Operational Agility

I suppose there are some similarities between mashups and ETL tools, as pointed out by Jacob Ukelson, in that they can extract data from a variety of different systems, play around with that data and then write it somewhere – a web page, an aggregated UI, another target application etc.  This offers a new perspective on data cleansing, process automation and orchestration, screen aggregation and much more, but without the need to access the back end systems.  No database transactions here, and no coding either.

Jacob wonders whether IBM can seriously launch into this space next year, as they state.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I welcome IBM’s efforts.  The very fact that they are even trying to enter the space, validates a market that it is very difficult for the smaller vendors like Blue Prism to build alone.

Just thought I’d alert you to Blue Prism Software Architect, Ciaran Gultnieks’ blog.  He doesn’t really need or want the publicity but if you are technically inclined or you like chickens and ducks you should give it a read.

Ciaran is currently experimenting and comparing CouchDB, Mnesia and MySQL which, if you are still reading, perhaps you should jump across and see what it’s all about.

I asked our CTO, Dave Moss, if he fancied writing a few guest posts on this blog, on the topic of developing a software product.

I think blogs should represent the views of the author and that there should be a single author.  However, you may recall me saying that Dave is the “techie” I respect the most of all I have met.  So having read his first effort (below), three comments sprung to mind:

1. I totally agree with his views in this instance and, therefore, since they exactly match my own, I am happy to put them on this blog in my name.
2. Dave is one of those rare CTOs who has acute commercial focus and places the highest emphasis on customer need, when evaluating product development objectives.
3. The writing is in Dave’s hand and his analogies stink!  So I refute responsibility for the way the message is communicated.

(more…)

I once met a financial adviser who offered to help me sort out my finances.  Within five minutes of meeting her, she had told me what I ought to do.  I had not given any information about my financial affairs, my needs, or desires, yet she was proposing a structure for my financial arrangements, based on one single fact, that I was a director/shareholder of a company.  Needless to say, she did not make the sixth minute of the meeting.

This morning I read more coverage of the stupidity blindness of IT people, this time observed by Lorraine Lawson at IT Business Edge.  In her post How You Talk about SOA to the Business, it is clear that IT folk are still keen on pushing SOA to their business counterparts.

This has really gone on long enough.  Do you think business people really care about SOA vs EAI?  Whether you think of SOA as a tool, an infrastructure, a methodology, or a technology, it is invisible to the end user.  What is visible to the end user is whether or not a business problem has been solved.

(more…)

Amongst the SOA buzz around the blogosphere and traditional media, there is a recurring theme of how to promote SOA and gain acceptance within the user community.  How to justify SOA.  How to demonstrate its worth.  How to measure its success.  How to cost justify its use.

I think this all rather misses the point.  SOA to me, is just a tool for delivering business value.  There are many tools in one’s kitbag.  Promoting SOA for its own sake is just wrong.  It is a great idea that should be used only where appropriate.

Like any other investment decision I have a simple rule.  If the business case is not blindingly obvious, if you have to scratch around inventing new ways of measuring intangible benefits, if the financial ROI is hard to pin down, then you are probably on to a loser.  Focus your attention on something that does offer a compelling and obvious business case.  Find a winner.

Wow, Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet has looked at the enterprise mashup space in much more depth than I did a couple of months ago.

He raises some interesting issues, though, about why some of these tools are struggling to gain acceptance in the enterprise.  I believe that there are some unique features that need to be addressed to meet enterprise requirements:

(more…)

I am feeling quite pleased with myself for managing to get the word thrice into my last post.  Such a fine word don’t you think?

This post comes to you with the word analyst.  A dirty word in some parts of the blogosphere.

I have never paid an industry analyst but I am thinking of doing so.  Not to write some white paper promoting my company’s solutions and position us positively against our competitors.  I can write that free of charge and just as many potential customers will ignore it as if an analyst had written it.

What I actually want to achieve is to look at a wider industry trend.  I want to test whether today’s view of IT architecture is really becoming business process focussed.

(more…)

More interesting coverage on alignment of BPM and SOA from Jean-Jacques Dubray got me thinking about what a large undertaking it would be to make such an implementation enterprise wide.

I am not trying to open up the bottom up versus top down argument here, already eloquently covered by Todd Biske.  Rather, I am trying to think of things as central or local.

I like the idea of tools that can implement local solutions to local problems.  Clearly central control is required or the IT infrastructure will run out of control.

However, IT departments are struggling to meet the ever growing number of change requests and have only blunt tools and scarce resources to address them.  So the business users get “wait for the strategic solution” (read between the lines “some months/years away if successful at all”).

Is it possible to provide solutions that are powerful but temporary?  Should these solutions be capable of fitting into a future architecture based around BPM and SOA?  Should business users have the privilege of not having to wait years for strategic solutions but be able to capture key process benefits right now?

Thrice yes in my view.

The Blue Prism Rogue IT survey has generated quite a lot of coverage, but I was particularly interested to read Rogue IT and magic wands by Patrick Ancipink.

I am one of the people that falls into the trap of forgetting about the harder parts of the infrastructure, in particular, networks.  Not only do they “just work” but everything is plug and play these days isn’t it?

In the hype surrounding software architecture and particularly SOA, it’s easy to forget that hordes of IT people dedicate their time to making sure that the software has a hardware infrastructure to feed it.  Furthermore that this community has the same concerns about alignment of business and IT objectives.

This press release landed in my in-tray this morning.  The basic premise is that enterprises are turning to BPM because the major systems (ERP, CRM etc) have not delivered the required flexibility in business processes.

There is a long held belief in the Build vs Buy debate that you either build and have a system that perfectly (or nearly) matches your business processes, or you buy a packaged application and change your business processes to what should be best practice.

But best practice (at least as determined by the software vendors) has some conceptual problems.  Firstly it assumes that all businesses are the same (they are not!).  Secondly it assumes that business users will accept the new processes (and so will their customers).  Thirdly it broadly ignores the existing IT infrastructure which varies enormously company by company.  Finally, it doesn’t acknowledge the massive amount of necessary change in business processes on an ongoing basis.

I think what we are seeing here is a user rebellion against large “benchmark” systems and the users are trying to address this with their own workarounds, or with BPM or similar.

(more…)