Category: Data managemetnt
November 20th, 2009
Panel: do cloud computing economic advantages break down in enterprises?
The purpose of information technology is “to provide compute and storage. That’s it. full stop. That compute and storage can be provided by mainframes, private data centers, distributed networks, or by the cloud.”
- Allan Leinwand, venture capitalist
At this week’s Interop conference in New York, I heard a great panel discussion, moderated by AT&T’s Joe Weinman, on the economics of cloud computing. Weinman was joined by Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, Allan Leinwand of Panorama Capital (which invests in cloud vendors), Andy Rhodes of Dell, Harris Tilevitz of Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, and William Forrest of McKinsey & Co., author of the last spring’s watershed report on “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing.”
A public cloud provider, private cloud operator, consultant, network provider, and venture capitalist debate cloud’s business value
McKinsey’s Forrest, for one, stated that while his research “found significant amounts of workloads today could be moved to public cloud providers,” it still “wouldn’t make economic sense to move large chunks of data centers to the cloud.”
Nevertheless, he predicts, “there will be a continued move to the cloud, as there are increasingly attractive economics over people building their own data centers.” He says that these economics keep getting better because “the public cloud guys have built a better box, they buy in volume, and operate more efficiently than most enterprises.”
“The idea that you buy an individual server, that is going away. You either buy racks of servers or go to the cloud.”
Amazon’s Selipsky, needless to say, was bullish on the cloud computing paradigm. He noted that in a government CIO rountable last week, Vicek Kundra, the US CIO, “certified that 45% of all government IT could run on public clouds.”
Selipsky went on to say that cloud computing is suitable for both large and small enterprises. “For start-ups, its a total no-brainer. We also have a lot of big enterprises using our services.” He foresees many enterprises moving to a hybrid cloud environment in the coming years. And, he noted that cloud providers also bring another advantage beyond cost savings: “The biggest benefit of the cloud is that is it enables focus. You can take the intellectual capital of your staff and focus on your business — not IT.”
VC Leinwand, however, says he still sees a “huge gap” between cloud services offered and the ability to effectively manage them in an enterprise environment. “Cloud storage costs one-tenth of onsite data storage,” he points out. But what about configuration, integration, data deduplication, and monitoring? There’s a gap between what the enterprise is used to doing behind the firewall and what cloud providers can do.” He added that he is seeking to fund companies that can help close that gap.
AT&T’s Weinman, for his part, raised doubts about the sustainability of cloud computing economics, which may break down as enterprise management requirements come into play. “I’m not sure there are any unit-cost advantages that are sustainable among large enterprises,” he said. A more likely scenario that will be seen is hybrid adoption of cloud computing in some areas, and private capabilities for others where it makes business sense.
Another option is private clouds, and Skadden’s Tilevitz reports great success at his global law firm of 2,000 partners. Originally, the initiative started after September 11, 2001, as a way to ensure business continuity by operating three regional data centers. Now, built on a Citrix environment, the virtualized environment has evolved into an internal cloud of sorts, from which the firm’s various office access online services. For example, he related, a partner may need to load five million pages of documentation into an online format overnight. “We have more than a petabyte of image data that we keep for seemingly forever that we use for litigation,” he said.
Economies of scale have also kicked in as well. “Our expenses for this private cloud have dropped over time,” Tilevitz said. “I see it as almost a reversion back to the mainframe world. Everyone is now using applications and data remotely.” Tilevitz also said his firm is looking at becoming a “public” cloud provider of sorts as well, selling excess disk capacity online.
November 18th, 2009
No SOAP for this Navy
This is the third of three installments of my discussion with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives. In the first post, Munson and Jennis described the business case for SOA within the Coast Guard. In the second post, they discussed how they built organizational support.
Coast Guard opts for ‘lightweight’ services; now tackling governance and security issues
The US Coast Guard prefers more lightweight services for its maritime and inventory tracking systems. “We are very REST oriented,” Munson explains. “We like the REST model very much. So where applicable, we have leveraged it in a significant way to develop our service oriented architecture. Internally, Munson points out, the prevailing standard is POX, or Plain Old XML for message exchange. “We do not subscribe to the extra wrappers and envelopes and overhead that’s required to serve out SOAP-based services.”
“What we have found within the Coast Guard is that the Web services model, particularly the traditional RPC-style Web services, are not suitable for implementation in the Coast Guard’s architecture,” he explains. “Our architecture is fundamentally message based. Where we do implement Web services interfaces, they’re all document-driven Web services for external users, where those kinds of interfaces are required.”
Munson and Jennis are also seeing some reusability in its SOA-aware services, particularly for lower-level services. However, Munson cautions, “we certainly don’t want to oversell that yet.”
That’s because the SOA team is still wrestling with the technical aspects of service governance. “The issue around SOA governance is still a challenge for us as it is with any organization,” he explains. “We have not implemented, for example, any formal service registry or automated service discovery. Were continuing to look at how we want to do that.”
The issue with registry and repository solutions on the market, he says, is that they are oriented toward the traditional SOAP-based Web services. “Most of them are still tailored to the Web services approach,” he says. “Many of them don’t have good answers for non-WS-* type of registration.”
Data security is another challenge for the Coast Guard’s SOA team, and this is holding back the ability to offer services to port partners and other outside parties. “One of the challenges in an enterprise service bus, and an SOA architecture in and of itself doesn’t solve this, are all the security challenges surrounding data services, particularly once you get outside of your organization,” Munson says. Internally, within the Coast Guard organization, the security around services is pretty straightforward. But starting with sharing with external partners at any level, security rapidly becomes a challenge for us. Like other folks, were still looking at how to crack that nut, and we still don’t have a silver bullet for that yet.”
The Coast Guard soon intends to make some services available to other federal agencies and its port partners. For example, the Coast Guard is participating in an inter-agency program called Watchkeeper, in which data is provided as part of a homeland security system. “We have probably a dozen or more services that are in testing that will be deployed as part of that system,” Munson says.
Additional services being piloted — and still in development — will feed data to and from WatchKeeper to other Coast Guard systems, such as MISLE, MAGNet, MASI and others, Munson adds. Additional services leveraging the Coast Guard’s ESB and SOA include systems for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surrounding Right Whale speed enforcement zones, as well as a system for monitoring and tracking Self-Locating Data Marker Buoys (SLDMB) for Search and Rescue.
The Coast Guard is making substantial progress with its SOA effort, and Jennis and Munson credit this to the close coordination between their teams and the Coast Guard management. “If you define what SOA means for your organization, and go forward with that, you’ll get SOA right,” Jennis advises. “In our case, we’re very much tied to the Coast Guard’s mission, and the doctrine of the Coast Guard. But if you go with a lot of the buzzwords, and you don’t have a clearly defined meaning for what your SOA will look like, you’ll get in great trouble in a hurry.”
November 17th, 2009
SOA promotes a sea change for the US Coast Guard
This is the second of three installments of my discussion with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives. In the first post, Munson and Jennis described the business case for SOA within the Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard dipped its toes cautiously into the SOA waters
The Coast Guard’s SOA initiatives had top-level support early on from the upper echelons of management. “We’d been challenged by our new commandant, Admiral [Thad] Allen, to become a department leader in SOA, and the department was taking a hard look at that time on where they wanted to go with their SOA roadmap,” Munson explains. “So it was just an opportune moment for us to dive into this, and see if there was any technologies that made sense, and that we could leverage. So we’ve taken a very deliberate, very measured approach to this, and started with a lot of small pilot projects, to validate, not only the technologies, but the architectural concepts that we’re trying to support with them.”
Even with strong organizational support, the Coast Guard’s SOA team approached the effort from the ground up, starting with smaller pilot projects. The approach was “build a little, test a little,” Jennis says. “We took a very measured and deliberate approach to SOA – no ‘big-bang’ projects. Everything was carefully architected and focused at the business architecture, the mission support of the Coast Guard first and foremost. And the technology implementations were validated and tested against that architecture in business-focused pilots. That is key to our success so far – being able to take things slow, validate the architecture, focus on the business, and make sure got it right before we started rolling this stuff out in production.”
Since the Coast Guard’s IT budget is small and highly fragmented across functional areas, the team did not have a big budget in which to engage its SOA effort, Jennis and Munson say. But the effort has delivered results well beyond the relatively lean expenditures made for the program. For example, the Coast Guard now can quickly pull up real-time data on ships that are entering US waters.
“We can also support maritime domain awareness by fusing data from multiple different data sources,” Munson adds. “We have, for example, requirements from homeland security for ship-arrival notifications 96 hours before a vessel enters a US port. That data can be fused with a long-range tracking system that identifies whether vessels are really going where they say they are going. Its tremendous value to promoting homeland security.”
The Coast Guard has also employed SOA to better track and manage its spare parts inventory – potentially saving the service tens of millions of dollars. “We developed what we call an ‘authoritative parts service’ that was able to identify and accurately catalog the value of the Coast Guard’s spare parts inventory,” Munson says. “We identified in that category more than $60 million worth of incorrect Coast Guard inventory evaluation. Measuring that against the federal cost of funds index – which is like interest on your money – it saved the Coast Guard $60 million, times the value of the federal cost of funds.”
Next post: By necessity, a RESTful approach — and unresolved issues.
November 16th, 2009
SOA helps Coast Guard navigate new tides of homeland security
Did you know the movement of any ship headed toward US waters is tracked by an SOA-aware service running on the US Coast Guard’s systems? And that SOA services are being employed to provide data to an international registry of maritime activity? And there is also an SOA service keeping track of the all the spare parts, equipment, and other assets the Coast Guard maintains? 
The Coast Guard already has close to 25 services that are either already or about to go into production as part of its growing SOA initiative – and more are planned. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives.
The Coast Guard – part of the US Department of Homeland Security – started looking at SOA in early 2007, as a way to address growing requirements to be able to share information not only across its own various units, but with federal, local and international agencies concerned with keeping an eye on vessels entering and leaving US shores. “We had the same conundrum of silos of excellence that many IT organizations have – IT systems tailored in stovepipes within lines of business,” says Munson.
Prior to its SOA implementation, the Coast Guard relied on slower and more manual methods of data sharing with its port partners. “It would either be some form of composed file that would be potentially handed over, or many times, a hard-copy printout or phone call,” Munson relates. In addition, sharing data with its fast-moving cutter fleet was also a challenge. “The cutters get underway and go where they’re needed, so we have fairly low-bandwidth connectivity to these kinds of assets at best,” Munson says. “So were also looking at not only data sharing, but also if there’s a better way with emerging technology to help address some of the problems of being able to use our systems with deployed assets.”
To address these requirements, the Coast Guard implemented an enterprise service bus-centered SOA that enabled asynchronous messaging from Fiorano Software Technologies. The solution was employed in the Coast Guard’s Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) system, which at any given time, is tracking up to 6,000 vessels moving toward or in US waters as well as vessels anywhere else in the world. LRIT tracks signals emitted from vessels every six hours. “That information is running entirely on the Coast Guard’s SOA framework in production,” says Munson. As a result, the Coast Guard SOA requires extremely high-volume services, “processing thousands of messages per second.”
A second system, the Nationwide Automated Identification System (NAIS), relies on a second transponder on ships exceeding 300,000 gross tons, broadcasting navigational information for ships of 300 gross tons or more at three-second intervals. These broadcasts from US territorial waters result in about 2,000 messages per second received in the NAIS system. The Coast Guard is currently protoyping various data services around this system for maritime domain awareness, Munson says.
This is the first of a three-part series. Next post: How the Coast Guard built organizational support for SOA.
November 13th, 2009
Data services may help address a major SOA unknown -- data quality
A couple of months ago, as reported here, Neal Fishman released a book that warned of SOA-based infrastructures helping to spread “epidemics” of viral data across enterprises — since data can be pulled from multiple, formerly siloed sources and quickly distributed across service-oriented systems and applications.
How much data pulled from multiple sources is bad data?
Informatica’s Ash Parikh, a long-time advocate of the data services approach to SOA, has also been warning of this scenario. I have gotten to know Ash through our participation on the Informatica Perspectives site, and recently had a chance to talk to him and Informatica’s Chris Boorman prior to the launch of Informatica 9, which embraces the SOA data services concept.
Ash proposes that organizations adopt a data services layer that provides “a model and standards-based reusable data abstraction layer that can make holistic, accurate and timely information available to an enterprise integration infrastructure, without all the typical complexity and maintenance costs.” He defines a data service as “a modular, reusable, business-relevant service that enables the access, integration, and delivery of complex enterprise data throughout the enterprise and across corporate firewalls in batch, near real-time and real-time modes, including federation.”
As companies move into the next level of SOA maturity, in which services start reaching across enterprise boundaries, many have been struggling to improve SOA’s ability to deliver business value. One factor is companies can’t trust the data that is being pulled in from all the stovepipes into enterprise services. SOA, as Chris puts it, “has lacked the data abstraction layer that enables organizations to basically define the data objects and the rules associated with data objects, that can then be permeated through — whether it be Web services or SQL or batch or anything else — to the applications that are using that data.”
Ash, who has been warning the industry about the quality of data — or lack thereof — surging through SOA-based infrastructures for some time now, says SOA data services open up many new avenues for connecting SOA with enterprise data management. “It’s much more than just data access,” he points out. “It’s making sure the data that is delivered is of the greatest quality.”
SOA data services also helps create a more collaborative environment between IT, data managers, and business data owners. In the real world, Ash says, “when people talk about data, they never talk about ‘data source X’ or ‘data source Y’ that’s sitting in a corner somewhere,” he says. “They report the data as a business representation of data — my customer data, my product data, things like that” This brings things in line with the perspective required of SOA architects, who need to better assure more timely and accurate and consistent views of their data and the product data.
Given this backdrop, I saw that Mike Kavis also has been doing work in this area, and just posted a business case for data services at his site. He describes the issues that can be rectified via an abstracted data layer: real time failover among multiple virtual data centers; managing multi-channel partners with multiple data structures; regulations and laws affecting data management and movement; and data security against direct access to databases.
Maintaining a loosely coupled data services layer takes away the complexities and inconsistencies of attempting to manage multiple data sources. “By abstracting the data layer and creating configurable services as access points to the data, teams can quickly implement solutions in a controlled and standardized manner,” Mike says. For example, they can move quickly “due to the simplicity of the data access and the fact that they don’t need extensive knowledge of the underlying data.”
Ash Parikh also talks about the divide between data management and real-life business needs, something that SOA and data services can help address. For example, he observes, many companies have built great data models, but these models tend to be static. “It’s great to have a model, but I also need a way to find all that information, and to make sure that information I’m finding across a multitude of these data sources – which can be varied in structures and formats — is relevant to me.” Many of these issues can be resolved at the data services abstraction layer, he says.
November 6th, 2009
Event processing means more than 'speeding up' existing systems
Complex event processing — now made possible by service-oriented architecture principles — represents the next stage of business intelligence. However, much work needs to be done to reach this capability.
Complex event processing requires a different mindset and skills
A ebizQ’s latest SOA in Action conference, I had the opportunity to moderate a session with Gartner’s Roy Schulte, CalTech’s Dr. Mani Chandy (CalTech), and IBM’s Frank Chisolm in an informative discussion about applying event processing as a strategy for businesses seeking to remain competitive in the years ahead.
However, Roy cautioned, event processing capabilities don’t just automatically pop up, even among companies with the most advanced BI infratstructures. “The way you get your systems to be more smart fast and agile is by having the systems designed correctly, and in most cases that means more use of the event processing design methodology,” he says. “You can’t just take a conventionally designed system and just speed it up to accomplish the goals that people want to do.”
While the technology now exists to build CEP, the methodology requires a different mindset among companies. “The limitation that we have today is that there are not enough people around who understand how to design systems that operate in this fashion,” Roy says. “They don’t understand continuoius intelligence or complex event processing.”
Complex event processing requires continuous streams of information from multiple sources. The good news is that CEP need not be so complex, and, in fact, over the next few years, systems that sense and respond to events will be as commonplace as business intelligence systems are today.
Mani, considered one of the early visionaries of complex event processing, said the “PC-cubed” formula (three Ps and three Cs) will drive CEP forward over the next few years:
- Price – The price of managing data sources will continue to drop.
- Pervasiveness – Sensors, such as mobile phones, have become pervasive.
- Performance – “Enterprises have access to immense computing power that can be harnessed through event processing,” Mani says. And now, “parallel, distributed, and cloud computing create ideal environments for event processing.”
- Celerity - “Businesses and consumers demand swift action,” Mani points out. “You expect to be notified immediately if your plane is late.”
- Connectedness – The world is more interconnected. Your company may need to respond immediately to an earthquake in China, a flood in India. Event processing applications help detect events all over the globe.”
- Complexity – “Businesses have become more complex, and expect IT to help with increasingly complex problems.”
As if laying out the case for complex event processing as “PC” doesn’t clarify enough, Mani also explained how a mnemonic — A, E, I, O, U (but not sometimes Y) — describes the CEP phenomenon:
- A — Adaptability: “The event pattern has two advantages, one is loose coupling for application integration, and the other is sense and response,” Mani said. “App integration because producers and consumers are coupled in a loose way without knowing about each other. Its easy to add or change the producers and consumers of a system. With the sense and respond aspect, an example is scheduling railroad crews — a complex problem, a sense-and-response problem. Because unscheduled events happen all the time, smart railroads are using event processing to adapt.”
- E — Exceptions: “Computers have to analyze torrents of data to extract nuggets,” said Mani. “These nuggets are the events that require a response. A characteristic of smart people and smart systems is that they mange by exception.. they perform continuing operations effectively, bit they continue to detect and respond exceptional situations. Event processing helps separate the critical from non-critical.”
- I — Instrimentation: “Successful businesses manage exceptional events successfully,” according to Mani. “Event processing is used to instrument and monitor the exception and the normal. You will see a rapid rise in business instrumentation and event processing for to improvement of business activity in the next decade.”
- O — Outside: “1960s-90s enterprise IT dealt with mainly IT inside the enterprise. Now the enterprise is responding the events externally,” said Mani. “The enterprise monitors actions by the government, its competitors, its suppliers, and its best customers. The ability to sense and respond to events out side the enterprise using event processing is a significant competitive advantage.”
- U — Unanticipated events: “Enterprises develop event process applications to handle certain types of that they expect, and must also deal with conditions that they don’t expect,” Mani explained. “Any significant deviations are detected by an event processing application which then sends information about this deviation to appropriate people before the analysis.”
Dr. Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte have just puiblished a new book on the subject, entitled “Event Processing - Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies.”
October 26th, 2009
EAI: square peg trying to fit into round hole of data integration
There’s a large gaping hole in the capabilities enterprise application integration (EAI) – and its successor, enterprise service buses – can deliver. Current middleware strategies fall short in addressing data integration and data quality issues – and this is costing organizations.
These are points raised by Dave Linthicum and Ash Parikh in a recent Webinar, I had the opportunity to moderate, posted over at the ebizQ site. Dave, who literally wrote the book on “Enterprise Application Integration” back in the 1990s, says EAI and ESB approaches are not suited for today’s high-transaction data integration needs, and have great limitations. But still, many organizations persist in attempting to plug in these types of solutions into vexing business problems that require a more holistic architectural approach. “There are a lot of people trying to put square pegs into round holes,” he says.
Dave says that while the square-peg-in-a-round-hole approach will work for a while, it’s far more costly in the long run. “With EAI and ESB technology, there are certain instances and problem domains where they’re a fit,” he explains. “But you need to understand there are certain limitations that are part of that technology that should be considered. Ultimately, if you don’t consider them and pick those technology approaches anyway, you’re going to start running into walls that are very difficult to back up and get around as you move the architecture forward.”
I posted a summary of points raised in the Webinar here at the Perspectives site.
October 21st, 2009
Gartner leaves SOA off 'top ten' list - again
Gartner just issued its Top 10 Technology list for the year ahead, and guess what’s missing? Once again, service oriented architecture got sacked by the sages of Stamford.
SOA proponents, however, can take cold comfort that just as was the case last year, SOA is the underpinning foundation and enabler of many of the Top 10 technologies. Cloud computing? You need a foundation to deliver those services across firewalls. Cloud also sucks in Web oriented architecture and enterprise mashups — prime SOA territory. Advanced analytics? They won’t be so advanced if data doesn’t get pulled out of organizational and system silos. Client computing? Enterprise mashups, anyone? And, hey, where is event processing?
September 24th, 2009
Enterprise mashup proponents start organizing
As reported a couple of days ago, the enterprise mashup market promises to be a huge one, growing to almost $2 billion in a few years. So it’s high time people involved in this space start organizing and working around some standards everyone can agree on.
Can enterprise mashup proponents avoid the mistakes made with ESBs?
A new consortium, called the Open Mashup Alliance, is the first effort to coalesce around this growing phenomenon. The group’s stated mission is to promote “the successful use of Enterprise Mashup technologies and adoption of an open language that promotes Enterprise Mashup interoperability and portability.”
One of the founding members is ZDNet’s resident Enterprise Web 2.0 guru, Dion Hinchcliffe. Additional charter members include Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow Technologies, ProgrammableWeb, Synteractive, and Xignite.
One of the OMA’s first endeavors is to shepherd the budding Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) specification for submission to a standards body. EMML is an XML-based, domain-specific language that was designed to address the characteristics that make mashups easier to create and reuse.
There were a bunch of supporting quotes included with the OMA’s announcement, but I think Michael Ogrinz, principal architect at Bank of America and author of the book Mashup Patterns, said it best: “For enterprise mashups to take hold, we need to remove the ‘vendor lock-in’ concerns raised by today’s proprietary toolsets. We also need to inspire the innovative minds of the open-source community to start working in this space. By establishing an open standard for mashups, the OMA and EMML addresses both of these issues.”
Perhaps the industry learned some lessons from another development that proliferated without guiding standards — the enterprise service bus. One of the fiercest criticisms of ESBs has been the way vendors took off in all different directions with their implementations before standards could be established. Perhaps we can avoid this with enterprise mashups. But the looming market size must be a huge temptation.
September 21st, 2009
Twenty percent of SOA value from service reuse; where's the other 80%?
Is service reuse a worthy part of the SOA value equation? This is a question that has been endlessly debated in recent years.
Mashups may hold the key to long-term SOA value
For example, last month, we quoted Forbes’ Dan Woods, who argued that companies are focusing on building SOA-based services that will be available for reuse as soon as they are tested and released to the registry/repository. Perhaps, he says, we should worry less about reusability at the beginning phase of service development.
Or, even if reuse does deliver ROI, it may only have a limited reach. Marc Rix recently weighed in on the topic, suggesting out that “basing SOA on reuse only modernizes 20% of IT and, thus, does not yield agility.” The other 80% of the equation, he says, is based on deployment of data services.
He arrived at the 20% figure by calculating the fact that reusable services tend to be the most popular or mainstream services, and “tend to orbit around relatively static business data (employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, etc.).” Building and deploying these services means relatively immediate reuse, and therefore, ROI. However, there’s little ROI beyond the immediate rush, he says.
For SOA value, Marc says, look to the ” Long Tail of IT” — data taken out of core enterprise systems and manipulated by business users, in applications such as business intelligence and analytics. “This is where business is really conducted and this is where SOA is really needed,” he says.
Why I hear Marc saying is the real meat of SOA will be seen in more dynamic, user-created (or at least user specified) composite apps. Enterprise mashups come to mind in this context. In these situations, end users can create their own interfaces as business requirements demand. They can be quickly built and used. However, what is needed is a way to make this possible within a governed framework. With SOA governance and best practices applied on this end at the architectural level, organizations have assurance that these enterprise mashups are subject to the same security and vetting as core SOA services.
September 14th, 2009
Create, cut, create, cut: How to be a successful CIO in 18 easy steps
Being a chief information officer sounds glamorous, but is not a cake job by any stretch. CIOs are at the epicenter of the crossroads, cross currents, and crosswinds of all changes and challenges sweeping today’s business. You have to be an insightful visionary, able pragmatist, savvy value creator, and relentless cost cutter all at the same time. And be thanked and cursed at the same time.
For anyone aspiring for the CIO’s job — or already in the hotseat — IBM recently released a new global study of more than 2,500 CIOs that points to the thinking of what it takes to be successful and of value to the business.
The study looked at the activities and priorities of CIOs “high-growth” versus “low-growth” organizations, as defined by 2004–2007 profit before tax (PBT) growth for their organizations. Here are some interesting contrasts — and it can be assumed that these priorities shaped the overall businesses’ success, versus the other way around (low-growth culture depressing more proactive CIO activity).
- To innovate, 64% of high-growth CIOs actively integrate business and IT across the organization, versus 33% of low-growth CIOs.
- To pursue corporate vision, 28% of high-growth CIOs spend the greatest allocation of time and budget on new technology and business initiatives, versus 15% of low-growth CIOs. (Note how this is a relatively small minority of CIOs, even in the high-growth case.)
- In staying in maintenance mode, 40% of low-growth CIOs spend most of their time in core technology services, versus 23% of high-growth CIOs.
- To promote intra-IT collaboration, 53% of high-growth CIOs actively use collaboration and partnering technology within the IT organization, versus 33% of low-growth CIOs.
- To promote enterprise-wide collaboration, 41% of high-growth CIOs used such technology for the entire organization, versus 22% of low-growth CIOs.
- To advance business intelligence, 58% of high-growth CIOs proactively craft data into actionable information, versus 36% of low-growth CIOs.
- To stimulate customer collaboration in the next five years, 87% of high-growth CIOs expect to seek customers’ active input and interaction, compared to 70% of low-growth CIOs. (Even the low-growthers are aboard with this one.)
- To achieve enterprise standardization within five years, 61% of high-growth CIOs expect to implement completely standardized, low-cost business processes, versus 50% of low-growth CIOs. (Low-growthers seem to be aboard here as well.)
The IBM study also finds that leveraging analytics to gain a competitive advantage and improve business decision-making is now their top priority. More than four out of five (83 percent) respondents identified business intelligence and analytics – the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights – as the way they will enhance their organizations’ competitiveness.
In addition, the IBM study also confirms that CIOs are necessarily relentless about scrutinizing budgets and processes to trim the fat. Across the entire sample, CIOs spend about 14 percent of their time removing costs from the technology environment. The report puts it this way:
To control costs, CIOs commonly view a central technology organization as the future of their function. Centralized infrastructures and processes enable shared services optimization that, in turn, provides economies of scale. Three-fourths of all CIOs—including those in both high-PBT growth and low-PBT growth organizations—anticipate having a strongly centralized infrastructure in five years.
Based on the collective wisdom IBM drew from these 2,500 CIOs, the report provides 18 key actions that can have the greatest impact on an organization’s success. (And perhaps put more in the “high-PBT growth” column next time.)
1) Push business and technology integration
2) Champion innovation
3) Extend CIO influence
4) Enable the corporate vision
5) Make working together easy
6) Concentrate on core competencies
7) Make data “sing”
8) Reach customers in new ways
9) Enhance integration and transparency
10) Standardize to economize
11) Centralize the infrastructure
12) Keep cost reduction a top priority
13) Know the business
14) Get involved with business peers in non-IT projects
15) Present and measure IT in business terms
16) Cultivate truly extraordinary IT talent
17) Lead the IT forces
18) Enhance the data
August 20th, 2009
Debate: Is SOA still too immature to secure?
Two recent posts by leading SOA thinkers have different takes on the state of SOA security. Is it a monstrosity that is almost impossible to secure end to end, or is it something that can be started relatively simply and grown with proper attention and management?
Will SOA outgrow its insecurity?
Forrester’s Randy Heffner says we have reached a point where SOA is secure enough for prime time. However, he cautions, while WS-Security has helped standard Web services using SOAP, some careful navigation is required for full-blown SOA. But it’s doable. “Advanced SOA security - involving federation among partners, nonrepudiation, and propagation of user identities across multiple layers of service implementations - is in its early days,” Randy points out. Still, the need for robust SOA security will be inevitable. “Many user organizations will find that advanced SOA security becomes mandatory - especially with increasing data privacy and other regulations.”
JP Morgenthal takes a dimmer view on SOA security, pointing out the world really hasn’t agreed on a consistent definition of SOA, and, therefore, there may be issues with attempting to provide security. As he points out: “If you can’t define it, you cannot secure it!”
JP adds that while there is plenty of research and literature on the topic of cybersecurity, there’s very little that connects SOA and cybersecurity. The problem is that SOA touches so many parts of the technology stack, and each has its own security solutions and protocols.
“If you’re tasked with focusing on cybersecurity for your SOA, you could focus on locking down access to your Web services, stopping SQL injection attacks, addressing DDoS attacks against the service, etc. Each of these areas requires considerable knowledge of the entire computing stack from telecom through the hardware through the operating system and into the application. Holy rotten fish Batman! That’s a tall order for even the most adept team, but it’s made even more difficult by the fact that there aren’t that many cybersecurity experts available that understands this entire domain.”
Still, Randy Heffner takes a stab at designing SOA security, starting with virtual private networks and two-way Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at the simplest level. “Hackers cannot even connect to an SOA-based service unless they steal a certificate and key from a service consumer,” he says. Move up a step or two, and the next option is to leverage “existing SOA security features in Java or .NET application platforms and concentrating SOA security within an SOA specialty product such as an enterprise service bus, SOA and Web services management solution, SOA security server, or SOA appliance,” Randy says.
Ultimately, even when starting with a simple SOA security such as VPNs or SSL, SOA proponents need to recognize that the process will develop into something more intricate. The key is “to anticipate the need for and leave paths open to build additional, deeper security functionality as business requirements demand and SOA security maturity allows,” Randy says. We’ll grow and learn as we go along, he believes:
“Typically not all applications need all of your security requirements; initial applications may be able to do with a lighter-weight pass on building your SOA security solution, while later applications require you to fill in your solution with additional features…. Each time you make a pass through, you will learn more about how to build the most effective SOA security solution with the pieces that you have.”
Still, JP says the current crop of tools and protocols are too immature for top-to-bottom SOA. Things will only get more complicated as SOA-enabled services become part of cloud offerings. “What I have experience in with regard to the WS-* security mechanisms, security tools and technologies for securing Web-based and non-Web-based applications, still do not begin to address the real hard issues regarding cybersecurity in an SOA; especially as we expand the notion of service.”
SOA raises issues that never arose in the days of siloed applications and point-to-point Web services. Both Randy and JP recognize that securing a complex network that touches many parts of the stack is going to take work. Where they disagree is whether current approaches are at least a place to get started. JP adds that SOA is too much of an amorphous, changing entity on which to base solid security decisions.
August 17th, 2009
Another view: SOA is like a mosquito, spreading viral data
Just as the Internet has shown itself to be a speed-of-light carrier of rumors, gossip, and misinformation, so can service oriented architecture within an organization.
I just came across new book titled “Viral Data in SOA: An Enterprise Pandemic,” written by Neal Fishman, program director for information forensics within IBM’s Information Management group, which highlights the risks that emerge as more and more applications are interconnected across and between enterprises.
On the cover of the book is a mosquito. A mosquito’s claim to fame is that it can pick up viruses and bacteria from any type of organism, and deliver the payload to any other type of organism on the planet. A human and a deer and a bird may not have much in common, but they can all share the same diseases.
Is SOA, then, a mosquito that can deliver payloads of bad data (what Fishman calls “viral data”) all across the enterprise — pandemic style — before it can be stopped?
Fishman points out that misinformation and bad data have been haunting and hobbling organizations — not to mention entire societies — since the dawn of time. Nowadays, of course, information travels at the speed of light, and SOA — enabling interoperability between all types of applications — becomes the “host” carrier. As he puts it:
“Overall, viral data in SOA has the capacity to become an enterprise pandemic and disable a company. Service-oriented solutions that incorporate interoperability, reusability, layering of abstractions, and loose coupling serve as perfect hosts to propogate misinformation. That is the knife’s edge of SOA.”
As often discussed at this site, data is often a last considering in SOA planning, but SOA really won’t function properly if it’s delivering bad data.
What can organizations do to control the proliferation of viral data across SOA-enabled infrastructures? Fishman makes these recommendations for a multi-pronged approach to taking the “viruses” out of data before it infects the entire business.
- A reference model for moving data
- Methods by which to assess data
- Capture of data provenance
- Use of meta-driven coding techniques
- Use of abstract model
- Use of contextual views
- Continuous monitoring
- An appropriate data architecture
- Data governance
The last item on Fishman’s list, data governance, fits very neatly into SOA discussions, because SOA governance ensures that the enterprise is behind the effort. Likewise, data governance helps ensure that the correct version of data is being deployed within the architecture.
August 4th, 2009
Surgical decisions: How to change business executives' minds about information technology
Let’s face it, without IT, there’s no business. But, IT has always been viewed by business executives as a cost center, versus a strategic asset. A relatively new work published by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross puts forth some ideas how to turn this thinking around.
In IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain, Weill and Ross say forward-looking businesses are transforming themselves with technology. They are building a “platform of digitized processes,” which are integrated environments, often anchored by an ERP or CRM system.
The core of success through IT apparently rests on competing on analytics, in which data from all parts of the organization is brought in and presented, via dashboards and the like, as insightful information to decision-makers.
Weill and Ross cite the following corporate success stories:
Aetna: “Aetna… uses the data generated from its core transactions to empower decision makers…” The authors report that Aetna was on the brink of failure in 2002, but employed savvy IT to turn itself around within five years. The company employed an executive information system to employ data to drive decisions. “Firmwide delivery of transparent and consistent performance data gave them an opportinity to train the company how to think about problems… Armed with useful data, Aetna’s senior managers started making what one observer called ’surgical decisions’ on prices in their proposals to institutional customers. The executive information management system was just the first step in using IT to make Aetna’s people smarter and more productive… Aetna started providing customers online access to medical advice and information about their accounts and history. These efforts have transformed Aetna into a highly respected and profitable health care company.”
7-Eleven Japan (SEJ): “SEJ uses IT to empower its people — all its people — with information…. Every salesclerk at SEJ has access to a handheld device for ordering stock… a constant flow of graphical data, showing recent sales, weather conditions, and product range information…”
United Parcel Service: “UPS equips its drivers with a DIAD (delivery information acqusiion device), which captures a customer signature and uploads data on each delivery to the company’s package information database. UPS analyzes this data to better understand the profitability of individual customers and packages, which leads to improved routing and pricing decisions.”
The ability to quickly access enterprise information made a difference to these companies, and illustrate the power of valid, actionable information to work smarter and faster. These success stories didn’t happen overnight, of course — there was plenty of sweating to achieve back-end integration, develop enterprise data models, and get business units on board. It takes visionaries both within IT and in the business to make this all work.
July 22nd, 2009
SOA's 'blind spot' -- where's the timely and trusted data?
My colleague Ash Parikh reports he has done a measure of “soul searching” — which included a lot of discussions with experts and practitioners — about service oriented architecture, and has come to the conclusion that much of the world is operating under a couple of misconceptions about SOA.
Incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate data torpedoes SOA
SOA “guarantees” business agility: Not necessarily, Ash says. “Applications and business processes require timely and accurate information, but SOA often overlooks or worse yet, simply assumes this requirement.”
SOA does “not” need to include a data integration layer: Traditional technology underpinnings of SOA such as EAI and ESB attempt to address data integration, “but in many cases cannot efficiently deal with data volumes and latencies.”
Actually, Ash has been talking for some time about these missing links in SOA efforts. Companies are missing the Read the rest of this entry »
June 24th, 2009
10 data center paradoxes -- widening area networks; iPhone inspiration (2)
Last week, I published the first five megatrends reshaping today’s data centers, pulled from my latest article in Database Trends & Applications.
Here the remaining five of the top 10 shifts, or paradoxes that are turning data centers upside down, rightside up, and many other directions:
Paradox 6: Consumerist Technology Trumps Corporate Computing: Will we someday see iPhone-based data centers? Data center planners are increasingly taking pages from the playbooks of consumer devices and services, which seem to be outpacing corporate IT in innovation.
Paradox 7: Networks Become Too Wide for Wide Area Networks: The rise of remote workforces and cloud computing is far outpacing the abilities of wide area networks (WANs) to keep up.
Paradox 8: IT Finally Starts to Automate Its Own House: IT departments have done a stellar job of automating tasks and processes all across the organization - from call centers to loading docks to benefits management. But the greatest challenge now lies ahead: automating IT management itself — from provisioning; patching process and recovery from routine failures; and setting up, allocating, balancing and correcting the performance of servers and storage.
Paradox 9: Business Intelligence Shared with Other Businesses: BI used to be a secretive process to gather senistive information about operations, custimers, and markets. Now the trend is to open up all this data, via collaborative sites, to partners, customers, and who knows who else. Think about the impact on supply chain management when vendors know in advance what demand is coming downstream, and what’s driving it.
Paradox 10: The Rise of Empowered Users Means the End of Empowered PCs: All sorts of vital services are now coming from the cloud, accessed through a browser.
June 18th, 2009
10 data center paradoxes -- out of complexity comes simplicity
For every action there is an equally potent reaction, and that is certainly the case in IT developments we’ve been seeing as of late.
Call them paradoxes if you will, and I just published some of them in an article for Database Trends & Applications on the shifting currents reshaping today’s data centers as we know them. Here are five of the top 10 paradoxical trends, based on the views of some leading experts and practitioners. (PDF link to the article here.)
Paradox 1: More Centralization Increases Decentralization of Computing Resources. For large systems sites, there will be a continuing evolution away from single, large general-purpose processors toward more distributed workloads on more cost-effective platforms.
Paradox 2: Tight Economy Drives Eco-Friendly IT. In times gone by, an economic slump meant companies would hunker down and focus on survival, while shelving “do-good” projects such as environmental awareness and protection. Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing for Sun Microsystems, says today’s rough-and-tumble economy may be dampening new projects and innovation, but the downturn is a boon for green IT initiatives. “The unstable economy is forcing IT managers to refocus on consolidation and energy efficiency to cut costs, in addition to a focus on co-location, managed, hosted or cloud computing providers rather than traditional in- house services,”
Paradox 3: Everyone Wants Virtualization; Not Everyone Understands It. A recent survey conducted by Unisphere Research for SHARE, the IBM users’ group found that virtualization is on the radar screens of a majority of enterprises, with server or storage virtualization already in place at many organizations. However, most respondents admit they are still learning and understanding virtualization, and most virtualization efforts are scattered or spotty. Ultimately, a majority of respondents view enterprise virtualization as a long-term IT strategy.
Paradox 4: Centralized Virtualization Leads to “De-localization” of Data. Tim Carbery of Axis Technology put it this way: “Virtualization and cloud storage trends coupled with data privacy and information management techniques will radically transform the concept of managed storage. Once a company has crossed the virtualization boundary, then information can be delivered to the point of impact, whether that is a telecommuter’s home, a researcher in a lab, a doctor’s office or the corporate head office. This ‘de-localization’ of data will then serve as a self-reinforcing catalyst. Collaboration technologies will finish the transformation of corporate office to virtual space.”
Paradox 5: Complexity Increases Simplicity. “There is pressure on data centers to provide more services, scalability and availability than ever before. That’s why cloud computing approaches are gaining in popularity—companies can ramp up capabilities by hiding away the complexity. “We do not see the concept of the data center disappearing, instead, we see the concept of data centers becoming more amorphous,” says Martin Schneider, director of product marketing at SugarCRM. “The emerging trend of cloud computing kind of ties all of the major trends around data centers, in that it enables companies to run far simpler data centers, if not obviating the need for them in some instances.”
I’ll bring out the next five paradoxes in a follow-up post.
May 18th, 2009
Goodbye, SOX?
Keep your eye on this one: the US Supreme Court has just decided to review the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
According to today’s news, the Supremes said they would consider a legal challenge to the law, on the basis that it “violates the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.” (Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, 08-861)
The law, which directly affects public companies and indirectly affects the companies that deal with public companies, requires greater transparency and accountability in financial reporting. This is has been both a major headache and opportunity for information technology departments. As a result, the need to better trace data has been a business driver of many data management and service orientation efforts in recent years.
Some analysts say SOX has scared off companies from going public.
Even if the law were struck down and sent back to Congress for heavy modification, it has had an impact in shaping the goals of information technology going forward. Enhancing the visibility and accountability of data and applications delivering the data are worthy efforts that often make business sense. Such efforts should be continued.
A few years back, I wrote a special section for Teradata Magazine that explored the ins and outs of SOX compliance for companies. (See Cover Story – “Uncovering Opportunity.”) I spoke with thought leaders such as Claudia Imhoff and Lee Dittmar, who encouraged businesses to look beyond the legalities to seize the business opportunities:
“Looking beyond sustainable compliance offers companies the opportunity to do new things with their data—to analyze and identify trends, improve customer service and eliminate redundancies in their supply chains. The effort is a continuous journey that, in the long run, will help companies become more efficient and informed in their processes.
“This is a journey that has to happen,” says Dittmar. “Compliance must be sustainable, and that takes work. The program must be effective and efficient. There are significant improvement opportunities, and it will take hard work to achieve the benefits. But pursued properly, this exercise can be translated from a compliance exercise into a journey that improves enterprise governance, enhances business performance and creates shareholder value.”
That’s a journey well worth taking, even without the government pushing the issue.
April 29th, 2009
Visions of cloud computing and Web 2.0, circa 1990s: the world catches up to Yale's David Gelernter
“Computing transcends computers. Information travels through a sea of anonymous, interchangeable computers like a breeze through tall grass. A desktop computer is a scooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up like seawater…” -David Gelernter, The Second Coming: A Manifesto, 2000
In a new and powerful interview from Edge Foundation, Yale scientist David Gelernter was joined by John Markoff and Clay Shirky in an inspiring discussion of Gelernter’s prescient visions of cloud, Web 2.0, and Semantic Web — years before anyone else was talking about them — and where we’re going with technology. (With a trio like this, you know it’s going to be good….)
The question is not ‘What can software engineers build?’ but ‘What do users need?’
Gelernter himself has always been a step or two ahead of the industry, publishing the book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean in 1991, which predicted the rise of the World Wide Web among other things. In his 2000 work, pulished at Edge, The Second Coming: A Manifesto, he predicted the rise of cloud computing. As he explained in the recent interview:
“The central idea we were working on was this idea of de-localized information — information for which I didn’t care what computer it was stored on. It didn’t depend on any particular computer. I didn’t know the identities of other computers in the ensemble that I was working on. I just knew myself and the cybersphere, or sometimes we called it the tuplesphere, or just a bunch of information floating around. We used the analogy — we talked about helium balloons. We used a million ways to try and explain this idea.”
Gelernter also discussed his original vision (circa 2000) of the rise of the Semantic Web and advanced search, which he called “lifestreaming,” in which all the documents and data that are part of your existence you need are retrievable at any time, on demand.
In preparing his initial work for Mirror Worlds, Gelernter said he had reservations about the idea of information being stored and managed across interconnected computers, wondering if it was a “stupid” idea that “would never work.” (This was 1991, after all.) “It is grossly inefficient. There is no way that you can take information, just float it out there, and expect people to search this whole vast collection, or somehow or other find what they want. And, you know, how are you going to find out what computer to put it on? How am I going to know what computer to look for it on?”
He says as he gained experienced and continued to research the problem, he determined that “In the final analysis, “the question is not, what can software engineers build? It’s the question, What do users need? If we identify our user need, the software technology will come along — in combination with hardware, obviously, and interconnect technology.”
In the interview, Markoff mentioned that many people appear to be abandoning their “fetish” for computers, as the emphasis has shifted to the world of information and content that is accessible via the Web.
“Easily half the world doesn’t like playing with machines,” Gelernter said. “It’s not something they enjoy doing. It’s not something they take to.” He added that the mission of the computer industry itself is shifting, albiet begrudgingly: “What are we looking for and should we have computers in mind, or should we have software in mind, or should we have actual users in mind? I think the average programmer still doesn’t understand that he is not a typical user. The average programmer still thinks that insofar as people don’t find his software easy to use, it’s because they are childish, or ignorant, or just obtuse.”
The original work of Mirror Worlds may be 18 years old, but, as Markoff put it, “the world is just now catching up with that…. It’s clear now with cloud computing that that’s the direction the world’s moving in. But only now.”
Gelernter says the only major fault with his earlier predictions were that they were “too conservative.”
HT: JP Rangaswami (“Confused of Calcutta”).
April 29th, 2009
Top off SOA with enterprise mashups
Here’s an example that illustrates the connection between SOA and cloud, and how this can be facilitated:
Mashups — any way the customer wants them
Mike Kavis reports that he is involved in a cloud computing startup, and a challenge was to develop output medium for his company’s services. As Mike put it, he would rather spend his time adding new business services that contribute to his company’s bottom line than fussing with the ways customers and partners want to consume his company’s data services — whether they be RSS feeds, gadgets, SMS messages, Web pages, Facebook applications, or portals.
Mike found the solution in enterprise mashups, which provide partners and customers the flexibility to access his company’s products and services “in ways that are convenient for them without having to wait on my IT shop to decide if (a) we think the request is important enough in our priority list, (b) if we have the time and resources to work on it, and (c) how much we will charge them.”
He adds that with SOA governance and best practices applied on his end at the architectural level, “we can be assured that whatever mashups our customers and partners create, they will be subject to the same security and governance as the services we have developed.” In the enterprise mashup layer, data services are exposed for customers to consume.
The result, Mike says: “I can now present various data services in a secured and governed fashion to my customers and partners without being concerned on how they want to consume it… this is the Icing on your SOA cake.”
Enterprise mashups represent the latest approach to buiding composite applications that are the centerprise of many SOA efforts — and make SOA real to business users. Mike encourages organizations to add an Enterprise Mashup Platform on top of their SOA stack. “This is the ultimate flexibility and agility that SOA promises.”
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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