Enterprise Gamification - The Next Big Paradigm
Continue reading "Enterprise Gamification - The Next Big Paradigm" »
Continue reading "Enterprise Gamification - The Next Big Paradigm" »
There is one objective for IT operations - reduce the existing operations cost and ensure a good sense of predictability on discretionary spending towards growth and scalability. All the initiatives whether it be SAAS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Virtualization are all aimed towards the same basic objectives. But enterprises still clamor for the right fit, fail in many of the initiatives and reducing the cost becomes a challenge. The IT vehicle hits the brakes on the road towards its supposed destination
It seems as if Cloud solutions could provide the mix of reducing the cost as well as provide tools and accelerators for new development. Sometimes it becomes a risk when the information transacted is part of the cloud and not “in” the Enterprise Infrastructure.
Some questions posed to the IT leaders are whether and when to go for cloud? Next is what all should go in the cloud? Should one have multiple clouds or single cloud? Should you have a mix of Private and Public clouds? and so on…
The theme of this write up is whether the “Enterprise Integration Services” could serve as the tipping point for the cloud and pave the way for exponential growth in usage of Cloud across the enterprise technologies.
Continue reading "Tipping Point for Enterprises towards Cloud..." »
A branch manager is interested in seeing whether there has been abnormally low or high transactions in a particular day. A Banking regional manager is interested in knowing whether there has been an increase in customers with a recently launched campaign. The country head is more interested in knowing which areas have performed better or worse as compared to a predefined expectation. The global CFO is interested in seeing that if there is a revenue at risk due to any kind of external or internal impact. The HR head is interested in seeing the percentage change in attrition due to an initiative to increase the employee hours in the branches for providing better customer service. The CIO needs to look at the benefits of the discretionary spending over the last year. An IT manager overseeing a multi-million development program wants to estimate the value and even compare the actuals once it is delivered and is ready for measurement.
Most of the information in such examples conventionally have been available as offline reports run through batch jobs scheduled as per the need and convenience or through different other means.
The question is how should an enterprise design its Information Architecture to deliver the right set of KPIs and also make it more usable at all levels. Here are some tips:
Continue reading "An Architecture for KPI - Most needed but ignored" »
In one of the past engagements, an SOA solution involving around 80 services being defined did not have any documented NFRs. When we requested to the business team, the response was quite timely - that all services need to respond within one second, all should be highly available, all should be available in multiple data centers and should be part of disaster recovery.
There is nothing incorrect in having such a requirement but it is neither realistic nor beneficial.
In another case, a programme going live in another few weeks was doing its load testing as the last phase of testing but most of the test cases were failing and not meeting the NFRs putting a risk to the programme.
Questions that naturally arise - How should one manage the NFRs in an enterprise without getting into ‘obvious’ troubles? How can we use the NFRs to predict the performance even before the solution is in build or even design phase?, What-if, after doing this exercise and the resultant prediction itself is leading to unexpected values?, Can we chart out a plan to get to the end goal with right justification to the cost?
These are exactly the questions that need to be answered through Performance Engineering.
Continue reading "Managing NFRs and Predicting Performance" »
In Continuation with my previous blog post http://www.infosysblogs.com/bpm-eai/2011/09/tucon_2011_-_core_banking_surr.html#more on BIAN indentifing 250 service domains across Sales & Services, Reference Data, Operation & Execution, Analytics & Risk and Business Support business areas, I think it is an important event within Banking Industry in terms of taking a collective step including Product Vendors & SI vendor to bring in standardization which was really due for long.
Continue reading "TUCON 2011 - More on BIAN as Core Banking Surround" »
A football coach when he joins a school, primary if you may want to call it, has a herculean task of training the kids for the real game. Kids know that the ball needs to be kicked into a goal and more often than not, in their enthusiasm of game, kick the ball into their own goal; defeating the very purpose of match. There might be “dares” too, as to who would dribble the ball for most part of the game - which in effect stops the ball being passed on to an untagged player near to the opponent goal, missing out on an opportunity to win.
Continue reading "TUCON 2011 - Core Banking Surround Strategy" »
Feeling good to be back after a pause.. I had few good discussion earlier which were more generic in nature in BPM & SOA space, so for a change I thought I will be little specific and focus on Financial Institution space..
Increasing relevance of BPM & SOA in Financial Institution
I think the last downtime forced Financial Institution to think about customer and operational excellence more than anything else.. as a result today financial institution is undergoing a major change to increase their focus on customer experience to increase stickiness and operation excellence to improve its cost parameter..
It will be wrong to say BPM and SOA is going to the sole strategy for the transformation, however after seeing what large banks today are doing to focus on customer centricity and operational excellence, I don't have any doubt about BPM and SOA significance in this transformational journey..
Since there are so many things happening around it will be difficult to capture everything in this single blog, so I will try to cover this through a series..
Continue reading "BPM & SOA Play in Financial Institution - Part 1" »
Continue reading "Infosys Team at TUCON 2011 - Annual TIBCO user conference" »
Some simple requirements - can a business implement a new business process or even a part of business process that find problematic today but be corrected in a day’s time. That is define a new process in your Business Modeling tool of BPM, deploy it as you are done, there will be regression test harness that will test out the older test conditions + the new test conditions and give the results and if fine, it will go ahead and make it live in production. Everything seamless, automated to a large extend and peace of mind to everyone. Better productivity and better rewards are obvious results if things happened this way.
Back in 1900, any purchase by consumers had limited choices; he could visit the store and pick the product from a select few available. In this era, consumer is aware of the numerous choices he can pick from, check on reviews and then finalize the delivery date and time at his door step. Today, 2011, the digital consumer an essential part of any business, where being able to select and choose from a given set of products and offerings is trend that is sure to change the enterprises of tomorrow and how they engage with their consumers. This engagement with the consumer also allows the business to work with them in order to identify and match up to their needs, consult and personalize the products for them. Where face of a bank was a teller with long wait time for simple activity such as deposit or withdrawing the money, today bank's website provides personalized products and services with limited visits to the bank location!
There have been bigger role of modes of communication with the consumers, real-time helpline, feedback, analysis of data received by surveys etc. And only to enhance this is social networking that constantly works on understanding the consumer with the perspective of his likes, dislikes and creates a digital intelligence of the consumer. For example, a hospital that patient visits irrespective of whether it is the local hospital or not, the patient information is provided to doctors with the awareness of the allergies he has as complete of data is already available with detailed medical information. Websites like TripAdvisor can select the preferences and provide the details on which destination, and which package to pick from numerous available options.
Businesses see this as an opportunity to enhance the consumer experience they provide and today with help of technology they can build the enterprise of tomorrow. This change in consumer perspective will bring in a huge shift in the way organizations have been working in the past. Organizations are being asked to provide personalized products and services. At the same time, consumers are also collaborating with organizations to create a greater understanding.
In my opinion the businesses exploring the social networking and working towards co-creating their businesses with consumers will be lost in the run to future proof their businesses! The future of this kind of association and of personalization lies in seamless integration. Technology being the key enabler for a future such as this!
There is a lot of material available on Internet about the Maturity Continuum Model *[MCM] defined by *Dr. Stephen Covey. In this model, Dr. Covey talks of the maturity of person/system/institution et al has three stages/phases called “Dependence”, “Independence” and “Interdependence” and these phases are cyclic. An individual entity might begin with a “Dependence” phase, and then moves to “Independence” phase, then to “Interdependence” phase, there upon again begin with “dependence” stage in another context. This cycle of continuous maturity levels is discussed elaborately in his path breaking book called “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” [ISBN 0-7432-6951-9].
Continue reading "SAP NetWeaver Gateway changes the game again... " »
Lets look at some typical cases that can be classified as an analogy to “Fire alarm” encountered in course of a software implementation.
Case 1:
A large programme in North American Energy corporate is scheduled to go-live phase-wise deploying 70 services connecting 15 applications and functionally connecting 8 business lines as part of a business optimization exercise. While sanity testing a App server hosting a new application connecting most of these interfaces in the 4th weekend of the schedule 7 weekends, it is observed that the application is not getting connected due to random errors. (Authentication failure, Null pointer exception, memory unbounded, etc.). None of these errors are reproducible in any of the Pre production environments. On top of it the senior management is hours away from a decision checkpoint meeting and this issue impacts the plan for the scheduled go-live. Dial 911
Continue reading "Scalable Application Clusters - Key to the truly Elastic Cloud!" »
Customer Data is like the oxygen processed by the lungs and heart (systems in information technology) and injected into the blood (business processes) of any Company. Simplified, the purpose of IT is to harness this key information for the improvement of business operations. Eventually the goal of business is provide the best services to their customers. It is even more significant to know this information for a prospective customer which has the potential to increase the business for an organization. There is no secret that a company outwits competitors just with better customer satisfaction and services at the same time maintaining lower TCO and increasing bottom line. The question in today’s world when IT is ever changing, what is the current scope in usage of technologies such as complex event processing.
Continue reading "Simplify with Complex Events Processing" »
Generalist is defined as ‘One who has a broad general knowledge and skills in several areas’ and a specialist is defined as ‘One who is dedicated to one particular branch of study or research’.
In our day to day life we come across both the type of experts, like in health care we have Physicians (who are generalists) and other -ists (who are specialists in areas like Ophthalmology, Oncology, and Neurology etc).
Likewise in the world of IT Services, we have both kinds of experts, hence the McKinsey Matrix of service delivery units being formed as Horizontal and Vertical units, where Horizontal Units take care of the breadth of all the specializations like packaged applications, while the vertical units focus on the domain specific needs.
Having said that - EAI is a space considered to be horizontal, but an EAI consultant needs to have very deep understanding of both the worlds. Let us take an example as to why we need generalist with specialist like skills in EAI.
In the era of BPM, with much more enhanced tools and techniques, let's look at a more common and realistic scenario. Where disparate systems identify to interface with other systems, web services, play a huge role. Need of the system is to get the information as fast as possible and accurate for sure! As cliché as it may sound, the very concept of web services is to ensure application interfaces are not affected. But, this pool of web services ensures that they are not left untouched. One of these scenarios, customer information system highlights this phenomenon clearly. Few characteristics that could have been over looked or been in place initially and lost over time:
- Business perspective to technical requirements
- Long term vision for middle ware technical architecture
- Evolve the architecture based on introduction of new entities
- Standards and guidelines for middle ware ever emerging development cycle.
Having defined a middleware tool to ensure the systems are connected is only half the job done. To ensure the operability and maintenance of what is developed is a bigger on-going challenge. Not forgetting to include enhancements. While architects struggle to identify the correct approach of which functionality to fit into which web service, developers struggle to fit the pieces of code into the existing web of web services.
With this highly complex set of interfaces, web services revolve around content and data. And much of the installation, configuration and maintenance work are done manually. This means managerial talents, user-experience knowledge are as essential as defining the technical architecture. At the core, following features when implemented would benefit the landscape of middleware:
- Simple Configuration
- Minimal or no Application Code Changes
- Interoperability
- Increased Application Performance
- Optimizing network traffic
- Increased Scalability/Maximized Network Throughput
To re-iterate the obvious, in most practical scenarios with ever reducing variables of budget and time, it becomes more of a necessity for architects to have holistic and futuristic vision of technology with business perspective.
Exception Handling, Error Handling, Fault Handling are different synonyms for the same concept. It’s relevance never decreased with increased usage of technology. It is probably the most necessary thing in any branch of IT in a parallel stream and can create problems if not conceptualized properly.
In another context in the branch of ‘electronics engineering’ Noise is considered a factor in amplification calculations (it is a necessary evil!) since if it becomes ‘0’, the signal strength will be infinity which is out of control and non desirable.
Similarly, Exception Handling is something which only increases the stability of any implementation. There is no doubt that errors cannot be done away with. They just need to be handled properly.
To define it simply as mathematical theorem:
S ∝ E where S stands for measure of Stability and E for robustness in Exception Handling (As E increases, S improves substantially).
There seems to be many similarities in the life-cycle of a home-maker with that of IT folks in Enterprise. Neither can ever achieve the nirvana, of less work and more output.
Of the many promises that SOA assures Enterprises of, the prominent one is the reduction of burden on developers, maintenance personnel, engineers et al, who are commonly clubbed under a banner category called IT folks in an Enterprise.
Let us look at this one particular promise from a different perspective, by comparing this SOA fever in today’s IT World with that of electrification of households in early 1900s.
There are many stalwarts in the world of SOA and the Blogosphere is filled with blogs and articles defining SOA in very simple terms. However, the following is a humble contribution from a semi-developed technical brain.
Let us consider the example of the simple entertainment system in most of the households across the globe - the Television Set and the channels we see in the same. Taking this as an analogy, we can say that the enterprise called “household” needs a service called “entertainment”.
Continue reading "SOA 101 - Explaining SOA in simple terms" »
In general mediation is a practice used in law to settle conflicts between two parties by a third party called the mediator.
In SOA where service contracts are created between a plethora of producers and consumers, there arises a need for mediation to provide sanity to the objective of of the overall concept of Enterprise Service Bus.
What could be the principles and prospective candidates for Mediation? Let’s look at them…
Continue reading "Service Mediation - An important factor in SOA" »
Continue reading "Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud (E2C) -- Introduction" »
Wish you all a Happy New Year and hope this blog reminds us of the fundamentals of Architecture.
The Hoover Dam, The Golden Gate Bridge, German Auto-Bahn, The Empire State Building, The Leaning Tower of Pisa are all historical marvels. But the Leaning Tower of Pisa stands as the odd one out as it is an example of an Architecture gone wrong.
Just like how the leaning tower of Pisa has been made to survive with counter lead weights and digging up a side to tilt the balance, there are fixes made to an IT solution that has already been delivered. In such cases the costs of fixes and changes even overrun the actual solution when it was designed and implemented. This is why Architecture is such a crucial part of any development whether it be in buildings or in Technology.
According to Vitruvius, a good building should satisfy the three principles of firmitatis utilitatis venustatis translating to Durability, Utility and Beauty. Isn’t it the same for technology?
Continue reading "Civil Architecture and Technology Architecture" »
I am not too sure about the title, but I had to enter a title to share my thoughts. And this is the best I could think at this point.
Now coming to the question, which I was asked few weeks back
"Company X has decided to go for SaaS based applications to run its enterprise and are not sure how to get control over these applications which are scattered over different clouds"..
It is an interesting situation which was never an issue in a typical on-premise deployment.
However when any organization chooses to go for SaaS based deployment, I would believe that organization has implicitly decided to let go the control over application and the data architecture which drives application behavior. This means the real issue that organization is facing is
"How can Organization's IT ensures that SaaS based applications can consistently deliver to the business goal if they have no control over these application architecture which are providing services to their business directly"
Continue reading "In a SaaS based setup what should be controlled by enterprise" »
The cloud computing concept cuts across verticals. And another one which goes along in utilities is Smart Grid. What do they have in common? Cloud computing being consumer focused at this time and even though smart grid aspires to be a consumer focused technology it is likely to get onto the cloud to get into mainstream.
Today, there is no visibility on the chain of power generation to determine how and where it's being used and whether its delivery is as efficient as possible. Like today's data center for computing purposes there is no equivalent in Utilities to effectively manage power. The data level / technical implementation include real-time alerts and other notifications based on the urgency of the event and require attention immediately, whereas bulk transactions can be process at higher time intervals. With the shift to cloud computing as an upcoming change in the industry, part of this shift attributes to the opening of cloud platforms. This means managing demand better, participation by consumers, which means better analysis and management of power demand; giving consumers higher control such as being able to generate their own energy, being able to sell the extra energy by sending it back to the grid. Optimizing assets and operating efficiently that can control the players of the grid to save un-used electricity meaning more distribution of power generated. One of the main features for the grid is self-healing that can be achieved on the cloud. If anything goes wrong at one place, network should be able to route through other sources. Moreover, making the grid hacker-proof as much as possible and ensuring innovation through new products, markets and services. The idea is how much can the cloud be leveraged than only using web services. However, cloud computing not only provides more computing resources based on demand but also provisions new services and capabilities as needed by individual customers. Implementation of smart grid will mean utilities needing to store much more data about customer usage, meter information, readings etc. than now.
Not forgetting the customer, getting them involved, provide them access to the data that is being captured by the utility, that too real time is essential for the entire solution to be effective. If it's for a "Smart" cloud it would dynamically manage the capacity as it relates to power, just the same way when user demand changes. This capability provides both the customer and the utility with benefits. These issues all point to the greater need to understand how we're using our valuable resource. I believe that the future strength is the ability to maintain the level of growth which depends on successful adoption of Grid.
For all these years of working in Integration domain, one thing that has been conspicuous is the constant factor of change. It doesn’t matter how promising a technology is in terms of ease of implementation, support for business agility, promoting better maintenance or may be user friendliness, we will invariably see that things get changed. I remember in one client (Investment Bank) we did implement an integration solution brainstorming in the meeting rooms, burning calories, staying back late in office, with impeccable architectural standards, earning accolades from various quarters, only to find that three years down the line the entire solution was migrated to another product. This makes me wonder about the lifecycle of the solution. Few days back I wrote a paper where I tried to simulate and find out if we can ever predict the change in advance to help the managers, architects make a better decision. The following two paragraphs is my POV (A consulting term which means Point of View) excerpts from that paper.
We have seen that over the period of time organizations have invested heavily into SOA and BPM primarily to bring business agility in responding to change in their business scenario. In my opinion SOA has definitely brought about a transformational change. We could leverage existing investment organizations have made in the legacy applications and ERP systems and could expose their functionality as reusable services using SOA as architecture model. SOA has also provided sophisticated integration technologies like ESB (Enterprise Service bus) to build complex business processes around these services. We have been using BPM technologies to bring in agility in modeling and implementing new business processes on the fly and utilized SOA infrastructure and services to automate large parts of these business processes.
Even though BPM & SOA has brought considerable improvement I see these mostly reactive in nature. SOA functions and BPM provide business processes which mostly react to the user requests. It's not a mandate of SOA to identify trends and patterns across these requests and then proactively take action to benefit from these trends or avoid any unusual happenings. SOA & BPM does not proactively identify suspicious happenings across tens of thousands of these invocations. This is precisely where Compex Event Processing (CEP) comes into picture and brings the benefits of being a watchdog which can sense new situations and abnormalities and respond to these. CEP gathers hundreds and thousands of events originating from SOA and BPM and uses the rules to identify patterns which suggest anomalies, threats or opportunities. It then alerts manual or automated processes to take corrective action. Typical application of the CEP technologies can be identified which requires some form of "situation awareness" or "sense and response" and "tracking and tracing" aspects which are predominant in business situations.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. With the Smart SOA approach, you can find value at every stage of the SOA continuum, from departmental projects to enterprise-wide initiatives.
Below are some of the availabilities of SOA.
Application Infrastructure Build, deploy and run applications in a secure and flexible SOA environment.
Application Integration At the core of a Smart SOA deployment enabling seamless universal data exchange.
SOA Governance Helps you make better IT decisions and drive service re-use value.
SOA Management and Security Enables visibility to monitor and control SOA based services and applications.
This new IT delivery model can significantly reduce enterprise IT costs & complexities while improving workload optimization and service delivery. Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides a superior user experience, and is characterized by new, internet-driven economics.
Google changed their main search page from Static to Dynamic with Instant. One of the challenges as pointed out in their official blog was increase in 5-7X hit to their servers due to this enhancement. Naturally the Infrastructure team had a huge challenge to deal with this without affecting the existing performance. But they solved the problem with changes as pointed out in the blog. Performance as we know is an obvious expectation from any solution from a Non functional requirement (NFR) perspective but still in most of the solution implementations it is not given the same impetus that the functional side usually gets. Most of the projects in initiation stage wouldn’t have planned for addressing the non functional requirements as compared to addressing the functional requirements. Down the lane during the software development it is often experienced that performance is not as expected and then time and effort is spent on tuning the solution to meet the NFR through cycles of load testing-fixing-testing. Though Performance Engineering is a vast topic, the interest in this post is towards an architecture pattern called SEDA (Staged Event Driven Architecture).
Most of the time we end up over engineer application integration without giving the right focus on the context of the application within the business. As a result we end up implementing integration patterns which does not suit the business context as we continue to focus on technical context.
Continue reading "Choosing the right integration approach" »
Can organizations solve real-time problems by gathering business intelligence in a dynamic way? This is a million dollar question in recent times in every major organization and seeking answer in high times of huge IT Investments. Will every organization would be able to tap the real value potential from their SOA and BPM and so called traditional integrations. Yes this write-up will present that how CEP (Complex Event Processing) has changed the system integration landscape in a dynamic way, coupling with SOA and BPM platforms and serve the real time event generation.
Continue reading "How Complex Event Processing Changed Over Time" »
The Cloud Computing paradigm involves the delivery of services utilizing a distributed set of assets each connected seamlessly through a high speed communication link over the Internet. This makes the entire solution universally accessible while providing enhanced agility and reduced cost. However, the entire solution uses the Internet as the backbone for data/information exchange and therein lies the Achilles heel of the mantra.
Continue reading "Content Delivery Networks - Helping the cloud become reliable" »
The emergence of mashups in the enterprise is a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly apparent. Admittedly, it has industry purists worried, because unlike the other buzz words that have surfaced in the last few years, this one goes beyond the buzz and promises to change the game forever.
This reminds me of never-ending vegetarian versus non-vegetarian debate, it always either ends up in both parties agreeing to disagree and take their own way or one party forcing down their way on the other if they have the strength to do so...
Some of you might believe that it is no different in the enterprises when it comes to debating centralized shared service model in a set up that is enjoying the federated delivery models. In real-life experience, I found that its not so much of the technicality of the matter that really makes the argument go anywhere closer to decision (leaving aside the few cases where CIO level interventions have made their way). Instead there are other ways that led to enterprise adopt the shared services way without wasting too much time debating about this whole matter...
Continue reading "Winning the shared service battle against forces of federated structure..." »
Continue reading "Can BPM take over the application development paradigm?" »
Part 1 of 3
Introduction
Industry analysts have repeatedly pointed out that technology is a beguiling proposition and businesses invest expecting to save money or increase revenue, but rarely realize either benefit.
The rapid investment over the first half of the nervous nineties have placed the CIOs under enormous pressure to become “Value Creators” and produce or increase profit from existing company property rather than investing further. This may be connecting the enterprise's data in new ways to give new insights and improve decisions. However, there is an added mandate to be thrifty and manage internal costs to free dollars to create innovation and value. With highly compressed decision cycles and the need for faster recovery of IT investment, consultants are increasingly being asked for recommendations with ROI cycles in months rather than years.
It is in such uncertain times, that the Enterprise mashup has presented itself as one of the promising technologies for the next decade. Let us take a look at what the mashup is and why do analysts think it will be the growth engine for Enterprise 2.0.
Continue reading "Enterprise Mashups – Recovering value from SOA Investments (Part 1 of 3)" »
Cloud computing today has become the buzz word in the IT industry and being seen as the big thing to address IT's ROI pain. However being involved with Integration, SOA and BPM for years I am constantly trying to see the value of Cloud in Integration or SOA or BPM space for the customers who already have invested heavily on a stack integration, SOA and BPM platform or on different individual platform to address all these areas.
Continue reading "Delivering Integration Platform as Private cloud - Part 1" »
Lately I have had multiple conversations and discussions on the topic of product selection. In such conversations, again and again I have seen the emphasis on why a product should be used for a given intent because that is what the product vendors have built the product for. Interestingly in one such conversation that I recall, the chief architect wanted to use a product that was meant for complex event processing to actually implement a process management capability. At the same time, there are products actually that do the process flow management that could be used. However, given the requirement of the software capability, both the products can do what is needed to be done. So now question is, in such situation, how appropriate or inappropriate is to use a software (if that meets your requirements) that is not intended to do what you want it to do from product vendor’s perspective.
Straight forward answer just could have been “Don’t misuse the product capability, stick to what the products are designed for”….but is it really that way? How do we approach this situation and make a decision that is not going to lend itself to disaster? That’s when the “repurposing” ideas started taking shape in my mind. In simple terms, repurposing is defining new purpose/usage of the object. In our case, we are talking about inventing/discovering new ‘utility’ of the software. Now, such new utility becomes innovation or misuse will possibly depend on number of factors that we will shortly come to.
Continue reading "Smartly "repurposing" the technology - Innovation or misuse?" »
Continue reading "Externalization based design strategies - another angle for SOA principles?" »
Continue reading "Are we growing on a fundamentally doomed DNA for tomorrow's IT eco-system?" »
Continue reading "What's next for Integration Competency Centers - Part 6" »
Continue reading ""What's Next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 5" »
I believe, in the next-generation view of the ICC, a key area of focus will be 'adoption of lean methods to reduce eco-system fat'. Let me talk about this ‘eco-system fat’. This is just a terminology that I use to represent the ‘undesired’ elements in the ecosystem of people, processes and technology fabric, similar to ‘undesired’ fat in our body. So even though organizations might have an ICC already in place and operating (in whatever capacity), over period of time processes tend to become difficult and ineffective, people seem to be getting stuck in a pattern of activities and hence become difficult to change etc etc. At the same time, context of what ICC does for the organization changes over period of time, need of the organization changes, environment changes. While all of that changes, things in ICC typically do not change in the same proportion and pace and hence what happens here that a layer of fat starts growing on various capabilities of the organization. By capabilities, I mean processes, knowledge, operations, contribution from staff, technology performance etc. Over a period of time, this fat makes the entire organizational system of the ICC slower and less effective (in terms of delivering results) which basically means burning lot of dollars to improve anything in the eco-system.
With the current acute economical cost pressures, a shared system like ICC will need to reduce this fat significantly. One of the most successful ways to reduce this fat, (or better called non-performing elements of the ecosystem) is to adopt lean methods.
Continue reading ""What's next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 4" »
Now that ESB has become the defacto standard for integration, all of us at some point of architecture definition experience faced situation where we had to make a choice on what will be the preferred strategy for ESB deployment.
Some of us who come with the baggage of older EAI technology tends to think we can make enterprise scalable & adaptable through distributed ESB. I guess the root cause of this lies in the way older EAI technologies worked where components within EAI layer were so interlinked that a small change within EAI layer meant considerable impacts to other components which lead to longer time to deploy changes.
Continue reading "Distributed ESB or Single ESB - The choice" »
Continue reading "BPM and application eco-system based integration platforms" »
Continue reading "Composite Application Framework: Ready for the big leap" »
Continue reading "Creating Sound and Credible Strategies for your Integration and SOA programs" »
I am writing another blog entry on SOA knowing very well the risk of triggering a yawn and ‘not again’ response from readers. In terms of sheer volume of debates and opinions generated, SOA will undoubtedly qualify as the most productive IT topics of recent times. However, the same can not be said about the true impact it had on the IT and business. Moving away from ‘Is SOA good or for real?’ debate, I wanted to touch upon the topic of how to deploy SOA for creating tangible benefits for organization. Offcourse I assume that debate around ‘Is SOA for real?’ has been settled (in favour of SOA. Now you know on which side of divide I belong to).
Continue reading "Greek Mythology and Challenge of introducing SOA in an organization" »