap a sense of pragmatic commercial awareness, which can often be lacking when the focus is on technology. It acknowledges that in all areas, technology included, we manage the mix of deficiencies and remedial measures (temporary and permanent). Each section of the roadmap referred to the changes in terms of deficiencies and temporary or permanent remedies.

I didn't get into the ratio measurement proposed in PEAF, partly because the application inventory doesn't use this language yet and partly to take small steps in introducing this new language/model; let it gain traction and then develop it.

I encourage you to read PEAF. How have you used this concept?

UPDATE: So I abused the PEAF terms, doing something a bit different. Made sense in the context of painting current state. I'll have to read over the PEAF material again.

Some good reminders

2008-06-25T22:49:00.004+01:00

Andrew McAfee has posted some interesting articles on the adoption of E2.0 applications. His most recent post, Is Management the Problem?, seems, inadvertently, to be a pretty good summary of these posts.

Is this just because he's been right all along ;-)?

I'm convinced that our success with news feeds (RSS et al) is due, in no small part, to getting senior management to experience it and use it. I can see the same pattern emerging (oops, no pun intended) with some E2.0 apps, although I'm not prepared to say which here.

Nokia that Symbian

2008-06-24T16:10:00.001+01:00

Wow, this is interesting.

Nokia Corp. Resources | ZDNet

Nokia is to buy out Symbian and set up a new open-source platform with Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoMo, forming a major rival to Google's Android The mobile open-source world suddenly has a very major new player, after it emerged on Tuesday that the Symbian, Series...

587 days

2008-06-20T08:31:00.003+01:00

Got this in my inbox today.

Hello from Weebly!

It looks like it's been 587 days, 21 hours, 57 minutes and 37 seconds since you last logged in...

Of course I'd completely forgotten what Weebly was all about and what my password was. The Weebly folk did something clever that I've not seen before, they included in the email a link to log in if I have forgotten my password. With the barrier to entry so lowered I clicked the link.

I remember this site, which 587.92 days ago was unusable. It's a simple web site editor and was usable enough for me to have a quick play and publish. You can create two types of content - pages and blogs (although you'll probably only have one of the latter). It reminds me a bit of jotspot, which is based on a wiki model.

Unless you fear the evil of Google I'd use Google Sites.

Social Network Fatigue

2008-04-29T15:24:00.003+01:00

Not for the first time I received yet another invite to Naymz. I just don't want to get into yet-another-social-networking-tool (just crying out for an acronym - YASNT).

Anyway, all the people who have invited me so far are people I'm connected to with Linked-In. Where's the added value?

So far I've just declined. Nothing personal, you understand.

Youtube Warp

2008-04-28T15:06:00.003+01:00

I've only just noticed that when you view a youtube video in full screen you can click on the Warp icon and explore related videos in a way reminiscent of Digg's visualisations. Nice.

Google generation

2008-03-31T08:34:00.002+01:00

This interesting report on the British Library web site was pointed out to me recently. It does a good job of debunking some of the myths that I have heard perpetuated about Gen Y.

Dark clouds approaching

2008-03-16T22:18:00.004+00:00

Do we have a problem looming? With the popularisation of folksonomies as a means of categorisation will we see tag clouds being built into several applications and how will we (and will we want to) join these clouds?

I fear the worst. Is there a standard XML expression for a tag cloud? I haven't found one.

Consumers ahead to stay

2008-03-13T22:53:00.005+00:00

In the '90s and into the early part of this decade it was fair to assume that the enterprise (well the big ones anyway) had the better technology. You would expect to find the IT department bringing out the new gizmo's that really enabled you to do something more, better, faster, easier. Largely due to cost, but also because of the low penetration of fast, pervasive networks, the consumer market was some way behind.

The tables have turned. Mobile technology is giving people access to their personal emails and 'the cloud', but connectivity into the enterprise is lagging. People stream media around their house, have terabytes of storage at sub-£500 prices and are used to anywhere, any-device access to their data stored with online services such as Google Docs or Zimbra.

The expectation is that the enterprise should still be leading the charge, and I don't think that is possible anymore. The constraints for the enterprise are just so different. It doesn't matter if you stream a video into your home and your backup doesn't run, or it takes a bit longer for an email to arrive. In the enterprise that matter a huge amount, and we're serving the needs of thousands, not a handful. Although protecting personal data is important to everyone, your phone holds your data. The phone the company gives you holds data about clients, the company or its personnel, and management and security of these devices becomes a constraining factor.

We (the IT department) need to help bring the realisation to our customers in the business that you won't see it here first anymore; you'll buy it on the high street. We also need to help the leaders (who see the consumer technology as unnecessary toys) to see the value, when it's there, and to be courageous in bringing the right technologies and services into the enterprise.

Microsoft super standards mode

2008-03-04T08:02:00.000+00:00

What a name - "Super Standards", should be something like "Finally Compliant". Of course this doesn't remove Windows Only features like ActiveX from the web.

Well, it makes me happy anyway.

Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

In the end — regardless of why Microsoft really is making this change — the decision to make standards mode the default in IE 8 should make many happy.

Feeds and Traffic

2008-02-26T23:27:00.003+00:00

A part of the adoption of RSS/Feeds inside EY involved discussions about what effect this would have on peoples browsing habits and what are the possible knock on effects. Would a desktop reader create, for example, capacity issues on our firewall or internal web servers?

The end result is that it's almost impossible to predict. However, the question came up again recently and, as we now have several feeds, I did a quick check. The xml file of the main feed on our Intranet site was 7k. The home page was 341k.

The most basic computation based on 7k returned every time the reader refreshes the feed on an hourly schedule shows that about 5 days worth of feed updates is equivalent to one visit to the home page.

The feed is only updated two or three times a day. When the xml file hasn't changed the web server returns a 304 (Not Modified) http status code - a tiny fraction of the 7k. Therefore the real value equates to 19 days or 26 if you add weekends in for free.

It's got to look like feeds will reduce traffic.

The counter argument to this is that people will be more aware of updates and therefore it will drive up visits to sites. This may be true, but I have no way to measure it. If it is then, assuming the content is work related, this can only be a Good Thing. It is, after all, one of the fundamental benefits of the technology.

It's a wired world

2008-02-26T23:21:00.001+00:00

As I look over the different technology elements involved in the creation of my combined feed I can't help but be amazed.

There are three sources: My blog (the simple Atom feed), NewsGator clippings (stuff I tag in my reader, FeedDemon, in RSS) and Del.icio.us (stuff I tag with tfkfeed in delicious, also in RSS)

These three feeds are merged, de-duplicated and sorted by publish date by a Yahoo Pipe and spat out as a single RSS stream.

This RSS stream flows through FeedBurner, which truncates the posts, and creates a combined-format feed that is more broadly compatible than standard RSS or Atom.

We've been pretty successful in Ernst & Young at utilising feeds. We've got many internal sources producing feeds, not just blogs. Some of our knowledge repositories and portals will display content in a mini-reader. All desktops have a feed reader (other than the rather incapable embedded ones).

I'm working now to raise awareness of what comes after this, and although it will take some time before we see anything like the picture I've painted above, I'm looking forward to challenge.

Copyright conscience

2008-02-26T22:52:00.004+00:00

For obvious reasons I don't subscribe to the feed on my own blog, but did so the other day just to check that the feed-reader-clippings-yahoo-pipes thing is working. It is, but there's no distinction between content that is my own and that from other sites, although the links are clearly to the source. Nevertheless, I feel this potentially misrepresents other peoples content as my own have set the combined feed to summarise. This final step is done by FeedBurner, which I've been using all along in order to track subscription.

I realise this may reduce the value of the feed, but I don't feel comfortable doing otherwise.

Delicious Yahoo Pipes

2008-02-21T14:41:00.002+00:00

So now I added del.icio.us into my Yahoo Pipe. I haven't used del.icio.us for a Long Time now, despite having the toolbars, I just don't think to tag things there. Well, in an effort to see if it's just habit on my part or really No Longer Useful I've joined it into my feed pipe.

Now if I tag something in del.icio.us with the tag tfkfeed it will flow through the same Yahoo Pipe that is currently joining my Google Reader (now no longer used) and my four FeedDemon clip folders. The nice thing about del.icio.us is that I can add a description that becomes the body of the RSS feed, so it's like a mini post that only goes into the feed.

Whilst in pipes I created a new pipe that joins my posts feed and this combined clip/del.icio.us feed into one. So now through one feed it's possible to track everything all my tech related streams.

All of this is making me want to try out Flock. Never done that.

Neighbourhoods

2008-02-12T08:54:00.003+00:00

This looks interesting, but can we spell it right?

Andrew McAfee

Awareness Networks builds, hosts, and deploys integrated E2.0 suites for an impressive roster of customers ... When they described how neighborhoods work within Awareness, I think I said "Great idea!" out loud.

Each Awareness installation is called a ‘community,’ and each community can contain multiple neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are simply ways to categorize the content that gets contributed over time, and are defined in advance by the people who commissioned the site. Since these people are usually the bosses of the company (or are at least acting on their behalf) neighborhoods tend to reflect the formal organizational structure or goals of the company, or some combination of the two.

Linking back

2008-02-12T08:51:00.001+00:00

Moving to FeedDemon as my feed reader has introduced an annoying side effect. The corporate browser is IE, so although I have FF installed on my machine it is not the default browser. I use ScribeFire for quick blog posts like this one and I haven't found a suitable equivalent in IE (not that I've searched very hard given that I do most of my browsing in FF). Whilst using Google Reader I was reading posts in FF too, so quick blogs were a simple matter. Now FeedDemon has taken my blog reading back into the world of IE and broken the link to quick and easy posting.

This extra copy URL-switch to FF-paste routine was certainly becoming a barrier to me making some posts. However, I found the entry below on the Channel9 forum that shows how to create a right-click menu entry for 'Open in FF'. Now I can easily bounce links from FeedDemon (and from IE) into FF from where I can use ScribeFire to post.

Barrier lowered, posting continues.

IE add-on: Open In Default Browser

In Firefox an extension exists - IE View - to open a link target in IE. I asked if a similar extension could be created for IE - Sven pointed out that it could. This IE add-on will allow you to click on a link in IE, and open its target in your default browser. Sven's version allows you to open the target in Firefox.

Has anyone a recommendation for posting direct from IE?

Blog beginnings

2008-02-11T16:00:00.003+00:00

I first came across Ricardo on Linked-In, where he had answered a question. He caught my attention because he works for PWC, a competitor to Ernst & Young (where I work). So I pinged Ricardo and we've been tracking each other's blogs. It was interesting reading Ricardo's post on the origins of his blog as it matches so closely to my own.

I started a blog internally about two years ago and recently decided to 'go public' for similar reasons to those given by Ricardo. However, I still actively maintain my internal blog and probably post equally frequently to both.

This motivated me to write a post about identities that has been stewing since I Roo Reynolds made a remark at the Online Information Exhibition I attended in December 07. Roo said that he has only one identity and it keeps him honest. Personally, I have lots of identities and I don't have any desire to mix them.

This blog is my professional identity, although I might post a bit of personal stuff in here. I do more personal stuff internally, partially out of fear of identity theft. I have several social networking persona's, the two main ones being Linked-In (professional) and Facebook (social). FB is the closest I get to publishing anything about my life on the web. If FB gave me the ability to have circles of friends I might do this more.

I have considered (but with four children never spared the time) setting up a private blog with logins in order to share my life with my closest family and friends who are scattered across the globe.

As bit of an aside: on identity theft the stories don't get much funnier that this.

What do other's think? Do you keep your worlds apart or throw everything into one bucket?

UPDATE: Someone sent me this link. It's an interesting read, but I think it's overdone. Sure there are people who exhibit extreme behaviours between different identities, most of us just reflect who we are in an appropriate way. In this post, however, I was thinking more about who I want to hear me. I'll tell my wife my deepest secrets, I won't blog them here. I'll tell my friends I'm looking for a new job, I won't post it here or on my internal blog, or on FB. I'll discuss some technical interest here, but internally will post about how EY could respond or use it.

Right now I have to have a separate application for each group and no tool yet enables me to break down my contacts into smaller groups and direct, at the level of a message, communications to these small groups. I'm guessing the future is not far off when I'll be able to do this in something like FB.

FeedDemon - 14 days

2008-02-08T15:02:00.000+00:00

I've been using FeedDemon for two weeks now. Here are my thoughts:

+ I have two machines so the way sync'ing just happens is great.
+ Gives me access to both internal and external feeds in one place. When I was using Google Reader I started ignoring Bandit and missed internal updates for extended periods.
+ Reports to help me manage dead feeds. Probably comparable, although quite different, to Google Reader.
+ Clip folders have given a bit more structure and context to posts that are of interest. I never really used the tagging in Google Reader.
- The toolbar for each feed (to flag, share, mark read etc) is at the top of the feed, so I keep scrolling up and down.
+- I initially missed the auto-mark-read-as-I-scroll feature of Google Reader, but now I'm not so sure. I quite like being in control of when feeds are marked read.
- I would to have the option for links to open in new tabs by default, instead I have to remember to click on the little icon next to the feed title. I guess once in the habit I won't mind this so much.
+ Prefetch seems an excellent feature, although I haven't needed to use it yet.
- The keyboard shortcuts seems a bit odd. Ctrl-Shft-A to mark a feed as read, Ctrl-R to mark the whole folder of feeds as read. On the plus side you can configure all the keyboard shortcuts.
- FeedStation doesn't auto clean up on a per feed basis. Some podcasts are daily, some weekly or less frequent. I use Juice and will continue to do so.

So the big question. Google Reader or FeedDemon? Nyah, it's an easy one. FeedDemon, and for this one reasons (or is it really two) above all else:

Combined internal/external with the sync'ing between machines (at least for the external feeds)

Carrots and what

2008-02-08T13:49:00.001+00:00

So what is the perfect accompaniment to a carrot? If this happens, what else will sell out? I say hummus.

Facebook users plot global carrot rampage

More than 60,000 people from an online group have pledged to swarm supermarkets and buy out their supply of carrots in one day in a bizarre mission labeled "impossible" by vegetable growers.

Laying traps

2008-02-08T09:38:00.001+00:00

Terry Doerscher posts a very interesting and eloquent entry on balancing the need for directive control and to give freedom to flourish in the work of Knowledge Workers. Quite rightly he concludes with no prescriptive answer, as there isn't one. I'm no expert on this matter and haven't the time to read even the two books Terry mentions let alone the library of thought that no doubt exists around this topic. Coming at this from a technical view we need to widen roads and lay traps.

People will use the tool that enables them to do what they need to do in the most efficient way. Efficiency means that not having to ask anyone for permission or assistance to get this done. People will sacrifice their contribution to the Greater Good if necessary. In other words, the tools we provide need to be obvious to use and unhindered by bureaucracy. (This reminds me of Andrew McAfee's post on The 9X Email Problem; if you need to make people change from what they are doing now the hill is so much steeper.)

Then there are the traps; not preventative measures but ones that capture what people are doing without requiring them to do anything different. This is the emergent attribute of technology that is at the heart of Enterprise 2.0 software. If we can harness every day activities and link them into the collective organisation in a way that contributes to the Greater Good then we gain something for nothing.

I'll conclude then to say that emergence will be a key technology contribution to the solution.

Planview - Blogs - Enterprise Navigator: Dancing on the Edge of a Razor Blade

Drawing upon the works mentioned and your basic daily observation, we know that knowledge workers, in particular, professionals, tend to be a highly independent sort and very cat-like. When you get right down to it, we like to do what we want and do it the way we want to, not necessarily how someone else wants us to. In fact, we are generally loath to take direction. Nor are we inclined to clue anyone else in on what it is that we are doing or our methods or progress, if we can avoid it. We want to establish our own list of tasks, set our own priorities for them, and figure out how to pull it all off without any help or oversight.