The Art and Science of Being an IT Architect

DataPower as a Web Service Debugger

2011-09-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

I am really starting to appreciate the WebSphere DataPower appliance. In addition to its stellar performance as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and strong security features, it can also be a useful tool in debugging SOA applications and web services. You can set up "probes" which allow you to monitor web service requests and replies that pass thru the device. There is a user interface that allows you to visually inspect the message contents. its like having a web service debugger.

Copyright © 2011 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Does anybody know what data SAP Enterprise Services actually expose?

2011-08-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

Anybody know where I could get the mapping of SAP database table & field names to data elements in the WSDL of a standard SAP Enterprise Service? It seems our SAP technical consultant is unable to determine this without manually opening up the ABAP code that comes with SAP. The element names in the Enterprise Service are long English names which are quite different from the German acronym-like names of the standard SAP databases that all the SAP functional consultants are familiar with. It seems very painful to figure out what data is actually being exposed by the Enterprise Service.

Copyright © 2011 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

An Unexpected Turn at Management

2008-04-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

I have not been nearly as successful at integrating blogging and podcasting back into my life as I wanted after my unreal, fantasy assignment in China ended at the end of October 2007. After the holidays and after some procrastination on my part, I was hit with a reorganization at work. Suddenly I was asked to be a first line manager.

For some people this would have been an exciting event and cause for celebration. But for me it was cause for pause. In some ways I had made a career out of not becoming a manager, a pure sales person, or a project manager. I had managed to advance to a pretty high level on mostly my technical merits, successful projects, and some happy clients who kept signing up for more services based on that success. I was comfortable in a career path that would hopefully get me at least one more promotion some day (soon I hope) to what IBM calls a "Distinguished Engineer." I was to be a mentor but not a real manager.

Now I was asked to officially take over the care and feeding of 14 specialists and architects. Something inside told me that I should say "yes" and give it my best shot. I still want to be a Distinguished Engineer but I think now is the time to grow some other skills which may prove valuable later. In the past, when something unexpected happened in my career it usually turned out to be for the best after all. Visit my other blog if you're curious about my outlook on such things.

Copyright © 2008 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

2008-02-19T08:13:00.001-08:00

A new breakout of the acronym “SAP” heard today:

SAP = Slow and Painful

International Conference on Global Software Engineering

2008-02-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

If you have been a regular reader of my blog, you know that globalization is one of my favorite topics of discussion. Therefore, I would like to draw your attention to the International Conference on Global Software Engineering which will be held August 17-20, 2008 in Bangalore, India. (Recently renamed Bangaluru.) The event is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society.

Please note that if you have some thoughts to share, there is still time to submit a paper. The deadline for abstracts is Feb 21, 2008 and the deadline for papers is Feb 28, 2008.

Yours truly is a member of the Program Committee for the event. However, that doesn’t mean I automatically get to attend. I still have pay the registration fee and pay to get myself there… or convince my employer of the wisdom of spending their money to send me. I had the good fortune to visit my team in Bangalore and interview a few programmers for positions back in the fall of 2004 and I would certainly enjoy a return trip for the conference. I would be curious have any of you (my readers) had success at securing funding for travel to this kind of thing? If so, I’d love to hear how you justified the expense to your employer.

Copyright © 2008 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Do You Use a Dash?

2008-02-10T21:30:00.001-08:00

This may be a silly thing, but when you write your job title, do you write it as "I/T Architect" or "IT Architect" ?

I got used to using the slash several years ago. I think that is what I saw most often inside IBM where I work.

However, now it seems that I am seeing the title written without the slash. I noticed that the Open Group certification program uses no slash. (See the Master Certified IT Architect logo on the right side of my blog.)

I'm tempted to abandon the slash. What do you think? Which do you use? Which do you like better?

Copyright © 2008 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Tennessee Rational User Group

2008-02-10T21:14:00.000-08:00

I received an email a while back from Tin Dizdarevic of the Rational User Group looking for a volunteer to lead the Tennessee Rational User Group. After much soul searching and a little procrastination, I decided to raise my hand and take this on.

If any of my readers from Tennessee would like to joint the Tennessee Rational User Group, please go to the Global Rational User Group web site, use the "Find a User Group" feature to search for the chapter in Tennessee, and register for the group.

I am also soliciting suggestions on the best (or least bad) times for the User Group to meet, how often it should meet, where it should meet, and what topics you would like to see addressed.

I'm Back (At Least I Hope So)

2008-02-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

I am a little embarrassed at how long it has been since my last post. My project in China was very demanding and when I rolled off that project the end of October I went immediately into the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. It was January before I started feeling normal again and by then I was out of the habit. I will try to do better now.

Now Podcasting, Too !

2007-12-19T12:21:00.000-08:00

One of the things which I learned in China is that many of the young, educated, professional Chinese view having good English language skills as a prerequisite to many of the top jobs in China. Apparently, the best jobs in China all require regular interaction with foreigners like me. I found they were a lot more interested in me helping them with their English than in helping me learn Chinese.

For some reason, I found that many found my voice, cadence, and diction easier to understand than most. (Maybe they were just trying to be nice to me?) Being from Tennessee in the American South, I mentioned this to an American from South Carolina that I met in Beijing. He laughed and told me that "the Chinese love Southerners because we talk slow." Whatever the reason, I took an interest in teaching English and came up with the idea of using a podcast with corresponding transcript to assist my new friends with pronunciation even when I am not around.

Off topic for this blog... but for anyone who might be interested I even got to teach English in a Chinese government-registered church. See My Chinese Church Away from Home.

I decided to start a podcast equivalent to this blog at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. If English is not your native language, I hope you will check it out. This is something of an experiment so if you try it and like it, you had better let me know. It is a little extra work on me and I might lose interest if nobody seems to be paying attention. Here's an online MP3 player with links to share our subscribe to the RSS feed. I went back and added voice for the most popular posts and a few of my personal favorites.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Back to the Real World After China

2007-12-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

About 6 weeks ago, I completed one of the most challenging 10 months of my entire 26+ year career. I helped create the Enterprise Service Bus for a major Chinese company and during that time I made six trips to China and spent a total of 4.5 months there. I joked with friends that I did not live in the "real world" anymore because I would have never believed that anyone would actually pay me to work in China for so long. I did, however, learn a lot about globally distributed teams, ESB's, SOA, and the culture clash of trying to make people from China, the US, Canada, and India all work together.

In particular, my job was to help integrate their website with 3rd party service providers and their SAP back end. My resume is now full of references to XML, web services, canonical data modeling (XML schemas), WebSphere Message Broker, and WebSphere Process Server.

It was a heady time but I must confess I'm glad its over. It has taken me several weeks to get back into the groove and sit down and take some time to blog again.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Learn to Love Your SAP IDoc

2007-08-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago, I had a post in which I discussed how difficult it is for a custom application development person like myself to get adjusted to projects based on a packaged application like SAP. It had the somewhat humorous title How to Talk to an SAP Consultant (If You Must).

If you keep reading this post, you will see that I am now starting to understand some of the SAP terminology which once seemed so incomprehensible. I hope you will find this post helps accelerate your own understanding of SAP if you are thrust into it like I was.

I now have become all too familiar with the SAP interfaces for external system known by the name "IDoc".

SearchSAP.com provides the following definition:

IDoc (for intermediate document) is a standard data structure for electronic data interchange (EDI) between application programs written for the popular SAP business system or between an SAP application and an external program.

Being relatively new to the SAP world, these complex documents reminded me of database schemas generated by the old Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools with many cryptic table names and field names that only an automated tool could keep track of.

For example, suppose you want to create an order from an external system in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module of SAP. What would you expect the interface to be called? How about something like "Create Order"? Wrong! My client's CRM team first instructed us to use a standard IDoc going by the rather unintuitive name of "CRMXIF_ORDER_SAVE_M02". Shortly later, they decided that this standard IDoc would not meet all their business requirements and they created a new IDoc from the standard one and gave it a name they prefixed with a "Z" and added a different ending. I will stick with the standard create order IDoc for this post, however.

Ok, suppose you get past that detail, get into the right IDoc and start looking for the data representing the order header. Do you find it under something like "Order Header" or "Order"? No! Try looking for something SAP calls a "segment" and whose name is "E101CRMXIF_BUSTRANS".

help.sap.com has this to say about segments:

Segments form the basic building blocks of an IDoc type and are used to store the actual data.
A segment type is the name of a segment and is independent of the SAP release.
The segment definition is the release-specific name of a segment. By combining the segment type and the release, the required segment definition can be determined: This way, you can assign segment definitions from previous releases to an IDoc type in the current release. This may be necessary if, for example, the partner is using an older release which supports your current IDoc type but not your current segment definitions. You then have to "reset" these in the Partner profiles .

This segment type name is not completely random but is based on the phrase "business transaction" instead of order. I believe the addition of "E101CRMXIF_" to the beginning makes the segment type release-specific and specifies the segment definition.

Each segment can in turn have multiple fields. Some of these fields can contain data defined by another segment. These can be optional or mandatory. One segment can have a 1:1 or 1:n relationship with another segment. For example, the standard E101CRMXIF_BUSTRANS segment looks like this when I look at it in the XML editor of Rational Software Architect v7 (though truncated to what would display on my screen and still be readable):

Note that the order segment has many individual elements (mostly strings) followed my many references to other segments. The graphical representation looks a lot like an object model or database design.

An entire SAP IDoc can be huge! The entire IDoc for orders includes well over 200 IDoc segments. After I used my XML editor to format the XML schema of CRMXIF_ORDER_SAVE_M02 so that it was neatly indented and had line feeds before each level of nesting, the resulting XML schema file was a mere 38257 lines long.

If your next project takes you down to the implementation level of SAP, I hope you're a detail-oriented person.

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Perils of Over-Customizing SAP-Broken Reports

2007-08-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

I've been around clients for some great discussion on the perils of over-customizing SAP lately. I hope to collect some of the lessons learned here for your reading enjoyment and career enrichment.

Here's a comment made by a country sales manager at a meeting I attended in May 2007.

"They told us that the new SAP system would have over 160 reports out-of-the-box that we could use to run our business and we didn't plan on having to create a lot of custom reports. Now they tell us that's not true. Almost all the out-of-the-box reports are broken. Almost every report we need must be a custom development."

It seems this company made some customizations to their base SAP system (ECC) when they were only operating in a only single country and were focused only on a transactional, commodity type business model. They then moved into multiple countries and began to look closely at big, relational customers and value-added services. To support this, they planned to create a new CRM system running on top of their existing ECC. They were not happy to find out that their legacy of prior ECC customizations "broke" a lot of the standard SAP reports.

I'd love to hear from other people who might have an SAP over-customization lesson to share.

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Globalization and the Brain Drain

2007-06-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

As more than a casual observer of the globalization of technology (I type this from my hotel room in Beijing) I was amused to read the article "China hit by brain drain, report says" in the China Daily provided by the Beijing Hilton. The article made some pretty stark comments about the state of affairs:

Since 1978, more than 70% of all Chinese who traveled abroad to study chose not to return home
Between 1978 and 2006 about 1.06 million Chinese went to study overseas and just 275,000 returned home.
About 300,000 people who went abroad with the initial intention of visiting relatives later enroled in higher education and stayed
Chinese students overseas, especially those with extraordinary abilities are a real hit in the global tug of war for talent.

I guess this must be true. After all, why am I here in China? Why do I personally know five IBMers from the US who'll be working here next week?

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Outsourcing to Vietnam

2007-05-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

My hotel in Beijing gave me a free copy of The Wall Street Journal Asia yesterday. The cover story got my attention with the title "Vietnam wins attention as new outsourcing hub." The article goes on to explain how companies like Harvey Nash PLC are using Vietnam to service clients such as Belgium's Belgacom SA, Honda Motor Co.'s British unit, Discovery Communications Inc.'s Discovery Channel, and NBC Universal's MSNBC. I did a little poking around on www.ibm.com's site search capability and found that my own employer is active as well. See IBM Press room - 2007-03-12 IBM Expands Global Service Delivery Capabilities - New Centers in China and Vietnam.

So which country is next?

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

On War and Aggessive Project Schedules

2007-05-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a 3-day "Business Design Assurance" or BDA held by my client. On the first day it was clear that there were still a lot of unresolved issues and the desired delivery date of the rollout to the first country was a risk. There was a lot of talk along the lines of "we can't go live without XXX!" A certain Senior Vice President could not attend the second day of the BDA but had the following as a message posted on the wall when everyone arrived for the second day of discussion.

"A good plan today violently executed is better than a perfect plan next week!"

General George S. Patton

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

The Global Lifestyle Time Challenge

2007-05-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

I had a subtle career milestone today. Today I became fully aware that I was now "Global" ... with a capital "G" I think.

At about 6:30 am Central time I checked email at home before leaving for the airport. I saw an email from a business leader in the UK which set off alarms in my head that an important business decision my client needed to make was not being addressed. Knowing that a politically important deadline is approaching, I fired off a "this is a big issue!" email designed to alarm my readers that something important was not happening.

About 8 am Central time today I was waiting for a flight at the airport and my cell phone went off. It was that same business leader in the UK who took notice of my alarm. I don't know about you, but I don't get cell phone calls from people I've never met from other countries every day.

Shortly after arriving at my destination on the East Coast of the US, I scheduled a web meeting for tomorrow morning between people in Baltimore, Raleigh, California, and Beijing.

Later I was on a call between the US and Canada talking about interfaces to a system in China.

Still later I discussed architecture diagrams showing system components in Rochester (NY), Boulder, Dallas, Tulsa, Phoenix, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Toronto. I tried to figure out if the component in Hong Kong was really necessary. Could it be co-located with the rest of the stuff in Beijing?

I ate a hurried dinner of Tandoori Takki with two co-workers. One is a Norwegian citizen born in China but holding an American green card and the other was born in India but has been working in the US for a while. My history is boring compared to theirs.

Five minutes after checking into my hotel, I joined a conference call between the US and China but the co-worker from China didn't make the call. My co-worker later came online in China on instant messenger later and I pinged him about the call he missed. It turned out he was double booked for that timeslot. Heavy sigh. When are we going to solve time zone issues for calendars? I made sure he had the information for the web meeting in 9 hours.

This globalization thing isn't all its cracked up to be. Exactly when is it I am supposed to have some calm moments to think? When is it I am supposed to get more exercize like my doctor told me? Will the guy in California get up to make the web meeting at 6 am his time? Did I even have a right to call a web meeting that required someone to be there at 6 am? Will the guy in Beijing who has to join at 9 pm his time have a decent Internet connection? Did I have a choice on the time given that the guy we want to talk to was available then and it was a comfortable 9 am for him? Will my flight home on Friday be on time so I can make my daughter's piano recital? How early do I set my alarm clock for tomorrow? Early enough to hit the hotel treadmill or late enough to get another hour of sleep?

I have another trip to China coming up in two weeks. It is still fun for now. I can see how this could get old. I would love to hear how my readers in similar situations are handling the demanding hours, encroachment upon personal time, cultural differences, etc.

FYI, globalization has been a frequent topic of mine. You might take a look at some previous posts such as:

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

I'd Rather Be Lucky than Good

2007-04-29T20:54:00.001-07:00

This isn't my usual type of post because it talks not about concepts or competence but about a stroke of unusually good professional luck.

I was one of 4700 IBMers attending the Technical Leadership Exchange in Anaheim, California. I had just gotten a new assignment to create the canonical data model for my client's new enterprise service bus (ESB). I think of this as the superset of all the many possible data attributes of the major business objects that flow across the ESB. Examples would include purchase order, order acknowledgement, invoice, advance shipping notice, and more. The back end system for all of these transactions is SAP.

There was some training on Sunday before the conference started on Monday. At dinner Sunday night I sat down at a table of strangers and made some IBM smalltalk with my new acquaintances. A few minutes later some other guys sat down. The guy who sat to my immediate left asked me who I was, where I was from, what I was doing, etc.

When I mentioned I was working on a project to create a canonical data model for an ESB, he casually told me "Oh, I've been working on IBM's canonical data model for IBM's ESB for two years. I'm the lead architect." At this point I just about fell out of my chair. I could not believe my good fortune.

I told him I would pick up his dry cleaning and wash his car if he'd tell me everything he knew about canonical data models. He laughed and offered to help me.

To make a long story short, he wound up showing me the canonical data model for IBM's own ESB and pointed me to where I could download XML schemas off the IBM intranet. Incidentally, IBM uses SAP for many of its back end functions. One valuable tidbit of information included was a spreadsheet linking attributes in the canonical form with specific SAP IDOC segments and fields.

In the consulting business we call this "intellectual capital" and wonderful intellectual capital it is. Obviously, this has really jumpstarted my work. I wish I could say that I was really good but in this case I must confess being really lucky (or have I been living right?... that's another discussion).

He never did make me wash his car either. As we said playing basketball after someone said we were just lucky to make a difficult shot. Luck counts!

Avatars for Architects

2007-04-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

There is a yearly conference for IBM's client-facing technical leaders. During the lean years when money was in short supply for training, being selected to attend this event was especially coveted. For a long time, the only way to be guaranteed an invitation was to get selected to speak at the event. Speaker selection became quite competitive.

I am happy to report that after about four years of trying, I actually got to speak at the 2007 Technical Leadership Exchange held in Anaheim, California.

I am a firm believer in sampling something really off-the-wall every now and then to knock the cobwebs off of some unused brain cells. I saw that a favorite speaker of mine, David McDavid, the source for a previous post The Role of the Business Transformation Architect was giving a talk on the business implications of Second Life.

I naively thought that only a few crazies like me would show up for such a thing. Wrong! There must have been 500 of my peers there to check it out. The entire conference was about 4700 people and you had to arrive by 1PM Sunday afternoon to attend the Second Life talk.

As a speaker, I was privy to the pre-registration numbers. When I sorted the 420 or so elective sessions, the Second Life presentation was the one that more of IBM's technical leaders wanted to reserve a seat to attend than any other. At the session I learned IBM is quite a land baron in the Second Life "megaverse," owning many Second Life "islands".

David talked about how he played around in Second Life and found himself wanting to set up his own place and how he intentionally chose a location with interesting neighbors including a small software company and East Coast artist. He raved about all the interesting people he had met thru Second Life. It began to sound like an endorsement of my unoriginal theory that it is good to check out off-the-wall ideas and hang out with interesting people not like me every now and then.

The message to my readers is that smart people are either taking Second Life and the business implications of it very seriously... or they are afraid they aren't taking it seriously enough and might be missing the next big thing.

I decided I must already be behind the curve. If you log into Second Life and find a boy next door looking avatar named Caleb Schumann who doesn't know what he's doing in the megaverse, it is me fumbling around trying to catch with the train that has already left the station without me.

Me over the volcano that is about to errupt and kill me if I don't do the hula for some character on a training island for newbies.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Word from the China Front

2007-04-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

I had the good fortune to make my second trip to visit my client in Beijing, China. My trip was extended twice and I wound up staying three and a half weeks.

The reason my trip got extended was that one of my team's biggest recommendations related to eCommerce was rejected by the client as too expensive and taking too long. Heavy sigh. A worthy competitor has been introduced into the overall solution as a result.
I got to observe an interesting phenomenon. When an army of English speaking people fly to China to conduct meetings in English with Chinese I/T staff, the English speakers tend to dominate the discussion while everyone is in the room. The Chinese are generally soft-spoken and before they can mentally translate from English to Chinese, the English speakers move on to the next point. The Chinese are too polite to interrupt and say "you're going too fast." Therefore, the English speakers think there is a consensus only to discover objections later that never got expressed during the meeting.
I joined the team tasked with creating an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for the client. This ESB must span from North America to China. I think it qualifies as the "Brokered ESB Deployment Pattern" as described in my earlier post ESB Patterns that "Click".
I've been learning more about SAP and integrating SAP to other systems.
On a personal level unrelated to I/T Architecture, I got to have dinner with a member of Communist Party, to be amazed yet again at the incredible changes taking place in Chinese society, to visit the Summer Palace, to visit the Lama Temple, and take a bicycle rickshaw ride thru an old Beijing hutong. I got really tired of Kung Pao Chicken too.

Me at the Summer Palace in March 2007.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

When do You Leave a Good Job?

2007-02-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

It has been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve posted but I recently made a huge career change and I’ve been pretty busy. I’m afraid blogging dropped off my radar for several weeks. At least it was huge for me. As a consultant, I could change projects and clients without changing employer. Not everyone is that lucky.

Here’s a little history. I was encouraged by my management back in the fall to leave my comfort zone and take on bigger challenges. I think the handwriting was on the wall that I was as high as I could go in the organization if I stayed put. At first it looked like I might become what we call an “Associate Partner” in IBM Global Business Services and take on more of a marketing role. Instead, I wound up taking on an Enterprise Architect role in a truly global project.

Me at the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China

I did indeed raise my hand and say “Yes” I will leave the position where I was happy, effective, and comfortable. I will leave the position where I got to sleep in my own bed every night and “jump into the frying pan.”

National Software Technology Park - Beijing, China

I knew I wouldn’t be bored. But would I be happy?

This whole experience had led me to think a lot about the question “When is the right time to leave a good job?” This is not an easy question. I think it strikes at the heart of our professional identity. I had to do a lot of soul searching about my priorities. I had to face questions like:

What is really important to me?
Am I content to stay where I am and continue to do what I’m doing?
What is the cost career-wise of staying put?
Is it better to leave now on my own terms rather than wait for some executive to make the decision for me by phasing out the position before I’m ready to leave?
Is it really possible in today’s global economy to have work-life balance?
Is it really possible to “work smarter not harder”?
Are there intangible benefits to making a change outside of my career?

If you look at my situation purely from a career point of view, I stayed in my previous position too long. Four years with one client on one major project using technology picked 3 or 4 years ago is too long for a technology professional. There were, however, other considerations such as the whole work-life balance issue. For me the decision to make a change came down these points:

I was getting a little bored because I’d been doing almost the same thing for four years.
I don’t know if it is healthy ambition or vanity, but I did find myself wanting the professional recognition and reward that came with a bigger, more visible project.
I think it is better to get out in front of large trends like globalization on my own terms rather try to hold onto what I’ve got and take the chance it might taken from me before I’m ready. A client once told me “There is an on-coming train coming. I can either put up my hand and try to stop it (and get run over) or try to get on board as the engineer.”
Biggest of all for me – the intangible benefits outside of my career. (If you’re brave enough to explore the spiritual side of leaving your comfort zone, click here.)

I’d love to hear what you think about leaving a good position. Have you ever done it? Did you regret it? Or did you never look back?

In case you're wondering how it is going... I'm working harder and working longer hours but I'm having a ball! So for now... it is good!

Click here if you are interested in my commentary and pictures about my recent travels to China. Still more pictures on flickr. Don’t forget Toronto.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

IBM Labs in Beijing

2007-01-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Here is the entrance to the IBM facility outside the 5th ring of Beijing in the northern suburbs. It contains the IBM Development Lab (off left hand side of picture), the IBM Research Lab (shown on right side), and the IBM SOA Solution Center (straight down the path between the two labs.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

More Fiber in Your Diet / IBMers at Play

2007-01-18T02:14:00.000-08:00

I have been able to visit the IBM facility north of Beijing's fifth ring where teh IBM Development Lab and IBM Research Lab are housed. There is also an SOA Solution Center as well. The internet was a lot faster there too compared to the hotel and my client. I've heard again that an earthquake off Taiwan ruined and undersea fiber optick cable and much of Asia is affected. How many of you have redundancy between the US and your global operations to survive an undersea cable break? What would you do if it only was a lot slower vs. broken completely?

Below, my IBM co-workers play a hacky-sak type game at lunch. The software group development lab is to the right, the solution center is straight ahead behind them, and the research lab is to the right side.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Off to China

2007-01-17T04:46:00.002-08:00

Anyone who has been a regular visitor to my humble blog has probably noticed that the globalization of software development has been a frequent topic of mine. In particular, I have been heavily involved over the last 3-4 years with software development in India. Whether you or I like it or not, it looks like I am going to continue to be immersed in the topic of globalization. I started a new assignment with a new client recently and this client has very strong ties to China. I could not believe my good fortune when I was given a golden opportunity to travel to China for about two weeks of meetings. Wow! A chance to observe the technology sector in China firsthand! I arrived in China Monday night.

Because of all the language and cultural issues, IBM has made a conscious effort to locate consultants who speak Chinese. Someitmes it seems like every Chinese speaking IBM consultant in the US and Canada is on my project! Not that this is a bad thing either. Its great to be able to hop in a taxis with a co-worker and have a co-worker act as interpreter.

Then around 10 AM this morning "it" happened. My client got passionate about a particular topic and switched from English to Chinese. Within about 10 seconds all my co-workers had joined in the discussions in Chinese too and "it" hit me. I was the only non-Chinese speaker in the room and there were three different Chinese conversations going on. I didn't take it as they were trying to exclude me. I think it was just easier for the client to express their thoughts clearly in their native language. I chose to just let the conversations go on without my interruption. My co-workers updated me later with a summary of their concerns. I have a feeling it won't be the last time either.

If you're interested in reading more about my trip to China, see my posts on China on my "Phil's Folderol" blog.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

2007-01-17T04:46:00.001-08:00

Anyone who has been a regular visitor to my humble blog has probably noticed that the globalization of software development has been a frequent topic of mine. In particular, I have been heavily involved over the last 3-4 years with software development in India. Whether you or I like it or not, it looks like am going to continue to be immersed in the topic of globalization. I started a new assignment with a new client recently and this client has very strong ties to China. I could not believe my good fortune when I was given golden opportunity to travel to China for about two weeks of meetings. Wow! A chance to observe the technology sector in China firsthand!

Because of all the language and cultural issues, IBM has made a conscious effort to locate consultants who speak Chinese. I think every Chinese speaking IBM consultant in the US and Canada is on my project! Not that this is a bad thing. Its great to be able to hop in a taxis with a co-worker and have a co-worker interpreter.

Then around 10 AM or so this morning "it" happened. My client got passionate about a particular topic and switched from English to Chinese. Within about 10 seconds all my co-workers had joined in the discussions in Chinese too and "it" hit me. I was the only non-Chinese speaker in the room and there were three different Chinese conversations going on. I didn't take it as they were trying to exclude me. I think it was just easier for the client to express their thoughts clearly. I chose to just let the conversations go on without my interruption. My co-workers updated me later with a summary of their concerns. I have a feeling it won't be the last time either.

If you're interested in reading more about my trip to China, see my posts on China on my "Phil's Folderol" blog.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

2007-01-17T04:46:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has been a regular visitor to my humble blog has probably noticed that the globalization of software development has been a frequent topic of mine. In particular, I have been heavily involved over the last 3-4 years with software development in India. Whether you or I like it or not, it looks like am going to continue to be immersed in the topic of globalization. I started a new assignment with a new client recently and this client has very strong ties to China. I could not believe my good fortune when I was given golden opportunity to travel to China for about two weeks of meetings. Wow! A chance to observe the technology sector in China firsthand!

If you're interested in reading more about my trip to China, see my posts on China on my "Phil's Folderol" blog.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Fortune Favors the Prepared Mind

2006-12-12T05:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not finished yet, but I can already tell that The World is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century is going to be one of those books which is going to havea great impact on my professional life. There is so much truth (I don't have to like the truth) in the information presented, I was motivated to shoot an email to almost everyone in my email address book to recommend the book to them as a way to prepare for the impact of globalization on their life and careers.

The email had "Fortune Favors the Prepared Mind" as the subject line and read as follows:

A friend of mine recommended The World is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century to me as a great book on the impact of globalization. I'm only about 20% done with it (the audio version) but I think there is a lot of good material on outsourcing, offshoring, India, China, etc. which I believe would benefit each of you as you think the future and the kinds of opportunities we all probably need to prepare for.

See also some great quotes from the book at www.wikiquote.org.

Some samples:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.
-African proverb

• In the pathbreaking 1989 essay, “Computer and Dynamo: the Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too Distant Mirror,” the economic historian Paul A. David explained such a lag by pointing to a historical precedent. He noted that while the lightbulb was invented in 1879, it took several decades for electrification to kick in and have a big economic and productivity impact. Why? Because it was not enough just to install electric motors and scrap the old technology – steam engines. The whole way of doing manufacturing had to be reconfigured. In the case of electricity, David pointed out, the key breakthrough was in how buildings, and assembly lines, were designed and managed. Factories in the steam age tended to be heavy, costly multistory buildings designed to brace the weighty belts and other big transmission devices needed to drive steam-powered systems. Once small, powerful electric motors were introduced, everyone hoped for a quick productivity boost. It took time, though. To get all the savings, you needed to redesign enough buildings with small electric motors powering machines of all sizes. Only when there was a critical mass of experienced factory architects and electrical engineers and managers, who understood the complementarities among the production line, did electrification really deliver the productivity breakthrough in manufacturing, David wrote.

Bill Gates: 30 years ago, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, and so many people can plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.

• America integrated a broken Europe and Japan into the global economy after World War II, with both Europe and Japan every year upgrading their manufacturing, knowledge, and service skills, often importing and sometimes stealing ideas and equipment from the US, just as America did from Britain in the late 1770s. Yet in the sixty years since World War II, our standard of living has increased every decade, and our unemployment rate – even with all the outcry about outsourcing – stands at only a little above 5 percent, roughly half that of the most developed countries in Western Europe.

• By automating these jobs, it enables companies to save money and free up talented brainpower from relatively mundane tasks to start new businesses in other areas. You should be afraid of free markets only if you believe that you will never need new medicines, new work flow software, new industries, new forms of entertainment, new coffeehouses.

• It takes a leap of faith, based on economics, to say there will be new things to do. But there always have been new jobs to do, and there is no fundamental reason to believe the future will be different. Some 150 years ago, 90 percent of American worked in agriculture and related fields. Today, it’s only 3 or 4 percent. What if the government had decided to protect and subsidize all those agricultural jobs and not embrace industrialization and then computerization? Would America as a whole really be better off today? Hardly.

• Well, here’s the truth that no one wanted to tell you: The world has been flattened. As a result of the triple convergence, global collaboration and competition – between individuals and individuals, companies and individuals, companies and companies, and companies and customers – have been made cheaper, easier, more friction-free, and more productive for more people from more corners of the earth than at any time in the history of the world.

• The sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is, quite simply, a growing cancer on American society.

• In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears – and that is our problem.

• As exciting and as visible as the flat Indian high-tech sector is, have no illusions: It accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India. Add those Indians involved in manufacturing for export, and you get a total of 2 percent of the employment in India.

• Immigrants are always hungry and they don’t have a backup plan. Young Chinese, Indians, and Poles are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. They do not want to work for us; they don’t even want to be us. They want to dominate us.

• The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink. They outsource to innovate faster and more cheaply in order to grow larger, gain market share, and hire more and different specialists – not to save money by firing more people. (p. 360)

• The business organization consultant Michael Hummer once remarked, “One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don’t want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the 14th century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh.

• People don’t change when you tell them there is a better option. They change when they conclude that they have no other option.

• Louis Pasteur said it a long time ago: “Fortune favors the prepared mind.”

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Supercomputers, Not Just for Chess, Weather, and Nuclear Bombs?

2006-11-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

Like most of you, I have marginalized the super computer space as a kniche I'll never play in. I considered that the realm of big government agencies predicting where the next hurricane will strike or modeling the temperature and density of uranium and hydrogen isotopes inside a nuclear bomb 9 nanoseconds after detonation. (Sorry, I read The Sum of All Fears.)

Well... my opinion was changed by an unlikely source yesterday. I stumbled across an investing article by The Motley Fool called "Do the Math: IBM Wins" in which the Fools extol the virtues of IBM as the best blue chip stock of 2007 because of supercomputing.

"I am convinced that IBM is going to be the best blue chip of 2007, but not just because it is a leader in the development and creation of supercomputers. Rather, it is because I believe that IBM's Global Consulting business, working in conjunction with its Center for Business Optimization (whose small staff specializes in applying advanced mathematics to business problems), will be able to first help businesses harness the power of these powerful computers to crunch data and then translate that data into meaningful -- and profitable -- insights."

"For example, IBM's Center for Business Optimization recently helped a company that had more than 70,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) with an inventory problem. Normally, finding the best way to manage this number of products would have taken six hours. With a supercomputer, it took 17 seconds.
What this implies in more practical terms is that the company, instead of waiting overnight for results, now gets them immediately. More importantly, because the results are available immediately, the company can now insert different variables into the program to find an even better way to optimize its inventory."

So it appears now I have to consider yet another hardware option in my solutions. I suppose somebody in IBM or Cray or both is selling super computer cycles "on demand" in a hosted environment for anybody who wants to rent one for a millisecond or two. (or is that nanosecond or two?)

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Overtime Pay for I/T Architects?

2006-11-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

I didn't even know this was going on until this morning, but apparently several high-tech companies including IBM, Siebel, and Computer Sciences Corp. have settled class action lawsuits regarding overtime pay for technology workers.

"International Business Machines Corp. settled a federal class-action lawsuit Wednesday, agreeing to pay a total of $65 million to 32,000 technology workers who claimed the company illegally withheld overtime pay....The case involved workers classified as "Technical Services Professional and Information Technology Specialists." IBM considered them highly skilled professionals exempt from overtime laws detailed in the Fair Labor Standards Act and California labor laws....Software maker Siebel Systems Inc. settled a class action suit by more than 800 workers earlier this month. The workers, who had job titles such as "software engineer" and "senior software engineer," will receive a total of $27.5 million....Last year, El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp. settled an overtime class-action suit by 30,000 employees for $24 million. "

For more complete details, see IBM Settles Overtime Lawsuit for $65M.

I don't plan on spending the money until I see it in my bank account. :-)

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Companies that Need SOA the Most Are Least Likely to Implement It

2006-11-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

My eyes were drawn today to an ITBusinessEdge post "Companies that Need SOA the Most Are Least Likely to Implement It". How could I resist that title? (That reminds me of a previous post of mine "Naming Well, an Essential Skill of an I/T Architect" but I degress.) That post in turn drove to yet another cleverly named post

Is SOA success in the genes? by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Todd Biske recently responded to my post about Microsoft's recommended approach to SOA (inch by inch, it's a cinch; mile by mile, its a trial), and ponders whether some organizations can get SOA right away, but others will never get it. How do organizations end up with their IT out of synch with business [...]

The basic premise here is worth entertaining. Companies that already have good alignment of I/T and business, already have good governance in place, already think proactively and strategically about I/T, etc. will find moving to a Service Oriented Architecture just the next incremental step in their improvement process. For the other companies out there (the vast majority?), the gap between where they are today and SOA is an insurmountable chasm that they dare not even try to cross.

I think there is an element of truth. I've seen a lot of situations where a company could benefit from new approaches but because they organize a bunch of independently funded, tactical projects no one project can fund the leap to the next level of maturity and flexibility. (See also "The Scourge of the I/T Architect's Universe".) Just a couple of weeks ago an acquanitance of mine at a major manufacturer told me he was interested in using SOA software products for their EAI-like-middleware value but he didn't think his organization was ready to embrace SOA yet. I guess this is like "flying under the radar" to wait until the political situation is more receptive to SOA.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Still More on Reverse Engineering Code into UML Diagams

2006-11-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

Judging by the unexpectedly large number of hits on my recent posting about reverse engineering Java into UML diagrams, I am not the only one interested in this topic. Along the same lines, I found this pretty cool demo of reverse engineering UML sequence diagrams from Sparx Systems. I haven't actually used the tool but what appears to be different with the reverse engineering capability of their Enterprise Architect tool is that it will generate diagrams via runtime execution. It also let you manually step through your code as it executes in a debugger type presentation. This would let you control how far “down in the weeds” you want your sequence diagram to go. For example, do you really want to include that call to the Integer class?

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Musings on Bill Gates, the IT Shortage, and Globalization

2006-11-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

I've taken an interest (by necessity) in the globalization of software development (and corporate life in general) so I read with interest "Bill Gates Says West Not Supplying Enough IT Talent" by James Kilner of Reuters. Bill Gates was speaking in Moscow and is quoted as follows:

"Worldwide, a lot of the developed countries are not graduating as many IT students as they were in the past, which is kind of ironic as it does mean it does increase the opportunities."

"There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity."

If you follow the link above to the story about Gates and look at comments posted at the bottom, they were mostly bemoaning the fact that I/T jobs in places like Russia, China, and India pay a lot less than the US and other Western nations. They attributed the "shortage" to a shortage of people willing to work for low wages.

I was probably as nervous as anyone else about the globalization of software development a few years ago. Since then I guess I gotten past my fears. On my best days, I have embraced the idea. On my worst days, I guess I just try to make the best of it.

It does appear to me that CIOs are taking the cost savings of global resourcing and using it to fund additional projects. If they had a budget 5 years ago to do 4 major projects a year then today they are using a similar budget to execute 5, 6, or even 7 major projects. These "extra" projects are often the ones that are the most fun to work on. They would have been "stretch" projects that never got funded in the past. One change that has happened, however, is that those of us in the US are having to play more of a leadership role vs. doing the "heads down" coding.

Another anecdotal piece of evidence that the sky is not falling. I've done some interviewing right here in the US for college graduates. Are we taking just anybody? No, we are being selective. But this is quite an improvement over just a few years ago. We're hiring both overseas and in the "high wage" countries.

By the way, see the Oct 31st article "IBM Plants New SOA Development Centers in India, China" to see that this trend is only accelerating. This is not about using global resources to maintain old code. This is about investments in the latest and greatest SOA technology... and doing it with talent from around the world.

"It's all about business model innovation—giving clients the ability to rapidly change business models by building applications with reusable software components," said Sudhir Sastry, leader of the IBM SOA Solutions Center, in Pune.
Key to the initiative is IBM's WebSphere Business Services Fabric—based on technology IBM recently acquired when it purchased Webify Solutions, Sastry said.

Back in September 2004, I got to make a trip to Bangalore, India. I saw an office building for almost every big-name tech company while I was there. Here's a few samples from my personal photo archives. They aren't great pictures as they were taken through the window of the taxi I was riding in.

First Oracle

Next Intel
IBM
And finally Microsoft

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

The Future Market

2006-11-08T05:35:00.000-08:00

You've really got to view this new commercial showing how wireless technology can be a game changer in retail. See "The Future Market" (a play on words.. think super market).

I've been told the commercial is actually pretty old but I don't ever remember seeing it. Maybe IBM needs to try using it again.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Silo-ed Organization Abolishment and Other Variations on the SOA Theme

2006-11-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

Brenda Michelson has some clever variations on the acronym SOA in her post Talking "S-O-A" with the Business.

Some of my favorites from her post include:

Strategy Offering Agility

Stream of Acronyms

Seizing Operational Agility

Silo-ed Organization Abolishment

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Little Shop of IT horrors

2006-10-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

For your Halloween reading pleasure: Check out Little Shop of (IT) Horrors.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Reverse Engineering of UML Class and Sequence Diagrams from Java

2006-10-30T20:41:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I had to stop work on an interesting project. There were just too many projects going on at one time, not enough resources to work on them all, and the other projects were more important from a political point of view. The project involved our B2B application making a call to a service provided by a 3^rd party outside the firewall. One of the developers had built some great Java code to do this right before we stopped work.

I recently picked that project back up again and needed to dig into that code, understand how it worked, and create some design documentation for the overall project. I also had just recently made a conscious effort to upgrade my object modeling tool from Rational XDE to Rational Software Architect (RSA).

I decided I would start by reverse engineering the Java code to create a class diagram. I had done this numerous times as a Rational Rose and Rational XDE user in the past so I had no worries. I managed to import the source code and began fumbling through the menu options looking for reverse engineering features. I got a sinking feeling at first that someone at Rational had taken the reverse engineering features away. I found numerous transformations for forward engineering from UML class diagrams into something else (like Java). It was not obvious, however, what to do if I already had the Java code and wanted to go in the reverse direction. I had a sinking feeling inside. Had the Model Driven Development / Model Driven Architecture adherents at Rational lost their minds? Had they taken those reverse engineering features away on purpose? Was this a heavy handed means of forcing the whole world to adopt a “forward engineering only” view of the application development process?

Luckily, I was able to determine that Rational had not lost its collective mind. Yes, it was indeed possible to reverse engineer code into a diagram and as I got more into it, I decided it was actually an improvement.

I highly recommend a meaty white paper I found on developerWorks called “The new IBM Rational design and construction products for Rose and XDE users” by William T. Smith, a Product Manager supporting model driven development at IBM Rational brand software. From it I discovered that many reverse engineering capabilities were available in RSA (as well as Rational Software Modeler (RSM)) and they appear to be significant improvements over what I was used to in Rose and XDE. There is a great deal of new terminology to get used to, however.

Here is a quick summary of what I learned about reverse engineering using RSA

I can select Java classes of interest with my mouse and quickly reverse engineer a class diagram by “visualizing” a “Topic Diagram”. This diagram can be synchronized with code as the code is modified.
I can “harvest” classes from the topic diagram and paste them into a separate UML diagram.
I can mix “pure” UML classes and harvested classes on the same diagram and the tool will mark classes reverse engineered from code with a glyph in the upper left hand corner.
There is a new “Browse Diagram” capability which allows the user to explore existing code by quickly generating class diagrams “on the fly” showing classes related to a selected class. Selecting a different class on this diagram will generated yet another diagram on the fly with all classes related to that class. This quick navigation from one diagram to another is a great way to “get to know” code someone else wrote. You can control which kinds of relationships are included when the class diagrams are created and how many levels (up to 3) removed from the selected class in the center of the diagram. I made great use of this on my project.
(Drum roll please!) I can reverse engineer Java method bodies into UML Sequence Diagrams by “visualizing” a “Static Method Sequence Diagram.” This type of program understanding tool has long been missing from UML modeling tools. It will be a windfall to any poor soul who must maintain/modify poorly documented Java code created by someone else who is perhaps no longer around. The only downside is that if the method makes any calls to low-level Java classes like “Integer” those method calls will clutter the generated diagram. But.. think of the time you’ll save!

Together, these reverse engineering capabilities will just about take away the last excuses for not having design documentation match the “as implemented” state of the Java code. It really is easy to create both class and sequence diagrams and rapidly document both the static and dynamic behavior of “as is” Java software.

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Halloween Horror Stories for I/T

2006-10-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

Out of the many emails I get from the various online trade rags, one jumped out at me from my inbasket the other day. The email pointed me to one article with a title inspired by the upcoming Halloween season: 25 Terrifying Information Technology Horror Stories. There's even a great video clip from an old black and white horror movie, "The Brain that Wouldn't Die".

I won't say I've read through all of the horror stories but from what I can tell, the lessons learned are worth a visit by any serious I/T Architect, project manager, CTO, CIO, and anyone else who doesn't want to be pointed out to the whole world as an example of how NOT to execute an important project.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

What Could Possibly Be Wrong With Corporate Blogging?

2006-10-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

Not all I/T Architect-bloggers are as fortunate as I in that my employer actually encourages us to blog. (See my very first post in this blog.) I'll reproduce a quote from the IBM employee blogging guidelines I quoted back then. "It is very much in IBM's interest – and, we believe, in each IBMer's own – to be aware of this sphere of information, interaction and idea exchange."

Obviously, not all corporations embrace this kind of thinking. Dan Gillmore points out two very different scenarios in " Corporate Blogging: What Could Go Wrong? The first is the obvious concern about someone leaking new product information and potentially giving a competitor an early start on catching up. But the second scenario was more interesting. It was about the cost of NOT using blogging and NOT being clear and transparent about problems in the open media. He makes an interesting point about not getting out in front of "bad news" and actually engaging potential customers in solving the problem.

"The real danger is not letting your employees harness the full power of an interactive, edge-in communications medium. If you keep the reins too tight, you won't reap the benefits of informed and passionate readers and users. And sometimes, if you're not communicating freely with your readers and users, bad news can catch them by surprise."

I have to admit I see his logic... especially in the area of product development. If I was trying to come up with the next generation Apple iPod I am sure I could recruit an army of passionate bloggers to help me. But what if client A has a whole bunch of fuzzy business requirements, a hodge-podge of technology accumualted from their merger history, and a minefield of political considerations. How would a crowd on the outside be able to digest all the client-specific nuances of the situation? And would the client even want their client-specific details out in the open?

Still...I've heard of the popular business book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations devoted to the innovative use of ideas from outside the company. I haven't read it yet, but maybe I need to. I'd be curious to hear if any of my readers have had success in using blogging to make better one-of-a-kind solutions for clients.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Getting Good Service from SOA

2006-10-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

You may find this article interesting regarding benefits being realized by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The author makes a point to reference many different companies and give some highlightes of their experiences. Here's a couple of samples:

"At Railinc Corp., a transportation logistics firm based in Cary, N.C., Garry Grandlienard, director of enterprise architecture, notes that many of his company's applications draw on certain basic information about railcars, stored in one main database. Before SOA, changing one element of that database might have meant changing 100 applications. With SOA in place, he may not need to make any application changes at all, since he can change the service layer and it will translate the database change for all applications.
Farmington Hills, Mich.-based RouteOne LLC is an exchange established by the finance arms of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler AG and Toyota Motor Corp. to provide auto dealers with access to a variety of financing options and services. Here, SOA gives CIO Joel Gruber a cost-effective way to make changes to his internal infrastructure without disrupting all the firms that use the exchange. In August, RouteOne began piloting an electronic contract feature, called eContracts, to allow auto dealers to forego paper contracts. Key to the eContracts pilot is a service the company built to test its messaging environment. At RouteOne, a transaction, such as an auto loan application, is treated as a type of message, and the testing environment lets the company see if new message types will cause any problems. "It doesn't sound like a service," notes Gruber. "But it's a utility service that means we don't break anything for our customers when we change something.."
Check out:Getting Good Service

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

A Company that Can Run Itself from Wherever It Makes the Most Business Sense

2006-10-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

I found this interesting blurb highlighting the continuing changes in corporate life:

"A job reassignment notice from IBM today signals something more than that another American executive is moving his office halfway round the world. John Paterson, the company's chief procurement officer, is relocating from Somers, N.Y., to Shenzhen in southern China. IBM's (nyse: IBM - news - people ) global procurement division is going with him. It is the first time, the company says, that it has moved a corporatewide headquarters division outside the U.S. Shenzhen sits just north of Hong Kong on the southeastern side of the Pearl River delta.....That shifting global pattern of employment is old news, but that the top-boss job in a key division is relocating marks a milestone along the road of IBM's transition from an American multinational to a global company, one that can run itself from wherever it makes the most business sense. "

Check out: IBM Goes Global - Forbes.com

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

College Hiring

2006-10-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

I present this little bit of anecdotal evidence that employment prospects for I/T professionals here in the USA are bright. I am making my first college recruiting trip! I will be interviewing undergraduates and graduate students at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville on October 27, 2006 ~~October 20, 2006~~ for positions in IBM Global Business Services-Application Services. We’ve been hiring experienced professionals all along for several years but this is my first personal experience interviewing college students for entry level positions. I like to look at it as hiring the next generation of I/T Architects and others who will become the technical leaders of tomorrow. Think about it. This is a clear indication of confidence in our future prospects for new business and demonstrates a willingness to invest in the training and mentoring of new employees who don't have lots of real-world experience.

I was actually on campus a couple of weeks ago to speak at an "info night" to talk about Application services and what career in consulting is like. Here's a picture of the UT University Center.

De-Nerding Your Geeks

2006-09-18T17:53:00.000-07:00

It seems that everywhere I am reading another article in some trade rag about the need for technology people to have "soft skills" and be able to communicate with non-techies. Here's a quote from a particularly good example that I stumbled across from the Australian version of www.cio.com. It goes so far as to quote one frustrated CIO who said 'Forget the technology skills, give me business skills and I'll teach them the technology'.

"I don't know what exactly happened, but when the program director came back he was very concerned about the project. I had expected him to be pleased," Setty, now chairman and chief evangelist for US-based Cignex Technologies, says. "I asked him what he was concerned about."
It turned out that program director had asked programmer whether he could make some changes to the program, and if so, how long they would take. Programmer, thrilled at this unexpected chance to flaunt his ability, had launched into an elaborate rundown of the work involved. As a result, program director got intricate details of child and parent windows and other jargon the intensely non-technical director could only translate as gobbledygook. That led program director to two misguided but deeply disturbing conclusions: the team was doing something like rocket science, and there was great strife ahead. "I asked him for a simple change. Now it looks like it will take three days and there is a risk to the project," the program director complained to Setty.
Setty soothed program director's ruffled feathers and assured him his team could indeed make the changes with little risk. That left program director with just one question: "Are you sure you've got the right team for the job?"
Of course, hardly anyone sees today's CIOs as geeks: most CIOs long ago discarded their white socks and sandals for the business suits that gave them passage to the executive suite. But the best laid plans of CIOs can and do often "gang" astray when the geeks who work for them slip their restraints and rub shoulders with - and the sensitivities of - non-geeks of influence within the organization.
Too Many Egos, Too Little Time
"My organization has plenty of people with massive egos that need to be soothed," says one CIO. "If they're having trouble with the computer I can't send some punk into the office who mumbles, won't look them in the eye and grunts, or next thing I know they're on the phone saying: 'I'd like to be treated with respect. I tried talking to him but he couldn't even be bothered answering me'."
So having expelled every last shred of geek-hood from their own bearing, CIOs must now find ways to start purging any symptoms of same from their staff.
"One of the biggest things that geeks have to learn is how to communicate with a non-geek," Setty says. "It's so important. The reason is, the budget most of the time lies with the person who is not a geek: it's with the CFO or a line of business manager. Typically at that level IT staff can't go down to the details of how exactly the software works. These managers just switch off if the geek starts explaining why this 'thing' happens," he says.
Many CIOs have become so sensitive to these difficulties that finding IT staff with business skills is becoming a major preoccupation, says Gartner Executive Programs managing vice president Mary-Anne Maxwell. "CIOs know IT staff need those business skills, and it's getting to the point that a lot of them are now saying to me: 'Forget the technology skills, give me business skills and I'll teach them the technology'. Over the long run that is more important than hiring a person who has a particular outlook on a technology that day."

For more fun reading, check out: CIO | De-nerding Your Geeks

Microsoft Patent Non-Assertion Covenant for Web Services

2006-09-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting post by David Berlind at Microsoft patent non-assertion covenant is remarkable | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

"Microsoft has issued a declaration — something it calls the Open Specification Promise — that it won't assert certain Web services patents it holds (or may hold in the future). Martin Lamonica reports:

Microsoft is pledging not to assert its patents pertaining to nearly three dozen Web services specifications–a move designed to ease concerns among developers by creating a legal environment more friendly to open-source software….The software giant published on Tuesday the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP) on its Web site."

Living on the Bleeding Edge for Fun and Profit

2006-09-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

Check out What is Bleeding Edge? by Elana Varon

"Let’s start by acknowledging that bleeding-edge has negative connotations for a lot of people. Just think for a minute about the imagery. Bleeding edge evokes danger. ....Engage in that battle, and you might survive, but you’ll get bloodied in the process. ....But my conversation with a couple of IT executives has me thinking about an alternative vision for the bleeding edge.....until you start messing around with new stuff, you can’t answer the question about whether it might provide a competitive advantage or suggest a new business model.....The implication here is that even a company that is uncomfortable adopting a new technology until someone else works out the bugs can’t really afford to wait to check it out. The bleeding-edge might be your competitive edge. And it starts to look smart, rather than dangerous."

Death of the Packaged Application?

2006-09-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

Judith Hurwitz says that SOA could result in the end of packaged applications as we know them. Check out SOA and Unintended Market Consequences - Weigh In - weighin - CIO

SOA Anti-Patterns

2006-09-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this article in developerWorks which was very timely for me. The antipattern I'm most worried about right now in my current project is "Chatty Services". I can see how it would be very easy to "fall into this trap" if we try to implement the same level of application-to-application interactivity as we currently enjoy between a user and a web page. Check out SOA antipatterns by Jenny Ang, Luba Cherbakov, and Mamdouh Ibrahim.

The Evils of PowerPoint

2006-09-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

Scott Mark's blog also pointed me to this gem. Check out: .NPR : Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'. I'm sure we've all experienced "death by PowerPoint."

"Tufte's most recent book, Beautiful Evidence, is filled with hundreds of illustrations from the worlds of art and science. It contains historical maps and diagrams as well as contemporary charts and graphs. In one chapter alone, there's an 18th-century depiction of how to do a cross-section drawing of how a bird's wing works, and photos from a 1940s instruction book for skiing.

They all demonstrate one concept: Good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death.

He's an outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations, saying they oversimplify and can stand in the way of communication. Far too often, he says, the bells and whistles of PowerPoint are used as a crutch by people who don't have anything to say."

Cultural Diversity for I/T Architects

2006-09-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

I found myself appreciating Scott Mark's reaction to his first visit to China. I had a similar reaction to India two years ago. Take a look at Application Architecture for the Enterprise: China and the Swarm

"China is amazing in many ways to me. For one thing, it's an incredibly pedestrian society. It's lightweight and limber at the lowest levels. Buildings are literally flying up all around Shanghai, and yet you see the bricks arrive on site via handcart and bicycle basket. I can't imagine the amount of goods in China that are hauled around by individuals rather than machines. Is that inefficient, or the product of a behind society? I don't think so. I think it's amazingly limber and responsive. The West is in the process of trying to discover or re-discover the swarm. China is the swarm."

WebServices and SOA Security

2006-09-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

I had the good fortune to complete a second week of SOA-related training in Pittsburgh last week. (See also The Many Flavors of IBM ESB Implementations). One of the instructors was Tony Cowan, a frequent contributor on IBM's developerWorks website. I was particular interested in his discussion of security in SOA implementations. I would like to point my readers to a series of four recent articles on implementing web services security on WebSphere Application Server Version 6.x. These four articles seem to have lots of good security-related information for those of us who aren't security experts, regardless of whether you are a using WebSphere Application Server or not. (This is especially true for part one, which Tony wrote.) Check out:

I ntroduction to security architectures
This article introduces various IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Version 6 Web services architectures, considering them strictly from a security perspective.

Using Username Token and SSL
In Part 2 of this series on Web services security, you'll learn about one of the most common ways to secure a resource: using a user name and a password. You'll learn about the UsernameToken Profile and how to use it with Web services using IBM WebSphere...

XML encryption and digital signature
In Part 3 of this series on Web services security, learn the steps required to implement XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption in a Web service using IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and IBM Rational Application Developer.

Using the LTPA token
Learn how to use the Lightweight Third Party Authentication (LTPA) token to secure a Web service using IBM WebSphere Application Server V6 in Part 4 of this series on Web services security.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Methodology and SOA for the Methodology Nazi in You (and Don't Forget Governance)

2006-08-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

The title is a little tounge-in-cheek but there is a segment of the software community that cares a lot about application development methodology and making it easier for a large team to follow the associated best practices (and correspondingly harder to make excuses for going off and doing their own thing). The current focus on Service Oriented Architecture has placed a really bright spot light on these issues and the stakes are high for ignoring best practices.

IBM's Rational Method Composer (RMC) can be used to customize an established development methodology such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for your particular project or organization. RMC comes with "multiple process content libraries, including RUP, RUP plug-ins, SUMMIT Ascendant methods, and other processes for Program, and Portfolios management."

Once you customize your development methodology, you can export it to Rational Portfolio Manager to help project managers create project plans. See Exploring Rational Method Composer and Rational Portfolio Manager integration.

You can also export your customized methodology into content that loads into Rational Application Developer for WebSphere (RAD) so that your developers can refer to the guidance from within the same Eclipse shell as they develop their Java code. The method content is displayed within RAD in a "Process Advisor" view as described in New Features of RAD 6 for WSAD v5 Developers Course Outline beginning on page 8.

For those of you who worry about making sure your organization follows a newly established SOA Governance policy as they start creating new business services, rolling out an Enterprise Service Bus, and making "grow my own" vs. reuse decisions, download IBM Rational Method Composer plug-in for SOA governance. This helps "identify appropriate best practices, merged with your existing IT processes, to provide proper governance of the capabilities introduced with SOA. The end result is a project plan to create your organization's unique governance framework." Note the project plan tie-in which would benefit from the integration of Rational Method Composer with Rational Portfolio Manager as described earlier.

For those of you who are both methology czars and service modelers there is a free download UML Profile for Software Services, RSA Plug-In which can be used to customize Ratonal Software Architect for modeling services in an SOA environment. It uses the conceptual model described in UML profile for software services and adds many useful stereotypes to your UML models such as Message, Service Partition, Service Provider, Service Consumer, Collaboration, Service Collaboration, Service Channel, Service Specification, Service, Service Gateway, and Message Attachment.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

The Many Flavors of IBM ESB Implementations

2006-08-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to receive an email at work which invited me to attend some training on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I jumped at the chance and quickly registered for two classes as it is so difficult to find time for serious learning while trying to keep my head above water in my "real job."

This week, the class has focused on how we could implement various Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) scenarios using the different IBM products. (Be prepared for WebSphere overload.) In particular, we've talked about:

WebSphere Process Server (WPS) with WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) as the tooling for WPS.
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB), which also uses the WID tooling. (Incidentally, WESB also comes bundled with WebSphere Process Server) This is based on "newer" J2EE technology.
WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) with its WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit as the tooling. This has also been called IBM's "Advanced" ESB product because it is based on "mature" WebSphere MQ technology and can handle higher volumes than WESB. However, there is no migration path from WESB to WMB since the underlying technologies are so different.

To a lessor extent, we've been talking about:

WebSphere Data Power SOA Appliances (It is a real coup d'état for IBM Software Group to "own" this hardware product.)
WebSphere Business Monitor, which can monitor business events identified in a WebSphere Business Modeler model.
WebSphere WebServices Gateway (WGW) which I believe has be renamed Service Integration Bus for Web Services Enablement (SIBWS)

Tomorrow, I hope to finish my lab in which we demonstrate an ESB scenario which uses both WESB and WMB. We are also supposed to address systems management issues using IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA (ITCAM). And... tomorrow we also get around to that frequent afterthought called "ESB security".

The class had been in Pittsburg and I must say I've been favorably impressed with the city so far. Below is a picture of the confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers at Pittsburgh as seen from the top of the Duquesne Incline, over 400 vertical feet above the river. The class is in the brown building on the right side right above the yellow arch of the bridge.

Here's the view from the IBM training facility on Stanwix Avenue alongside the Monongahela River. For you old timers, I'm told this facility dates back to the days of the IBM acquisition of TransArc and their products like Encina. Nice view. Tough duty, huh?

Click here for more Pittsburgh pictures.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

How on Earth Do We Test SOA?

2006-08-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

More than once on my SOA journey I have wondered to myself and out loud "How on earth do we test this stuff?" with the "stuff" meaning an SOA infrastructure or an SOA-based application. Intuitively I have always thought that the testing strategy must have to be different. One of my numerous email newsletter subscriptions ( IT Business Edge Hot Story )caught my eye the other day with the catchy title "The Pitfalls of SOA Software Testing." Its worth taking a look:

There's not a lot of talk about software testing in an SOA, maybe because it's so complicated. Even in a simple database that's part of, say, an order processing application, you have to expose the application code as a service, make sure it does what it's supposed to do, make sure it doesn't do anything you don't know about, regression test the original database, stress test the service, acceptance test it—and that's only one service. It gets worse with composite applications.Read "SOA and Software Testing" at IT-Director.com.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

IBM Acquires Webify

2006-08-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

See IBM Acquires Webify. This acquisition has both a Software Group play and a Global Services play in the SOA space.

"Webify software helps accelerate the development and deployment of applications that business users need to quickly respond to market and competitive pressures. It provides hundreds of industry-specific, pre-built standards-based accelerators, tools and frameworks. Webify's offerings help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry such as HIPAA compliance for healthcare companies and ACORD standards in the insurance industry.
IBM's acquisition of Webify strengthens its leadership in service oriented architecture, which helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align it with business goals, resulting in greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity. By bringing together IBM's development and use of open industry standards with Webify's expertise in semantics, IBM can better solve common business problems in a given vertical industry. Together, IBM and Webify will help businesses run more efficiently by accelerating the integration of business processes and the sharing and reuse of proven applications and best practices. "
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Leading a Software Project Like Directing a Movie?

2006-07-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago a co-worker passed me an article that really got me thinking about what it takes to lead a significant software development project. In Successful software management style: Steering and balance* Walker Royce, Vice President Rational Brand Services, makes an interesting argument that running a major software project is a creative act, more like directing a movie than what most of us think of when we think of project management.

I must admit his argument is seductive. I think that as an architect, I consider myself more of a “creative type” who makes something out of nothing. Often I don’t like being held to a plan I had no part in making. And when I help make a plan, I budget some time for some tinkering.

Maybe Walker Royce has a point. Here are some quotes:

“Managing software projects successfully has proven to be very failure prone when using the traditional engineering management discipline. Comparing the challenge of software management to that of producing a major motion picture exposes some interesting perspectives. Both management problems are concerned with developing a complex piece of integrated intellectual property with constraints that are predominantly economic. This article introduces some comparisons between managing a software production and managing a movie production, then elaborates four software management practices observed from successful projects. The overall recommendation is to use a steering leadership style rather than the detailed plan-and-track leadership style encouraged by conventional wisdom.”
""Heresy!" some may shout. "Software projects need more disciplined engineering management, not less." Before you dismiss my claim as an insult to the profession, consider these observations:
Most software professionals have no laws of physics, or properties of materials, to constrain their problems or solutions. They are bound only by human imagination, economic constraints, and platform performance once they get something executable. Some developers of embedded software are the obvious exception.
In a software project, you can change almost anything at any time: plans, people, funding, milestones, requirements, designs, tests. Requirements -- probably the most misused word in our industry -- rarely describe anything that is truly required. Nearly everything is negotiable. "
"Metrics and measures for software products have no atomic units. Economic performance more typical in service industries (value as observed by the users vs. cost of production) has proven to be the best measure of success. Most aspects of quality are very subjective, such as maintainability, reliability, and usability."
"Process rigor should be much like the force of gravity: the closer you are to a product release, the stronger the influence of process, tools, and instrumentation on the day-to-day activities of the workforce. The farther you are from a release date, the weaker the influence. This axiom seems to be completely missing, or at least grossly underemphasized, by the process evangelists and literature, but it is usually very observable in successful software projects."
"Most unsuccessful projects exhibit one of these characteristics:
Over-engineering on the early phases (creative aspects) of the life cycle. You need maneuverable processes that easily adapt to discovery and accommodate a degree of uncertainty to attack a few major risk items, prototype solutions, and build early and coarse artifacts. What creative discipline can you think of in which more process rigor is considered beneficial in helping humans think?
Under-engineering on the later phases (production aspects) of the life cycle. Extensive change-managed baselines of detailed and elaborate artifacts need engineering processes with insightful instrumentation and attention to detailed consistency and completeness to converge on a quality product."

On the flip side, there is the problem of “Can my customer culturally handle the kind of “give and take” in a creative software development process? Do they understand the idea of “discovery” of requirements or do they think they've identified them all already? Can customers really admit how little they know about what they want or how poorly they sometimes articulate their “requirements”. Can they accept trying out an idea, deciding it was all that good, and throwing the work away?

Another problem area is that for most of us is that we have to live within a budget which often must be cast in stone very, very early in the process before those requirements (negotiable as they may be) are really well understood. How many customers really work in an organization that allows them to “go back to the well” and ask for more money without commiting some kind of career suicide?

Then there is the recurring problem of technical orgainzations expecting to have their budget estimates cut so they pad their numbers. Business users then come to expect to routinely receive padded numbers and promptly cut the estimate by an even larger percentage. For a humorous look at this situation see Project Approval Games: Three Fantasies mentioned in a previous post Feudal Line Management and Shared Resources.

My gut tells me to accept a lot of Walker Royce’s ideas and bake them into a project plan that appears more traditional by adding a lot of tasks with formal sounding names that really mean “verify we really understand what they want”. My experience is that customers often articulate pretty well the “happy path” of what they want when everything works like they hope. They are not so good, however, at telling you how many things can go wrong and telling us what the software should do when an exception occurs and we are no longer on the “happy path”. It may be wise to add a few formal sounding task names that really mean “contingency for exception handling we don’t know about yet goes here”.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Hot Skills / Cold Skills - What's the Near-Term I/T Future?

2006-07-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

I’m sure I am not the only technical professional who has pondered questions like:

Are my skills becoming obsolete?
Am I becoming too expensive to do the things I’m good at or like to do?
What kind of skills do I need to develop to stay gainfully employed? (keep from getting fired - play defense)
What kind of skills do I need to thrive in the future? (get promoted - play offense)

I stumbled across a ComputerWorld article by Stacy Collett entitled “Hot Skills, Cold Skills: The IT worker of 2010 won't be a technology guru but rather a 'versatilist.'

In the article she has some interesting quotes such as:

“The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all.”
“IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.”
“the skills required to land these future technical roles will be honed outside of IT. Some of these skills will come from artistic talents, math excellence or even a knack for public speaking -- producing a combination of skills not commonly seen in the IT realm.”

Check out the article. I’d love to hear from others about what skills they think it will take to “play offense” and thrive as an I/T Architect in the near future.

Also, for anyone who has had their head in the sand, you may want to see these for a little motivation to consider the future. (hint) Both of these are focused on the latest and greatest SOA technology, not legacy code.

From my humble employer from back in March, IBM Launches Global Business Solution Center to Accelerate Global Delivery Network New Center in India Will Develop and Manage Reusable High-Value Consulting Solutions
From the worthy opposition (competition) only about two weeks ago, Accenture sets up shop in India Center to focus on R&D in systems integration and software engineering.

You may also want to check out some of my previous posts which address similar issues related to our changing and evolving careers:

The Globalized I/T Architect

I Really Am a Master Certified I/T Architect

Are All the Good I/T, Science, and Engineering Jobs Going Overseas?

The Role of the Business Transformation Architect

A Culture of Innovation? Or NOT?

How to Become More Creative in Solving Problems

$1 Billion Investment in "Info on Demand"

Are you Pi-shaped?

Epidemic Career Advice

SAP Disrupts Everything

Naming Well, an Essential Skill of an I/T Architect

Vendor-Neutral I/T Architect Certification Program

I/T Architect Certification Revisited

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

What's in a Name? SAP Gives Up on ESA and Adopts SOA Terminology

2006-07-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

I heard today that SAP was abandoning their name "Enterprise Services Architecture" name (see this ESA post from 2004 and Breaking Down SAP's ESA Strategy) in favor of the more widely used term Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I decided to do a little Googling tonight to check it out. I could find no official announcement about the name change (I didn't look all that long) but many of the top ranked search results now seem to come back with the term "Enterprise SOA" (see SAP's Enterprise SOA Adoption Program). It is a little amusing that on one SAP page pointing readers to white papers, both terms are used.

I don't know how significant this really is, but it appears they are grudgingly adopting the terminology everyone else is using.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Feudal Line Management and Shared Resources

2006-07-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

There is often a fuzzy line in practice between the role of a project manager and an I/T architect. I say in practice because all too often it is not possible to be a “pure” I/T architect. We have to help the project manager be successful if we want to continue to have our fun creating new solutions to solve new problems.

I know, for example, that my project managers often rely on me for help setting up a viable project plan. How are they supposed to know which tasks in the technology mix are predecessors of others if the I/T Architect doesn’t tell him? And since all of my projects have at least some first-of-a-kind (with the client anyway) element to them, how would the project manager know what the tasks are in the first place.

Then there are the resource issues. If the first-of-a-kindness of the project involves some development tool or middleware that we haven’t used before then a good I/T Architect should help the project manager identify the skills required. I know once names are submitted, I often get involved in the interview and selection process as well.

One of my project manager friends and I were discussing a common project management problem – the resource that everybody needs for their project. In our case, we are anticipating that if our client adopts SAP then the already thin ranks of the programmers supporting the legacy systems will be in great demand. Who will provide the routine support if these people are in requirements discussions related to SAP? Who will create that urgently needed report if they are in a conference room trying to help the data migration team move the legacy transaction history over to SAP? What if the client’s business climate becomes more competitive and the business requires yet another tweak to the legacy system to support the latest marketing program? But there are all those SAP meetings to go to!

We came to the quick conclusion that the client could hire 20 or 50 or 100 SAP consultants (or another 250 in India) and not deliver a working SAP instance any faster because those few legacy subject matter experts (SMEs) could only attend just so many hours a day of meetings.

My project manager friend pointed me to a set of really wonderful project management “fables” which uses the feudal system of middle age Europe and the story of Robin Hood to illustrate the real-world, political problems faced by today’s project managers in a the resource constrained realm of shared resources. Check out Robin Hood PMs and Feudal Line Management by Dick Billows at 4pm.com. This article makes some great points and is amusing reading and all too true! A small sample of this gem:

“Sure, there were all those blasé assurances of “full support” from the line managers before the project started. Now that the work has begun, these feudal Sheriffs of Nottingham patrol their castle walls hurling stones and boiling oil on PMs who attempt to utilize one of their artisans.....’A person can have but one boss and that is I.’.... the sheriff notes the PM’s project work assignment on a scrap of paper but does not assign a specific individual from the castle to complete the task. ... They (the PM) don’t know who will be working on the assignment When the sheriff finally does allow work to start, the selected individual is usually not the most skilled artisan in the castle. Often, the sheriff picks an individual whose absence from the castle may actually improve the castle. .... The sheriff may recall them on a whim or to silence another whining Robin Hood. How does the borrowed person react to all this? It’s clear that the project assignments should not, in any way, interfere with the person’s accountabilities in the castle. It’s there after all, that the sheriff will decide on compensation, promotion and continuing employment. The PM has none of these rewards to dole out... With several borrowed people on the team, usually on critical path assignments, the project team takes on an excessively casual, holiday-like atmosphere. This is in stark counterpoint to the user or client King who views the project as a crusade and reminds the PM of its importance at annoying frequent intervals.”

Another gem from the same site, Project Approval Games: Three Fantasies where the fantasies are Executive Fantasy Land (too much confidence in the PM), the Used Car Lot (PM as “slick shyster” trying to rip the executive off), and The Eager Puppy Dog (which drives PMs to pad their project estimates with contingency and executives to assume there is extra fat which can be cut).

Read both and enjoy!

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Back from a Blogging Hiatus

2006-07-05T17:47:00.000-07:00

I am hopefully back from a long blogging hiatus. Things just got a little crazy for a couple of weeks at work and at home. I spent a lot of time working with some members of the IBM SAP consulting practice on enterprise integration issues related to connecting SAP to non-SAP systems. It was fun and I learned a little about the “order to cash” process while I was at it but it suffocated my blogging-related brain cells. I also spent numerous weekend hours braving the June and July heat in Nashville to scratch a couple of items off my “honey do list.” These items were however only belatedly off the list as I was reminded “if you’d done it earlier in the year it wouldn’t have been so hot.” Also during this time I have been trying to take better care of myself and get some much needed exercize on weeknights. Put those three things together and you have very few discretionary hours left for blogging. Surely, I am not the only blogger to have this problem?

The Globalized I/T Architect

2006-06-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

There was a lot of fanfare about the IBM "town hall" in Bangalore, India recently. My teammates in Bangalore all got to attend. Based on the Tuesday morning conference call comments, it was a big hit over there

Sam Palmisano, also had some interesting words in the Financial Times the other day. Basically he said the multi-national corporation is dead ... to be superceded by "the globally integrated enterprise." I have no way of knowing how much of this is truly original thought but I would point his comments out to readers.

All of this globalization has a huge impact on those of us who have to shepherd complex software projects along. The globally dispersed development model is alive and well. I suppose, however, that almost any big company that might move a lot of software work offshore has already done it. So now what happens? What does this mean for us as "high wage country" I/T architects? Here are a few thoughts:

Whether we like it or not our job often become to ensure that the global model chosen by the bosses way above us is succesful. Project sabatoge to get them to change their mind is career suicide.
Our job will be getting even more consultative. We will likely spend even a greater percentage of our time worrying about business requirements.
Our "Soft Skills" become even more important as we spend more time writing, presenting, facilitating, persuading, planning, coordinating, selling our ideas, etc.
We'll focus more and more on the things which must be done face-to-face with the business users, excutives, clients, etc. If you can do your job over a VPN from your home office, beware because the job could probably be done from the other side of the world.
We'll write more documentation than ever before so as to enable the armies of offshore developers to be successful (see #1). More and more we will be successful when we achieve results thru others. (Almost sounds like management doesn't it?)
The offshore teams' work will move "up the food chain" to become more and more strategic. See a URL I've pointed to before, IBM to invest $200 million in Global Business Solution Center. The technical lead for this effort, Ray Harishankar, was recently appointed an IBM Fellow, the highest level a technical person can achieve in IBM. There are only 62 of them today out of over 300,000 IBM employees.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

I Really Am a Master Certified I/T Architect

2006-06-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

I have previously blogged about the on-going efforts for vendor-neutral certification of I/T Architects, The Open Group which is running the program, how the goal is to get this certification as widely recognized as the PMP certification for project managers, and how IBM was the first employer to have its internal I/T Architect certification program "accredited" by the Open Group. (Drum roll please...) I would like to officially announce that according to the Open Group I am now a "Master Certified I/T Architect".

Anyone who would like make sure I didn't make this up may do so by going to the directory search and using "IBM Corporation", "Hartman", and my personal confirmation code of "ART_SCI_ITA" as the search criteria.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Are All the Good I/T, Science, and Engineering Jobs Going Overseas?

2006-05-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

Over the last several years, I have endured much gloom and doom talk among I/T professionals about the evil influence of offshoring of I/T jobs to India, China, and other lower-cost countries with large numbers of highly educated workers. The mood around me seems to have improved over about three years ago from one of panic to one of acceptance (or is that resignation that offshoring isn't going away?).

I recognized early that one important enabler of this business model was the wide availability of inexpensive and reliable telecommunications. This allows, for example, me to have my regular Tuesday and Thursday morning conference calls with my co-workers Bangalore without anybody really worrying about the cost of the phone call. I do, however, remember making my own jokes about how the US needed the CIA to put some Navy SEALs in mini-submarines on the floor of the India Ocean to cut the fiber optic cables heading to India.

As a sign of the improved relationship with my Indian friends, I got brave enough to share my joke with one of our programmers from Bangalore. I was pleased to find he took my joke in a good natured way and countered my joke with a laugh and something along the lines of "Oh... we have so many redundant lines we'd be ok in Bangalore. But Pakistan... if you cut one fiber optic cable the whole country would be out of business!"

I've been a little behind in my blog reading and I stumbled across a gem on Irving Wladawsky-Berger's blog. He's the IBM Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation. He has a posting entitled Skills, Jobs, Competitiveness, and Innovation which address the comment I've heard many times from I/T professionals "I wouldn't let my child go to college to major in computer science." He makes several good points:

According to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) the size of the IT employment market in the United States today is higher than it was at the height of the dot-com boom.
Information technology appears as though it will be a growth area at least for the coming decade, and the US government projects that several IT occupations will be among the fastest growing occupations during this time.
And... like we in leadership positions in custom application development business at IBM Global Services have been preaching to our practitioners... the role of the I/T professional in the US and developed countries is changing to one which is more consultative vs. heads down pounding code into the keyboard. Soft skills and business knowledge are becoming more important. "These new jobs are much more collaborative, interdisciplinary and broad than in the past. They require solid technical competence, combined with industry, business and management knowledge as well as good communication and interpersonal skills."

I will add this one cautionary note. The attitude now is both that offshoring is not going away and that decision makers will lead with offshoring. By "lead with offshoring" I mean that almost any big project will be assumed from the beginning to be delivered by a globally dispersed team. For consulting organizations, that means the first proposal will already have global resources baked into the projected costs. (If for no other reason than the assumption that the competition will.) For more evidence see IBM announced a $200 million investment.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

SAP Projects and the "Big Bang" Theory

2006-05-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

A fellow IBMer saw some of my previous posts about navigating the SAP maze from a custom development point of view and sent me an email basically asking the question "Can SAP projects be iterative? All the ones I've ever seen always seem so 'big bang.'" The more I thought about his question, the more I realized how reasonable the question seemed to those of us who've been building custom applications. After all, how many small SAP projects have you seen? How many have put something in production in 3 months? Don't most of them have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars (or even more)?

I decided to pose his question to a "real SAP consultant" I met recently. She claimed that SAP projects can be iterative. An project can cycle thru multiple iterations of the ABAP programs used for point-to-point integration with SAP (the old style integration pre-dating XI) and companies can and do gradually add new modules to their SAP environment. (This is probably more incremental vs. iterative).

I challenged her "don't the customization done at the beginning of an SAP project drive the generation of database schemas? Aren't these database schemas hard to change?" She said she typically isn't involved in that kind of SAP setup but that it could be done. There was, however, a catch. Such a change would probably require some kind of data migration project associated with it to move data from one schema to another. My gut tells me these data migrations are almost always painful. There is a reason IBM acquired Ascential a while back. The phrase Master Data Management (MDM) is familiar to all SAP consultants. If your client is looking at SAP, you'll get familiar with it too.

I think this may shed light on why SAP projects appear to be such a "big bang". Most companies do not want to support more than one system of record simultaneously. (The "E" in ERP stands for "Enterprise" so otherwise you are taking the "E" out.) They want SAP to take over all of whatever it is doing (for example the order to cash process). Otherwise you get into a need for the new SAP and the old legacy system to exchange a lot of information to keep each other "in synch" with what they are doing. Everyone these days wants their data up-to-date in real time so that probably means real-time synchronization.

I know of a company facing exactly that kind of decision. They don't really like the idea of rolling a new system out across the whole company. They'd prefer to roll new capabilities out to a single line of business first. But... each line of business shares a lot of the same customers and dealers. They often share warehouses. Shipments to customers often contain a mix of products from different lines of business. With today's legacy systems, customer can mix products from different lines of business on the same order. Imagine the implications of changing the order to cash process to a new SAP system and rolling it out to only one line of business at a time:

Do I track inventory in two different systems?
How do I load a truck at the warehouse if the shipment includes products from both systems?
How do I keep up with vacant storage bins in the shared warehouses if the inventory is split between two systems. Do I draw a line down the middle and and disallow putting line of business A's inventory on the line of business B side of the line?
How will I generate the pick list for the people that load the trucks? Will they have to work from two lists? How do yo make sure it'll all fit on the same truck?
Dealers don't have to split orders by line of business today, will they have to split their orders into two separate orders tomorrow while we're in transition?
Will customers have to check the status of different line of business orders separately?
Will my dealers get a single invoice with all line items like today? or will they get two separate invoices, one for each system?
Will dealers get a single monthly statement?... or two separate monthly statements?
When a dealer visits the B2B website today they can order products from different lines of business from one screen. In the future, will they have to go to one screen for one line of products and to a different screen for the others?

So, the choices are clear (or is that murky?):

Offload the data integration onto your employees and customers; making them deal with separate orders, separate shipments, separate invoices, separate statements, etc. OR
Spend millions on middleware solutions to broker all transactions so that they all look to the external customer like there is a single back end system OR
Put the "E" back in ERP and don't even try to roll out an order-to-cash process until your whole business (Enterprise) is ready.

Which would you choose?

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Consumers Wag the Enterprise I/T Dog

2006-05-16T07:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting read. What happens when your customers have a better PC and more bandwidth at home than your employees at work? What happens when your teenager's cell phone offers more features than your sales force automation solution. What happens when these people come on board as employees? Will they be satisfied with what your enterprise has to offer them?

Gartner: Commoditization means consumers will wag the enterprise IT dog by ZDNet's David Berlind -- As one of the four major pairs of themes underlying Gartner Symposium/ITxpo here in San Francisco, Gartner research chief and distinguished analyst Steve Prentice explained to attendees why the commoditization and consumerization of technology is not to be ignored an an enterprise's strategic information technology roadmap. Prentice's presentation was given as part of the event's open ceremonies. Companies [...]

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent
IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Data Integration Nightmare for Your Supply Chain?

2006-05-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

A while back I had a post Supply Chain, the Next Sarbanes-Oxley regarding the possibility of greatly increased government regulation of supply chains due to Homeland Security concerns. This included the possibility of US importers having to take responsibility for security of their inbound shipping containers enroute (regardless of when they legally take ownership of the goods), increased demands for standardized data (What was the passport number of the driver who brought the goods in from Mexico?), and more. The US Customs is currently piloting with some major importers a program which uses Global Positioning Satellite receivers to track the exact route taken by ocean bound shipping containers. (Why did your shipping container make a stop in Pakistan on the way to the US?) This kind of information collection is currently voluntary but there is speculation it could become mandatory. For an update of pending Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism legislation take a look at C-TPAT Legislation Update.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Is the Mainframe the Best SOA Platform?

2006-05-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

A while back I had a post about a major US bank running a web services performance test and getting spectacular results using multiple zSeries Application Assist Processors (zAAP). James Governor makes an interesting point that using zAAPs on the mainframe can significantly reduce software licensing costs, making it a potentially attractive platform for new SOA-related infrastructure. A specific customer example with Farmers Insurance is cited here. Another post says that mainframe CICS customer are upgrading to the lastest CICS version which is XML- and web service-enabled at a faster pace than seen by CICS in 35 years. The same post claims 25% of z-Series mainframes are now running WebSphere Application Server... thats one in four. This post gives a customer reference from Wachovia (only the 4th largest US bank) which is running WebSphere tools on the mainframe.

Ex-Smalltalkers rejoice!

2006-05-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

Check out Is smalltalk set for a renaissance? on James Governor's MonkChips blog.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

How to Talk to an SAP Consultant (If You Must)

2006-05-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

I discovered via last week’s post SAP Disrupts Everything that I am not the only one in the I/T Architect blogsphere who is craving information on the integration of SAP with the rest of the information technology world. It was by far my most popular post ever. (Thanks to everyone who visited and special thanks to those of you with widely read blogs that directed others to this post.)

I am just becoming aware that the package-world people and SAP people in particular don’t communicate very well with us custom development types.

A prime example is the use of the word “requirements”. You’d think this was an almost universally understood word in software development. Well... maybe not. When I think of requirements, I think of things like the answer to “What do you want your system to do?” or maybe a collection of use cases. Oh.. and don’t forget non-functional requirements like “if the database crashes we need to be able to recover in 4 hours or less”.

I am still trying to figure this out but it seems that to someone who has grown up in the SAP space, the word requirements takes on a very precise and specialized meaning. This is not a term used in the same sentence with open-ended, green field questions. SAP has something called a “business process hierarchy”. At the top level, this might include something like purchasing. At the next level down purchasing is decomposed into purchase requisition, purchase order, etc. At the next level down, it would be further decomposed into things like release of purchase orders, transmission of purchase orders, scheduling agreement delivery schedule, transmission of scheduling agreement, etc. This decomposition continues down to an excruciating level of detail, perhaps 6 levels down. A “requirement” then is which of these many low level business process are chosen out of the SAP-approved business process hierarchy which are identified as “in scope” for the SAP implementation in question.

In the newer versions of SAP, all of these many different business processes are loaded into a tool called Solution Manager which visually provides a hiearchial way to browse these business processes. This tool also provides a way to load things like the user roles and client’s organizational hierarchy. Maybe requirements becomes a slightly bigger term encompassing all the “in scope” items in Solution Manager. Not 100% on that so I’m open to comments or correction.

I’ll try to point out more examples of SAP-specific language and nuance as I bump my head against them.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

RFID and Privacy Issues

2006-05-09T18:18:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have seen a previous post of mine Real World RFID Application in Production Now . I heard about another interesting (chilling?) RFID application in the works in the casino industry.

If you have been to a big name casino, you’ve heard about the “players cards” or “players club cards” in which the gambler gives up all anonymity in exchange for the chance to be earn some of the famous casino perks or “comps” (short for complimentary drinks, meals, shows, etc.). This also makes it easier to become a “rated” gambler. The gambler inserts a coded card into a card reader at slot machines, blackjack tables, etc. and the casino can determine who is gambling, what games they play, how long they play, how much they bet per hour, etc.

I heard that the casios are going to embed RFID chips into the players cards. They also plan to embed RFID into the high-value gambling chips (eg. $100 chips and greater). Of course, the casinos can put RFID antennas in the ceiling, floor, game tables, etc. along with all the other video devices used to spot cheaters.

Imagine you run a casino. You track the players club card in the wallet of a high roller’s back pocket as he gets off the elevator and heads for the gambling floor. He buys some big chips. You can track his movements from table to table and from slot machine to slot machine. Red Alert! He’s heading for the bar with $12,000+ in chips in his pocket! That $12,000 is not in play while he’s in there. Radio the pit boss to have a hostess intercept him with an invitation to an exclusive high limit black jack table and offer some free cocktails.

I’m not a security and privacy expert, but it seems like there’s plenty of opportunity to exploit the RFID infomation here.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

SAP Disrupts Everything

2006-05-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

I spent the last three days as what seemed like the only custom application development guy in a sea of SAP consultants for whom the world revolves around their favorite package. Since a client of mine is likely going to bite the bullet and go down the SAP path, I had begged my management for some “just in time” training in SAP. I had no illusions that with three days of training I could actually implement anything related to SAP. I just hoped to get to the point I could discuss topics intelligently with the SAP folk who will likely be showing up soon.

The more I listened (and occassionally dared to show my ignorance via an occasional question), the more disruptive SAP’s entrance into the SOA space seems to get. This is not to say that being “disruptive” is all bad. (See my post “A Culture of Innovation or Not” for some discussion about corporate culture and innovation as in “Wouldn’t it be fun to work at a disruptive company like Google?”)

Here are some examples of the kind of disruption in the software industry and SOA in particular that I’m talking about:

There are numerous releases of SAP which are simultaneously supported by SAP at present. Many companies got up and running a while back and are faced with the prospect of trying to migrate to newer versions when they have customized SAP heavily. (Customization may need more custom work to get them running on the new version.) At the same time, SAP is raising the price of maintenance support of the old versions it doesn’t want to have to support anymore. In the very near future some of the oldest versions won’t have support at all except to pay SAP by the hour.
Does a back-level SAP customer take the “safe” route and upgrade to a non-SOA-enabled version whose support runs out one or two years later? Or do they risk larger changes to their infrastructure and leapfrog into the latest and greatest version SOA-enabled versions.
People with skills implementing the SAP using the “old style” BASIS and ABAP will likely have to learn that the latest and greatest versions are based on a J2EE application server. Similarly, the old SAP “modules” seem less and less relavant as SOA-enablement facilitates business processes that cross the old boundaries of modules with acronym names like SD, MM, PP, and FI. The list of digraphs is a lot longer than that.
IBM is hiring SAP consultants by the way. A huge number of SAP accounts are on those back-level releases. Many want or need to upgrade. The SAP time-bomb is ticking.
People like me who already have J2EE skills might like the idea of having our skills more readily transferable into the high-demand SAP space as SAP adopts the J2EE application server technology.
People like me who already have J2EE skills need to remember that unlike ABAP, there are armies of J2EE-ready programmers in places like India who will also be embarking on an SAP journey soon. IBM announced a $200 million investment in exactly that kind of thing not too long ago. Granted, not all of that is directed at SAP projects but I believe IBM is SAP’s largest integration partner. Read between the lines.
(only slightly off topic) IBM is still hiring J2EE types by the way ... and hiring them in the US. In fact, I got an email a week or so ago from my organization in the US outlining how many people we’ll have to telephone screen, how many we’ll have to invite for face-to-face interviews, how many offers we’ll have to extend, etc. to meet our hiring goals in the US for the second quarter alone! (I thought it was a pretty big number.) Did I mention you generally have to be willing to travel? Also, as a sign that the job market for people like us is pretty good... not one person bothered to send me their resume as I offerred in “IBM to Invest $1 Billion in On Demand.”
People who have grown up doing point-to-point integration between SAP modules will need to jump into a new projects where point-to-point is discouraged and the new paradigm is to use the XI infrastructre as a broker (that smells a lot like an Enterprise Service Bus or ESB).
Soon, it won’t be just the J2EE SOA crowd who will be thinking about visually stringing together discrete services to form larger, coarse-grained “composite services.” An army of SAP consultants will soon be trying to modify the out-of-the-box SAP processes by inserting new, client-specific steps. (Gasp) Will they be doing it in visual modeling tool? And which tool will they be using? ARIS for SAP Netweaver? WebSphere Business Modeler? WebSphere Integration Developer?
This impacts more than you think. How does an I/T architect estimate how long it will take to complete an SOA-enabled SAP project? Will previous estimating guidelines apply? (No!) Will the best practices be different? (You bet!) Will the methodologies have to change? (Absolutely!) How will you test an SOA-enabled SAP solution? (Hmmm..)
And don’t forget the .NET crowd. Project Mendocino is out there exercizing integration options between things like MS Outlook Calendars and SAP.
With all the buzz surrounding whether an SAP customer should use Netweaver XI or IBM WebSphere products to integrate their systems, it is easy for some of the smaller integration vendors to be ignored.

Is all that disruptive enough? Or do I give SAP too much credit?

There are lots of new skills that will have to be learned by lots of people. There are lots of big impact decisions to be made. Lots of companies will need expert help. I repeat the mantra from a previous post.. its a great time to be an I/T Architect.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Get Ready for n-Series

2006-05-03T14:24:00.000-07:00

I just finished three days as practically the only non-SAP consultant amongst about 200 of my SAP consulting bretheren from IBM Global Business Services (formerly IBM Business Consulting Services). I must say that it was well worth my time and as I have the bandwidth to blog about it, I will add more posts about what I learned, my observations of the SAP space as it affects enterprise architecture, SAP and SOA, WebSphere vs. Netweaver XI, and maybe a few predictions about the future of the SAP space.

Let me start my run of blogs on this topic with hardware, however. Perhaps you’ve heard these platforms:
• z-Series (the mainframe)
• i-Series (AS/400 midrange)?
• p-Series (IBM’s unix platform running the AIX operating system)
• x-Series (IBM’s Intell-based servers used for both Windows and Linux)

But... have you heard of “n-Series”? Neither had I. n-Series is the IBM brand for a storage appliance. This appliance has great usefulness in the SAP space where customers are constantly making copies of databases.

Since it is an appliance, it plugs into the customer network with its own operating system embedded in it. This frees up resources on SAP database platforms for other things.

n-Series also offers FlexVol™ which decouples storage space from physcial disk drives. With it “system administrators can dynamically assign storage space to a user from the available pool of storage resources based on that user's space requirements. This flexibility can help your organization simplify operations, improve utilization and efficiency, and make changes quickly and seamlessly.”

n-Series also offers Flex Clone™ which provides the ability to quickly make copies of databases. In the SAP space, customers are always making copies for testing, promotion, exporting via batch processes, etc. “FlexClone technology generates nearly instantaneous replicas of data sets and storage volumes that require no additional storage space. Each cloned volume is a transparent virtual copy that can be used for enterprise operations.” Apparently, the embedded operating system keeps track with which blocks of data in any given file have changed. It provides virtual copies or “clones” for data blocks which still match the original copy. It senses when a user/system has made a change to data block within a virtual copy and only then allocates new disk space. The result? Faster copies, less physical disk space required, and faster backup and recovery.

Click here for more information on n-Series

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

I've Gone Over to the Other "Dark Side"

2006-05-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

In previous posts I have made some references to "going over to the dark side" whenever I talked about marketing types, salespeople, and selling in general.

For an application architect who has taken some pride in creating exactly the custom application solution a client needs, there is sometimes another "dark side" to be reckoned with. I'm talking about our fiends and colleagues who specialize in packages. Not all of us who've made a career in custom development like the prospect of our favorite clients looking at SAP, Oracle's ERP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, Reteck, or one of the other popular packages. It seems those "package types" speak a different lingo. Frankly, we are jealous of the salaries these specialists command. We wonder whether "packaged enabled business transformation" could be any fun compared to creating a solution from scratch. We wonder if anybody will ever do a big custom development project ever again. We fear we had better jump on the bandwagon.

Well, for a short time at least, I have gone over to this "dark side." For three days, I get to spy on my colleagues in IBM's SAP consulting practice and attend some of their training. One of my clients is seriously looking at replacing some legacy systems with SAP. In particular, I am focusing on the project methodology they use and the middleware issues related to connecting SAP with non-SAP systems. I'll get to spend some time learning the different approaches to this problem proposed by both IBM Software Group and (gasp) SAP's NetWeaver and XI.

Its too early yet to see how this is all going to turn out but my friends in the SAP space know how to do training. Below is the view of Baltimore's Harborplace from my hotel window. Its a tough job but somebody has to do it.

Epidemic Career Advice

2006-04-19T20:59:00.000-07:00

A friend recently loaned me a thought-provoking book called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. The general subject is how epidemics spread. Not just diseases but more importantly - epidemics of information. What starts fashion trends? How does word-of-mouth lead to a restaurant becoming wildly popular? Why are some advertising messages memorable and why do others flop? Click here for a summary of the book’s primary points and definitions.

When I was about half way through the book I commented to the friend who loaned it to me how much I was enjoying it. He runs his own Real Estate Title business and he commented that the book changed the way he looked at his career and the way he runs his business. He explained that a lot of his business comes thru referrals from real estate agents. Around Christmas time and New Years, many businesses like his invite customers, prospects, and business partners to parties. He said he had done that before but after reading this book, he decided to wait until after the usual party rush. He threw an “Equinox” party in March and invited all the real estate agents around him. He was amazed at how many people called to ask “What’s an equinox party?” and how many more people showed up for this unusually named event than had showed up at Christmas parties in previous years. The equinox message was “sticky”

His comment got me thinking, “Is there an application of The Tipping Point in the field of Enterprise Architecture or in a successful I/T Architect career?”

In the book, the author identifies a “Law of the Few” which describes how an epidemic can start with only a few people... if they’re the right kinds of people:

“Connectors” – People who know lots of people. People other people want to know. They are “social glue”.

“Mavens” – People who provide us with new information. People who accumulate knowledge but are not passive collectors. They want to share what they know. They educate and help without persuading.

“Salesmen” – They persuade us when we are unconvinced. They get us to make decisions or change our minds. They build trust and rapport quickly. They infect others with their emotions.

The author also says that in order for a message to spread rapidly, the message has to be “sticky”... an attribute called the “stickiness factor”.

Another important consideration is what Malcolm Gladwell calls “The Law of Context.” Rapid spread of information, rumors, opinion, disease, etc. is heavily dependent on the conditions and circumstances of the time and place.

Back to the question, “Is there an application of The Tipping Point in the field of Enterprise Architecture or in a successful I/T Architect career?”

Is, for example, all the current focus on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) an example of an information epidemic? It seems that not too long ago, only the true “early adopters” of technology were taking it seriously. Now, even some of the more technology risk adverse companies are taking notice. Is the SOA message “sticky”? There are certainly a lot of “salesman” out there extolling the virtues of SOA. There are certainly a lot of I/T Architects who want to be "thought leaders" in this area. The concept of being a thought leader certainly seems like being a “Maven” to me. Am I an SOA “connector” by virtue of the number of people in my email address book, the number of visitors to this blog, the number of people I’ve talked to on IBM conference calls over the last 13 years, and the number of clients I’ve shared a whiteboard with? All this talk about SOA also comes in the context of many companies moving from mere cost cutting to seeking business flexibility to chase “top line growth”. And what about the “resume” factor as epidemic context? I am sure there are thousands of technologists who all want to make sure their resume contains real-world experience with the latest buzzwords and alphabet soup just in case the next round of “business transformation” has them looking for a job soon. That context certainly makes one segment of our industry very receptive. (It may be a little off topic but check out Scott Mark’s “Resume Points to Consider if You Want a Job at a Large Enterprise” and James McGovern’s “Enterprise Architecture and Resume-Driven Design” for some good discussion on this.)

Returning to my friend with the Real Estate Title business, what should I do to take advantage of these concepts to enhance my I/T Architect career? What follows is my attempt to cast the characteristics of an information epidemic into career advice.

Be a connector. Spread the word of another’s success. Know who to talk to that knows people. Be a friend just because you can. Don’t worry about whether there is something in it for you. If all your friends are in I/T, make a conscious effort to cultivate personal relationships in other areas.
Be a maven about something someone cares about. We all need to have some expertise that others value. More importantly, don’t hoard your knowledge. Help others be successful. (The Golden Rule comes to mind.) Pass lessons learned (good and bad) on to others so they can benefit. Educate others respectfully for their benefit. Expect to learn something valuable in the process but something probably unanticipated.
Though some I/T Architects may consider it “going over to the dark side”, be a salesman. Maybe you don’t sign up for a real sales quota ($$), but be able to persuade others and sell your ideas. It is also important also to be able to translate back and forth between business and technology domains and be able to communicate costs and benefits to both sides in their language. Be enthusiastic about what you’re doing let it infect others. Be trustworthy.
Make your architectural messages “sticky”. State your message in a way it will make sense to the hearer and in a way it will be memorable. See also my previous post “Naming Well, an Essential Skill of an I/T Architect”. Looking back on it, I think that good class names, method names, variable names, pattern names, etc. are “sticky”. Learn to judge how much detail is just enough for the listener and how much detail is too much for them.
Be aware of the political context. I used to call this “political awareness”. Be aware of what is keeping your client up at night. Be aware of which “boat anchors” (an architectural anti-pattern) are out there that nobody will criticize because the guy who bought it is too powerful and won’t admit to making a mistake. Know how to work your organization’s budget cycle (or your clients). Also it is good to know what is keeping your customer’s customers awake at night, too. Be aware of which decision makers are “movers and shakers” and which ones are coasting to retirement. Know who has influence even if they don’t make the decision.
And here's the hard one. Don’t be afraid to be part of an epidemic. Ride the wave fearlessly. Enjoy the process. Stretch the envelope. Get out of your comfort zone. See also "The Value of Rough Seas." Now if only I can practice what I preach.

"A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner." -- English Proverb

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Feel Your User's Pain

2006-04-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

All you Microsoft bashers out there will enjoy this post on Dave Nicolette's agile software development blog: Connecting Users with Developers. Make sure you click the "Share Pain" button and view the video!

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Supply Chain, the Next Sarbanes-Oxley

2006-03-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

I have spent most of my I/T architect career working on customer service and sales & marketing type applications in the industrial sector. I will admit a lack of real-world experience in the area of supply chain. However, when I read Security Compliance: Customs Rattles the Supply Chain I found myself wondering how long it would be before my first supply chain project.

It seems that the recent political spat over the safety of US ports and public discussion of how ports could be used by terrorists has shined a bright spotlight on something called the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, or C-TPAT. There is now some widespread speculation that this currently voluntary program might become mandatory and have as big an impact on US corporate life (and I/T Architects) as Sarbanes Oxley.

In a program called Operation Safe Commerce, it seems that the Department of Homeland Security has been quietly using GPS and RFID technology to track the cargo containers enroute to some major US importers and the results have been unsettling. A few quotes:

....companies actually know very little about what goes on in their supply chains.
Among common unsafe practices identified by these sources were: truckers dropping off containers without ever encountering terminal security, containers left in unsecured areas, and containers bypassing a port that's considered safe (even if scheduled to pass through that port) and traveling instead through a country that poses a greater threat—without either the company or U.S. Customs and Border Protection being informed.”

Some other randomly selected quotes:

Right now, information about any given supply chain is hard to come by. And that's by design. The goal of supply chains is to get something that's needed—a part, a product—to where it's needed as quickly and cheaply as possible. If a container arrives too late to be loaded onto one ship, it's rerouted and loaded onto another. And as long as the container arrives on time—or close to it—no one need be the wiser. In fact, historically, each person or entity that handles a shipment collects and shares information only to the extent necessary to guard against liability.
Similarly, Customs was created to enforce tariffs and calculate import taxes. And while Customs' role expanded to combat drug trafficking in the 1980s, regulating trade was the department's primary job until September 11, 2001. Now, says Robert Bonner, former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (he resigned in November), "The priority mission of U.S. Customs is national security."
Experts say that Bonner, who was sworn in at Customs on Sept. 24, 2001, was right to change the agency's focus. Most agree that the likelihood of terrorists attacking the United States through the global supply chain is so high that it's a matter of when, not if. Such an attack (most analyses focus on a dirty bomb) won't primarily be designed to kill a lot of people, but to cause panic. "It isn't the event but the sudden lack of faith in the system that it causes," says Stephen Flynn, senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

If a bomb goes off, Flynn says, there will be huge pressure on the government to close all the nation's ports until every container on every site in the country is inspected. An October 2002 war game that mimicked that scenario found that closing the nation's ports for as many as 12 days created a 60-day container backlog and cost the economy roughly $58 billion.

Legally, a company is responsible for a container only when it formally purchases it, which—precisely for that reason—usually doesn't occur until it reaches a port, either in the United States or abroad. Target, for example, typically does not legally purchase the clothes it orders from China until they arrive in the terminal. But the government wants importers to take responsibility for everything that occurs prior to purchase, even if the container is in the custody of a trucker in China or a longshoreman in Rio de Janeiro. The principle vehicle for this is C-TPAT. This so-far voluntary program gives certain benefits, such as reduced inspections, to companies that can show they meet a minimum level of supply chain security.

The second prong of Customs' strategy is to collect as much information as it can about what's happening in the supply chain so that, through data mining, it can spot anomalies. The key to this is the Automated Commercial Environment, or ACE, a $3 billion-plus trade processing system begun in 2000, which Customs plans to complete by 2010. ACE has modules that do everything from serving as Customs' ERP system to targeting containers for inspection. Within the next six months, carriers entering the United States through land-border crossings in seven states will be required to send close to 100 data elements to Customs, including information about the vehicle, its driver and its cargo. If they don't, they don't get in. Customs is also piloting an ambitious ACE add-on called the Advance Trade Data Initiative (ATDI), which requires importers to share with Customs every bit of information about a shipment, including the purchase order, which ports it passes through, proof of delivery and its final destination within the United States.

Soon, companies that achieve this level of compliance will be rewarded with a Green Lane designation—essentially a "get out of Customs free" card that will do for borders what E-ZPass does for highways.

It's also important to limit access to supply chain information. "If the bad guys know that IBM is going to ship products from point A to B on a particular Tuesday, it gives them a leg up," says Debbie Turnbull, IBM's program manager for supply chain security. A bad actor inside a company could alter the information attached to a container from Karachi, Pakistan (which might raise an alarm), so it looked like it was coming from a factory in Hong Kong (which might not). Or that bad actor could pass scheduling information to a crony outside the company. IBM uncovered one such plot a few years ago. A worker in a plant in Mexico noticed that one container he was about to load was 53 feet long on the outside, but only 50 feet long on the inside. Upon inspection, it was found that the container had a false back, behind which was hidden several million dollars in narcotics.

Even secure processes "can be compromised," says Ken Konigsmark, Boeing's C-TPAT program manager. "[Overseas workers] get paid peanuts, and it would be very easy to bribe them." CIOs need to be able to tell when a truck driver leaves a factory and when he arrives at a port. The CIO can then alert Customs if a four-hour trip turns out to take 12.

For example, Customs wanted information that UPS stored as address line one in address line two. In other cases, Customs wanted information that UPS simply didn't have, such as a driver's passport number.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

I/T Architect Certification Revisited

2006-02-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

I previously blogged about a Vendor-Neutral I/T Architect Certification Program sponsored by The Open Group. I noticed recently that IBM became the first employer to have its internal I/T Architect Certification Program “accredited” by The Open Group. This was effective January 26, 2006. I believe what this means is that I/T architects who work for IBM and are certified by internally by the IBM I/T Architect Program will also qualify for The Open Group I/T Architect Certification. (For anybody who cares, I've been an IBM-Certified I/T Architect since July 1996.) The Open Group calls this “indirect” certification. I expect HP will also get their I/T Architect certification program accredited as well as HP is also a “Platinum Member” of The Open Group. If your employer does not have an accredited certification program or you are an independent, you have the option to get a “direct” certification. See I/T Architect Certification for more details.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

$1 Billion Investment in "Info on Demand"

2006-02-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

My buddy Bob Z. pointed out this bit of news about IBM to Invest $1 Billion in "Info on Demand" including a plan to add almost 10,000 new consultants over the next 3 years. Wow! I think now is a great time to be an I/T Architect. Send your resumes to me so I can get the employee referral bonus ! (sorry, I couldn't resist... hey at least I'm honest)

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Google to Partner with IBM?

2006-02-06T06:09:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting piece on CNN Money Googling IBM in which Eric Schonfeld argues that Google should seek a partnership with IBM. Some quotes to get your attention...

"Partners and analysts believe that Google (Research) is ready to plunge into the lucrative business-software market—and IBM (Research) may be the best partner to help it dive in."

"Of all the big tech companies, IBM is perhaps the least threatened by Google, since IBM's focus is on large corporate customers. IBM, in turn, could tap into Google's small-business constituency.

Talk about a powerful partnership," says IDC's Gens. "It would bring hipness to IBM's brand and corporate gravitas to Google."

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Why I Hate Frameworks - Humor with a Purpose

2006-02-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

For anyone who may have enjoyed the humor found behind my previous post Waterfall Methodology Makes a Comeback! there is some still more humor with a purpose to be found in the post Why I Hate Frameworks on The Joel on Software blog.

Why I Hate Frameworks does a great job of pointing out the danger of using frameworks which attempt to solve every problem of software architecture known to man by providing seemingly infinite flexibility. Along the way, the framework becomes so complex it becomes unusable for the very practical, near-term problem we face now.

Thanks also to Deepak Kaul for pointing out this gem was also on Grady Booch’s blog.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions

Waterfall Methodology Makes a Comeback!

2006-02-03T06:28:00.000-08:00

Check out this post I discovered via link on Grady Booch's blog regarding the comeback of waterfall methodologies being celebrated at an upcoming Waterfall 2006 Conference. Register now!

For anybody who doesn't know, Grady Booch is an IBM Fellow and was founder of Rational prior to its acquisition by IBM.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Naming Well, an Essential Skill of an I/T Architect

2006-02-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

I had a recent experience on my project which caused me to think about the impact of names and the choice of words we make on I/T Architects and the success we have on our projects and in our careers.

We had a production problem that was giving us fits. I came into problem determination somewhat late and was invited to a meeting to discuss the issue. There were error messages in the log and the team was investigating the data associated with the transaction that failed. One developer who had been looking at it for a while said "I don't see a problem... the data looks good." There was then much discussion about what the cause of the problem might be. Someone raised the possibility that perhaps the transaction that threw the error was not the cause of the problem at all. “If the problem was a deadlock on a database record, then the next transaction to try to update the same record would fail.” Without thinking much about it, I threw out the comment "Then the transaction that failed was the victim and not the perpetrator." Another architect on the project then smiled, leaned over, and made an interesting side comment on all this with a comment along the lines of "That's why you're THE architect!"

At first I didn't quite know what he meant. It appeared to be some reference to me being the lead architect. Also something about my casual (casual to me at least) comment had something to do with me getting promoted over time to my position. He and I have a great working relationship I think (tell me if I’m wrong “Z”) and the apparent reference to my rank in the organization made me a little nervous. I didn’t know where this was going and there was still a room full of ears in the room and a couple still on the phone.

Then he let me in on his perspective. He said I had quickly come up with two very descriptive words; "victim" and "perpetrator." His opinion was that my choice of words were immediately understood by all. (My words now.) They provided a "shortcut" for everyone who had not yet realized that the problem might not be with the transaction that threw error messages into the error log. The choice of words allowed all to quickly change gears and consider a new (and perhaps more likely) cause of the problem.

Shortly later I had several hours to think about this while I was captive in a seat in coach as I was flying cross-country. I was, of course, glad my comments and the names I chose were helpful. I wondered to myself at 34,000 feet, “Are the words we choose to name things really that important?” I had a slightly more provocative thought, “Was my ability to choose names for I/T concepts that were quickly understood a major contributor to my success in my career?" Could it be true that the names I have chosen over the years for all those problems, symptoms of problems, objects, attributes, methods, database tables, columns in databases, subsystems, components, use cases, etc. really have been a major productivity boost for me and project my teams? Bored with the SkyMall catalog I continued...

How many hours of development time have been saved over the years by not having to explain a concept over and over because the name itself helped explain the concept quickly?

How many painful hours of documentation were avoided?

How many hours of skill transfer were avoided when new developers joined a project in mid-stream?

Unfortunately, there is no way for me to know but my gut instinct is that the number of hours saved over all the projects and all the team members over all the 20+ years in technology is large. Intuitively, I think it must really be a big deal.

As I found no way to get comfortable in my airline seat in coach so as to get some sleep, I contemplated still more questions. “How do you tell if you're good at it?” After all, nobody goes around saying "I want Phil on my project because he names things well." More likely they say something like "I want Phil on my project because he's been successful before" or "I want Phil on my project because he's up on all the latest technology."

Wait a minute. Keeping up is hard work keeping up and there are only so many hours in the day. Could the real story be that I am successful in spite of being a step behind the latest tech craze because I name better than the ultra-geek who is up on the latest thing? Thankfully, I fell asleep in that uncomfortable seat before this thought went too far.

Now that I’m back home, I guess I have no excuse for continuing to think about this whole “naming thing.” With all the ethnic diversity in the software business, is this an area where aspiring I/T Architects from other cultures (than mine) might have trouble picking the perfect name for others to grasp immediately? My guess is probably "yes" but I'm no cultural anthropologist or cognitive psychologist or anything like that. (Incidentally, my architect-friend who complimented me on my choice of words "victim" and "perpetrator" grew up in Brazil.) If the recipient of my architecture documents is from a different culture than mine, does that make me the one at a disadvantage? Again, my professional instinct says the answer is "yes" but I can’t prove it. Is naming well a skill that almost any technically inclined person can learn? Or is it a gift? Is there a "naming gene" that predisposes me to compete at a higher level in the software business "naming olympics?" Do I name well because of how God wired my brain or because of my unique combination of life experiences? Or both? I wish I knew.

In conclusion, I believe I have convinced myself that “naming well” is indeed an essential but unrecognized skill of an I/T Architect... and I am grateful to have this small advantage to keep me gainfully employed a little longer. :-) I’m not sure I know how to teach someone else to “name well” but I know a good name when I hear it. I invite your comments on this topic.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

A Culture of Innovation? Or NOT?

2006-01-25T17:57:00.001-08:00

By any measure, IBM is a huge corporation. With around 300,000 employees there is a large number of really smart people covering almost any field of business or technology. As a result we inside IBM suffer from information overload. There are thousands of “communities of practice”, “centers of excellence”, and “knowledge management teams” that regularly publish zillions of pages of information in internal newsletters, intranet pages, and internal blogs,. There is simply not enough time to go through it all.

To cope, most of us who are drowning in information settle on a few sources of information that make to our “short list” of favorite sources. My post tonight comes from one on my personal “short list.”

Every so often I get an internal newsletter entitled “Consultant’s Edge” put out by Peter Andrews of our Executive Business Institute. (Regular readers of this blog may remember a previous post based on his work called “Crisis in Time, Talent, Trust and Transformation.”) I find Peter states business issues in just such a way that it makes sense to my architect brain quickly and helps me figure out how to communicate with that all important “business side” of the house.

The last “Consultant’s Edge” had to do with corporate culture as it relates to innovation. With his permission (Thanks Peter!), I would like to share a diagnostic quiz he developed to help executives assess how their company innovates (or doesn’t innovate). I think any good I/T Architect can see the wisdom in this diagnostic immediately. You’ll see your business users, customers, and clients in almost every word.

Defining innovation within an organization

For the first set of questions below, you may mark down as many answers as apply, writing down A, B, C, D and/or E. At the end, count up how many of each letter you have recorded for questions 1 through 6.

Question 1: What is the perspective of your organization on innovation?

A. Innovation needs to make a return-on-investment contribution this quarter

B. Innovation should continually and reliably improve our offerings and follow a known, accepted process

C. Our innovations include adopting the best ideas in our industry

D. We believe in getting our innovations from everywhere, even if it means we must adapt and re-envision them from other industries

E. Innovation from us should catch everyone with surprise and should occasionally disrupt competitors

It’s not unusual to be able to poke into the corners of your organization and find people who hold all of these perspectives. That’s fine, but generalize which style fits best. The second question is a bit more challenging because it goes from belief to action – specifically, measurement.

Question 2: How do you measure innovation?

A. Innovation proves itself quarterly with standard business measures related to profits, growth and market share

B. Our innovations start from a solid business case, and then must achieve standard milestones along the formal innovation process

C. We measure our innovation by comparing ourselves with the best in our industry

D. In addition to maintaining a solid track record over the years of contributions to the business through innovation, we use specific measures of how we are viewed by the public and the media vs. other innovative organizations

E. We look at our stock price, the requests from others for advice on how to innovate, who wants to partner with us and whom we have disrupted with our innovations

Let’s push things a bit further and look at the results of your activities. Let’s look at the innovations themselves.

Question 3: What do successful innovations for you actually look like?

A. The project gets done on time and delivers the business results we committed to

B. Our offerings are constantly being improved

C. We are quickly able to match any innovations by our competition

D. We have our share of important “firsts” in the marketplace

E. We change how success is measured in our marketplace and our innovations make us the unqualified leaders

Now we’ll shift to an outside perspective, one of the most important ones.

Question 4: What do investors expect of your organization?

A. Our investors expect steady performance, but do not expect much, if any, growth

B. Our investors expect us to fulfill our plans and to grow as well as our market

C. Our investors push us for growth, and we sometimes please them

D. Our investors are focused on our steady growth and improving market share

E. We offer our investors lots of sizzle, backed up by dramatic successes

Now, some of those questions touch indirectly on the investors’ view. That’s intentional. In general, investors looking for achievement do not like you to take too many risks with their money. More and more, they want you to perform within a time period that really puts the pressure on, like the next quarter. But with the right story and a good history, they’ll accept, and maybe even welcome, a longer view. Of course, that view needs to be balanced against what your competitors are up to, which brings us to our next question.

Question 5: In the context of innovation, how would you describe your relationship with competitors?

A. Competitors often throw us off balance, force us to change our plans and sometimes make us miss our financial targets

B. Our competitors often beat us to market and take share

C. Our competitors respect us and know we can match them in most instances

D. Our competitors follow our moves closely and are frequently forced to follow where we lead

E. Often, organizations are dismayed to discover we are their competitors

When we talk about competitors, it’s tough to give an honest answer. We are doing a quick diagnostic here, but you’ll need to move to real business intelligence and a good set of measures to get a more quantifiable view of where you stand versus competitors. Our last question is one that pulls together the others, in a way. But it’s worth asking.

Question 6: What is your organization’s reputation as an innovator?

A. Our organization is thought of as dependable and reliable, but not exciting

B. Our organization is important within its marketplace, but not looked to for trends

C. We are considered to be a competent organization that validates new trends

D. Our organization is looked to for leadership

E. We are lethal to competitors, great to partner with, and people never know what we are going to do next

Really looking at the content of each question and discussing it with your team should lead to some insights and maybe even a sense of the opportunities before you. In the meantime, count up how many of each letter you put down. Each of them point to a specific kind of innovation that has credence within the enterprise you are taking a look at. Here are the kinds of innovation that inspired the questions:

A. Innovation is changing something for the better within our organization

B. Innovation is making incremental improvements within our products and services

C. Innovation is adopting the best practices for our marketplace

D. Innovation is doing something that is new to our market

E. Innovation is breaking into or disrupting marketplaces

If you have three or more A’s, the first kind of innovation is probably happening. If you have three or more B’s, innovation includes incremental improvements to products and services. And so on. You may have all five of these kinds of innovation going on within the organization you’re looking at. Or only one. What you should have depends on your market, your strategy and your real-world business situation. The important thing is to get a more realistic view of what is actually going on and to make sure this is broadly understood.

Identifying existing innovation capabilities

No matter what innovation means, it can only be successful if the capabilities to support it are available. In general, the more challenging the innovation is and the broader the portfolio of innovation efforts, the more capabilities you’ll need. Here is another set of questions to get a start at both assessing and thinking about innovation capabilities.

Innovations are done by people, so that’s the starting point. For questions 7 through 11, record your answers using the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and/or 5.

Question 7: What kind of people does your organization have?

1. Our people know their roles and generally execute with experience and competence

2. Our people are great at doing analysis on new projects, then making sure they stay with the plan and achieve expected results

3. Our people work out the details, but are willing to make corrections mid-project and to take on some uncertainty

4. Our people work on a variety of low and high risk projects, but they all include those who are willing to try new things and push the limits

5. Our people are always looking for the big opportunity and everyone (even our clients) is an innovator

And innovations are never done in a vacuum. They are always tied to real world needs and possibilities.

Question 8: How does your organization detect opportunities for innovation?

1. We watch to see how competitors are getting business value

2. We listen to our customers and pay attention to the ideas our innovators have for which a good business case can be built

3. We scan our industry annually for best practices

4. We look far and wide for good ideas and are particularly driven by innovation successes that are related to our capabilities and our market, even if they come from another industry

5. We not only want the best we can come up with, we want the best innovations possible, so we provide forums for ideas and opportunities for action that include our people, our clients, researchers, suppliers and even competitors

But it’s not just about the payoff. Every innovation effort must be considered against the possibility of failure.

Question 9: How do you view the risk presented by innovation?

1. We manage risk by limiting activities and punishing failure

2. Adherence to our process limits our risk, as does the careful monitoring of milestone achievement

3. We are comfortable with a limited range of risks for different kinds of innovation projects, but look for a record of proven benefits

4. We always include high risk (but high potential) projects among several options in a managed portfolio of innovation efforts because our leadership understands the value of leading our market

5. If the possible benefits are high enough, we’ll bet the company

The ultimate reality check on capabilities in a business is funding. Where does the money come from and how reliable is it? Funding is an action that speaks much louder than any vision statement.

Question 10: How do you fund innovation?

1. Every innovation project must compete with all other projects and show higher value in our budgeting process

2. We have an annual process where research and development organizations get a set percent, then allocate according to our roadmap and commitments

3. We always ensure that some of our funding goes to strategic projects aimed at our maintaining our leadership position

4. Funding for each project depends on the criteria established for its place in the portfolio, and we continually rebalance our portfolio of innovation efforts to maintain an aggressive posture

5. We dedicate all the resources that are needed to ensure the success of our high-impact innovation projects

Finally, there needs to be a process for getting the innovation done. And for any broad portfolio facing dynamic situations, there may need to be many processes.

Question 11: How does innovation get done in your organization?

1. We identify the innovation and manage the same way we would any other important program

2. We have a standard process in place to identify opportunities for improvement, select them, develop them and introduce them to our offerings

3. We have more than one formal way to bring innovation ideas forward and make them happen, depending on the goals

4. Our innovations have been realized through a variety of pathways, both informal and formal

5. We provide time and resources to actively encourage our people to get new things started, then provide opportunities for them to move things along informally before they are finally introduced into formal pathways

That completes a quick and dirty gap analysis of the capabilities available for the innovations to which organizations aspire. Below, the dots between the two are connected, and some labels are provided for the specific capabilities implied by the questions.

A. Innovation is changing something for the better within our organization – so you need “1’s”: Project management, measurement, relevant skill/talent and leadership

B. Innovation is making incremental improvements in my products and services – so you need “2’s”: Planning, defined development process and technology transfer

C. Innovation is adopting the best practices for our marketplace – so you need “3’s”: Business intelligence, strategy, integration and a flexible business model

D. Innovation is doing something that is new to our market – so you need “4’s”: Risk management, research and portfolio management

E. Innovation is disrupting my marketplace – so you need “5’s”: Creativity, communities and informal processes

Evaluating the innovation climate: Motivating people

Developing or obtaining these capabilities is hard work and requires the focused and coordinated efforts of management. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. Even with all the capabilities in place, there still needs to be a good climate for innovation – specifically for the innovations that are desired. Five final questions provide a quick check on the current climate.

Again, innovation begins with people and what they need to be motivated. For questions 12 through 16, record your answers using the lowercase letters a, b, c, d and/or e.

Question 12: What rewards does your organization provide for innovation?

a. Everyone in our organization can name an innovator who left or was pushed out

b. Those who successfully improve our offerings are given bonuses on an annual basis

c. We reward inventors with new patents and those who help us implement new, strategic projects successfully

d. We have a variety of rewards at many levels for those who invent, discover new possibilities, adapt innovations to new situations, nobly fail and help their teams achieve milestones that are appropriate for the kinds of projects they are working on

e. Our organization shares the successes and learns from failures, but we create millionaires every year

The innovators need to be able to team together, often across the organization.

Question 13: How would you describe the status of informal networks and processes in your organization?

a. We don’t discourage camaraderie, especially during holidays, but going outside our established areas or processes is frowned upon

b. We expect people’s primary allegiance to be to their teams and we have good formal process for them to get their work done

c. We are encourage informal communications by moving people into different business units so they can build their networks

d. We always make sure there is some extra time and opportunity for experimentation, and our people have communities of practice and some opportunities specifically designed to encourage cross-organizational conversations

e. Informal communities are where most of our key innovations get their start and we have lots of routes – both formal and informal – to get new projects off the ground

Question 14: How does your organization respond to change?

a. We are reluctant to change, do so slowly and only with difficulty

b. Since most of our changes are introduced gradually, through a well-recognized process, we have little difficulty

c. We have one or more big changes each year and we rely on change management techniques (e.g., leadership, communications) to get us through

d. Our changes are not entirely predictable so we work aggressively at getting the right people involved and devoting resources to manage change

e. We depend on each person in our organization to be ready for change, and this is supported by a great track record in leading change and benefiting as an organization from successful change

Question 15: How would you describe the culture of your organization?

a. We have established processes and rules and our people shouldn’t violate them

b. People know what is expected of them and they collaborate well across the organization through familiar interlock processes

c. We can move people to other business units for projects without major disruptions; competence is celebrated

d. Our people are primarily dedicated to the success of the whole organization, rather than their business units, and we have matrix management and formal communities to help support that

e. We look messy and have lots of tough discussions across the organization, but we have basic belief, a common vision and strong, organic communities that keep us working together.

Question 16: What kind of customers does your organization have?

a. Our customers are low growth, so they mainly push for cost savings

b. Our customers are successful, but they don’t include the industry leaders

c. Our customers expect us to be as good as our competitors and to provide dependable roadmaps for adoption of any new technologies

d. Our customers include a significant number who look to partner with us to do things that are new to our industries

e. Our customers are also our partners and they have high expectations that we will create the next generation of offerings

These last five questions help you do a simple analysis of the readiness of your climate for innovation:

A. Innovation is changing something for the better in my organization – so you need “a’s”: Adherence to processes, focus on results and clear rules

B. Innovation is making incremental improvements in my products and services – so you need “b’s”: Well-defined roles, attention to deadlines, evaluations that are complete and fair and an emphasis on working well within your team

C. Innovation is adopting the best practices for my marketplace – so you need “c’s”: Enthusiasm for change, opportunities for working across the organization, rewards for adaptiveness

D. Innovation is doing something that is new to my market – so you need “d’s”: Tolerance of risk, flexibility, open communications with clients and suppliers, rewards for inventiveness

E. Innovation is disrupting my marketplace – so you need “e’s”: Celebration of rebels and honest failures, rewards for many roles, appreciation of talent, vibrant informal communities

It would not be fair to pigeonhole any one company into any of these styles. However, since organizations are largely driven by their marketplace, some industries are more prone to one model versus another.

Just to help you map the innovation culture styles:

A’s – Regulated utilities may be appropriate

B’s – Airlines may be a good example here. They often try to lead or quickly follow changes in the marketplaces. However, some are more successful and there are clear leaders and followers

C’s – There are a wide spectrum of auto companies but a few obvious industry leader fit into this style

D’s – High tech’s typically fit here and a few leading consumer oriented firms jump to mind as they continually lead and re-invent themselves

E’s – Very few organizations fit here and it would only be unfair to point out leaders like Google (but you already discovered that yourself by taking the quiz)

Going from intent to outcome is never easy. Aligning the climate of your organization to enable innovation is difficult and may take time. Culture is notoriously difficult for organizations to change.

The questions above, however, provide a first step toward understanding what your organization really expects from innovation. And, discovering the gaps – between what the relevant capabilities and climate are and what each needs to be – can be a key step toward the required outcomes.

I must admit that after reading this the first time I wondered what my own level of innovation was. How would I fit in at some small startup? How would I fit in at a "disruptive" company like Google? Is IBM considered "disruptive" to its competitors because of its innovation? or just is size (read $$$). Comments are welcome and encouraged.

Please check out the “Future Value” class that Peter Andrews teaches for additional information and more of his business insight! Check it out so he'll continue to let me "borrow" his stuff for my blog!

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

ESB Patterns that "Click"

2006-01-24T19:47:00.000-08:00

One of the highlights of my trip to IBM Software University 2006 in Las Vegas last week was a session led by Marc-Thomas Schmidt, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. He presented some architectural patterns which just “clicked” with me and I hope will “click” with any of my readers who might also be digging into Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the concepts behind an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in particular. With his permission, I will share some of the concepts he presented with you. Click on the embedded graphics to get a larger, more readable view.

What is an ESB
With an ESB, rather than interacting directly, participants in a service interaction communicate through a bus that provides virtualization and management features that implement and extend the core definition of SOA. The ESB provides virtualization of:

Location and Identity – participants need not know the location or identity of other participants, e.g., requesters need not be aware that a request could be serviced by any of several providers; service providers can be added or removed without disruption.

Interaction protocol or style – participants need not share the same communication protocol or interaction style; a request expressed as SOAP/HTTP may be serviced by a provider that only understands Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI). Interaction partners may chose to use one-way, request/response, asynchronous, synchronous, and publish/subscribe type interactions

Interface – requesters and providers need not agree on common interface. The ESB reconciles differences by transforming request messages into a form expected by the provider.

Qualities of (Interaction) Service (QoS) – participants declare their QoS requirements through policies which include, for example: performance and reliability, encryption of message contents, routing algorithms (e.g. to available implementations, based on workload distribution criteria, and so forth). Policies that describe the QoS requirements and capabilities of requesters and providers may be fulfilled by the services themselves or by the ESB compensating for mismatches.

As depicted in the left hand part of the picture, messages flow over a bus that interconnects a variety of communicating participants. Some participants invoke services offered by others; other participants publish information to interested consumers.

Interposing the bus between participants provides the opportunity to modulate their interaction through a logical construct called a mediation. Mediations operate on messages in-flight between requesters and providers.

The basic ESB pattern abstracts application components into a set of services that interact via a bus rather than through direct, point-to-point communications. A given service can be a provider, a requester, or both. The ESB provides interaction points where services put messages on the bus, or take them off. It applies mediations to messages in flight and guarantees QoS to these managed interactions.

Patterns for building ESB-based solutions are classified as: interaction patterns to enable service interaction points to dispatch messages to or receive messages from the bus, mediation patterns to enable the manipulation of message exchanges, and deployment patterns to support solution deployment into a federated infrastructure.

Interaction patterns

The ESB enables endpoints to interact in their native interaction mode via the bus. It supports a variety of endpoint protocols and interaction styles. A few examples of interaction patterns include request / response, request / multi-response or event propagation:

Mediation patterns
Mediation patterns manipulate messages in flight on the bus (requests or events). Messages dispatched by a requester are transformed into messages understood by a semantically matching but structurally incompatible provider selected from a set of potential endpoints.

Complex patterns
Mediation and interaction patterns can be combined to realize more complex patterns.
For example, a protocol switch followed by a transformation can implement the Canonical Adapter pattern in which the set of messages and business objects used by all parties is normalized to a canonical format.

Deployment patterns
Solution Administrators have several choices for ESB topologies. Some common examples are shown below.

Global ESB: all services share one namespace and each service provider is visible to every service requester across a heterogeneous, centrally-administered, geographically distributed environment. Used by departments or small enterprises, where all the services are likely to be applicable throughout the organisation.

Directly Connected ESB: a common service registry makes all of the services in several independent ESB installations visible. Used where services are provided and managed by a line of business but made available enterprise-wide.

Brokered ESB: bridge services that selectively expose requesters or providers to partners in other domains regulate sharing among multiple ESB installations that each manages its own namespace. Service interactions between ESBs are facilitated via a common broker that implements the bridge services. Used by departments which develop and manage their own services, but share a few of them, or selectively access services provided across the enterprise.

Federated ESB: one "master" ESB to which several "dependent" ESBs are federated. Service consumers and providers connect to the master or to a dependent ESB to access services throughout the network. Used by organizations that want to federate a set of moderately autonomous departments under the umbrella of a supervising department.

I throw in some additional graphics which seem to resonate with me (forgive me for not explaining them all in great detail) but I'll ask you to probe further at an article co-authored by Marc: SOA programming model for implementing Web services, Part 4: An introduction to the IBM Enterprise Service Bus.

High Points and Challenges Regarding SOA and Other Tidbits from IBM Software University

2006-01-23T17:35:00.000-08:00

The “Best Stuff” from IBM Software University 2006 (in my humble opinion)

IBM Software Group I/T Architects were almost giddy with delight about IBM’s acquisition of DataPower, a manufacture of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) “appliances” used to “speed and secure” Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). There was much buzz about how this “ESB in a box” would be a great way to put ESB technology and web services gateway technology in particular in corporate DMZ’s. I think it is a great convenience also for smaller companies interested in a plug in device vs. managing a software stack on a traditional server.

Some great ESB pattern work I’ll cover in a future post. (link to left added after the fact when new post added)

Service Component Architecture (SCA) and how it is used to assemble services into composite applications.

A good discussion of “Simplicity” in our solutions vs. being “Simplistic”.

The Architect “Jam” with the top Software Architects from the IBM Architect Software Board, DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus, and Rational.

New collaboration between the IBM Software Group labs and field practitioners.

IBM acquisition of PureEdge and the incorporation of this technology for e-Forms into IBM Workplace Forms. This offers great technology to get closer to the “paperless office” environment and eliminate the need for optical character recognition (OCR) of paper forms and faxes.

On the methodology front, a plug in for the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to support SOA projects.

New research from MIT showing correlation between the business agility provided by I/T investments and business value generated.

IBM acquisition of BowStreet technology and its use in “dashboard” type displays in portal applications.

Improvements in packaging that allows WebSphere Process Server version 6.0.1 to be installed from a single CD and have all the components required to run sample Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process flows.

Improvements in the new WebSphere Business Modeler to include a swim lane editor and a business measures editor.

SOA Challenges Still Out There (also my humble opinion)

Governance of SOA in the budget and political realities of our customers. This includes a lack of shared funding models for shared services. (See my previous post on the funding topic)

Relative complexity of the software stack required to implement a full-featured SOA within a corporation including ESB, identity management, security, service aggregation, process choreography, etc.

Semantic interoperability between web services in large organization. “Does a purchase order service mean the same thing to me as it does to you?” This is closely related to the governance issue above. "How do we keep from proliferating a large number of similar but slightly different web services?"

Favorite Joke Heard:

"Do you know the difference between a computer salesman and a car salesman?.... The car salesman knows when he's lieing."

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Incredible Web Services Performance Achieved

2006-01-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

I ran into a co-worker I had not seen in a while last week at IBM Software University 2006. He has a major US Bank as his customer. He told me how they were pushing the envelope of web services performance by running the WebSphere software stack on their mainframe using multiple (I think it was 13 of them) zSeries Application Assist Processors (zAAP) for the mainframe Java virtual machines. They just ran a performance test for a web service enabled IMS legacy system transaction. (SOAP messages over HTTPS in through the web/java/JCA/IMS layer and back) The workload was driven by the WebSphere Workload Simulator, recently renamed the Rational Performance Tester for zOS. The ran 1000 transactions per second while achieving a 0.1 second average response time. Granted, the bank does not have this in production but this sounds like a big step forward in web services performance to me.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Password Protected Toothbrush

2006-01-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.

Clifford Stoll

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Real World RFID Application in Production Now

2006-01-19T21:07:00.000-08:00

Last year at Software University, IBM used bar code scanners at each training session as a way of taking attendance. As we entered each classroom, we would have to let someone shot an optical scanner at the bar code printed on the badge we had to wear around our necks. While I suppose a manager who suspected an employee of spending all day in the casino and skipping class could have eventually found out how many classes the employee's badge was scanned at, I think the real purpose was to track which classes and which types of classes were most popular. It was also a way to compare pre-registration attendance with the number of people who actually showed up.

This year, there were no optical scanners at the classrooms. Instead, we were each issued a name tag like badge we were to wear around our neck. Behind each name tag was an RFID. IBM hired a subcontractor to errect RFID receivers at doorways. Entrances to classrooms, the Solution Village, and the dining areas. Dining areas were not part of last year's optical scanning so I suppose this gathered data on how many people rushed to eat immediately after class and how many trickled in later after taking phone calls and checking email.

RFID at the breakfast dining area at the MGM Grand. I guess this is a way to answer how many people got up to eat vs. how many were out too late gambling the night before. This would be useful I suppose for planning how many meals to buy next year.

If you peal of the name tag to expose the RFID chip and antenna, this is what it looks like.

This is a zoom on the RFID chip and the connection to the antenna elements.

A close up of the antenna used at entrances.

RFID receiving antennas were also hidden inside these lighted signs at the entrances.

RFID antennas were also at the entrance to each class or event where employees were supposed to pre-register.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

IBM Software University 2006 in Pictures

2006-01-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

I've been staying at the MGM Grand. Here's the view out my hotel window (taken through the glass) at about 6:30 am this morning. That's the New York New York Casino across the way.

Here's another angle showing the Tropicana, Excalibur, Mandalay Bay, etc.

One of several entrances to Software University.

Lunch with 10,000 of my closest friends from Software Group.

The Solution Village where all of IBM's brands and business partners are available for discussion, demos, product literature, etc.

A minor diversion... inside the Canal Shops area of the Venetian Hotel and Casino.

Got to leave tomorrow...

Copyright © 2005 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Exhilarating, Humbling, and Invigorating - IBM Software University 2006 in Las Vegas - Day 3

2006-01-19T00:41:00.000-08:00

Being here in Las Vegas with my 10,000 closest IBM Software Group friends has been exhilarating, humbling, and invigorating.

It has been exhilarating because there have been so many opportunities to learn. I believe in the opening session they stated that there were over 3200 individual sessions to choose from. Granted, not all of them really apply to me as an I/T Architect but the sheer number of choices is staggering. (Warning-Radical Honesty to follow!) I might as well admit it, I also enjoy the opportunity to hear the insights and opinions of people who are influential. Tuesday, I got to sit in on an assembly of arguably the most influential software architects in the world. How many people can say that sat in a room with the head of the IBM Software Architecture Board and the top technical guru of each of the IBM software brands and the leader of our Business Consulting Services SOA team?... and to hear each of their opinions about the issues surrounding Service Oriented Architectures? How often do I get to hear the Chief Architect of the WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus product? I’m glad my management decided to be one of the 300 who got to join this party.

It was humbling because the exhilaration described above came at the price of realizing how much I don’t know and how many really cool and influential projects are going on. My projects are important in their own way but... truth be told... in my work I stand upon the shoulders of giants.

I must be a high-touch type person because I have found the face-to-face interactions here invigorating. In the consulting business in IBM these days we don’t get to have much time to meet face-to-face with our own internal management or other members of our consulting practice who are working with different clients from our own. We get to know our clients a whole lot better than the IBMers. This week has been a nice change, however. Tuesday, I had breakfast a Software Group Vice President in our WebSphere brand. I ran into an IBM Distinguished Engineer on the shuttle bus yesterday. I had breakfast today with a Business Consulting Services Partner and Associate Partner in the Retail Industry. Today for lunch I got to talk with the Enterprise Application Development Practice Leaders for the SouthEast, Central, and West regions. We had a spirited discussion on how the changes in our consulting business are affecting the careers of our technical practitioners (I/T Specialists and I/T Architects). I renewed an acquaintance with the architect who heads our Rational brand product skills enablement. I got to talk to the architect who is building some tooling around some of our design patterns and best practices. One of my official mentors and I got to meet face-to-face for the first time after talking on the phone for about a year. I ran into an old friend who is now the lead IBM Architect supporting on of the 10 largest banks in the US. One my current interests is application development around the business problem of product warranty. I got to eat dinner tonight with a BCS Partner knowledgeable in this area . This is all goodness and not easily reproducible in the “distance learning” favored by corporate bean counters.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Greetings from Software University in Las Vegas

2006-01-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

In this era of constant corporate pressure to cut costs, it has been my good fortune to have been selected as one of a handful of IBM Global Services people to tag along with 10,000 of my closest friends from IBM Software Group to the training event IBM Software University 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The window from my hotel room in the MGM Grand looks out across the Las Vegas Strip at the New York New York, Excalibur, Tropicana, and Mandalay Bay casino hotels.  I have an obstructed view of the Luxor pyramid and the top few floors of Monte Carlo as well.

The opening session for all 10,000 of us included some door prizes (Unfortunately, I did not win the iPod Nano.), some high-tech entertainment, a talk by Steve Mills, more talk by Mike Borman, and an inspirational speaker/mountain climber/explorer named Jamie Clarke.  If you detected a correlation between the trials and tribulations of scaling Mount Everest and the trials and tribulations of taking on the competition everyday in the software industry, you were dead on.  Jamie Clarke was great and I’d recommend him to speak at any corporate event.

I have one more huge session in just a half an hour that includes all of us here from the Americas.  However, the rest of my week will be spent with my I/T architect peers.  The primary topic is likely to be service oriented architectures (SOA) and all the issues associated with making it a reality in world of our clients.  I look forward to the interaction with old colleagues and for the chance to make new acquaintances with like interests.  It should be a great week!

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Doubts

2006-01-12T17:32:00.000-08:00

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

Unknown

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

I've Been Promoted to Chief Process Officer

2006-01-09T20:05:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across some interesting reading in the blogsphere recently related to business process management (BPM) and the associated culture changes which seem to trump any technology issues. Take Phil Gilbert’s blog Perspectives in Process . He has an article “
Is it Time for a Chief Process Officer?” where he makes a few interesting points.

“These factors combine to mean that the complexity of running your business is
way up, even as the old costs of doing what you do are going way down. It's less
costly - on a direct basis - to build something in China and ship it here than
it is to build it here. But guess what, it's a lot more complicated. And if you
don't get a grip on these new complications, you will eat up in costs and in bad
service everything you wanted to save!

Process, then, is the word we use
today to describe "getting a handle on the complexity, putting programs in place
to reduce the complexity, and scaling our ability to consume the supply chain
and deliver to the channel in as easy a way as possible." The companies that are
able to do this - scale the integration and complexity - will win.
....
Because of this, "process" becomes the business. A business is no
longer defined by its goods and services as much as it is defined by its
capabilities. Is Wal-Mart in the, um, what business is Wal-Mart in? What do you
call a business that provides retail hard goods, medical services and banking?
In the end, the products don't define Wal-Mart as much as their capabilities
define them.
....

So now, back to the original question: Is it time
for the CPO? Absolutely. The only other person who is capable of leading such a
shift (or who should be tasked with leading such a shift) is the CEO. So if the
CEO isn't ready to take this on, then some, one person should be designated as
the person to move the company's capabilities into the limelight.”

Another interesting read is in James McGovern’s blog called Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership He has an article “Recent Thoughts on BPM” in which he takes a few shots at Phil Gilbert’s notion of a Chief Process Officer and asks why he is

“encouraging yet another ivory tower role be created
within the enterprise. Curious if he doesn't think that this is already covered
by folks who practice real enterprise architecture? If I were a vendor though, I
too would encourage creation of such a role as it makes it a lot easier for me
to identify whom to sell to...”

Incidentally, if you don’t like James McGovern’s ideas on Enterprise
Architecture, you may be amused by the assortment of completely unrelated
photographs and political cartoons mixed in with all the architecture
discussion. Conservatives beware, most of his political commentary in the margins is often on the liberal side... but his blog is never boring.

Phil Gilbert responded to some of McGovern’s points in a second blog article “A Chief Process Officer.” In it, he distinguishes he idea from an “ivory tower” position as follows:

”The single biggest reason process-centric projects fail today is bad
governance. Processes span functions and when optimizing a given process,
political disputes arise, and there's no single owner that has the power to
drive the project to completion. Something that is good for the organization is,
basically, killed because someone's power would have been
diminished. The answer is not another reorg! The answer is to drive a
process-based culture, but in the short-term (read: the real world) what this
means is that someone will need the power to make this stuff happen. You can't
change culture without changing reality. I propose that this means - in
practical terms, not in "ivory tower" terms - someone with clout has to be
driving the process initiative.”

All this talk reminds me of previous post on my blog, “The Role of the Business Transformation Architect” in which I quote a colleague of mine Douglas McDavid, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Is a Business Transformation Architect basically a Chief Process Officer with political clout?

Oh, I was just kidding about getting promoted.... but I'd take it if they gave it to me.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

More Fun With License Agreements and SOA

2006-01-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

How many of us I/T Architects actually read and care about all that legal jargon associated with software license agreements? How many times have you just clicked “Yes, I Accept” without really reading what you agreed to? I know I'm guilty and I expect 98% of you are too.

We all may have to start calling our friendly neighborhood intellectual poperty (IP) attorney. Check out Chris Lindquist’s blog TechLinkLetter on the CIO.com website and his article “GPL 3.0: Open Source Renews Its License” too see how rumored changes in GPL 3.0 might impact anyone using open source software in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Here are a few quotes:

“Second, and potentially much more challenging, is the possibility that GPL 3 will impose its licensing conditions on GPL-based software that is not physically distributed, but is exercised by remote execution. Specifically, the rumor is that the redistribution requirements will be imposed on GPL software used as part of a “Software as a Service” implementation. This means, for example, if an application service provider uses modified GPL code in its product, it would have to make the modified code available free to the public.

And remember that “viral” thing? That means if the modified GPL code is commingled with the ASP’s proprietary code, the whole thing could potentially becomes GPL. There’s no doubt that some software-as-a-service vendors will get caught up in this license requirement, should it come to pass.

And there’s another organization that could get tangled: yours. If you are one of the many IT organizations moving to service-oriented architectures (SOA), you are delivering software as a service. If part of your software stack is GPL, any changes to the license could affect your obligation to release your source code publically.”

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Skewering of the Semantic Web

2006-01-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

See Clay Shirky's article, "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview" for a real skewering of the Semantic Web initiative. Some quotes:

The Semantic Web's Proposed Uses #

Dodgson's syllogisms actually demonstrate the limitations of the form, a pattern that could be called "proof of no concept", where the absurdity of an illustrative example undermines the point being made. So it is with the Semantic Web. Consider the following, from the W3C's own site:

Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web? A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller's own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/]

One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.

This example sets the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.

All the actual complexities of matching readers with books are waved away in the first sentence: "You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want." Who knew it was so simple? Meanwhile, the trivial operation of paying for it gets a lavish description designed to obscure the fact that once you've found a book for sale, using a credit card is a pretty obvious next move. (boldface mine)
....

From time to time, proselytizers of the Semantic Web try to give it a human face: For example, we may want to prove that Joe loves Mary. The way that we came across the information is that we found two documents on a trusted site, one of which said that ":Joe :loves :MJS", and another of which said that ":MJS daml:equivalentTo :Mary". We also got the checksums of the files in person from the maintainer of the site.
To check this information, we can list the checksums in a local file, and then set up some FOPL rules that say "if file 'a' contains the information Joe loves mary and has the checksum md5:0qrhf8q3hfh, then record SuccessA", "if file 'b' contains the information MJS is equivalent to Mary, and has the checksum md5:0892t925h, then record SuccessB", and "if SuccessA and SuccessB, then Joe loves Mary". [http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/]

You may want to read that second paragraph again, to savor its delicious mix of minutia and cluelessness.

Anyone who has ever been 15 years old knows that protestations of love, checksummed or no, are not to be taken at face value. And even if we wanted to take love out of this example, what would we replace it with? The universe of assertions that Joe might make about Mary is large, but the subset of those assertions that are universally interpretable and uncomplicated is tiny.
...
Meta-data is Not A Panacea #

The Semantic Web runs on meta-data, and much meta-data is untrustworthy, for a variety of reasons that are not amenable to easy solution. (See for example Doctorow, Pilgrim, Shirky.) Though at least some of this problem comes from people trying to game the system, the far larger problem is that even when people publish meta-data that they believe to be correct, we still run into trouble.

Consider the following assertions:
Count Dracula is a Vampire
Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
Transylvania is a region of Romania
Vampires are not real

You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real. That's wrong, of course, but the wrongness is nowhere reflected in these statements.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

The Internet is Broken

2005-12-31T05:40:00.000-08:00

I would direct you to some intersting and insightful comments on the state of the Internet infrastructure by MIT's David D. Clark in

The Internet Is Broken

The Net's basic flaws cost firms billions, impede innovation, and threaten national security. It's time for a clean-slate approach, says MIT's David D. Clark.

By David Talbot

Here are some quotes to get your attention

In his office within the gleaming-stainless-steel and orange-brick jumble of MIT's Stata Center, Internet elder statesman and onetime chief protocol architect David D. Clark prints out an old PowerPoint talk. Dated July 1992, it ranges over technical issues like domain naming and scalability. But in one slide, Clark points to the Internet's dark side: its lack of built-in security.

In others, he observes that sometimes the worst disasters are caused not by sudden events but by slow, incremental processes -- and that humans are good at ignoring problems. "Things get worse slowly. People adjust," Clark noted in his presentation. "The problem is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants."

.....

Indeed, for the average user, the Internet these days all too often resembles New York's Times Square in the 1980s. It was exciting and vibrant, but you made sure to keep your head down, lest you be offered drugs, robbed, or harangued by the insane. Times Square has been cleaned up, but the Internet keeps getting worse, both at the user's level, and -- in the view of Clark and others -- deep within its architecture.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

How to Become More Creative in Solving Problems

2005-12-30T11:48:00.000-08:00

Over my 20+ year career, I have had the opportunity to observe many different co-workers in fields as diverse as computer programming (business), computer programming (scientific & engineering), solid state physics, antennas, digital logic design, systems integration, customer service, accounting, web design, mathematics, banking, insurance, manufacturing, marketing, databases, acousto-optical signal processing, microwave electronics, management consulting, package-enabled business transformation, radar, security, and enterprise architecture. There are more to the list but I won’t bore you.

It seems that no matter what field, there are always a few people who stand above the rest as being really creative and innovative in the way the solve problems. They’re the ones you go to when you have a really intractable problem.

The solution they select may not always be elegant in the academic sense. Sometimes the “problem” is the project schedule and the solution really needed is something which can be done quickly. Sometimes the solution isn't a technical one either. Perhaps there is a political solution or an idea can be "sold" differently.

I find myself often wondering “Why do some people come up with more creative approaches than others?” and “Is this kind of creative problem solving something innate (something we are born with, a gift) or is this a skill that almost anyone can learn?”

I suspect the answer is a little of both. For the creativity I was born with, I am truly grateful.

As for developing my creativity as a skill.... I am not an expert on how the brain works, but I have noticed that my most creative ideas come at times when I am exposed to new ideas from others. When I hear them express problems or solutions in a way different from mine, it gets me out of a rut. It makes me exercise new and/or different brain cells.

For example, I filed a patent application on an idea I had while listening to someone else’s presentation at a large IBM technical conference. I had this burst of insight when I looked at a particular block diagram in the presentation. As the guy talked, I immediately thought “His diagram is missing the XXX !” (where the XXX was my idea, not to be talked about here)

For any management who might be reading, this (perhaps unoriginal) observation of mine doesn’t bode well for all the emphasis on distance learning which saves money by eliminating travel costs but greatly reduces the chance of accidental discovery of new people and ideas!

I would say that it is probably good for our creativity if we allow ourselves the opportunity to “hang out” with people who are really different from us occasionally. This may mean “different” because they have different areas of expertise (see my first paragraph), personalities, personal backgrounds, employment histories, motivations, hobbies, etc. Me being a conservative preacher’s kid from the Bible Belt, I must admit that I learned a great deal about Object-Oriented Analysis and Design from a guy who liked to hit strip clubs in the evening after work. :-) (If you’re reading this - you know who you are... and thanks for the great mentoring!) Therefore, I recommend developing personal relationships with people on all extremes.

I have gotten similar bursts of inspiration when reading material that is off-the-wall or outside my area of expertise. I had some frequent flier miles on an airline I don’t travel very often that I used to subscribe to some different magazine than I normally read. I found the following to be particularly “different” from my usual fare to get creative juices flowing:

Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation – This one has lots of stuff on all the cool gadgets, cool ideas, cool projects in corporate research labs, etc.

Fast Company – This one is really focused on business, motivating people, and what makes people tick. Incidentally, I first heard of this magazine during a talk given by the head of IBM Research at an IBM conference in Toronto I attended several years ago.

I can’t prove it but I think learning to play a musical instrument or learning a foreign language will also “wire” your brain to be more creative, though probably most effective if done when young.

I will end my post with a list of links which you may find thought provoking and examples of the outside-the-box kind of thinking I’ve been talking about.

Fast Company Dec 2004 The 6 Myths of Creativity

Fast Company Dec 2004 What Makes Beautiful Minds

Johns Hopkins Feb 2005 Changing Their Tune (entrepreneurship in the field of classical music?)

Wired Feb 2005 – Revenge of the Right Brain

Here’s a book I will admit to only partially reading as it is very long, but it provides a fascinating look at how we mentally name and categorize things in our native language. The book is called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. The title comes from a classification in Dyirbal, an aboriginal language of Australia. Imagine a culture where the terms women, fire, and dangerous things are thought of as "going together" ? :-)

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

The Dangers of Wikipedia

2005-12-18T17:43:00.000-08:00

It seems that I am seeing references to Wikipedia everywhere these days. The idea of tapping the expertise of millions of volunteer experts around the world to create an immense online encyclopedia is intriquing indeed. No doubt there are tons of useful information which we might otherwise not have available to us were it not for this information-age repository of knowledge. But... how do we know if the informaiton is correct? What if the volunteer was in error. What if they were just showing off?

The dirty secret is that it does happen. See a Boston Globe article "The Wiki Effect" which describes how one prominent free speech advocate found he had been listed as a suspect in the assasinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. As it turns out, the man who posted this assertion which was freely available to all for months eventually admitted it was all a hoax designed to dismay a co-worker.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Forget Business - I/T Alignment ?

2005-12-12T20:36:00.000-08:00

I found an illuminating post on I/T Architecture that proposes a view about Enterprise Architecture which is counter to the prevailing “business – I/T alignment” winds. This post called “Why Enterprise Architects should eschew IT / Business alignment“ in James McGovern’s blog “Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership” advocates approaches which are no doubt heretical to some – but makes points that have worried me for some time.

Here are some provocative quotes to get your attention:

“The phrase, IT should align with the business is commonly heard in magazines such as CIO. I have blogged sporadically on the fact that this form of hype is actually detrimental to the health of the enterprise.”

“Enterprise Architects that embrace agile methods understand that there is a chaordic balance and attempting to make everything predictable is not only limiting the possibilities of greatness but in many situations futile. Predictability as a system quality is further championed by folks who don’t write working software for a living and instead focus in on comprehensive documentation. These folks encourage practices such as Six Sigma, Eight Omega, CMM and other efforts without focusing on the real problem space; lack of innovation.”Predictability causes mediocrity. Enterprises that desire to be predictable buy the same software as their competitors, are rare to implement technology within their vertical first and prefer to let other enterprises work out all the bugs. “

“I am firm in my own belief that the recent practice of vendor consolidation may be the decline of the IT enterprise as many within our profession have outsourced their architecture via Powerpoint to vendors whose sole competency is commoditizing solutions and promoting them to your competitors.”

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Do You Want Out of Your Arranged I/T Marriage?

2005-12-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

I had gotten pretty far behind in my reading and decided to take some time to thumb through some of the trade magazines I’ve been avoiding for too long. Inside the November 2005 issue of Java Development Journal, I stumbled across something which got my I/T Architect antenna twitching.

You see, there is a side of us architects that thinks that if only our clients or organizations would devote some more resources to creating Enterprise-wide shared components, shared infrastructure, shared services, etc. life in the land of software development would be sweet. Great project success would happen in parallel as multiple teams reaped the benefits of all the smart decisions previously made.

Well Yakov Fain was able to burst my bubble and return me to reality in his article “Arranged Java Marriages” where he compares the uneasy relationship between the masses of Java developers and the architects who are tasked with centralized creation of reusable components or services or any other kind of software asset. As this arranged marriage progresses from honeymoon to adding children to fighting over the family budget, all is not always well. These arranged marriages usually take place in a culture where divorce is not an option, too.... or at least frowned upon. So the trick is, how do we architects live peaceful, productive lives with our programmer “spouses”?

How to Write Unmaintainable Code

2005-12-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

More chuckles: How to Write Unmaintainable Code

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Hillarious Look at Implications of Outsourcing

2005-11-30T19:51:00.000-08:00

I ran across a great article that will really make you think about the concept of outsourcing and the potential impact on ourselves, our work habits, the economy, and the world. You'll get a chuckle reading this very non-technical, non-I/T treatment of outsourcing through the eyes of a magazine editor. Check out My Outsourced Life by A. J. Jacobs of Esquire Magazine. Warning, there is a small amount of off-color language and a bit of male chauvinism, too. Its worth reading and a lot more fun than that the latest thought leadership on business-I/T alignment or J2EE vs. .NET web service compatibilty issues.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

My Forward Thinking Employer Wants Me to Blog !

2005-11-21T08:19:00.000-08:00

Check it out: IBM to workers: Blog away
Report: The technology company is encouraging its workers to publish to the outside world.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.