Can BPM take over the application development paradigm?
Continue reading "Can BPM take over the application development paradigm?" »
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" »