CTO Blog

A plan for ‘legacy’ in a world of change

A long time ago a colleague said that his ideal would be a job where every day you started anew with nothing from the past intruding on your new day. I guess that’s a fair description of the way most of us regard our relationship to ‘legacy’ systems? Not surprisingly this came up in a survey of Retailers, who regarded their legacy systems as the biggest barrier to their development of cross channel online systems, but does it have to be so, or can we start to figure out a more logical approach?

21st Century Business Architecture?

Every now and then I, like many of us, like to take a step back, slow down, and have a good old think about what’s really going on. Preferably on a summer evening with some good company and a glass of something cold – but I’m digressing.

It never ceases to amaze me how new ways of working emerge when information and services, from many different sources, are available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

What’s really fascinating is that these new ways of working aren’t the preserve of the corporate strategists - communities of people, both as employees and as individuals, are often generating them. In fact, the IT we use as an individual is often more sophisticated than the IT we use at work.

The world is exponentially more connected and each connection fuels more connections. This level of (increasing) connectedness is unprecedented. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented level of ‘business-technology fusion.’ People and machines, business and IT, are becoming fundamentally fused (even without the science-fiction, recall the last time you left your phone at home and for most it feels like a part of you is missing!)

How might we view our changing world? Here are some concepts I’ve collated from the great and good over the past months. Whether one agrees with the specific definitions or not, what each of them describes in spirit is an undeniable reality and the onward march of each is inevitable:

• Co-value creation (I use this quite a bit)
• Exponential globalisation
• Collaborative innovation
• Prosumerism (a personal favourite!)
• The long tail
• Connected everything
• No frontiers automation
• New business model innovation
• Information centricity
• Interaction centricity
• Mashed up corporations
• World 2.0
• Supply to demand chain, and
• Unbundled everything

While these are all useful strategic concepts they are more of an effect than a cause. And so for the balanced view we should peek into the cause too.

How might we describe the cause? I like to use the phrase ‘Information & communications technology society’ to describe the shift in the macro-environment and to my mind there are three causal trends:

#1 Everything and everyone becoming connected
#2 People and machines becoming fused
#3 Product-based to service-based economy

The intriguing aspect is that each of these is opposite to the culture baked into many business models in use by mature organisations today.

I’d actually go further and say successful 21st century business and government is based on a business model which has all of the 3 trends considered foundationally, and which understands that people are people:

This picture emerged from a stimulating conversation I had recently with Ken Olisa, and I’d love to hear your views.

Enterprise SOA without Enterprise Architecture – hunting for treasure without a map?: Guest blogger - Jonathan Ebsworth

With SAP Sapphire coming up it was only natural to find myself talking with my colleagues Jonathan who leads the UK practice and Frank who leads the Dutch practice about the changes and challenges in the ERP world. Not surprisingly both had some clear opinions based on their work and I suggested that both should share them via guest pieces on the CTO Blog. The first is from Jonathan.

I have been working with SAP NetWeaver and the developing Business Process Platform since 2003. In that time I have seen the emergence of a rich and increasingly complete SOA-enabled software platform. Despite some interesting development around Enterprise Architecture in that time, I wonder whether much has changed in typical SAP implementation projects?

The potential of the Business Process Platform is substantially different than yesterday’s CRM, ERP, SCM etc. platforms. Delivering SOA-enabled business content on a rich infrastructure offers the possibility of some very different deployment models for business solutions. Too often I find that the SAP team within the client organisation acting as the sole custodian of SAP solutions and that the Architecture Team (if one exists at all within the customer’s organisation) seen as the ‘enemies’ of the SAP team. Too often the Enterprise Architects are not even interested or engaged sufficiently in guiding and shaping the development of those SAP deployments within their business. If they do try, then they tend to operate out of their old-fashioned custom developed software paradigms. We are also frozen into the old way of very large-scale project deployments of business solutions – when, in fact we could be moving to a more rapid finer-grained deployment and enhancement of business capability.

How can we pull the world of the Enterprise Architect together with that of the SAP practitioner?

It's okay Cyber Storm II has passed

Hands up all those who knew that we have just had the largest exercise ever to test the preparedness for a cyber storm attack on the communication infrastructure of ‘western civilisation’? You didn’t know about this? Cyberstorm II, as it is named, was organised by the US Department of Homeland Security to test how well IT Infrastructures and Government agencies would survive in the event of a determined cyber attack designed to break the Internet, and other communication mediums. It was a big, and well organised, affair with 18 federal departments, and more than 100 US and global enterprises, from right round the world, as well as some key technology vendors, such as Cisco, taking part.

The Index of Convergence - Chris Yapp

By guest blogger, Chris Yapp

I wanted to share this post with you. Chris is a leading industry figure and a close colleague. We’d be fascinated to hear your views on Chris’s idea of an Index of Convergence.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did when I read it.

Index of Convergence – Chris Yapp

Thirty years ago this month I took delivery of a Decwriter II and an acoustic coupler. It could deliver 110 baud and on a good day 300. I sent my first email! We often talk about the exponential change and the rapid innovations in IT. Certainly I’ve seen over my career moves from hundreds and thousands to Mega, Giga and Terra on the one hand and down to the nano on the other.

Yet last week, I was talking to a client who was still struggling to make a business case to upgrade from office 97 meet financial hurdles. If we really were making exponential change surely this wouldn’t be so hard?

Are eBay – changing their game?

When one of the companies seen as a founder of the ‘web for people’ movement starts to change its stance then it creates a lot of interest, and a lot of comments. After all this time, and building certainly one of the world’s largest community sites, eBay is changing its fees and rules in such a way that there has been an outcry that this now favours businesses, and will dismantle the ‘individual and ‘trust’ model that it pioneered. The moves come direct from the new CEO John Donahue whose vision is to upgrade eBay so it is less of a flea market and more of a shopping mall.

The shift in fees, announced back in February 2008, certainly helps volume sellers at the expense of individuals selling their unwanted items, as they; on one hand lift the eBay cut of the transaction from 5.25% to 7.25%, whilst offering volume discounts of up to 40%; on the other hand they reduce the listing fee by up to 33%. Both moves that favour, and presumably encourage, the business seller, hence my comment is this a game change in the business model?

What is the definition of Middleware these days?

I have been listening to presentations by some of the big vendors on their ‘Middleware’ strategies, products, and capabilities over the last month and I no longer think I understand the term Middleware in quite the absolute way that I did. What I can’t decide is if there is a generic redefinition that we should all be updating our understanding to grasp, or not.

The old definition was pretty clear and linked to the technology and the needs for interconnection between applications, and systems which were inherently separate vertical stacks. But now I see it being used to cover a much wider range of topics, and most, if not all, of them relate to what I would describe as ‘business’ activities. Take a look at Oracle Application Integration Architecture, AIA, to see what I mean the Oracle definition now includes Business Intelligence as an example.

Extract, Transform and Load – now available for MashUps

As more and more enterprises move to adopt MashUps the question of what content, and from where is it coming, is being asked more and more often. I guess it's part of the move we are all taking part in from using structured data, created by our own computers, to an increasing use of unstructured data, which could be described as created, and used by, people with the resulting ‘inconsistencies’.

Users are increasingly recognising the value of a MashUp to combine this mass of unstructured content found on the Web into a focussed view that suits their requirements. Maybe we should coin the term ‘structured presentation’? A well built MashUp is truly a satisfying experience, producing the same feelings in the user as I think the spreadsheet must have produced when they first experienced it. Freedom to do what I require the way I need it to be done.

However there are a couple of concerns;

My Laptop, Your Laptop

It’s something I particularly like to do when speaking at Open Source conferences, where the sentiments every now and then just tend a bit too much towards the politically correct. Open Source is Free, Green, Saving the World and – most importantly – helps us to battle the dominance of the You-Know-Who guys. Yeah. Right. In these cases, it always seems appropriate to dedicate a few minutes to the important work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the beginning of the presentation.

Just a bit of warm bonding with an audience. There’s nothing like it.

But admitted, during the recent Go Open conference in Oslo, I saw an excellent example of what the Open Source is donating to the real world. I have written about it before, but the XO ‘100$ laptop’ of the One Laptop Per Child foundation still manages to inspire more and more people. After Håkon Wium Lie, the brain behind the Opera browser and a true IT Rockstar in Norway, had showed a XO during his speech, the podium was swarmed by people that just wanted to touch and feel that small, very green-painted wonder machine.

Although the XO is not an open source community initiative (others are responsible for that), it does run completely on free software, which obviously helps to keep the production price low. The OLPC initiative is extremely relevant, as it aims to educate the children in our world, and I encourage all of you to donate to it and tell it to others.

Exit Yahoo – an early end to technology innovation?

I am pretty sure like everyone else you have been following the Yahoo saga, starting with the shock of the bid with Microsoft, through all the twists and turns. I am not going to comment on the commercials of this; not sure anyone needs more on this given all the coverage I have seen to date in the Press and online! What interests me is the early stage potential consolidation of what I would describe as a technology market that has yet to become mature and the impact that has on the technology.

By the way for those not keeping up with the news so called ‘white knight’ AOL has now gone off and bought a search company, albeit perhaps not a general search engine, but a more focussed one. Meantime other names are being quoted, or speculated, as being interested, and the list now includes Google, (of course), and News Corp. At some stage all markets become mature and consolidation occurs, witness the recent main software vendor’s activities in buying up smaller companies, but this is usually a sign that innovation in the market, or the products, is now slow and revenue growth needs to come from this route.

About the authors

A plan for ‘legacy’ in a world of change

21st Century Business Architecture?

Enterprise SOA without Enterprise Architecture – hunting for treasure without a map?: Guest blogger - Jonathan Ebsworth

It's okay Cyber Storm II has passed

The Index of Convergence - Chris Yapp

Are eBay – changing their game?

What is the definition of Middleware these days?

Extract, Transform and Load – now available for MashUps

My Laptop, Your Laptop

Exit Yahoo – an early end to technology innovation?

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