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
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 08:27 AM
The latest computer glitch comes from the California Employment Development Department. Due to the system's inability to record extended unemployment benefits, over 100,000 residents have not received their checks and may not until after December 25.
Recognizing back in 2002 that the 30-year old computer systems were in need of a serious upgrade, the federal government gave the state of California $60 million to address the current and anticipated issues. While some progress has been made, it's clear that the project is not complete.
Of course, this isn't what unemployed residents want to hear when their bills are mounting and the holiday season is upon us.
So how do you explain to little Suzy or Bobby that Christmas may be delayed? Articulating the complexity behind the computer glitch may be a bit heady for some parents so here are five excuses to tide you over until the unemployment checks clear.
1. Santa decided that this year that he would split up his trip into two nights and you're on the list for the second delivery that is expected after the 25th, or somewhere thereabouts.
2. There was a layoff in Santa's workshop and with less elves working, they weren't able to make as many toys as they used to.
3. The reindeer caught the H1N1 virus and won't be able to fly until later this month when they're feeling better.
4. Santa's credit card was frozen in the North Pole and it won't thaw until the end of the month.
5. Your email to Santa got stuck in a spam filter.
While the California residents patiently wait to see if the glitch does in fact delay their checks for another few weeks, the issue calls into question the flexibility of the IT infrastructure. You have to wonder how much governance has been applied to the system design and why such a slight change such as the extension of benefits could trip up so many.
Posted by Jeff Papows on Thu, Dec 03, 2009 @ 07:45 AM
It was a Black Friday indeed for Toys R Us customers who discovered that they were charged double for their purchases due to a computer glitch.
Now customers have to straighten out the charges with Toys R Us as well as their banks to address the issue and the potential overdraft fees.
While Toys R Us did admit that the computer glitch happened at several stores, it didn't give the number of consumers that were affected. However, setting up a hotline gives me a pretty good indication that this isn't a one-off incident.
Where the IT infrastructure went awry is still not clear though I suspect the architects and developers are working harder than Santa's elves right now to fix the issue.
I empathize with them and wonder, like their customers, if this issue could have been avoided altogether. Was it an oversight in the software code or the inability to scale to meet the demands of the busiest shopping day of the year? Along those lines, it may have been the unanticipated backlash from a highly successful social media campaign. In case you missed it, Toys R Us is currently the fastest growing brand on Facebook with 400,000 fans. The company's aggressive Black Friday marketing campaign gave a sneak peek of Black Friday deals only to its fans. While the campaign was successful at driving customers to the stores, it is IT that will bring them back.
From the outside looking in, the company made smart technology choices and aligned with top vendors. Whether they have a service oriented architecture, cloud strategy or other best practices in place is unknown to me and now is certainly not the time for I told you so. However, you can guess that an IT audit wouldn't be an unreasonable request once the dust settles. Of course, I'd question the governance that's in place to prevent these types of glitches but that's only one piece of the puzzle.
I'm sure this will all be fixed by the time you read this though I still believe that an ounce of governance prevention is worth a pound of cure.