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Apr 7

social networks
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The Social Enterprise – what problem are we trying to solve?

Social Computing along with Cloud Computing is one of the hot IT buzz words – i.e., the Social Cloud must then be the ultimate in buzz word compliance. This is in fact what Andrew McAfee from MIT’s Management school and Mike Gotta from Cisco are discussing.

Andrew presents his Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way in a recent blog post. He describes a project done internally at Tata Consulting Services, where they build a social collaboration tool to rate and share the broad collection of project derived knowledge. It sounds deceptively simple, but on the other hand, I have seen the results from a number of similar projects deploying a very structured, formal approach to knowledge sharing – and none of those worked very well – so why not? The real trick at TCS didn’t seem to be so much about the tool, but what motivated the TCS consultants to engage. You could call it a bottom up approach to the Social Enterprise.

The opposite example is presented by Mike Gotta in his presentation: Build an Architecture of Participation. I have to warn you, it is heavy on models, slides etc. Although he is discussing the same thing, it is probably more of what you’d call a top down approach to the Social Enterprise.
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Mar 30

confused

IT confuses (again)

I occasionally read Nick Malik‘s blog, Inside Architecture, and his latest post about ‘Business Capability’ reminded me of IT people’s general ability to take a perfectly understandable word, such as capability, and turn it into something confusing. This is not a criticism of Nick or Paul Harmon who wrote the article, Capabilities and Processes, that promoted Nick to write – but merely used as an example to illustrate my point.

Now, IT’s definition of ‘Business Capability’ is ‘what a business does at its core‘, and its description (e.g., model) captures ‘what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfil its objectives and responsibilities‘. The idea is to focus on ‘what‘ an organisation needs to do, rather than the actual ‘how‘. A conceptual view, if you like. And so the discussion continues in search of the ‘what’ and what it really is.

I think the confusion around ‘Business Capability’ stems from the fact, that a noun can refer to an entity, a quality, a state, an action, or a concept. Read more

Dec 22

Door paard getrokken taxi

Enterprise Architecture – the search for a faster horse?

Len Fehskens from The Open Group recently wrote an interesting article for The Open Group blog titled ‘Enterprise Architecture’s Quest for its Identity‘ (and subsequently recycled at ZDNet and SOA World Magazine), where he poses two questions:

  1. Is enterprise architecture primarily about IT or is it about the entire enterprise?
  2. Is enterprise architecture a “hard” discipline or a “soft” discipline?

Len argues in favour of Enterprise Architecture as a soft discipline concerned with the entire enterprise and not just IT. But I would have liked Len to have addressed the ‘why?’ part better – often identity is derived from the purpose of doing it. He makes a few references to ‘descriptions’ of an enterprise. But as Todd Biske pointed out, the relevance of Enterprise Architecture is determined by the whether the Architects of an enterprise are Enterprise Archivist (model focused) or Enterprise Activist (engagement focused). Read more

Oct 10

Steve Jobs at WDC 2010

Worth remembering

Mar 30

Tools
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beyond the tools of the trade

Architects like to discuss the type of framework they use, their preferred patterns or the pros and cons of a new technology. We, as many other professionals, have a fascination with the tools in our tool bag. But the success of our projects often rests on other, less tangible skills. Here’s five that I’ve found particularly useful. Read more

Mar 16

256px-Gutenberg_press

Architects as facilitators

Arthur Wright, a software architect from Credit Suisse, wrote an interesting article in the current issue of the IEEE Software magazine, called: Lessons Learned: Architects Are Facilitators, Too! He describes a number of divergent behaviours causing the architecture to fragment through unauthorised interfaces, ill-considered technologies and protest designs. The article is an ‘anti-pattern’ to Conway’s Law. The form and structure of an architecture is often – when you deal with a certain level of complexity – closer related to the (human) organisational communication patterns and structure then a direct realisation of the (wishful) thinking of an architect – competent or not…. Read more

Mar 6

Security Model

The (real) problem with Cloud Security

A real gap has appeared between how Cloud vendors and their customers perceive security. In a recent survey, that 69% of vendors believe security is primarily a cloud customer responsibility, but only 35 percent of them believe security is their responsibility only. Just 16 percent of cloud providers feel security is a shared responsibility, compared to 33 percent of cloud users.

Although security has repeatedly been highlighted as one of the key concerns with Cloud Computing, only 20 percent of cloud vendors see security as a competitive advantage, and fewer than 27 percent feel their cloud services can protect and secure customer information.

Why is there such a gap? Read more

Feb 12

Architect

The importance of mentoring

English: Architect at his drawing board. This ...

Image via Wikipedia

According to a recent survey by MIT Sloan Management Review, 60% of employees surveyed don’t have enough data to do their jobs. And it is not a technology challenge; but rather cultural and management. Not an entirely encouraging statistics in the context of the growing importance of the tertiary sector of our economies – information is key, especially if you work within the IT industry.

The survey reminded me about Nonaka, a professor in management research. According to him, we have two kinds of knowledge – explicit and tacit; and four knowledge processes (framed below in the context of software architecture):

  • From Tacit to Tacit – when a less experienced architect (or wannabe architect) observes a master architect in action; if your organisation has a shortage of good architects, then this one is important.
  • From Explicit to Explicit – an individual can combine separate pieces of information into a new whole, e.g., combining several architectural styles and patterns into a new, solution specific architecture. But explicit descriptions are only as good as people’s ability to read and understand them – i.e., the tacit knowledge the reader is assumed to possess. Read more

Aug 4

facebook_logo

Maybe Zuckerberg is right – our privacy is dead

The tracking of online user behaviour is a big deal. And I think it is one of these things that people are aware of – at least to some degree. But how much – and who is tracking your web browsing? Toolness.org wrote a tool, that enables you see just how much tracking is happening and by who. The image is a screen shot of visiting just five web sites – each dot is a separate site, i.e., 37 site in total, even though I only loaded five sites: mozilla.com, wordpress.com, cnn.com, arstechnica.com and amazon.com.

The red dots are the tracker sites (confirmed by privacychoice.org). The two separate dots are mozilla.com (grey) sending information to webtrendsline.com (red), while wordpress.com sends information to wp.com, youtube.com, gravatar.com and quantserve.com (red) (top right five dots)

The big one, which surprised me, created by visiting arstechnica.com, amazon.com and cnn.com – only three sites – and another 27 companies know about my web browsing! Most of whom I have never heard about. For example, loading an arstechnica.com webpage will send your browsing information to Twitter, Facebook, scorecardresearch, outbrain.com, 2mdm.net, addtoany.com, reddit.com, doubleclick.net, and Google.

And sites like scorecardresearch, facebook and doubleclick (owned by Google) collects from other sites.  Basically, they are likely to know more about you than any government organisation and maybe even your friends.

Paranoid yet?

Jul 6

It’s human to error, but real catastrophes require computers

A typical server "rack", commonly se...

Image via Wikipedia

InfoWorld published a story last week titled the Top 10 worst cloud outages. The article certainly makes for good reading, although it would be nice, if people would stop acting so surprised about cloud failures. It is after all just software and server hardware, and, while very clever, all technology fail at some point despite the recent hype. In fact, the more you have, the more likely it is to experience failures. A Cloud vendor would actually need to work harder to just match a ‘simpler’, traditional data centre in terms of high availability.

The Butterfly Effect

The most important lesson taught at a first aid course is to ‘stop the accident’ – the same is starting to apply to highly interconnected software systems.

The recent Gmail failure caused by a software bug discovered during the deployment process, yet it still managed to affect 0.02 percentage of Gmail users. Skype has experienced two outages due to a combination of localised high load and a (replicated) software bug (discussed here and here). Amazon’s recent failure was a network misconfiguration which escalated into a data replication storm.

High availability built through infrastructure replication typically still share the same software infrastructure, e.g., multiple deployments, same code, so a bug in one equals a bug in all. The space shuttle had two separate flight systems to avoid this and achieve high reliability – not the same as high availability – which in a cloud computing context equals the ability to use two (or more) alternative cloud vendors for the same service.

The case of ‘localised failure bringing down an entire network’ isn’t new of course. Read more

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