Now that I'm only 5 slides short of a full deck, I thought it would be a good to tell folks that on Monday, I'll be representing the SOA Consortium's EA2010 working group at SAP's ASUG conference in, you guessed it, sunny Orlando.  I'll be giving a talk on our EA2010 work.  Areas of discussion include 21st century business, service-orientation, business architecture, enterprise architecture and enterprise architects.  If you are attending the show, please come by, Monday at 9:30-10:30, in 308C. 

If you'd like to connect at the show, I'll be at the Sunday evening ESOA Community Networking Session, and taking in sessions and wandering around the expo floor on Monday.  Drop me an email at bmichelson at gmail dot com.

Now, I just need to fit in my reading assignment from Paul Kurchina, Mashup Corporations, The End of Business as Usual. 

[Disclosure: SAP is not a client of Elemental Links, however they are a sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is a client of Elemental Links]

Posted by brendamichelson in | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Do you have a SOA story to tell?  One that speaks to business value generation, rather than the singular pursuit of technical nirvana?  If you answered yes to both, consider participating in the SOA case study contest from the SOA Consortium and CIO magazine.   Ripped from my own post on the SOA Consortium Insights blog:

"The goal of the SOA case study contest is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption.

Case study submissions must be for completed projects that used a SOA approach to deliver business value.   In keeping with our charter, we are not looking for dissertations on the technical beauty of the architecture and implementation. Rather, we are interested in the business story, the business value generated, the degree of cross-organizational collaboration, and the usages of SOA approaches and supporting technology.

For more information on the contest and participation, please go here."

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]

Posted by brendamichelson in SOA • SOA_Consortium | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jack van Hoof contacted me about his IT Services Stack collaboration experiment.  Jack, as many know, is an enterprise integration architect and author of the popular eda-soa blog.  In his email, Jack asked if I would let my readers know of his experiment and offer my feedback.  Since the work will remain in the public domain, I'm happy to do both.

The Initiative

The best way to describe the work, is to excerpt from Jack's post and show his picture in progress.

"It is not always easy for an enterprise IT architect to keep scope and hold the complete picture. As we have several architects with different competences I felt the urge to develop an IT Services Stack. The IT Services Stack is a picture of a layered view on all aspects of IT from a component perspective."

"I would like to make this premature IT Services Stack more consistent and supply an extended view on every component mentioned in the picture. The model should be defined one level deeper, with the following attributes:

• Function of the component
• Relationship with other components
• Sub-level components and models
• Related open standards
• Innovative products in the market"

Jack then asks for community help, that's us.  So, if you are inclined, jump over to Jack's blog and offer your comments.  Or, as I'm about to do, post your comments and link to Jack.

My Three Cents

I suggest the addition of a new (leftmost) column, IT Business Management.  This column would contain components related to the 'business of IT'.  Top of mind components are:

• Business & IT Collaboration: Strategy, Architecture, Planning
• IT Offerings - the products and services IT provides to the business.  The supplier might be a third party.
• Demand and Supply Management
• Portfolio Management - Budget, Project and Asset
• Talent Development

The Hardware section caught my eye, only because I wonder how much hardware will continue to be under direct management of IT.  Beyond interaction devices (laptops, keyboards, mice, pdas) and networking equipment, does hardware ownership and management by IT organizations become obsolete?  Do we care about the hardware?  Or, just the technical infrastructure services at the next layer up?

In respect to the SOA box, the SOA Consortium's community of practice is working on a planning framework.  I sense some sharing in our future.

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]

Posted by brendamichelson in bda community projects • enterprise architecture • general IT | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Let me preface this post with the obvious, I am not an engineer. But, it would be fair to say I’m green. So, consider what follows information sharing, but definitely not analysis. Other than, “Hey, what Cork Internet Exchange did is cool”.

I’ve always wondered if there was a green opportunity in data centers. Instead of expending all that energy cooling down data centers, couldn’t the generated heat be redirected for good, such as heating the building? Maybe not the best idea in Florida, but certainly applicable here in the Northeastern US.

Now, not being an engineer, I wasn’t sure if this was a really good question, or a really dumb one. But, since I’m more interested in learning than being right, when people talk of Green IT, I ask my question. This morning, on Twitter, I asked it of James Governor (RedMonk, GreenMonk). In response, James sent a link to a post about Tom Raftery’s data center redesign at Cork Internet Exchange. An excerpt follows, is mine.

“What was the design decision that makes all the difference at Cork? Well you see a normal data center has hot aisles (backs of servers) and cold aisles (fronts of servers), but the data center has an average ambient temperature based on convection and flows of these air streams. Indeed most data centers are pretty much designed and run with the ambient temperature in mind. So what did Tom and team do? They put a cork in it. They sealed the cold aisles, which means that when you walk into the data center you’re hit with a blast of 30 degree celsius air. For humans the temperature is very high, but where it has to be cold, it is. Which is pretty smart if you ask me. Of course this idea would never fly in America where humans can only stand a very small ambient temperate range between 65 and 70 degrees F. But in Europe I can certainly see some organisations trying something similar. To be clear- the data center heat is also used to warm the offices and hot water at cix. Says Tom: “Our central heating is powered by Intel”. The crack about Americans and air-conditioning above is a little unfair- after all- Cork has the native advantage of not being as hot as California, or locations where many US data centers are located. But still- it surely makes sense to concentrate on cooling machines rather than people when you’re designing a data center.”

For readers who are engineers, check out the details here. Perhaps my brother (an engineer) will explain it to me!

So, I’m (continually) curious. Are other organizations redirecting generated data center energy? What other creative Green IT initiatives are folks undertaking? Are these initiatives adding environmental and business value? Or, do you feel greenwashed?

Posted by brendamichelson in creativity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As most know, my IT soapbox has “business-driven” emblazoned on all sides. By business-driven, I’m referring to an IT organization’s imperative – to deliver business value.  In this vein, I talk about (harp on) numerous topics including business-focused technology innovation, business-driven architecture, IT gaining business-smarts, and more recently business-IT integration.

I started to use the term 'business-IT integration', because I’m thinking beyond traditional business-IT alignment. Alignment refers to the review and reconciliation of independent activities, in this context the reconciliation of business strategy and plans with IT strategy, architecture and plans.

For business to reap the true value of IT, business and IT must collaborate on the development of strategy, architecture and plans. This collaboration, which should continue through delivery and operations, is business-IT integration. In order to have an integrated environment, business and IT professionals must be more conversant in the other’s discipline. Historically, IT has put this learning burden on the business, but it’s time for IT professionals to 'get business'.

If you bear with me for a moment more, I’d say that business-IT integration will naturally evolve to a business-IT fusion of sorts, at least in the strategy and innovation arenas, but now I’ve gone well beyond the intent of my post…

My intent was to amplify a key message from a MIT Sloan Article on Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT.  The authors, from Bain & Company, share their “growing realization … that the usual diagnoses of IT’s troubles – and the usual prescriptions for fixing those troubles – are often misguided”. In particular, they call out companies “seeking to deliver higher business value performance by harnessing IT have focused on alignment… the degree to which the IT group understands the priorities of the business and expends its resources, pursues projects and provides information consistent with them”.

The authors believe the following is true "A lack of alignment can doom IT either to irrelevance or to failure”. However, they raise an important flag that every IT leader should take to heart “a narrow focus on alignment reflects a fundamental misconception about the nature of IT. Underperforming capabilities are often rooted not just in misalignment but in the complexity of systems, applications and other infrastructure.”

They go on to describe situations in which business alignment run amok actually drives up IT complexity – silo-ed data centers, customized packaged applications, bolting on legacy applications, lack of standards and shared infrastructure – therefore driving down IT performance.

The authors quote Richard F. Connell, senior executive vice president and CIO of Selective Insurance Group “Aligning a poorly performing IT organization to the right business objectives still won’t get the objectives accomplished”. That, the authors say “is the alignment trap”.

For those in the alignment trap, the authors recommend a return to basics “temporarily focusing on effectiveness at the expense of alignment”. And of course, effectiveness requires simplification. Quoting Leonardo da Vinci, the authors remind us “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

The article has good insights on diagnosing IT pain and shares company anecdotes. If you have access to MIT Sloan Review, I recommend reading the article.

As for the big takeaway – in pursuing business-driven IT, don’t lose sight of the fundamentals, effectiveness, simplicity (to the degree possible), and constant communication. Host cross project/initiative forums with key players (project managers, architects and business analysts). Open lines of communication and collaboration to help your organization “balance well the needs of the entire organization with those of individual businesses”. And always, beware the alignment trap!

Posted by brendamichelson in Business-IT Integration • business driven architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)