| CIO Blogs
IT Blog Awards |
Subscribe
RSS news feed
Add to Technorati FavoritesRecent Posts
- Voicemail
- What Happens Next? EU and Obama ask the same question
- Tech Predictions 2009: Slow IT
- The Incognito Banking Corporation and the Fairy Godmother 2.0
- What happens to my product portfolio if …
- Technology that Matters
- Apple/O2 versus Blackberry/Vodafone versus Google/T-Mobile
- Tech Predictions 2009: Bricolage IT
- Why Business Models need Cloud Computing
- Now, who's the President?!
Navigate
Search the blog
« People;- Profiles, Communities and Mesh Working | Main | Strategy and differentiation »
HP Software Universe and a Business issue
Another industry event; this time its HP Software Universe in Barcelona, and again it’s bigger with more attendees, (around 4000 people), than in previous years. This fits a pattern I have seen over the second half of this year with industry events getting better attended again after a period when interest and attendees had declined. It seems that people are realising that there is a sea change in technologies and their use in business going on so they again want to attend to find out more. The crowded stands at these events are the demonstration booths where one person provides a one on one introduction and tuition on a new technology. As I have said before I don’t intend to cover HP products and propositions as they can do that for themselves, but it’s a case of the discussions and linkages that attendance produces.
There is a common feature that I have seen at these events leading me to my real interest. These popular demonstrations all seem to feature the use of so-called easy to ‘drag and drop’ techniques by which you reconfigure your business process through the orchestration of the ‘services’ in the SOA layer. Looks great, probably is as well, but the consequences are the real issue. The HP message at the event is around how to support this with smart infrastructure, i.e. self configuring automatically to handle the impacts of these changes, as well as unpredictable user demands. The use of more Web 2.0 over SOA solutions, possibly as ‘shadow IT’; meaning that the first that the IT department will know about the deployment, or change to a process, is when a ‘drag and drop’ change actually occurs. Therefore the infrastructure needs to be smart enough to identify this and compensate through automated optimisation reconfigurations. Nice thinking, guys, and good to see some real capabilities to handle this situation. But is it enough?
My challenge is that there is a similar, but different problem in the business process stack and I am not sure how this will get handled. Process integrity leading to data integrity – what I will call ‘procedure’ - has taken a long time to achieve in our deployments, and now the ease of change capability looks as though it may threaten this. I accept it seems likely the various software giants have thought of this, though I have not seen any evidence to support that they have, and made some controls. However these new ‘services’ do not behave like applications, or ERP systems, where integrity means achieving a standardised data model, usually in line with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, GAAP.
No, these new ‘services’ are there to achieve strongly differentiated abilities for your enterprise to do better business in today’s competitive markets. So it’s a little difficult to come up with an effective kit of built in rules and policies for checking deployments when the whole reason for the change is to be ‘different’ to the rest of the market.
So I am left wondering about this; after some thought my conclusion is that it reflects the difference between the existing ‘transactional’ IT systems, exposed as services, and the concept of ‘Interactions’ representing this new techno business environment. My natural instinct is to think of control, and consequences in terms of ‘transactional’ systems, where as may be at the interaction layer we shouldn’t think this way? May be if we have an active smart infrastructure to keep things operating we don’t have to worry about anything else? After all we don’t seem to need these rules for Web 2.0 social networks and their gadgets and widgets.
Posted by Andy Mulholland on December 3, 2007 | 
Digg this | 
Seed Newsvine
TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.capgemini.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/273
Comments
# on December 6, 2007 11:47 AM, Guillaume Leleu said:
Hi Andy,
nice article. HP is probably one of the most advanced player in the Web Services infrastructure and (technical) processes monitoring.
Nevertheless they still address solely the technical challenges (and even more specific the runtime view) of SOA and even if they try to move to real-time BPM configuration, they still do not have any (business) services to provide. They can propose their technical ones but it is still limiting.
Shifting from "transactions" to "services" is not an easy path mainly because the existing applications still do not support it. Not from the technical point of view, more from the process one! As they are mainly designed to be "stand-alone" (and sold as-is), their data model does not really allow flexible changes (remote master data, etc) and their integrity is ensured by "short" transactions. They can expose services but in a pre-defined order and manner.
Nevertheless the issue is not really at this level.
The market has adopted (package) business apps because it was costly to build custom/own apps (except in the Financial Services Industry) and also because they wanted to get the Best Industry Practice "out of the box". In most of cases, during the implementation, the organization has failed to comply with the (market) best practices simply because they thought they were unique (for their business processes). Which is wrong, the key differentiator is what you propose (innovation!) not the way you work (at the same quality, cost, etc).
Doing better in the today's market, most of the time means being able to renew your offers faster than your competitors (higher value chain), as the competition for lower cost is always when you have reached the last wave of the adoption cycle ("commoditization"!).
That is the most interesting point, renew you offers faster or bring new services/products to the market (not necessarily at a lower cost if you have a strong differentiaton - eg. Apple iPod and now iPhone) and that is not really an issue in the today's information system...which is more a huge issue from the organizational model and the one that takes the responsability.
On the last CIO survey, it appears that their primary concern was...to do not loose their jobs due to a wrong decision. It sounds like completely incompatible with the principal key factor which is the innovation...
SOA is also a question of social challenges. I have an eBook (from a software vendor) that highlights that fact. For the blog readers, I can send you a copy (contact me).
Regards
Guillaume Leleu
# on December 6, 2007 12:30 PM, andy mulholland said:
Good post thanks Guillaume with lots of content.
Its interesting to reflect that the functional role of the IT department is all too often now set out to be the maintance of stability. Particularly if the CIO as the head of the department reports to the CFO.
yet the business management outside of the Finance industy is pushing for dynamic change as a competitive weapon.
the misinterpretation between them seems to be in the definition of 'agility'. to the IT department is this about methods applied to an existing environment, to the business managers its about a different game in how to do business.
actually you need both, but the clash between the two sides and the two different types of requirements will be painfull i suspect.
# on December 6, 2007 12:30 PM, andy mulholland said:
Good post thanks Guillaume with lots of content.
Its interesting to reflect that the functional role of the IT department is all too often now set out to be the maintance of stability. Particularly if the CIO as the head of the department reports to the CFO.
yet the business management outside of the Finance industy is pushing for dynamic change as a competitive weapon.
the misinterpretation between them seems to be in the definition of 'agility'. to the IT department is this about methods applied to an existing environment, to the business managers its about a different game in how to do business.
actually you need both, but the clash between the two sides and the two different types of requirements will be painfull i suspect.