Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Architects produce many types of models. One useful distinction is between AS-IS models (which describe the current situation) and TO-BE models (which describe some projected future situation). If we can compare an AS-IS model with a TO-BE model, we ca…
Chris Potts will return to Denmark on 24-25 January 2013 to give an exclusive seminar: Driving Business Innovation & Performance With Enterprise Architecture: How to be a Highly-Influential Enterprise Architect. Chris Potts has just published the last book in his trilogy of business novels: “FruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology”, “RecrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary …read more
An architect looks at a valley and imagines a viaduct. She then describes this imaginary viaduct in great detail. As a result of her imagination, and the efforts of many engineers and other workers, when we visit the valley ten years later we too can s…
As time goes by architects are reviewing less custom / "home grown" solutions and looking at commercial off the shelf (COTS), platforms or cloud based solutions. I thought I would share with you a vendor architecture question template that I…
#entarch #EABOK There is a considerable “body of knowledge” in the enterprise architecture world. Among other things, this includes
Founding documents that everyone references, such as Zachman’s 1987
paper for the IBM Systems Journal, and the MIT bo…
Possibly one of the most common questions I get with regards to TOGAF is finding a good sample set of templates. Luckily the Open Group has a set that you can download that is quite extensive. Personally they aren’t the…
According to Kerry Bodine and Bobby Cameron at Forrester, we’ve entered the age of the customer (http://tinyurl.com/9jauwhg). “In this new era, past sources of competitive advantage have been commoditized in the face of customers who are empowered by information. In this age, the only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption: an obsession with customer experience. And this obsession must extend into the CIO’s organization.” 1
Good news: it appears CIOs and IT professionals see eye-to-eye with Forrester’s view. Recently Troux conducted an opinion poll of IT professionals (http://resources.troux.com/tsurvey12). Our poll asked respondents to rank the priority of 5 investment areas:
The results…more than fifty percent of all respondents agreed; investments that help retain
existing customers and attract new ones are most important when it come to IT priorities. This sentiment also matches those of CIOs that participated in the Gartner-Forbes CIO Survey2 conducted earlier this year.
It’s now clear to the corporate IT community at-large that the customer experience (CX) is the last bastion of differentiation and ultimately will determine the difference between market leaders and also-rans. But the role IT will play in improving the CX will be a difficult one. Bodine and Cameron state “Although it can sometimes be difficult to see the connections between the customer experience and the systems, processes, and policies that exist — deep behind the scenes — it’s critical for CIOs to understand them.”
For CIOs and IT professionals ready to take on this challenge there is good news. Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) solutions can help. EPM can help CIOs illustrate these relationships and ensure the right investments are being made. EPM can help shine a bright light across the complex model(s) that define the customer experience and as a result uncover and expose the relationships between:
With the understanding of the connection between the customer experience and the systems, processes, and policies that exist, CIOs will be in an ideal position to guide and counsel other business leaders with the empirical data that is needed to ensure the right customer experience investments are being made.
In order to ensure good CX investment decisions are being made, Bodine and Cameron state, “[CIOs] must understand [the] customer experience ecosystem – the complex set of relationships among [a] company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions. The dynamics of the customer experience ecosystem are such that every action and decision of every employee and external partner affects the customer experience in some way. Now consider the extent to which employees and partners rely on technology to do their jobs, and you can quickly draw a line from information technology to customer experience.”
Successful CIOs need the ability to draw (and re-draw) the line from information technology to the customer experience to truly see the connection between technology and business goals and strategies. This ability will help all executives better prepare for Age of the Customer and the good news is… EPM can help.
The first part of this is just a ‘public-service announcement’ service for Cynefin aficionados: Dave Snowden has announced that his current process of updating Cynefin has now extended to include a rethink of the Chaotic domain: RT @snowded: 2 months…
Heard an interesting story recently, from a software developer advocating Scrum. I shall omit the names of the companies and individuals, and I may get a few of the details wrong, to avoid embarrassing anyone.
Our hero was working for a mobile device …
Continuing with the series on power and politics in enterprise-architecture, a brief summary-so-far, some practical suggestions on modelling of power-issues, and a very important warning… The quick summary is as follows: the practice of enterprise-architecture is often ‘relentlessly political’ one…
This morning I was part of a panel at the GigaOM Structure:Europe 2012 conference in Amsterdam., titled: The Evolution of Private PaaS solutions. The abstract:
Enterprises are starting to take interest in running PaaS solutions virtually, as app developers want to focus on building apps rather than dealing with infrastructure issues. Enterprises that use PaaS solutions almost always go down the private route. In this session we focus on private PaaS offerings and look at the considerations and what will happen if one day enterprises want to use PaaS solutions in the public cloud.
The idea was to discuss private vs. public PaaS and, as it was a theme throughout the conference, the differences in adoption rates in the US vs. Europe.
You can view the full video coverage of the panel at the GigaOM website.
Here is an overview of some statements made during the panel to
highlight some of the discussions (in my own words, so could be biased,
but you can watch the video to make up your own mind 😉 ):
Enterprises want PaaS within their own environment, behind their firewall, i.e. Private PaaS.
Public PaaS is focused on the lowest common denominator, limited to certain framework, database, etc. Private PaaS adapts (can/should adapt) to everything used in the enterprise, any language, framework, database, etc.
In our customer base we roughly see a 50%-50% split between applications deployed on our Public PaaS vs applications deployed on our Private PaaS. It mainly depends on data, integrations, and policies.
Mobile is actually helping public PaaS adoption. It is a new subject, and within such a new space enterprise seem to be more open to new ideas.
PaaS is a huge enabler for Cloud Computing. PaaS is “clicky-clicky”: development and deployment that took months brought down to minutes.
PaaS is more driven by productivity gains than the need to move to “the cloud”. The business wants a solution for a business problem. Fast. Keep evolving with the changing business. PaaS should cover the complete application lifecycle.
A PaaS covering the application lifecycle in this way requires a new way of thinking. Connected to agile, continuous integration, etc.
PaaS can help to transfer old way of working seamlessly to cloud. It is just a small step.
No, you need to change the way you work. Modularize applications, no application silos.
If you really want to speed-up. We should also stop programming, start doing MDD.
MDD is possible now… no programming involved perse (also read: Why aren’t we all doing Model-Driven Development yet?).
Enterprise are adopting it.
PaaS should add a layer of abstraction. It should add a software layer. Key is that it is just the first step. New language constructs will abstract even further.
PaaS can bring harmony between operations and development.
The opportunity is even bigger: it can bring all stakeholders in the application delivery process together. Even end-users providing feedback, and business owners collaborating on requirements. The complete application lifecycle should be covered by PaaS. Not only covered, also speed-up.
Even end-users doing app development and deployment?
Back to private vs public. I believe in hybrid. Even if enterprises want to go with private PaaS, they often want to have development and test environments in the public cloud. Once they start using production data in acceptance or actual production they move the app within the premise of the company.
OSGi has been mentioned a couple of times, what is it? A dynamic modularity system for Java. The only industry standard that enables modularity, currently in the Java space but will become available for different languages.
But… enterprises are not asking for OSGi or these kinds of standards.
No, they do not ask for OSGi specifically. But if an enterprise starts to user your PaaS you will encounter something like this: build first small app fast, in an agile way with a small team.
If they start to build a huge app, i.e. with a lot of functional components, people will start to think about modularisation. If you want to release a new feature you do not want to redeploy the complete app. But only the changed component, and if needed the dependencies of this component.
Customer ask indeed about real-time updates in PaaS.
Version/configuration management becomes important: what version of my software is running. And what versions of all the components?
PaaS is about virtualising away lower layers. However, PaaS can also bring back to the table an understanding (and management of) what an application actually needs with respect to the underlying infrastructure, e.g. data needs to go over the same switch, caching is sensitive for locality, etc.
There is no clear distinction between layers. IaaS and PaaS players are moving into each others space. Amazon started out as IaaS, but nowadays delivers a lot of higher level services that you could categorise as begin part of the platform layer. Microsoft Azure and Google are moving the other way around: from PaaS player to also delivering IaaS.
It depends: if you only have .Net it makes sense to have a .Net specific PaaS. However, most organisations are heterogenous. So you need to support multiple languages.
You see that because we are in a transition, people still use their current methodologies. As PaaS becomes stronger, full stack, there will become PaaSes that focus on one language. That will need a different way to build the application. Because you need advantages like auto-scaling, dealing with locality, etc.
If you really want to change, you need to disrupt. Do not cling to your existing methodologies and languages. I truly believe there is a big opportunity for PaaSes with focused languages.
Forrester defined space within PaaS: new productivity platform. Step to higher level languages. Different roles that build applications.
Platform should run components defined in all kinds of languages.
It depends on how you define PaaS. It is not just a deployment platform. It should also cover the other aspects of the application lifecycle like development and maybe even requirements/feedback management.
If you really want to disrupt the field and make it a lot easier and faster to build applications (that’s in the end what businesses are looking for), than you also need to change the way you develop applications not just the way you deploy it.
Interesting thing last 2 years: not really a difference. Everywhere businesses are looking to improve their software delivery. There is no business innovation nowadays without software delivery involved. Businesses want improvement, productivity gains.
Then the question is will it be a private or public PaaS. We see the same thing in US and Europe: it depends on the kind of data and the kind of company. Banks will probably go for private. But a lot of other companies will go with public PaaS, especially for their customer facing portals.
It all depends on the usecase. Not on region.
PaaS often starts small.
That’s an opportunity. We take a week to create a working app for new customers and they have something tangible to show within their own organization.
No difference between Europe and US. Almost all private PaaS.
It seems like we are saying that if you are an enterprise of course you will have private PaaS. That’s not true. A lot of big companies are using public PaaS. Of course there are enterprises that go with private PaaS, but it is use case dependent. Not dependent on the size of organizations.
Why do we see so much private PaaS? Well, it could be that if you product supports private PaaS that it is a lot easier to sell that.
People feel comfortable with private PaaS, that’s what they are used too. If they get used to the idea of cloud and see advantages they will move.
This morning I was part of a panel at the GigaOM Structure:Europe 2012 conference in Amsterdam., titled: The Evolution of Private PaaS solutions. The abstract: Enterprises are starting to take interest in running PaaS solutions virtually, as app developers want to focus on building apps rather than dealing with infrastructure issues. Enterprises that use PaaS solutions almost always go down the private route. In this session we focus on private.
The post The Evolution of PaaS in the Enterprise appeared first on The Enterprise Architect.