Posted by Carlos Bernal on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 @ 10:33 AM
With the release of more than 90,000 government documents related to military operations in Afghanistan making headlines around the globe, from a technology perspective, it's certainly putting the idea of crowdsourcing into the mainstream.
For those who have heard the term but aren't fully versed on it, crowdsourcing is essentially a way to gather the collective knowledge of the public to complete a business related task. It's based on the premise that the experience and intelligence of an interested community will contribute to the greater good of a project. (The folks over at BNet have a really good summary available here.)
The immediate pluses and minuses of crowdsourcing are somewhat obvious in terms of free labor versus you get what you pay for. However, it's not always that black and white as variables such as size and scope of project as well as the pool of experts in the particular field will impact the outcome.
For example, just look at what the open source movement has done for the tech sector in the past 15 years or so and certainly crowdsourcing aims to take a page from that playbook.
One open source project in particular that I find of high interest is the work around the Jazz platform from the folks over at IBM Rational. They're making software development more collaborative through open source.
The crowdsourcing movement has picked up steam of late in the age of Web 2.0 and the sheer volume of people and tools that are connected throughout the world whether it's through Flickr, LinkedIn, dedicated crowdsourcing websites, etc.
The one area that shouldn't be overlooked in crowdsourcing and open source contributions is the role of distributed management and oversight of the projects. It just seems logical that there needs to be some sort of system of checks and balances to assure that contributed content is valuable, constructive and moves the project forward. This doesn't mean that contributors will be evaluated as that's an obvious turn-off to inspiring group brainstorms.
However, if you're making certain aspects of your business and/or software code available to the public, there should be some sort of oversight of the contributions. And it doesn't have to be obvious. In fact, it may be more valuable if it's run in the background and only presents itself when there's a potential contribution of something that doesn't align with the project's mission.
Of course, there are systems in place at most crowdsourcing sites and code reviews conducted with open source initiatives. These systems often track back contributions, confirm registrations, etc. Though as the aperture opens even wider for group collaboration, it calls for a distributed approach to governing the activities.
Before a crowdsourcing project kicks off or contributions are accepted, consider the role of distributed IT governance as a safety net. The IT community is embracing distributed IT governance when it comes to open source so it stands to reason that crowdsourcing also takes a closer look at the mechanisms in place that foster collaboration while cutting through the clutter and accelerating a project's success.
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 Mon, Jan 04, 2010 @ 04:12 PM
After a few days away from the office, I came back with renewed enthusiasm for 2010.
As I made my way through my inbox and got caught up on the latest industry news, I was surprised by David Linthicum's Infoworld blog entry titled, "Cloud Computing Will Kill These 3 Technologies." In his post, Linthicum states that cloud computing will kill design time governance.
What makes the blogosphere so great is that we're all entitled to voice our opinions. So I will now share mine in response to Linthicum's post because his view is a bit askew from what I know is happening in the real world.
Now if you've been reading any of my previous blog posts, you'll know that I believe nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, right before Thanksgiving I blogged about the importance of design time governance for cloud computing in the entry titled, "Governance: A cloud computing strategy's silver lining."
The bottom line is this: if we cut corners at the beginning of the development process, we will almost always create gaps in the cloud resulting in the proliferation of bad code and applications. If in fact more services are accessed, sometimes anonymously, from God knows where, in fact the quality of those services now destined to be used and reused must in fact of an even higher quality. Sounds like design time governance to me.
Now you're probably thinking, ‘of course he's going to push design time governance.' And that's true to a certain extent from the perspective of creating and distributing better software throughout our infrastructures especially as services make their way into the cloud. From a practical point of view, I'd tell anybody purchasing technology to select the vendor that's best suited to addressing his or her particular business needs.
But when it comes to the statement that cloud computing is the death knell for design time governance, I simply have a hard time believing this. Especially coming from Linthicum, the pragmatist.
Sure, aspects of design do go away by using cloud-related resources but it's unimaginable that most serious organizations will believe that run time is enough. On the contrary, utilization of cloud resources brings forward new design governance challenges. For example, when and how should cloud resources be used, do they support the proper technologies, functionality and performance we expect?
I'm not sure which ‘runtime SOA players' David is referring to when he says ‘many of the existing runtime SOA governance players support enough design and implementation capabilities that separate design-time tools are not required.' I'm quite frankly shocked at this statement because to the best of my knowledge, most of those runtime SOA governance players support little to no automated design time governance.
I suspect the theory that cloud computing will kill design time governance is up there with other marketing campaigns that declared XYZ technology is dead. Sure, they make great headlines and get some of us all worked up but they're not very practical or realistic.
If anybody knows who those existing runtime SOA governance vendors are that can supposedly obliterate separate design tools, please drop me a line at jeff@weblayers.com or comment below on whether or not you think the cloud will kill design time governance.
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 Tue, Dec 15, 2009 @ 08:45 AM
David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog over at Infoworld makes solid points about SOA governance's move into the clouds. As I've addressed in my November 18 post, "Governance: a cloud computing strategy's silver lining", the key to building a seamless enterprise architecture is through governance.
The guiding principles of SOA and all out efforts to break down the silos we've inadvertently created over the years has led us to a point where governance can no longer be an afterthought as it is in so many instances. As more applications and services are opened up to a greater amount of users - many of whom may not have been anticipated when the original architecture was being sketched - there needs to be a more concerted focus on the way governance is introduced and carried throughout the software development life cycle.
This is most evident in a company's decision to solely focus on a run-time governance approach. Now there are certainly places where runtime governance is most relevant and necessary - to gain better control of the runtime environment - and when it's equally critical to enforce governance at the very beginning design stage. While each approach, runtime and design time, brings value to the architecture and are complementary to each other, what is becoming most relevant and critical as companies move to cloud computing is the distributed governance model.
To this end, WebLayers announced in July the industry's first fully distributed policy management platform. As more companies start to roll out products in this arena, I suspect that we may no longer be differentiating between distributed governance and non-distributed governance. It will simply be that distributed governance will be the de facto approach due to the fact that nearly all architectures will be distributed to some degree as we continue to extend our applications and services to other departments and divisions as well as external customers and partners.
photo by pink princess