Posted by Jeff Papows on Fri, Mar 26, 2010 @ 11:16 AM
Whether you’re for or against healthcare reform, you have to admit it’s going to cause major shifts that will directly impact IT. Of course, this doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s even remotely involved in managing the infrastructure of a healthcare or health-related organization.
For years, the healthcare industry has been dealing with a somewhat late arrival to IT adoption with regard to building and sustaining infrastructures. And this certainly isn't a knock on the healthcare industry as a whole. It's just that in order to get a full view of all activities in a healthcare organization requires a complex IT infrastructure that needs to support and connect all of the various departments and people in the patient life cycle.
For example, a patient who enters the emergency room for a short visit can easily interact with admissions, the HMO, x-rays, doctors, nurses, and the pharmacist before the information is aggregated and linked to billing and insurance. Now multiply this complexity by the fact that the average emergency room in the United States sees 82 patients per day.
Now when you add in new government regulations -- like we saw with HIPAA a few years ago -- the massive IT undertaking required to adhere to the new healthcare reform can't be understated.
Even for those organizations like Kaiser Permanente and Independence Blue Cross that have built sound IT infrastructures that are based on a proactive approach to IT governance, the new regulations are going to require significant investments of time from both the business and IT groups.
On the upside, however, is the opportunity for the healthcare industry to leapfrog other industries and show how to simplify these complex back-end systems so that the end user -- in this case, the patients -- do not have their care interrupted due to shoddy IT practices.
Healthcare is certainly one area where preventative measures, including IT governance, can go a long way, especially as new government mandates kick in.
Posted by Jeff Papows on Thu, Jan 14, 2010 @ 11:44 AM
I'm noticing that a lot more eyes seem to be on governance these days. Joe McKendrick dedicated some airtime to it in his recent "SOA in Action" blog posts and Dion Hinchcliffe just did an interesting take in his post, "A New Vision for SOA Governance: A Focus on the Social Aspect."
Hinchcliffe brings up the very human aspects of SOA that can make or break an initiative. This can be said about many IT projects that are going to have a widespread effect on a company. I.T Governance is certainly no exception, especially when you consider the old adage, ‘everybody wants governance but nobody wants to be governed.'
Of course, there have other views that don't recognize the importance of governance to the sustainability of the organization as I noted in a previous post calling out David Linthicum's erroneous assessment that cloud computing will put an end to the need to design time governance.
However, the point is that governance is moving out from behind-the-scenes to front and center as we enter the economic recovery zone. And I don't think that it's too much of a stretch to say that the recession has heightened the awareness of and greater need for governance. Here are two main reasons why:
1. Mergers and acquisitions: the speed and size of the recent M&A deals, especially the market consolidation in the financial services sector, is requiring IT efficiently integrate various back-end systems in an effort to accelerate the creation of newly formed entities. With so much at risk, it makes sense that best practices and governance policies are adhered to during the extensive integration process.
2. Cloud computing: with all of the recent debates about the risks associated with cloud computing as outlined in the InformationWeek article, "Don't Rush to Cloud Computing," there are still many companies and government agencies that are adopting the cloud as part of their IT strategy. Governance can help reduce this risk, especially when it's introduced at design time, so that applications and services are based on more solid foundations before they are extended to a cloud environment.
As the IT industry prepares for recovery, most recently forecasted by industry analysts at Forrester citing that hardware and software will bounce back in 2010, governance will very likely continue to be a focal point.
While the road to recovery will continue to be a bumpy ride, I'm looking forward to it.
Posted by Jeff Papows on Tue, Dec 29, 2009 @ 01:19 PM
Like everybody else at this time of the year, we look backwith the hope that perhaps we've learned something in the past 12 months. And if you're like me, we're alsolooking forward in anticipation to a new decade.
The past year was certainly an interesting one and we havehopefully gotten through the worst of one of the worst recessions I canrecall. We were also witness tosome major industry shifts including Oracle's purchase of Sun,Microsoft's launch of Windows 7 and Twitter's ability to bea viable source for breaking news.
When I first started blogging last February, the talk around the water cooler was whether or not SOA was dead and when the economy would fullyrecover. The more things changethe more they stay the same.
As I thought about some New Year's resolutions, I started tothink about how we could all use a little more governance across theboard. Not just for ourinformation technology infrastructures but across all other aspects of ourindustry such as media, the blogosphere, the analyst community, and our overallapproach to mitigating all the potential risks in our business.
So here are three resolutions I've decided to adopt. All are relatively easy and are probablynot too far from what you're already thinking about as next year approaches. In 2010 I resolve to do the following:
1. In a recent conversation with industry analyst Dana Gardner from Interarbor Solutions, he aptlypointed out that you really can't successfully engage in cloud computing unlessyou have a sound SOA infrastructure so the notion that SOA is dead, is, well,dead.
2. Tocarefully evaluate every trend that seems to catch fire in the blogosphere andassess it on its own merits with regard to industry relevance and what actuallyconstitutes news. It's far tooeasy to read headlines without the actual story or take so-called news items atface value simply because they appear online. It seems to me that the blogosphere could use a set ofgovernance policies to better mitigate the risks of inconclusive reporting.
3. Along those lines, I resolve to also pay closer attention to critical issues andtrends that will have far reaching effects on our IT infrastructures. Infoworldactually did a great round up on "The Top Underreported Tech Stories of 2009" citing the issues around the wireless spectrum and broadband availability as well as the dark side of cloud computing and its legal ramifications along with eight other under reported stories that will most certainly be part of our conversations in 2010.
Ah, three simple resolutions and none of themrequire that I restrict calories. If you have some resolutions to share, drop me a line at:jeff@weblayers.com
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Nov 02, 2009 @ 08:39 AM
If you missed last week's eBizQ SOA in Action virtual conference, you'll want to download and listen to the presentations, especially the keynote from Forrester's Randy Heffner who declared that SOA is far from dead. He also points to some very interesting data about the rise in SOA governance, the top SOA mistakes and what it takes to make a SOA effort successful.
As you may know, WebLayers did participate in a roundtable discussion, SOA Valuable is Unreachable Without Governance with Software AG that was led by industry pundit Joe McKendrick. Regardless of the vendors at the table, what really came through in each presentation was the fact that SOA is moving into a new phase.
In fact, Joe McKendrick aptly summarizes it as Phase 2 of SOA where SOA moves out of IT shops and becomes more entrenched in the business. Where, in my opinion, it always has been (or at least should have been in order for it to be successful).
But the bigger question I have is do we still have to call it SOA? If this phase two is going to really take hold in the boardroom, it has to find a more succinct and direct way of illustrating its value to the business in terms that can be more easily digested. What that term may be is still TBD. However, as the infrastructure continues to evolve, the terminology around it will become less relevant when compared to the value it brings to the organization.
Of course, the IT folks may still call it SOA. Meanwhile, business units may suggest a hybrid or cloud environment to support the SOA. And the CEO may be simply asking for a way to get information from point A to point B without any interruptions.
So this next phase isn't going to be so much about SOA as is about building the IT foundation that provides greater visibility, mitigates risks and streamlines business processes.
What we really need to be thinking about at this point is how to manage the infrastructure across the board as opposed to specific initiatives such as SOA or cloud.
From the initial idea and design stage through the actual building of the infrastructure and on-going evolution there needs to be a better way to organize and oversee the development so that this next phase of SOA (or any new initiative that's introduced to the infrastructure) will actually deliver on the business benefits it touts.
We're calling it distributed governance though would love to hear your thoughts on what we should call this next phase of SOA - and if we call it SOA at all.
-Jeff
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Oct 19, 2009 @ 08:28 PM
As you probably know, IBM just rolled out its biggest release of middleware ever with the introduction of WebSphere 7.0. It's been a while since we've seen such a massive, full scale WebSphere upgrade with 6.0 versions of various flagship products dating back to 2004.
While the IT community may be closely evaluating the new version of WebSphere ESB or the DataPower security appliances, this latest release actually speaks to three significant business challenges that are affecting many organizations today and that are being addressed by SOA, cloud computing and BPM.
The first challenge is the architecture itself. Remember that SOA is an architecture and not a product. Think of it as the foundation to a house - without a sound architecture, it's impossible to build anything on it. Given the amount of mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, global expansion and/or contraction that has occurred in the past year alone, the IT architecture really is the foundation that will help sustain the organization as it evolves.
For those considering venturing into the cloud, there are still a lot of discussions around security and standards. However, if executed properly, a hybrid computing model that supports some applications and services in the cloud could significantly reduce costs.
The third challenge, where BPM is most valuable according to IBM, is in helping the line of business respond more quickly to real-time events. From my experience and I'm sure IBM would agree, these real-time events can range from executing millions of financial transactions per second to establishing the processes that keep a hospital emergency room up and running 24/7, for example.
Within the BPM suite, IBM has upgraded its integrated governance and policy management tools. As a long time IBM business partner, WebLayers will continue to complement the WebSphere governance offerings including the latest release of WebSphere Registry and Repository. The Channel Insider story sums it up well, "IBM tapped a small group of select software and business partners to build out development tools and application management governance products that round out its BPM and SOA life cycle management offerings."
Obviously, what really stands out for me in this new WebSphere stack are the governance offerings. Much like the house metaphor, governance across the entire infrastructure will help create a more solid foundation - one that will accelerate the speed at which way that SOA, cloud and BPM address business issues. Of course, selling these IT concepts and products to the business is a matter of articulating the business benefits and steering away from the jargony dialog.
Regardless, IBM's WebSphere 7.0 is big news indeed and speaks to the strength of the entire middleware portfolio - which is probably why not many folks were too surprised to learn about WebSphere's 14 percent growth in sales as reported in this past week's earnings announcement.
-Jeff