Thoughts on Enterprise Architecture and Project Management

Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #14 - January 18, 2009

Welcome to the January 18, 2009 edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture.

Business Process Management

Shahid N. Shah presents Effective artifacts to use on modern WOA/SaaS projects posted at The Federal Architect, saying, "Suvajit Gupta, at The Federal Architect blog, summarizes the recommended artifacts in an agile methodology called SPEED (Streamlined Process for Effective Enterprise Development). He talks about why certain artifacts are necessary for the proper development of architecture and systems."

Enterprise Architecture

Craig Borysowich presents Deliverable: Conceptual Architecture Definition posted at Craig Borysowich.

Mike Kavis presents Top 10 reasons why MDM might be the next dead buzzword posted at Enterprise Architecture & Other Enterprise Topics.

Other

Mateusz Jasny presents Six sigma ITIL - how to reconcile? posted at PMIT.PL Blog.

Mateusz Jasny presents M_o_R - Management of Risk in Organizations posted at PMIT.PL Blog.

Baz Old presents Round Corners With jQuery and CSS posted at Web Development 2.0: Web Design, CakePHP, Web 2.0.

Praveen presents Dynamically Building Java Classpaths from Unix Shell Scripts posted at Unix Simplicity.

Robert McIlree presents Measuring Technical Debt posted at Technology Architecture & Projects.

Mike Kavis presents Did SOA die or do we just suck at architecture? posted at Enterprise Architecture & Other Enterprise Topics.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

14th Carnival of Enterprise Architecture Coming January 15, 2009

The 14th Carnival of Enterprise Architecture that I host through Blog Carnival is coming up on January 15, 2009, with submissions due by January 14, 2009. If you have an EA- or IT-related post that you'd like featured through the Carnival, you can submit the Permalink URL and related information here.

This is a very easy and effective way for EA and IT bloggers to get their messages across to a wider audience, and I hope that EA and IT bloggers will consider submitting their best pieces to the Carnival. Please note that you do not have to be the author of the material to submit it, as long as it: a) meets the guidelines below; and b) honors the author's copyright and fair use guidelines.

As always, here are a few pointers for article submissions to the carnival:

* Off-topic material, sales pitches (direct or disguised) for products & services, and content spam will be not be published. Prior to every carnival episode, I delete a number of pieces of obvious spam, vendor ads, and off-topic material prior to publication - and it's a complete pain in the rear, believe me. Please don't waste your time or mine and thanks in advance.

* Feel free to nominate blog posts of others for the Carnival, but make sure to identify the author!

* Material posted in previous editions of the Carnival will not be re-published, regardless of who submitted it and when it was originally submitted.

Again, the deadline for submissions is January 14, 2009, and the carnival will be published on January 15, 2009. I look forward to all worthy contributions!

The 14th Carnival of Enterprise Architecture that I host through Blog Carnival is coming up on January 15, 2009, with submissions due by January 14, 2009. If you have an EA- or IT-related post that you'd like featured through the Carnival, you can submit the Permalink URL and related information here.

This is a very easy and effective way for EA and IT bloggers to get their messages across to a wider audience, and I hope that EA and IT bloggers will consider submitting their best pieces to the Carnival. Please note that you do not have to be the author of the material to submit it, as long as it: a) meets the guidelines below; and b) honors the author's copyright and fair use guidelines.

As always, here are a few pointers for article submissions to the carnival:

* Off-topic material, sales pitches (direct or disguised) for products & services, and content spam will be not be published. Prior to every carnival episode, I delete a number of pieces of obvious spam, vendor ads, and off-topic material prior to publication - and it's a complete pain in the rear, believe me. Please don't waste your time or mine and thanks in advance.

* Feel free to nominate blog posts of others for the Carnival, but make sure to identify the author!

* Material posted in previous editions of the Carnival will not be re-published, regardless of who submitted it and when it was originally submitted.

Again, the deadline for submissions is January 14, 2009, and the carnival will be published on January 15, 2009. I look forward to all worthy contributions!

Duct Tape & Bailing Wire as Architecture Eventually Fails

This post was brewing for awhile in my brain, but then Mike Kavis' spot-on analysis about problems with Twitter and Technorati arrived in the blog reader today. I'm currently going through a fairly similar thing on a project I'm involved with, so here's my two cents.

I started using Twitter casually a few months ago, and have run into the "Fail Whale" screen a few too many times to take this site (not the concept, mind you, the site) seriously. Until they get their act together with respect to uptime, there's no way that I'm taking this service with much more than a grain of salt. I have used Jott and PhoneTag (formerly SimulScribe) for almost a year now, and am very satisfied with their services. Twitter? Great concept, really crappy execution when they tried to scale. Deal killer, in my book.

Technorati is another story - they had a banner going on the top of their pages for the better part of last week claiming that they were "under a heavy load." Wonderful, that's probably why I kept getting logged off the service against my wishes or had it lose where I was on the site and return me to the home page on random occasions. Not a good way to earn anyone's trust, much less loyalty.

The classic development solution to these issues is to keep writing and tweaking more code, and not to do much in the way of architecture and design up-front. This usually works for a defined (and usually short) period of time. Then as the demands and problems escalate, the systems have become so complex and jerry-rigged that any further changes not only fail to fix the existing performance or usability issues, but create new ones as well.

This 'duct tape' approach to systems has its limits, and those are usually reached very quickly. Had there been some forethought to architecture and design, three things happen: a) the current set of needs are met; b) the systems are stable in production; and c) the systems can scale as demand rises. This is Architecture Benefits 101 folks, and as shown in the Twitter example, they are ignored at the risk of peril.

So, I've been involved with this project where architecture has been semi-pooh-poohed by sponsors and IT management as not really necessary. That is, until it hit the fan on them within the last two weeks when the business won a major contract and the public-facing websites are glitch-central in a lot of critical instances for their customers. Not only do they have code problems, but they have numerous data-related issues also contributing to the mess. Oops.

Now they have a double whammy: developers are struggling and scrambling to make the existing, very complex, short-cutted-to-the-max code get them through this crisis; and they now realize that there has to be some forward-looking architecture and design done so that these things don't happen again in their highly competitive marketplace. They can't afford to screw this up and lose the business that they landed - funny how stuff like this works sometimes.

Mike mentions in his post that the "Twitter Method" of "architecture" (like it or not, they do have one, even if it sucks) and subsequent negative outcomes across the board cost them at least double what it should have. I think it's worse than that, because mistakes like this happen over and over, so they pay for it, over and over and over. I don't know about you, but I don't like paying for the same work twice, much less 5,6, or even 10 times. But that's precisely what happens when systems are developed and deployed in this manner - the duct tape fails, and the bridge falls down.

Maybe there is some good out of this - Twitter becomes the Poster Child of Crappy Architecture, and what happens to your site, and your business, when "architecture" is performed exclusively with code stop-gaps and shortcuts. You will pay. Heavily.

Markets over Technology

Steve Jones attended JavaOne recently and hears arguments about Web 2.0, SaaS, cloud computing, and social networking that ring true to those made circa-2000 by long-cold .com corpses. He writes of the "buzz" at the conference:

"Now in 2008 I got exactly the same feeling I had back then "umm really?", what I saw then and now was some potentially useful technologies and a few great business ideas applying the technologies but lots of crap business ideas based purely on the technology.  Web 2.0, SaaS and Cloud Computing are all things that could be useful and there will be some business models that come out of them but lots of the current ideas are just hype and nonsense."

A wise old sage from my past, an astute businessman as well as a technologist, advised me back then that business success largely stems from embracing markets, not products or technologies looking for a market. A market exists or appears, and firms develop and compete to meet those needs. Developing the product or the technology first, and then hoping that a market shows up on your doorstep begging to buy, is more than risky, it is often no more than dreaming. Too bad a lot of otherwise competent dreamers erroneously use that as a business model.

Steve goes on to say: "I'm not saying that Web 2.0, SaaS and cloud computing aren't decent changes in the way IT works, what I'm saying is that this isn't an over-throw of the old world order and it is hard to see the numbers living up to the hype."

Here's an interesting bit of data that reinforces his comment: craigslist.org, the classified ad/community website, is estimated to take in $150 Million USD per year with 24 (that's right, 24) employees.  That's approximately $6.25 M USD per employee, per year from a website that has been described as "having the visual appeal of a pipe wrench."

Now, lets look at one of the poster children of Web 2.0, whiz-bang interface technology: Facebook. TechCrunch reported early in 2008 that Facebook's 2007 revenue is estimated at $150 M, but it has over 150 employees, and counting (the employees, that is).

Craigslist might have the "visual appeal of a pipewrench," but it is difficult to argue with the above math. What they did successfully at Craigslist was to offer a viable alternative to local newspaper classified advertising. Competing in, and in a way, redefining, an established market - that for short-term locally-based advertising by individuals or small businesses. Not only is that market established, but it is sustainable long-term. Technology by itself, focused on a narrow niche, is always replaced by something else, and nowadays, usually very quickly.

I agree that, as Steve relates, Web 2.0/SaaS/etc. are great technologies, but aren't sustainable markets in and of themselves. The real test of that statement aren't abused metrics such as "eyeballs" and click-thru rates on ads. Rather, as boring as it may appear, it's cash flow and profit based on servicing markets sustainable longer than a few years.

If you're going to be seduced, get seduced by markets, then apply the technology to serve those markets, not the other way around.

Life Defined...by Crackberry

James Governor comments on Crackberries, RIM, and life:

And who has done more than RIM to change the boundaries of work and play, personal and business communications in this era called 2.0? RIM is the most important company in Office and Enterprise 2.0 in terms of behavioural change, worklife balance and so on. RIM manages you 24 hours a day.

The minute that RIM, or any other instantaneous 'information vendor' "manages" me 24 hours a day is about the time when a gun should be placed in my mouth and the trigger fired, because I've essentially lost it. I reckon that I'm too old-school to have my life dictated by any device - telephone, laptop, a PDA, or cell phone. I'm happy with that, thank you very much.

God help the 'instant-on' human being - there are too many nuances and great moments in life, wherever such a life leads, to be hamstrung by a device and its services - and yes, I have more than one of these devices. And they are off or not attended to at various moments such as airline travel, time intimately spend with loved ones, spending time with friends and family, and such. Do I address all of these inputs later? Of course, when I choose to, not when RIM or any other utility dictates that I must.

Governor would have you believe that the latency period between someone's email, IM, or response to your blog post is something along the matter of seconds, or perhaps if you're fortunate, minutes. If you're willing to put up to being a slave to your electronics, then have at it.

If you truly don't want a life, there's not much better along these lines than slavery. Your choice, as always.

Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #8 - September 27, 2007

Welcome to the September 27, 2007 edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture.

Business Process Management

Raj Sheelvant presents Virgin America’s IT Strategy posted at IT Strategy, saying, "Does Virgin America's IT strategy make sense?"

Enterprise Architecture

George Ambler presents Strong opinions weakly held… posted at Architecture and Change, saying, "The phrase "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" from a post by Bob Sutton describes an important philosophy for architects...."

Jacques Brisson presents Corporate IT Architecture blog posted at Corporate IT Architecture blog.

Aloof Schipperke presents Does IT Hate Itself? posted at Aloof Architecture.

Salman Siddiqui presents Data Center - The Challanges posted at CompuWorld.

Adrian Grigoriu presents The Definition of Enterprise Architecture, revisited (ii) posted at Adrian Grigoriu.

Paul Wallis presents Understanding Enterprise Architecture complexity posted at Keystones and Rivets, saying, "This article discusses Zachman, TOGAF and DoDAF and compares these traditional frameworks with the OBASHI methodology."

Other

Raj Sheelvant presents SaaS in Large Organizations posted at IT Strategy, saying, "Why CIO's for the large organizations resist implementation of SaaS"

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor) posted at Mad Kane's Humor Blog.

Chris Barnes presents Redundant Failover firewall with pf, pfsync and CARP on FreeBSD posted at random utterings.

Cassanova presents The Browser Wars posted at Thoughts of a future engineer.

Paul Wallis presents IT exists for one reason posted at Keystones and Rivets, saying, "This article introduces a concept which I believe will prove to be very important for business and IT in the years ahead."

SOA

Adrian Grigoriu presents The virtualisation of the Enterprise IT posted at Adrian Grigoriu.

Vilas Prabhu presents SOA Fable: Do you wear a watch? posted at Thoughts and experiences of an enterprise architect, saying, "SOA Anti pattern to avoid."

System Architecture

Renata Vincoletto presents > systemcall dot org » Product Development cycle posted at > systemcall dot org.

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #7 - August 21, 2007

Welcome to the August 21, 2007 edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture.

enterprise architecture

Pankaj Arora presents ROI from Enterprise Architecture posted at Architectural Thoughts.

Vinay Pai presents SaaS Making Inroads in the Consumer Space posted at Vinay Pai's Blog.

Alan Inglis presents Should IT include a business architecture function? posted at Chief Architect.

Alan Inglis presents Enterprise Architecture Management Styles posted at Chief Architect.

Alan Inglis presents Get out there! posted at Chief Architect.

Robert McIlree presents Interoperability, Change and Architecture posted at GotzeBlogged, saying, "John Gotze and Olov Östberg comment at length about enterprise architecture in government."

other

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Captured By CAPTCHA posted at Mad Kane's Humor Blog, saying, "CAPTCHA Humor"

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Victory In My Battle Against Feed Scraping Content Thief 4Comedy.com posted at Mad Kane's Humor Blog.

Ashish Gupta presents Data Mining Demystified - I posted at Ashish on technology and social media.

Raj Sheelvant presents IT Does Matter posted at IT Strategy, saying, "Challenging Nicholas Carr's view that IT does not matter"

Raj Sheelvant presents Making Enterprise Application SaaSy! posted at IT Strategy.

SOA

Michael presents Want SOA?  Got Data Governance? posted at Data Governance Blog, saying, "Data Governance is a necessary piece of SOA.  This article discusses the value of Data Governance to SOA."

system architecture

James Urquhart presents Agile Computing Catches Up to the Data Center posted at Service Level Automation in the Datacenter, saying, "With the coming evolution/revolution in the data center towards utility computing, automation and virtualization (server and otherwise), more and more organizations are facing the cultural shift from detailed planning of tightly controlled system architectures to goal-oriented automated systems.  The cultural upheaval this is causing is very similar to the pain (and gain) felt by developers moving from waterfall to agile methodologies.  What can we learn from their pain to ease the transition in the data center?"

Johan Idstam presents Developer Summit, Architecture and Business value. posted at Johan; thinking out loud..

Johan Idstam presents Information vs knowledge posted at Johan; thinking out loud..

R. Auch presents Colocation facility move posted at totalnetsolutions.net, saying, "System architecture, tips and hints for system setup, and other technical matters."

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of enterprise architecture, blog carnival.

Blog Worthiness & The Value of Metrics

The day where blogs are treated like real estate has arrived! Click here to find out how much your blog is 'worth' monetarily.

We all knew it had to come to this eventually, as blogging is now so mainstream that connections to money, power, and perhaps fame are inevitably made. However, when I showed it to my old-school banker buddy Teddy, he unequivocally stated that he would not loan anyone a dime with a blog as collateral. Call my man Ted very conservative, but he always has a knack for determining when people are overreaching.

Now to my real point: the site referenced at the beginning of this piece uses the Technorati API and something called the 'link-to-dollar' ratio. As a metric, that makes this one immediately suspect because Technorati, while a great resource, has had some problems of late with computing rankings and other calculations of "authority" - they keep changing all the time, for starters. It is difficult to use such metrics when the definition of them changes too often.

Which can make derived metrics, and the assumptions and conclusions we arrive at from them, equally suspect. Another example is Google Trends. Fine tool (thus far). Great concept. But not ready for prime time yet. A fairly-well-known Web 2.0 pundit (who shall go nameless) used it about a year ago to justify how Web 2.0 was taking over the internet and computing by looking at search trends on various Web 2.0-related acronyms and buzzwords. Issue #1: He was basing his assertions on what people searched for on Google, not what they actually had or did. Issue #2: Google Trends is not yet sophisticated enough to discern the difference between something like SOAP, the acronym, and soap as in detergent and cleaning agents. I ran his Google Trends analysis as he had it and with things like "soap, detergent" and a number of name brands of soaps/detergent. Guess what? Same results as his Web 2.0 version. Why is that not surprising? So, we have a context problem with the data and parameterization. That didn't stop this guy from making some very bold assertions from his 'work.'

In our business, we have things like "pick-your-nines" uptime and other calculations that while useful on the surface, mean little if erroneously computed or derived - including agreement on how such measures are arrived at. Relevance also plays a role here in addition to correctness.

While I've found the monetization calculations of blogs suspect at this point, they do have some value as entertainment, amusement, and for daydreaming purposes. Herewith are the 'monetary' values of this blog, some selections from my blogroll, and others:

   

    This Blog: $20,323.44            Chris Petrilli: $24,839.76        Nick Carr: $989,292.60
    Nick Malik: $4516.32             Sandy Kemsley: $47,421.36     Todd Biske: $80,164.38
    Tim Johnson: $41,775.96      Stowe Boyd: $287,915.40        James McGovern: $9032.64
    David Maister: $18,629.82   Seth Godin: $4.04 million         Techcrunch: $9.63 million

Looks like we have some A-listers with multi-million-dollar blogs, and a couple that blog frequently who couldn't use it as collateral for a used car. Anything wrong with this picture, folks?

Apply such skepticism liberally and consistently until satisfied with the measurement and process, not just the results.

UPDATE: Per Sandy's comment, removing the 'default.aspx' from Nick Malik's URL moves his blog's 'value' from $4516.32 to $23,146.14. Adding the 'ea' Typepad filename to mine lowers my 'value' to $13,548.96 from $20,323.44. Adding a '/' to James McGovern's URL changes his value from $9032.64 to $110,649.84. Looks like the guy propagating this has a lot of work to do....

UPDATE #2: The values shown in the original list above were calculated by giving the tool the URL as it appears in the referenced links. In every case presented above, manipulating the URL as described in the first update changes the value - up or down - depending on the weather, it appears. A pity it won't work on my NCAA basketball tournament brackets...:)

Still Time Left to Submit Posts to the Carnival of EA #3

There's still time left (until February 17th) to contribute posts to the Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #3 that I'm hosting at Blog Carnival. Submission is easy, and BC and I take care of the rest.

Please note that spam and pitches for products or services devoid of any other content or off-topic will not be published.

You can submit your works here with my thanks in advance!

Dinosaurs Masquerading as CIO's - Revisited

Last June, Sandy Kemsley commented on how far CIOs are behind the times with respect to adoption of Web 2.0 technologies based upon survey results published in CIO Insight magazine. Well, CIO Insight recently published their 'Top Trends 2007' analysis and the news on this front isn't any better than it was last year.

Here's the breakdown of response percentages stating that the indicated technology is of "no interest" and "not on the radar screen" (percentage in parentheses is from the 2006 report that Sandy referenced):

SaaS: 37%  (32%)
SOA: 27%  (30%)
RSS: 38%  (38%)
Podcasts: 49% (not referenced)
Social Networking (tags, social bookmarks, virtual communities): 51%  (51%)
Wikis: 46% (46%)

This year's survey sheds some light on why this is with the results of three follow-up questions. The first asked is Web 2.0 technologies increase security risks, to which 74% agreed. Next, respondents were asked if their company encourages employees to experiment with free or inexpensive Web-based applications - 68% disagreed. Finally, 73% agreed with the statement that the corporate IT department should evaluate new technologies first before any users try them out.

The answers to the follow-ups lend credence to IT management feeling threatened by Web 2.0 technologies, and as long as they have their hands at the organization's IT controls, I have doubts that adoption of these emergent technologies is going to occur at the pace that some folks would have you believe. It will be futile to stop the spread of these technologies over time, but it looks like a substantial number of IT managers are going to give it their best shot trying.

Perhaps the third time - next year's survey - will be the charm. If there isn't significant improvement in these numbers, the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 crowd will need to realize that the chasm here is much wider than they originally thought.