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- Wave! You are live and online!
- New Game Changers for the Internet; Opinions differ on value!
- Do Turkeys vote for Slow IT?
- The Internet of Things just got a little closer
- The Washington Template
- Secure ID – gets a work around with support from key vendors
- The Ideality of the Cloud
- Situational Software - The ‘Killer Application’ for Enterprise 2.0?
- Guest post on Sustainability by Colette Lewiner, Global Leader of Energy, Utilities & Chemicals, Capgemini
- Where the work should be put? Time for Phase 2 in the Off Shore debate
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Methodologies
Testing Times from the Credit Crunch
I had a task flag to take a look at the proceedings from the annual International Conference for Software Process Improvement, ICSPI 2008, but on visiting their site I was pretty amazed to find this message. Due to severe cuts in education and travel budgets across most organizations, the International Conference on Software Process Improvement (ICSPI) 2008, which was scheduled to take place October 20 th -24th , is regretfully being postponed until October, 2009. Yup a casualty of the credit crunch it would seem.
Okay maybe this isn’t one of the biggest events around, but it has been a good ‘working’ event by the people involved in the topic for the people who are involved in the topic, but maybe that’s been its downfall, no big names and publicity just the kind of good feedback and discussions we all feel the need for from time to time. The major reason I was interested was in the ‘how’ software development processes can be improved. It’s part of my own feelings that development tools are improving, but on the other side of the fence smaller, faster, is likely to be the way increasingly, and this, particularly in ‘tough times’ is likely to put pressure on time which all to often means quality suffers.
So if the credit crunch is changing the projects what about the testing side? After all testing tools are expense, often expansive, and their use can be complex, all of which seems to be going in the opposite direction to the trend towards smaller simpler better defined projects where presumably the risks are also better clarified. Sure enough there are some companies out there who have recognised the opportunity with single user testing suites.
Four ways that Technology has changed our buying patterns
In the past couple of years I have read much more widely than ever before as I have tried to understand Business Technology, the bringing together of technology and business into a single capability as opposed to IT which is a separate operation that must be aligned to business. There is no shortage of stuff to read around the topic, and most of it seems to be from a business point of view, and poses lots of interesting and difficult questions about business models. One of the most thought provoking places to learn more is here. Of course having just had the news that the last two major USA investment banks have decided not to be investment banks anymore and change their business model to retail banking it kind of makes the point about the importance of ‘business models’.
As a simple technologist I can’t say that I can answer too many, if any of the points raised, but as an engineer I tend to want to research for facts so here is my conclusion from examining as many case studies as I can find to try to identify the common business threads that technology has played the leading role in changing. I would not say everything fits but i have found that I can recognise four reasonably common threads, and the first three may be interesting, but it’s the fourth one that is driving the market;
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?
Transations and Interactions
I have been having an interesting dialogue with an ex colleague York whose own blog is well worth a read. The particular dialogue has been around what is essentially the changing, and expanded environment in which we are all increasingly working. It’s a World in which Web Services and traditional IT both exist, and therefore we need to start to be careful to discriminate about terms to ensure that we really understand what we mean.
The challenge that this produces is that if both exist in parallel then we need to get a whole load more carefully about terminology. What exactly do you mean by a process as an example? Is this part of an application, an orchestration of ‘services’ or even something achieved through REST? Some 18 months ago I wrote a white paper about using Web 2.0 and SOA in which I attempted to make some clarifications.
A month so back I asked for thoughts on how to define Middleware in the new World and sure enough after some great posts I think we got a really good and recognizable definition. Well I would like to try this again with the following; (I do believe that ‘crowd sourcing’ works, particularly when looking for an ‘open’ definition).
Boundaryless IT Specialist
I am currently in San Francisco. Just around the corner here in California, the Republican candidates for the presidency are debating, trying to establish who is the most conservative while the Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are holding hands to show off their unity.
The Open Group is having its own show-off. The quarterly member meetings and the Architecture Practitioners Conference are better visited than ever, and for the very first time there is also an IT Specialist Conference. The reason: the direct availability of IT Specialist Certification: a unique, open program which assesses senior IT specialists on people skills, technical skills, experience and contextual awareness of adjacent areas such as business, architecture and project management.
Based on the real-life proven, internal certification programs of Capgemini, IBM and EDS, this open program is destined to quickly become a world-wide standard. And we’re only too sure that the world is waiting for this: the key success factor for organisations to collaborate is still the quality of their individual employees. Technology-driven change highly depends on the proper abilities, experience and skills of IT specialists. These need to be real, demonstrated attributes, so we are not talking about isolated book knowledge or having passed some shallow multiple-choice tests.
Is Copy Right necessarily the same thing as Digital Right?
I cannot understand why there should be an apparent gap in the debate between the rising concern over Copy Right on file sharing sites and the work that has been done on Digital Rights over the last few years. To quote from a recent newspaper article; ‘YouTube can identify spam, porn, and hate speech, but not copyrighted material. Come on!’ The point is obvious with two threads to the discussion; the motivation; and the technology; however it does leave some further questions on definitions in a digital society unaddressed. The assumption is that we can use technology to manage the current status of copyright law built around definitions formed with no concept of the digital content that is increasingly at the centre of our society.