IT Vigilante: how Charles Bronson would develop applications

I am obviously old enough to remember Charles Bronson in his most famous acting role: as a vigilante, ruthlessly taking care of any criminal crossing his path. Deserted by the police and judges, he has nothing but himself – and a few nasty street fighting skills – to get his justice. And he is quite good at it too, although admittedly half of the city is blown up and the resulting mess takes weeks to clean up.

Not exactly your regular art film house movie, no.

But a useful metaphor here: slowly but surely we are seeing the birth of IT Vigilantes: people outside the scope of the IT department that create their own solutions, simply because they feel that they are not enough supported by the corporate entities. In our TechnoVision approach we refer to it as a pent-up demand: as consumers, we know exactly how to use technology to achieve our goals. And we expect nothing less than the same experience when we return to the offices on Monday morning. If there is a gap – and usually there is – this can lead to a lot of frustration, especially with the IT department in denial or too absorbed by the challenge of keeping their existing, aging systems alive.

Left to their own devices, people will start to develop applications themselves, even bring their own laptops to work. And it easier than ever to create solutions. Gartner notices the trend as well: analyst Erik Knipps coins the concept of Citizen Developers (with 0.95 certainty more politically correct than IT Vigilante) for it. He mentions four areas that help citizen development to advance: the possibility to customise software for personal use - in our TechnoVision approach described as the You Experience -, the delivery of services through the cloud, - software as a service -, the growing digital awareness among workers and the availability of easy-to-use, yet powerful development tools.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on October 24, 2009

Haussmannisation

This may come as a surprise from a Chief Technology Officer, but in my family I am not exactly seen as a handyman. When it comes to construction skills, I am more like the laugh of the town. My brother effortlessly builds entire kitchens and just for the fun takes care of the plumbing and electrical wiring too. Personally, I already get nervous when I watch a Billy bookcase kit getting unpacked.

On the other hand, I have undisputed demolition skills. Give me a sledgehammer and within a few hours even the worst junk yard looks like an empty Zen garden. An underestimated, yet quite useful skill that is becoming more and more relevant in the IT landscape as well.

Because let’s face it, our systems developers are still mainly educated as constructors. This is done from the downright naïve perspective that software is developed in a green field situation. Almost all of the innovations in our profession aim to build better, faster and smarter. Starting from nothing. For that, we fill our toolboxes with accelerators such as Model Driven Architecture, frameworks, components, services, Domain Specific Languages and code generators.

And then we are genuinely disappointed that these toolboxes are being used less and less.

The reason? All the junk that the constructors before us – or maybe even ourselves – have left behind. The bulk of the budget of the average IT department is spent on keeping existing systems operational. Sometimes, these systems have been written in programming languages that are only known from old myths. I recently heard about a certain crucial Scandinavian government system that is only understood by one single, 74-year old programmer. He is being kept alive with iron pills, massages and daily blood transfusions.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on September 14, 2009

Do Turkeys vote for Slow IT?

Metaphors are dangerous. A talented thinker once even stated that “using a metaphor is like carrying water in a bucket with a hole in it; there is a limit to where it will take you”. But anyway, the link between my earlier pleas for a more careful approach to technology (‘Slow IT’) and Slow Food is stronger than just a metaphor.

After all, the Slow Food movement started in Italy as a reaction to a quickly degrading food culture in which more and more of the taste and experience was sacrificed on the holy altar of Agitated Speed. When a McDonalds restaurant was even opened at the Piazza Di Spagna in Rome, it was the last drop that made the cup run over (good metaphor, yes). Carlo Petrini founded the Slow Food movement and even made it to one of the Time Magazine 2004 heroes, just because he promotes the love for original food that is prepared and tasted with the time and attention it deserves.

Seems that the current approach to IT is ready for some tender loving care as well. Especially in this period of downturn, the anxiety for short-term patches may drive us in the arms of hasty solutions that only partially satisfy. Then they will leave the organisation hungrier and unhealthier than it ever was. Proper timing and focus can help us to rediscover what value we actually want to deliver through technology and what foundation we need to achieve that.

David Sprott, the well-respected founder of CBDI forum (“a think tank specializing in practices for SOA and architecture led software delivery and management”), recognises this too. He makes a good analysis of why doing things right – in Slow IT style – is necessary in an industry in which offshoring, agile development and Web 2.0 are promising, but all too often hysterically abused tools. He doubts however that organisations will be ready for Slow IT, as he sees many of them already ‘slowing down’ in terms of cutting budgets, reducing headcount and – in general – doing more with less. The emphasis is now on quick, effective results and advocating more ‘slow,’ he says, nowadays seems a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on June 19, 2009

The Washington Template

I just might be repeating myself a little bit. But clearly, the Obama administration is setting a worldwide example of how to change a business through technology 2009 style. It went through my mind again when preparing for a panel on Tech Transformation, next week at the Forbes CEO Forum in Scotland. You see, it is one thing to get inspired by new technologies and understand how they can radically change business models – which is more than ever relevant in this period of downturn. But actually execute on these ideas and bring the promise to life: that may be the tougher challenge of the two.

I think they are doing both in Washington and we should all watch and learn from the patterns that are unfolding.

Barack Obama himself, to start with, is an excellent role model for any CEO that wants to grasp the potential of technology to transform business. He is obviously technology-savvy (without being a geek) and shows how to apply information technology in a pragmatic way. Many would argue that he got elected because of his smart use of Web 2.0 to reach out to his potential voters and mobilise a community. And after becoming elected he is still actively using all Internet channels to stay in touch with that community. Already in his campaign, he referred to technology as one of the most important tools to address the phenomenal challenges that America – indeed a complex business - is facing. Healthcare, education, energy, R&D: in the plans of Obama, technology would provide the breakthroughs to make his country leading again.

And now he is executing on the vision. Together with an impressive team.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on June 13, 2009

Wax On, Wax Off

There is something symbolic about it: organising an IT conference in the Central Hall in London. Right next to the Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference takes place in one of the landmark buildings of the protestant Methodist church. Established in the 18th century by John Wesley, the Methodist movement consists of people that aim to live a devout, serious life. Not some noncommittal philosophising about the heavenly glory and all that, but practicing faith every dag again, through dedicated, hard work. It’s only when you share your meal in the soup kitchen with the underprivileged of this world, that you start to experience the real essence of faith, so the Methodists believe.

Interesting thinking and at the very least, it gives an extra dimension to the panel discussion on the podium. The topic today is the eternal tension between the long term and the short term. In the panel team we find enterprise architects, IT strategists and a market analyst (no, not exactly the underprivileged). The hypothesis discussed is that the shallowness of today’s economic climate asks for a more careful, architected approach. That way, the requirements of the business can be much better aligned with solutions and it will be easier to achieve – and demonstrate – the value of IT.

A politically correct argument that nobody can really oppose to.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on May 7, 2009

Freemarket

Cultural differences, every now and then it takes some time to explain. Being a Dutchman, wherever I come abroad I have to defend the infamous Dutch lunch. And believe me, there is very little ammunition. We usually stick to a miserable sandwich with some Gouda cheese. If we are in a daring mood, there may be a croquette. And always, there is buttermilk, the unnecessary cruel incarnation of what originally was meant as plain dairy. I have seen tough, Mediterranean business men cry like little babies when they had taken their first sip. The pain, the agony!

Compared to that, our annual Queen's Day celebration on the 30th of April is not even that hard to explain. A monarchy? Sure, why not. Charming. Celebrating the Queen's birthday when it’s not even her birthday? Probably some good pragmatic reasons for it. Grown up people dancing in the streets with orange wigs on their heads? Well, we have seen that before on live television, haven’t we. Might even get used to it one day.

Only the ‘vrijmarkt’ (freemarket), that’s still a question mark to many. An American colleague who accidentally witnessed it once did an attempt to summarise. “So if I understand this well” he said with a worried tone in his voice “your idea of celebration is to open up your attics, get the old stuff out of there and then sell it on the street to other Dutchmen?”. I confirmed, hesitantly. It did sound a bit strange, the way he put it.

On the other hand, I do support the concept. In business, that is. It is a good idea to periodically go through your belongings. Wipe away the dust and have a good, contemplating look. Some assets shine more than expected. Others, no doubt can be thrown away immediately. It cleans up and creates more room to breathe. Exactly the energy boost you need after a long, cold winter. And then even make money with it, why aren’t they doing the same anywhere else in the World?

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Posted by Ron Tolido on April 29, 2009

TOGAF 9: A Sunny Day in San Diego

It’s just a standard day in San Diego. That is to say, the friendly people over here are kind of used to blue skies and summer temperatures at the beginning of February. On the other hand, these days are quite special. The Open Group just released version 9 of TOGAF (The Open Group Architectural Framework) at its first 2009 conference, and I am convinced that we are witnessing nothing less than a breakthrough in the world of Enterprise and IT Architecture. Consider it: the role of architecture as a crucial tool to put strategy into practice is becoming more and more prominent. After all, architecture always has been the antidote to complexity, misalignment and lack of direction. And these are exactly the phenomena we have to deal with in the typical business / IT climate of today.

A sign of a maturing craft is standardization: the availability of repeatable processes, clearly defined results, reusable best practices and the tools to support that all. In the world of Enterprise / IT architecture, entire careers have been dedicated to creating methodologies, frameworks and meta-models. Actually, some made a career out of comparing and selecting methodologies and yet others managed to create frameworks to assess frameworks (go ahead, take your time to fully appreciate this). In the end, every architect seemed to own his or her own methodology and more than once, I had the feeling architects were more occupied with discussing methodologies and frameworks than actually using them. Yes, architects were brought together. But only to discuss their differences.

These days might finally be over now. TOGAF 9 will further strengthen its position as the de facto standard for Enterprise and IT Architecture. And not even primarily because of its superior methodological content (although the list of enhancements to the previous version is very elaborate and convincing and we find SOA, iterative principles and even the acknowledgement of standard packages in the new TOGAF), but much more because TOGAF 9 is the result of an open and collaborative industry consensus process.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on February 5, 2009

Silo Considered Harmful

So what exactly is everybody’s problem with Silo’s? Not a particularly warm-received phenomenon among IT specialists and consultants. Any junior writer of IT marketing material knows it: first you launch some platitudes about globalization, increasing competition and changes that occur faster and faster. And right after that, it is time to deal with silo’s. Silo’s are evil. Our legacy systems resemble them. Isolated and compartmentalised, they lead an utterly useless existence. Luckily, now we have the principles of object orientation and service oriented architecture to battle these immovable pillars. We recreate them into a collection of loosely coupled objects (or components, or services, whatever we want to call them) and thus gain in flexibility, maintainability and overall coolness.

Sounds feasible, doesn’t it? And indeed, many an IT strategy contains – often risky and complex – plans to get rid of silo’s. In the meantime, more and more the question is raised whether silo systems are really that bad.

Obviously, the silo is just a metaphor. But let us elaborate a bit more on the very nature of this useful construction. A silo is especially build to store non-perishable materials for a longer period of time. Think grain, coal, fertiliser, sand and cement. If we take a look at most IT systems, we also see many elements that have a low turnover rate. These are elements that contain information and business rules that stay relatively stable throughout the years. Only very few changes will occur. Furthermore, although these elements are at the very core of business, they typically do not deliver much differentiating value.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on September 30, 2008

A different premise for operation?

I was thinking about IT, and how the business community can find IT services relevant to their work but not find the IT department relevant, something which was shown in our most recent CIO survey. It occurred to me that perhaps we (the IT community) are working from some wrong, or at least obsolete premises. The tendency in IT is to put things into nice, neat boxes. Our background with programming logic makes us do that, it's to be expected that we'd like things nice and logical. But it also seems to me that we tend to build towards models that are too static - if we just get this enterprise data model done, all our IT problems will be solved. And I think that's where the challenge comes in - conventional IT seems to build to static models, and plan for clean neat solutions, when the world no longer, or never did work that way in the first place. If so, perhaps that's why we see so many "shadow IT" groups in business units - because they are able to adapt quicker to changes, or to work better with ambiguity by working "closer to the user". Perhaps we should be looking at a change of premise, a different outlook for IT overall, one that helps balance the laudable goals of enterprise architecture with the realities of a quickly changing IT landscape where "good enough" represents the essence of another premise. I'm asking myself why the IT department doesn't matter, playing over and over the answers I've seen in big shops and concluding we try to do too much and that putting more "IT" in the hands of the business might be the answer we need. What do you think?

Posted by Sean Rhody on September 15, 2008

The Open Architecture Community

Well it had to happen didn’t it? If we have more and more emphasis on Open Source Software and on using the Web as a Platform, (albeit that might become Cloud Computing eventually), at some time the thought of architecturally consistency for these environments has to become an issue. So with great interest I went to see what these guys are up to at the Open Architecture Community, and also wondered why I haven’t heard of them before.

Wrong architecture! It’s all about buildings; more particularly it’s all about sharing and reviewing designs, project management tools and even some repositories. However its worth a visit to see a really interesting example of a Web 2.0 community creating value in an area where frankly I would have thought ‘Professionals’ were loathe to share their hard won knowledge.

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Posted by Andy Mulholland on September 15, 2008

ASAP is dead! Long live ASAP!

My colleague Mendel Koerts has been publishing guest blog-items on SAP BMP / eSOA and the SAP TechEd before and it is with great pleasure that I give him the stage again. Yep, you guessed it, it's about SAP. But not the SAP as we know it. I happen to watch Mendel working on an important book about 'Architected SAP'. Consider the following item by Mendel as a prelude, and follow this blog for more news soon.

ASAP is dead! Long live ASAP!

Since this title obviously caught your attention you are most likely familiar with AcceleratedSAP, the good old methodology for implementing and upgrading classical SAP solutions. In spite of the title, ASAP Roadmaps, like those for implementing ERP, are still living happily in the SAP Solution Manager 7.0 product. True. But the point is this. Having worked with various clients over recent years on adopting and taking advantage of services-based SAP solutions, it became evident that as-is ASAP is not by far sufficient as a robust approach for services-based SAP projects. With the irreversibly rise of ‘thinking services’, it is time to declare ASAP dead and to coronet the new ASAP: ArchitectedSAP.

Pretty self-explanatory name, I guess. ArchitectedSAP is a fusion of the architecture profession and the SAP world. It simply makes a broad range of architecting techniques instrumental to guiding the happy few that master SAP services configuration. Helping you to navigate from strategic intent to delivered SAP solutions, regardless of their nature: be it a classical one, services-based or a mixture of those. ArchitectedSAP encourages deploying the services-aware SAP Enterprise Architecture Framework (SAP EAF) to its full extent to allow addressing both business and IT change in an integrated way (guess what the source for the SAP EAF was…). Another architecting goodie adopted in ArchitectedSAP are the architecting processes from the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM), each process complemented with services-based SAP specific merits.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on July 20, 2008

Guest Blog: Mendel Koerts on SAP BPM and eSOA

With the annual Sapphire event about to close in Berlin and my dear company being honoured with SAP's Pinnacle Award, it seems nothing more than appropriate to highlight some key insights of SAP's yearly business show case. And why not get it right from the experts? My colleague Mendel Koerts, who has been instrumental in the co-creating with SAP of the Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF) wrote an excellent piece about one of the hottest subjects discussed on Sapphire: Business Process Management and its relationship to eSOA. Mendel, the floor is yours:

Ever been to a SAPPHIRE? This huge travelling SAP marketing circus pitched its tent in Orlando from May 4 to 7 and in Berlin from May 19 to 21. This major happening attracted ten thousands of visitors and, by tradition, it was the moment for SAP to make major announcements and to launch new products. One of this year’s spotlighted products is SAP NetWeaver BPM.

Somehow the ‘S’ of ‘Suite’ or ‘System’ fell off along the way, I suspect. In my book, Business Process Management (BPM) as such namely is a management discipline, a business thing. Quite an important one, however, since the eyes of many business types are focused on operational excellence. They’re continuously optimizing the way they manage their business processes. Naming a product ‘BPM’ will therefore undoubtedly attract attention of the business. A product that manages your business processes for you, who wouldn’t want that? And if you can have such a tool why bother about eSOA any longer? Didn’t sell to the business any way. So, the curtain falls for eSOA?

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Posted by Ron Tolido on May 21, 2008

Strategy and differentiation

A lot of us place a great deal of hope in enterprise applications. After all, applications have been a great source of differentiation in the past. In a world where globalisation has firmly taken hold and we're all under intense cost pressure, everyone is searching for that edge that will push up margins or grab a little more of the market.

The poster child for this is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart made a massive investment in a data warehouse during the early eighties (somewhere around US$110 in 1980's money), mining the data for insights into supply chain behaviour that enabled them to create the most efficient supply chain in their industry. Half the savings this delivered was passed directly to the customer in terms of every day low prices, and the rest if history. The application enabled Wal-Mart to differentiate, while the investment required (not to mention the delivery effort) was a barrier to competition. IT strategy was, effectively, application selection strategy.

Today, a lot of companies are taking a similar approach, pinning their hopes on a best of breed solution that will help them stand out from the crowd. I find best of breed to be a funny term though, as it carries connotations of being better than the rest when it really means no worse than anyone else. That application-centric approach to IT strategy doesn’t work any more.

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Posted by Peter Evans-Greenwood on December 4, 2007

To the Centre of the Enterprise and now back out again!

I seem to remember that the academics in the early 90s were writing fascinating papers on the need to rethink the alignment of resources through out the enterprise by using the new wonder technology of Client-Server which of course led to a whole round of investments in ERP systems. Now there is a whole new round of papers saying we got it wrong, this has not added value etc., and not surprisingly, there is Nicolas Carr, of ‘Does IT matter’ fame, or notoriety depending on your point of view right there at the front of the movement.

For a more thoughtful approach on the topic, Andrew Mcfee, of Sloan Business School, offers an evaluation of the pros and cons in his Blog titled ‘Are Enterprise Systems part of the problem or part of the solution?'
As Andrew points out using other pieces of published work from other people as well;

‘if ERP wasn’t working then business managers wouldn’t keep investing in it’

. I think I would go one stage further; my view is; if you want to stay in business with your auditors you will need to invest in your ERP system.

But, this also illustrates what I see as the real issue, namely ERP is now seen as good, but standard, business practice and not as a competitive capability, the usual case of the cutting edge of technology becoming blunted with time and change. Enterprises need effective ERP systems, but not so much for the competitive edge of utilising their resources better, more just to stay in business these days. Why these days? Because rules and regulations assume that you can manage through ERP.

The competitive argument has moved from centralised understanding of resources towards decentralised optimisation of opportunities in doing business. The, so called, Front Office now being the point to focus upon as opposed to the, so called, Back Office of ERP systems. Interestingly there is a fair argument to say that technology has created both the need and the capability through cause and effect. Again Andrew Mcfee comes in with a good contribution, (if you haven’t guessed by now, yup I am really interested in a lot of his work), in which he introduces the idea of ‘de-coupling’. As far as I am concerned is another way of saying ‘loose coupled’ and therefore firmly pins this new focus to changing technology capabilities.

Now comes my own thinking; I believe that the so called ‘Long Tail’ effect is forcing businesses to enlarge their revenues, and profits, by entering more segments in more markets, and that this is where the competitive benefit of a new wave of technology lies. However, there is a corresponding impact on an enterprise in the fragmentation of its core activities, and this drives two requirements; a stable effective ERP for recording commercial transactions through Data integration, and, something new, that I call ‘Synergy Resource Planning’, or SRP. This is a horizontal layer across the business between ERP and the new optimised to differentiated Front Office where integration takes place through process. Yup it’s the SOA argument, but thought about in a different way.

The CEO acquires companies, and reorganises business operations, in order to gain the beneficial leverage across the business from the combination of capabilities. We need to approach SOA with this business driver in mind and design the differentiated element in the front office to be as ‘thin’ as possible, and gain the synergistic benefit across the business in those elements of the business process where shared orchestration will create this elusive business value.

SAP and Oracle, or Oracle and SAP just to ensure that I am not seen as playing favourites here, seem to be pretty close to this, and BEA seems to almost be saying it, but I have yet to see an open and clear statement as to what we are trying to achieve with SOA in these terms. Having advertised other people’s white papers I hope it's acceptable to mention my own called ‘Changing the Game’ that deals with this in more detail around thinking of four business layers:

• Personalise – the layer of Web 2.0 if you like


• Differentiate – the layer of optimised business solutions


• Organise – the layer of Synergy Resource Planning through correctly applying SOA


• Comply – the layer of ERP

I haven’t talked about Personalise and Differentiate in this blog, that’s a different question about the use of Mashups and Web 2.0 in the enterprise rather than a challenge to the value of ERP.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on November 26, 2007

Enterprise Architects versus Business Architects

It’s the Open Group Enterprise Architects Practitioners meeting in Austin, Texas, and it’s notable for the fact that they are the group under fire, both from inside the profession and from others outside, and the cause of the fire? SOA of course! The opening speaker Dave Linthicum set the context with the remark; ‘there seem to be two groups of people out there, the world of enterprise architecture and the world of SOA. The funny thing is that those in each world think that they can do the other world’s jobs’. Get his presentation here.

This statement encapsulated the reoccurring theme in many of the sessions, and highlighted the start by the Open Group a year or more ago around effort to get better business languages for expressing requirements. Unfortunately progress isn’t good for just the reason Dave gave, the two sides seem to be struggling to get it together. The Enterprise Architects rightfully see themselves as the responsible keepers of a properly integrated cohesive IT system supporting the business, and the others…?

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Posted by Andy Mulholland on October 15, 2007

Unlikely Love

Sometimes, life is not so bad at all. Writing a blog-item on the balcony of a Paris hotel on a sun-drenched day in spring: doesn’t feel like a prison camp. Especially not with a panoramic view of the Eiffel tower, just a stone’s throw away. Did the Open Group have a metaphorical brainwave when they organised their next Architecture Practitioners conference at exactly this place? One would think so, with hundreds of IT-architects from all over the world discussing the balance between the undeniably ugly appearance of the metal construction and the deep, mathematical drivers that inevitably had to lead to precisely this design.

IT-architects - or ‘Enterprise Architects’, I am not even going to start a discussion here - like to spend time with each other. They can occupy themselves for days with their own methodologies, abstractions and meta models, often refreshingly far removed from daily reality. Introspective and unworldly: delicate qualities that sometimes seem to be firmly-embedded in the genetic material.

Yet, changes are coming.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on April 24, 2007

Janet and John talk Business

Modelling. All in all it takes a degree in maths to really achieve something in this area. Even in the context of modelling business processes and organisational structures, we don’t seem to be able to get rid of the analytical halo that surrounds the persons that are doing it. Look: it’s IT people in disguise!

Even dogs and cats see right through them. I suspect it has something to do with magnetic fields. Or it may just be karma.

Despite everything, IT people persist in their attempts to bridge the worlds of information technology and business. It doesn’t always work and every time again there is this genuine astonishment that the other side is just not getting it.

Take for example Service-oriented Architecture. It is difficult enough to explain to the non-initiated what services exactly are. Let alone to clarify how to define them or – let’s go wild – actually use them in practice. And then we haven’t even touched on architecture, something that IT experts have taken for granted as an advanced concept in their profession.

Bring that to the business side. There they perceive architecture – like all normal people – as something that pertains to homes, offices and other buildings. And the translation to information systems is simply not being made, not even when IT experts try to explain the concepts in plain Janet and John language.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on March 14, 2007

7 Ways to scare EAI experts (part II)

Well, it’s already a few weeks ago that we discussed three viewpoints on integration that may help to unfreeze your local Enterprise Application Integration expert. I stated that integration is actually something you want to avoid: it’s not a mission in life by itself; it’s merely a prerequisite to do exciting things in business, enabled by systems and information. If you can avoid integration and still achieve the same, do so by all means. Furthermore, it was pointed out that excellent integration tools are now available on the market, both in open source and as industry-strength, commercial packages. Don’t waste a second of your precious time building and maintaining homebrewed, non-standard solutions. Finally, I suggested to first focus on your data governance before even considering fancy projects around web services and that almighty Enterprise Service Bus.

Two weeks of time with arguments like that! You must have witnessed some changes in the behaviour of your integration experts next door. If by any change this is not the case, please have a look at four additional opening lines that are bound to help them break on through to the other side.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on September 25, 2006

7 Ways to scare EAI experts (part I)

Enterprise Application Integration. Sometimes, you just can’t help associating it with a absurdist theatre play. Two EAI experts are sitting on a bench, somewhere in a deserted place. They are awaiting the arrival of someone named Godot. But Godot never shows up and the EAI experts seem to have forgotten why they are waiting in the first place. At the end, nothing has happened and nothing has changed. One expert says to the other “shall we go?“ and the other one responds “yes, let’s go”.

Nobody moves.

It used to be an art, or at least a scarce design skill, integrating all these different, heterogeneous systems, let alone knowing the ins and outs of an abundance of EAI tools and platforms. Professionals used the title ‘EAI Expert’ with pride on their business cards and established a firm street credibility among IT peers. But every now and then, some of them seem to think that their very mission in life has become integration, forgetting about both the original business rationale and the evolution of technology, systems and strategy.

They desperately need to unfreeze. And in order to achieve that, they may need to be scared a bit first. Let me introduce you to 7 opening lines to achieve that, based on many engagements with EAI experts (and suppliers of EAI tools for that matter) across many different organizations:

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Posted by Ron Tolido on September 5, 2006

Just what is SOA?

The industry is buzzing with SOA being positioned as the next big thing. As with all new technological fashions SOA promises to delver better, faster, cheaper IT support than was possible before it arrived on the scene. However, all this hype seems to have resulted in a great deal of confusion around just what SOA is, and what it isn’t. Is it a new generation of middleware based on web services and the WS-* family of standards? Is it a new generation of process modelling tools based on BPEL et al? Is it something to do with enterprise architecture? Or is it just another over hyped technology?

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Posted by Peter Evans-Greenwood on July 25, 2006

There Is No Spoon

I guess it’s a good litmus test. When I heard Jason Weisser, IBM’s Software Group VP for Enterprise Integration, discuss the other day with 30 Capgemini software engineers and architects what the real secret is of Service Oriented Architecture, he used this intriguing sentence: “there is no Spoon”.

Is it Plato? Buddha? The Bible? Alice in Wonderland?

Well, all of that. Sort of. Jason puzzled almost the entire audience, but I was lucky enough to have two teenage kids that force me to watch every cool pop movie you can possibly think of (how’s that for a justification…). So I recognized this phrase from The Matrix instantaneously. The Matrix is a movie filled with useful quotes, including ‘Knock, Knock, Neo’, ‘Follow the White Rabbit’ and of course ‘Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability’.

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Posted by Ron Tolido on July 11, 2006

Mummified architects

Yes, we’ve heard it all before. A good IT or Enterprise Architect is supposed to be able to bridge the gap between business objectives and technology solutions. In order to do that, architects still need thorough analytical skills: even with (some might argue 'thanks to') service-orientation the solutions landscape seems to be more complex than ever. Clearly, there is also a need for excellent communication skills: no architecture will be successful if it is not properly discussed, explained and driven through all layers of stakeholders. And then – of course- there’s also the political skills that an architect should possess in order to carefully align all parties involved. Looks like the portfolio of a mature, experienced professional that has seen it all and indeed, not many architects are likely to come fresh from university. But is it enough to have seen it all? Or is it a good recipe for mummification?

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Posted by Ron Tolido on June 9, 2006

Why couldn’t I get the airline upgrade? — turned out to be an Architectural question!

I was facing an eleven hour flight back from India after an IT Industry event, had checked in and was sitting in the lounge contemplating an uncomfortable sleepless night with others I had become friendly with over the last few days. In breezed someone else from the event who happily announced he had been upgraded to first class. Took a moment before half in joke someone said ‘give you $50 for the seat’, but it was a high enough price point to show serious interest and see if there was a reaction. Then the bidding started in earnest and it was serious, to cut a long story short, it was $500 that closed the deal.

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Posted by Andy Mulholland on June 5, 2006