Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Brenda Michelson Yesterday, Dave Linthicum and I exchanged top cloud computing stories for June. In our exchange, Dave nominated me to succeed Vivek Kundra as US Government CIO. Are you laughing? Me too. Our podcast.
Related posts:We’re Back: Top 3 Cloud …
I’ve been on a bit of a speed, accuracy and decisioning theme over at my Active Information blog on HP Input Output.
In last week’s post, I called out an MIT Sloan Review interview that advocated data delivery speed (fast data) over data accuracy in the context of better decision-making. I agree, on the surface it appears counterintuitive.
This week, I called out a related MIT Sloan Review article that added the dimensions of attention span and context to the speed versus accuracy equation.
A one-line snippet in this second article inspired a little late night, design as you type, session for me. [Life on the road]
Anyway, check out both posts, including my “works on a whiteboard” design-stream-of-consciousness. Then, consider how you might add “a time-table for each piece of information.”
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Obama IT Czar Leaves D.C. for Harvard – Technorati IT
Setting direction is easy. Executing transformation is hard.
“A massive task and challenge awaited Mr. Kundra as he sought to change the direction of the government’s $80 billion annual Information Technology budget. In December 2010 the changes in direction were outlined in his 25 point plan to reform government IT.
Reports of his success levels vary, but no doubt Kundra stirred the pot and set a direction. Changing the direction of anything at the Federal government is not for the faint or impatient heart.”
tags: execution transformation IT government
High Scalability – High Scalability – 35+ Use Cases for Choosing Your Next NoSQL Database
“We’ve asked What The Heck Are You Actually Using NoSQL For?. We’ve asked 101 Questions To Ask When Considering A NoSQL Database. We’ve even had a webinar What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications.
Now we get to the point of considering use cases and which systems might be appropriate for those use cases.”
tags: scalability nosql
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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My post this week on HP Input Output is Data-Driven Business Innovation: That’s Progressive. The post highlights a cool use of data collection and analysis by Progressive Insurance.
I say “cool” confidently, because when I recounted the scenario to my friend Sandy Kemsley this morning, she said “that is cool”.
Check it out.
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VMware: Rethink IT: The future of cloud and NYSE Euronext’s capital markets community platform
“NYSE Technologies (a unit of NYSE Euronext) announced their new “community platform” cloud computing service today, running on vSphere and vCloud Director from VMware. The target customers for the service are capital markets organizations such as hedge funds and the trading departments of banks, with initial customers including a unit of Goldman Sachs and the hedge fund Millenium Partners.
…
NYSE’s service is innovative in several ways. NYSE Euronext is primarily known for being a financial exchange as well as a provider of market data, rather than as a cloud provider. So why start offering cloud computing? NYSE saw how it could significantly simplify and improve its customers’ competitiveness in capital markets by providing an integrated service that combined on-demand computing with access to the market (the exchanges), a low-latency secure network and instant access to data feeds. In a reversal of traditional approaches to IT, computing capacity is literally coming to the market and the data — rather than the data and market being piped to the computers.”
tags: nyse cloudcomputing capitalmarkets
5 Technologies That Will Shape the Web – IEEE Spectrum
“Today the Web is going through another reinvention, morphing into a place where our social interactions are ever more important. And the main force behind this phenomenon is, of course, Facebook, led by Zuckerberg, now a 27-year-old billionaire.
So where will the Web go next? We asked two dozen analysts, engineers, and executives to describe what technologies they think will shape our online experiences in the next several years. Their predictions could easily fill this entire issue, but we distilled their wisdom into a more palatable list of five key technologies that our sources mentioned most frequently.
We also asked six of the experts to tell us what these technologies mean for today’s dueling titans, Google and Facebook. What challenges do they face? Who’s got an advantage?”
EA: To infinity and beyond! « Adam Deane
Adam Deane employs the Toy Story characters as Enterprise Architect and (requisite) cast of doubters:
“Buzz: All this is going to change. I am Buzz Lightyear; I am the new generation of Enterprise Architects. No longer IT oriented. I’m business oriented. I come in peace.
Woody: How are you going to make a difference?
Buzz: I will create business growth instead of trying to find ways to save money. I will generate revenue. I will speed up business cycles. I will make myself indispensable to the organisation.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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I’m proud to share that Esther Schindler, a real writer and editor, invited me to contribute to her latest project, the Input | Output site, which is sponsored by HP. On Input | Output, you’ll find me in the community section, writing about one of my favorite topics: Active Information.
Active Information is the term I use to describe accelerating the transformation of data to value. From a technology perspective, Active Information covers a lot of ground, including (but not limited to) sensor/instrumentation (smart stuff), event-processing, data science, analytics, data visualization, data processing innovations and enterprise data management practices.
My first two posts are up:
McKinsey Global Institute: Big Data = Big Opportunity
Give ’em a read. Check out the full site.
[Disclosure: This is a for-pay gig. However, I’m under no obligation to write about HP, its products or services.]
Yesterday, I traded cloud stories with Dave Linthicum and Bill Russell of Blue Mountain Labs. The usual drill, we each pick 3 important stories from the prior month, keep them to ourselves until Dave presses record, and then round robin with our picks and feedback.
Last month’s top story was obvious. This month, we had to dig a little deeper. Check out the podcast.
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The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology – All Things Distributed
SOA, data management advances, cloud computing and more, in use for Amazon’s core business:
“Our technologies are almost exclusively implemented as services: bits of logic that encapsulate the data they operate on and provide hardened interfaces as the only way to access their functionality. This approach reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system. Service-oriented architecture — or SOA — is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. Thanks to a thoughtful and far-sighted team of engineers and architects, this approach was applied at Amazon long before SOA became a buzzword in the industry. Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. For example, to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer.”
“The storage systems we’ve pioneered demonstrate extreme scalability while maintaining tight control over performance, availability, and cost. To achieve their ultra-scale properties these systems take a novel approach to data update management: by relaxing the synchronization requirements of updates that need to be disseminated to large numbers of replicas, these systems are able to survive under the harshest performance and availability conditions. These implementations are based on the concept of eventual consistency.”
Drenched by the Cloud | CFOworld
The cloud is not a substitute for planning, architecture, risk management and common sense. Know what you are doing. The finger pointing here should not be at Amazon, but the decision-makers who naively delegated all control to someone else.
“Already Downing and his team have taken significant steps to ensure they are never caught like this again. “We’ve had a series of meetings here internally to review all points of failure in our cloud strategy. We’re digging deeper to find out where data is hosted and what the backup plans are for that data,” he says. He adds that he’ll be hosting the main database at an additional cloud service for redundancy – a cost he calls blatantly necessary in light of this situation.”
tags: amazon cloud management
Silicon Valley and the technology industry: The new tech bubble | The Economist
Is there a bubble? Or is the bubble conversation a bubble?
“With luck the latest web bubble will do less damage than its predecessor. In the 1990s internet euphoria caused a dramatic inflation in the price of telecoms firms, which were creating the infrastructure for the web. When internet firms’ share prices plummeted, telecoms investors suffered too. So far, there has been no sign of such a spillover effect this time around. But the globalisation of the internet industry means that many more people could be tempted to dabble in web stocks in the current boom, adding to the pain of the bust.
When will that be? This paper warned about both the last internet bubble and the American property bubble long before they burst. Irrational exuberance rarely gives way to rational scepticism quickly. So some bets on start-ups now will pay off. But investors should take a great deal of care when it comes to picking firms to back: they cannot just rely on somebody else paying even more later. And they might want to put another bumper sticker on their cars: “Thanks, God. Now give me the wisdom to sell before it’s too late.””
tags: technology investing
The Sensors Are Coming! – NYTimes.com
”Sensors will be everywhere in the next few years and will be able to help people become more conscious of the environment and our own health,” explained Mr. Vigna. “Your socks, shoes, glasses and even your garbage can will have sensors inside designed to help you manage everything from your effects on the environment to your health.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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This morning, Dave, Bill and I exchanged our top 3 cloud computing stories for April. We uncovered a new industry disorder, public-cloud-phobia. Listen here.
Related posts:Top Cloud Stories for March Podcast
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O…