The Pros & Cons of Web Services, May 13, 2002.

Remember the heady dot.com days circa 1999? We thought we were reinventing business, forming a New Economy, revolutionizing the essential nature of commerce. In our dreams! By late 2001 the bubble had burst, and what we thought was a new paradigm for business—the World Wide Web—turned out to be little more than a new marketing channel.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to disparage the power and importance of the Web. After all, the Web, and the Internet in general, have deeply affected so many aspects of business today. It’s hard to remember the time when you had to talk to a teller to use a bank or a stockbroker to trade stocks! But we were wrong that the Web was a revolution. It wasn’t a paradigm shift. Fundamentally, the rise of the Internet was more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Not wanting to succumb to this delusion again, ZapThink has long held that the rise of SOA was also more evolutionary than revolutionary. We point to many SOA best practices, including abstracted interfaces, encapsulation, loose coupling, and iterative approaches to dealing with changing requirements, among others—all practices that were already well-known and favored before SOA came along. SOA  moved the ball forward, to be sure, but didn’t fundamentally change the way we tackled distributed computing. It wasn’t a true paradigm shift, because we didn’t have to throw out old ways of thinking and replace them with new ways. Instead, we leveraged the existing approaches while tweaking and improving them.

Today, however, ZapThink is willing to go out on a limb and proclaim that we now have a true revolution on our hands. A true paradigm shift in the world of IT is afoot, one that is already forcing us to discard old ways of doing things, in favor of new approaches, new technologies, and new ways of thinking. Yes, we’re talking about ZapThink’s vision for Enterprise IT in 2020 with its five Supertrends and multiple Crisis Points. We’ve already laid out the context for the turbulence that is already underway and yet to come. But we haven’t explained why we’re calling this period in time a revolution. Why does this decade herald a true revolutionary change, when even the dot.com period (aka “Web 1.0”) of 1994-2001 didn’t qualify?

The Context for Revolutionary Change

The most familiar revolutions, of course, are political—the American Revolution, the French Revolution, etc. The author most responsible for extending this definition beyond the political sphere was Thomas Kuhn, whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions discussed the nature of revolutions such as the Copernican Revolution or the one leading to the Atomic Theory of Matter. Such revolutions in the process and theory of science represented periods of dramatic change, requiring intellectuals of the day to discard old ways of thinking and replace them with new ones—often over the course of a generation, as the old guard eventually died off. Kuhn also coined the term paradigm shift to refer to such upheaval in ways of thinking. (Yes, if you ever wondered where the notion of paradigm shifts came from, it was Thomas Kuhn who came up with the whole idea).

Kuhn’s book was so influential that his notions of revolutions and paradigm shifts expanded well past the realm of the history of science into virtually any area of human endeavor. His insights, after all, applied to fundamental aspects of human thought and behavior: human endeavors don’t progress evenly and gradually, but rather in fits and starts, and occasionally there’s a large upheaval that resets the playing field. But not every change represents a paradigm shift, and not every trend is revolutionary.

Revolution vs. Evolution

How then do we know we’re truly in a revolution, and not simply another period of evolution like the dot.com or SOA eras? Kuhn points out that, well, it’s harder than it sounds. People often don’t recognize that a revolution has taken place until well after the fact. It’s not like one day somebody wakes up and realizes that the way they were doing things is suddenly obsolete. In fact, the pre-revolutionary patterns often persist well into the revolutionary period, even though in retrospect it becomes clear their days were numbered.

Another reason why revolutions are hard to identify while in the midst of them is that the changes are numerous, often sporadic, and typically subtle. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the moons of Jupiter, it’s not clear that he realized he was helping to change an entire civilization’s world view. When the Catholic Church forced him to recant his discoveries, I’m sure the church authorities had no idea they were fighting a losing battle. Only in retrospect can we place these events into the proper context of the Copernican Revolution.

A third impediment to identifying a revolution in progress is the clichéd nature of the terms revolutionary and paradigm shift. It seems that every technology startup these days touts their new widgets as being revolutionary paradigm shifts. Hell, it seems that every minor improvement in laundry detergent or automobile oil is revolutionary. It’s no wonder we’ve become jaded about the entire subject. If the marketeers tout every minor improvement as revolutionary then nothing is revolutionary.

That is, until a real revolution comes along.

Why ZapThink 2020 Signals a Revolution

If we only spotted one trend (like SOA) or one disruptive change (e.g., the Web replacing tellers and stockbrokers), then we might have a hint of a revolution, but more likely than not, we’d be wrong to apply the term. However, there are simply too many different forces of change impacting IT today, and in turn, impacting business in general to consider such changes to be an evolutionary trend. We have Cloud Computing, mobile computing, the threat of Cyberwarfare, the rise of social media, the app store model for purchasing software, outsourcing, insourcing, complex systems engineering…the list goes on and on. Any of these trends taken separately may be considered evolutionary, but put them together and there are strong hints of a paradigm shift in progress.

The second aspect of ZapThink 2020 that indicates a revolution in progress is the potentially disruptive nature of the Crisis Points. While the Stuxnet worm may have only disrupted Iranian power plants, the next professionally designed cyberattack promises much greater disruption. And while buying enterprise-class apps via your phone is novel, it has yet to put one of the big enterprise app vendors out of business. So, we won’t really know just how disruptive this paradigm shift will be until after the fact.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of an ongoing revolution is the evolving perspective on change, and the role technology has in supporting it. People are simply getting fed up with inflexible technology. We’re sick and tired of legacy that slows down our organizations and sucks up our budgets. The need for greater agility drove the move to SOA, but SOA alone doesn’t solve our inflexibility problems, in large part because SOA is part of the old paradigm. What we need is a new paradigm for architecture-driven agility that is inherently different than today’s architectural approaches. It’s the fact that we’re already seeing the shift to this new paradigm that is the primary reason we’re calling this point in time a revolution.

The ZapThink Take

The most challenging aspect of identifying a revolution is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to do so while it’s still in progress. We understand this challenge, and realize that we may be wrong about the whole affair. After all, there are still so many unanswered questions. For example, in 20 years when we look back on this time, what will we call the revolution? We can guess, but there’s no way to know what the next big thing will be until it’s finally here.

Perhaps we can look back at the last revolution for inspiration—the postwar Information Revolution that heralded the Information Age. Starting with Colossus cracking the Nazi’s Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, through the rise of digital, programmable computers to the networked world we have today, no one can disagree that the rise of computing disrupted the pre-computer ways of thinking and conducting business, leading to an entirely new context for human endeavor writ large. But no single innovation, no single disruption signaled the revolution. Only in retrospect can we take all the disruptions together and recognize a true paradigm shift.

We’re the first to admit, therefore, that we may be completely wrong about what we call the Agile Architecture Revolution. And we may not know how right we were for another twenty years. But we can say that rethinking how we approach agility will be a critical enabler for organizations over the next ten years and beyond. Whether agile architecture heralds a revolution may be too hard to say with any certainty, but agile architecture is undoubtedly here to stay.

“There’s perception and there’s reality,” he began. “The perception in the market is it’s yesterday’s news. It’s too difficult. Web services had too many complexities. We’ve moved on to the cloud, so SOA’s dead.

“The reality,” he continued, “is there is more SOA than ever going on. There are huge initiatives going on. But because of the perception, they’re being called something else: enterprise integration, regulatory compliance. But if you get architects together, they look at it and go, ‘Yeah, it’s SOA.’ ”

Read the entire article at http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=36566&print=true

Read the entire article at http://informationweek.in/Cloud_Computing/12-05-09/Cloud-Oriented_Architecture_and_the_Internet_of_Things.aspx.

Cloud Computing Podcast

Still it could take GSA and contractors some time to adjust to FedRAMP, which is expected to be rolled out in phases.

“It’s a lot of bureaucracy, and it’s going to take a while to work out all the kinks,” said Jason Bloomberg, president of McLean-based cloud company ZapThink.

Read the entire article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/gsa-readies-fedramp-to-improve-cloud-security/2012/05/04/gIQAinEK6T_story.html.

Every specialization has its own jargon, and IT is no different—but many times it seems that techies love to co-opt regular English words and give them new meanings. Not only does this practice lead to confusion in conversations with non-techies, but even the techies often lose sight of the difference between their geek-context definition and the real world definition that “normal” people use.

In our Licensed ZapThink Architect course, for example, we spend far too long defining Service. This word has far too many meanings, even in the world of IT—and most of them have little to do with what the rest of the world means by the term. Even words like business have gone through the techie redefinition process (in techie-speak, business means everything that’s not IT).

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that techies have hijacked the word Agile. In common parlance, someone or something is agile if it’s flexible and nimble, especially in the face of unexpected forces of change. But in the world of technology, Agile (Agile-with-a-capital-A) refers to a specific category of software development methodology. This definition dates to 2001 and the establishment of the Agile Manifesto, a set of general principles for building better software. In the intervening decade, however, Agile has taken on a life of its own, as Scrum, Extreme Programming, and other Agile methodologies have found their way into the fabric of IT.

Such methodologies indubitably have strengths, to be sure—but what we have lost in the fray is a sense of what is particularly agile about Agile. This point is more than simple semantics. What’s missing is the fundamental connection to agility that drove the Manifesto in the first place. Reestablishing this connection, especially in the light of new thinking on business agility, is essential to rethinking how IT meets the ever-changing requirements of the business.

The Paradox of Business Requirements

How do techies know what to build? Simple: ask the stakeholders (the “business”) what they want. Make sure to write down all their requirements in the proverbial requirements document. Now build something that does what that document says. After you’re done, get your testers to verify that what you’ve built is what the business wanted.

Or what they used to want.

Or what they said they wanted.

Or perhaps what they thought they said they wanted.

And therein lies the rub. The expectation that the business can completely, accurately, and definitively describe what they want in sufficient detail so that the techies can build it precisely to spec is ludicrously unrealistic, even though such a myth is inexplicably persistent in many enterprise IT shops to this day. In fact, the myth of complete, well-defined requirements is at the heart of what we call the “waterfall” methodology, illustrated in the figure below.

In reality, it is far more common for requirements to be poorly communicated, poorly understood, or both. Or even if they’re properly communicated, they change before the project is complete. Or most aggravating at all, the stakeholder looks at what the techies have built and says, “yes, that’s exactly what I asked for, but now that I see it, I realize I want something different after all.”

Of course, such challenges are nothing new; they gave rise to the family of iterative methodologies a generation ago, including the Spiral methodology, IBM’s Rational Unified Process, and all of the Agile methodologies. By taking an iterative approach that involves the business in a more proactive way, the reasoning goes, you lower the risk of poorly communicated, poorly understood, or changing business requirements. The figure below illustrates such a project.

In the above diagram the looped arrows represent iterations, where each iteration reevaluates and reincorporates the original requirements with any further input the business wants to contribute. But even with the most agile of Agile development teams, the process of building software still falls short. It doesn’t seem to matter how expert the coders, how precise the stakeholders, or how perfect the development methodology are, the gap between what the business really needs and what the software actually does is still far wider than it should be. And while many business stakeholders have become inured to poorly fitting software, far more are becoming fed up with the entire situation. Enough is enough. How do we get what we really want and need from IT?

Changing the Way We Deal with Change

Even the most Agile development teams still struggle with the problem of changing requirements. If requirements evolve somewhat during the course of a project, then a well-oiled Agile team can generally go with the flow and adjust their deliverables accordingly, but one way or the other, all successful software projects come to an end. And once the techies have deployed the software, they’re done.

Have a new requirement? Fund a separate project. We’ll start over and include your new requirements in the next version of the project we already finished, unless it makes more sense to build something completely new. Sometimes techies can tweak existing capabilities to meet new requirements quickly and simply, but more often than not, rolling out new versions of existing software is a laborious, time-consuming, and risky process. If the software is commercial off the shelf (COTS), the problem is even worse, since the vendor must base new updates on requirements from many existing customers, as well as their guesses about what new customers will want in the future. The figure below illustrates this problem, where the software project represented by the box can be as Agile as can be, and yet the business still doesn’t get the agility it craves. It seems that Agile may not be so agile after all.

The solution to this problem is for the business to specify its requirements in a fundamentally different way. Instead of thinking about what it wants the software to do, the business should specify how agile it expects the software to be. In other words, don’t ask for software that does A, B, C or whatever. Instead, tell your techies to build you something agile.

We call this requirement the metarequirement of agility—a metarequirement because agility applies to other requirements: “build me something that responds to changing requirements” instead of “build me something that does A, B, and C.” If we can build software that satisfies this metarequirement, then our diagram looks quite different:

Because the software in the above diagram is truly agile, it is possible to meet new requirements without having to change the software. Whether the process inside the box is Agile is beside the point. Yes, perhaps taking an Agile approach is a good idea, but it doesn’t guarantee the resulting software is agile.

The ZapThink Take

Sounds promising, to be sure, but the devil is in the details. After all, if it were easy to build software that responded to changing requirements, then everybody would be doing it. But there’s a catch. Even if we built software that could potentially meet changing requirements, that doesn’t mean that it actually would—because meeting changing requirements is part of how you would use the software, rather than part of how you build it. In other words, the users of the software must actually be part of the agile system. The box in the diagram above doesn’t just represent software anymore. It represents a system consisting of software and people.

Such software/people systems of systems are a long-standing fixture in ZapThink thinking. In fact, ZapThink frequently talks about agility in the context of SOA. With SOA, IT publishes business Services that represent IT capabilities and information, and the business drives the consumption and composition of those Services. In mature SOA deployments, policies drive the behavior of Services and their compositions. If you want to change the behavior, change the policy. In other words, SOA is governance-driven, and governance applies to the behavior of both people and technology.

Agile architectural approaches like SOA, therefore, focus on implementing governance-driven technology/people systems that support changing requirements over time. The challenge, of course, is actually building such systems that meet the business agility metarequirement. Where in this system do we put the agility? It’s not in any part of the system. Instead, it’s a property of the system as a whole—what we call an emergent property. If you’ve been following ZapThink, you’ve heard this story before: business agility is an emergent property of the combination technology/human system we call the enterprise.

In other words, we started by deconstructing the notion of Agile and ended up with Enterprise Architecture, because what is Enterprise Architecture but best practices for designing and building the enterprise to better meet changing requirements over time? This is not the static, framework-centric EA from years past that presuppose a final, ideal state for the enterprise. We’re talking about a new way of thinking about what it means to architect technology-rich organizations to be inherently agile.

Want to learn more? Stay tuned for our new book The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST-Based SOA, and Mobile Computing are Changing Enterprise IT, to be published by John Wiley & Sons in the spring of 2013.

Photo by Rhys Asplundh.

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Some of the prominent speakers include:  N Nataraj, CIO & SVP, Hexaware; Venguswamy Ramaswamy, Global Head of iON, TCS; T Srinivasan, Managing Director, VMware India & SAARC ; KP Unnikrishnan (Unni), Marketing Director Asia Pacific for Brocade; Srikanth Karnakota, Director, Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India; Ravi Gururaj, VP Products, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix Systems; Janakiram MSV, Cloud Specialist; Krishnan Subramanian, Industry Analyst and Researcher; Chidambaran Kollengode, Director, Cloud Computing, Nokia; Jayabalan Subramanian, CTO & Co-Founder, Netmagic; Jason Bloomberg, President, ZapThink; Sunil Varkey, Head Information Security, Idea Cellular.

Read the entire article at

http://informationweek.in/Cloud_Computing/12-04-23/Is_India_the_emerging_cloud_computing_capital_of_the_world.aspx.

With company participation from every level of the cloud computing ecosystem and a non-stop, 4-day technical program, Cloud Expo New York features expert speakers from every top Cloud & Big Data player, including ActiveState, Amplidata, AppZero, AT&T Business Solutions, Backupify, Barracuda Networks, Blue Mountain Labs, CA Technologies, Capgemini, CARI.net, Cbeyond, CipherCloud, CiRBA, Cisco, Citrix, CloudSwitch, Coalfire Systems, CodeFutures, Copyright Clearance Center, Coraid, Dell, Dell Boomi, dynaTrace, EnterpriseDB Esri, Eucalyptus Systems, FastIgnite, Fiorano, Full360, Fusion-io, GCE, GoGrid, GreenButton, Hortonworks, Hostway, HP, HyperStratus, IBM, iland, Impetus, Infineta Systems, Intel, Intel IT, Interactive Intelligence, Interxion, KPMG, KuppingerCole, Layered Technologies, Layer 7, Mashery, McAfee, Meltzer Lippe, Microsoft, National Reconnaissance Office, NextIO, NJVC, OASIS, OpSource, Oracle, OutSystems, Pacific Controls, Parabon, Pegasystems, PerspecSys, Ping Identity, Piston Cloud Computing, PricewaterhouseCoopers, QLogic, Quest Software, Racemi, Rackspace Hosting, RightScale, Rise Partners, Riverbed Technology, Robust Cloud, ScaleMP, ScaleOut Software, ServiceMesh, SHI, SHI Enterprise Solution Services, The SI Organization, Servoy, SnapAppointments, Spoon, Stoneware, Sybase, Symform, Telx, 1010data, Terremark, Trend Micro, UnboundID, U.S. Dept. of Justice, UShareSoft, VDC Research Group, VMware, Voxel, WidePoint, Xiotech, Xoreax, Xsigo and Zapthink.

Read the entire article at http://www.sys-con.com/node/2255811.