Are architects going green?  IT is trying, but I don’t really hear many EA clients I talk to bringing this up.  There are certainly things to do, and green can mean lower cost as well as sustainable.  So, why no real focus?

I have an opinion, but it’s only that: it’s deemed to be too low level.  But, if the enterprise you’re architecting actually itself cares about green, I bet you ARE focused on this.  You certainly SHOULD be.  The alignment of green IT projects/future states to corporate business strategy could be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back of funding change initiatives to bring the EA to real life.  If they don’t care about green, then the cost advantages could also prove effective.  Either way, green would be a nice color to paint your EA.

So, why is EA not more concerned with green?  Do you have any examples of where using green helped you?

My version of this architecting “free” started when I was first introduced many many years ago (1996 maybe) to Enterprise Architecture.  I attended an EA Seminar by Larry Deboever, then at META Group where I worked before it was acquired by Gartner (where obviously I work now). One of his most common challenges to new architects was to get their heads out of the sand and think about very different worlds the future could bring.  A particular exercise he used was to answer this: how would you design applications differently if the network were free and had unlimited capacity.  The answer of course is: you would make VERY different decisions about how to architect systems.  Imagine that!

The Gladwell critique of Anderson’s notion of “Free” brought this all to mind again.  When I heard Larry’s design challenge, I was on the networking analyst team.  I knew perfectly well that this could never happen: networks would not be free and networks would not have unlimited capacity, and certainly not both.  So, I always wondered really how far such thought experiments could go.  Anderton’s book certainly provides some specific examples of how it has worked, but there are others where it has not (as Gladwell points out).  While it is true that networks are much cheaper and much higher bandwidth than ever before (and really, compared to 1996, they might seem free and unlimited — during 1999/2000, I almost thought we’d get there, but CRASH!), still they are not free or unlimited.  As I write this I’m paying to use a network (Verizon FIOS, $39.99 / month for high but still limited bandwidth) and so is Gartner paying for connecting our bogging system to the Internet so I can use it from my home office.

So, I agree with Gladwell: money has to be made somewhere.  Often, the revenue/cost is displaced — as when Google doesn’t charge for its search engine (et. al.) but of course makes money from ads.  We don’t get charged for TV content usually (though we may be charged for distribution of TV signals); that too is paid for by ads.   And those ads cost us money in increased product prices.  Maybe the networks will end up free and unlimited bandwidth but we’ll have to watch ads?  Hmm.

In any case, I don’t really see that most things can be free.  If I understand Anderson correctly, information will be increasingly free — that may be true, but accessing that information won’t be.

However, i do think it’s worth asking big questions like this.  While networks may not be free now, they are a whole lot cheaper — and that HAS changed how we design things.  If you can detect the trends toward lower cost (or greater abundance) — in IT resources like networks, or business resources like staff or product components — you can change your architecture and your enterprise (your enterprise architecture!) to take advantage of those changes in cost, and deliver signficantly new options to the business.  Clearly the Internet — a low cost, high bandwidth network widely available — and Web technology (HTTP/HTML, basically) is a case of where this trend was capitalized on (say by Amazon in becoming a different kind of book store than the bricks and mortar Barnes & Noble). So, the experiment of imagining free or just much lower cost resources that your current business depends on is a good one.  These discontinuities can lead to major business change.

Of course knowing when things will get more expensive (greater scarcity) is ALSO a useful trend to watch and take advantage of.  Free (or just way cheaper) is not the only cost trend to watch.  Moreover, something (like fuel costs) that is widely variable in cost is yet another thing to be aware of (as airlines have learned, but still find it hard to master).

Thus, while architecting “free” is a great idea, it’s not the only magical thinking that will provide value.   Learning about what things actually cost now and what they might cost in the future — close to free, free, or nowhere near free — must guide architecture thinking.

Feel free to use this advice when you architect.

I read this three times before it sunk in.  Capacity = budget?  Yes!

We’ve often in our Gartner EA practice discussed that EA should focus on service levels beyond just RAS (reliability, availability, scalability) into other “-ilities” like securability or interoperability, and even affordability (cost as an attribute of the system or solution, stated so that like other attributes higher is better).  This is not however common practice.  Mostly we plan the best (ie most RAS) solution, and then just tell the customer what the cost is.

But, perhaps the balancing of cost and RAS (or just performance or capacity) will become more common over time as cloud computing services change how we compute value for alternative architectures.  Within the most elastic of cloud services, the elasticity of provisioned service is directly exposed to the customer, both for performance and price. Both go up and down — this is what elastic scalability means.  Scalability alone connotes ONLY scaling up, never down again.

Furthermore, as capacity goes up (or volume of usage, anyway), the overall cost ALSO GOES UP.  This is why contracts, as Lydia so clearly points out, will move from simplistic usage only to all sorts of capped and other forms — look at your mobile phone bill for a model, for example.

Thus, as capacity is planned, the budget is also planned.  More to the point, as capacity is actually used, costs go up.  Not paying for not using capacity means paying for using it.  (I had to read my own sentence twice to make sure — yes, it’s true!)  The problem will move from overpaying for unused capacity to overpaying for used capacity (at a higher rate — like that mobile phone bill).  Which means we’ll be right back to paying for average capacity (and generally not actually using all of it) to get more predictability in budget.

It also means that EA teams should stop saying that they’ll design a solution (or even more general guidelines for solutions to repeat) for high scalability becuase that’s best.  It means we need to design to fit a budget, and that we’ll need bronze rather than platinum configurations.  Perhaps we can design a system that can do both service levels simultaneously, but I’m skeptical on this.  It seems possible in theory — and cloud computing is a new way to try for this kind of perfectly scalable solution — but hard to deliver in practice.  Even on the cloud, we’ll have some service providers that can scale higher but will cost more, while others opt for lower cost without the same global scale.  And, we customers will have to CHOOSE between them.  In fact, we’ll probably offer a variety of such choices to our customers, mixed in with ones we provide (versus sourcing from cloud or other outsourcing vendors).

More importantly, however, this can be used to manage demand, not just to design the supply.  Customers using elastic services will decide how much to use based on budget.  They will in some cases say we’ll just say no to scaling up capacity, because we can’t afford it!  The assumption that more is better (upsizing) will yield to the idea of right-sizing — just enough and of course just in time.

It is worth noting that some of these are single moment trends (a snapshot in time of many search terms = what’s hot now) while others are trends across time (of fewer search terms, then).  Both views are interesting.

But searching for trends in EA terms can be misleading.  I just tried Google trends on the FEA reference model acronyms (PRM, BRM, SRM, DRM, TRM) and of course some of these acronyms are NOT just for FEA (most notably DRM, which also means digital rights management).  That doesn’t help.

How can one track EA trends, then?  On Google, the trend for searches on the term EA has remained pretty constant over the years — constantly declining, which itself is interesting.  As an ongoing discipline, it has passed the hype phase (try trending EA against cloud computing, for example).  We’re in the plateau of productivity, using Gartner Hype Cycle terms.  But, consistency does say something, even if declining — it’s not spikey.  It’s not new.  Perhaps this should just make all of us EA people feel old?

In some sense, this constant nature of EA searching may tell us something.  It may imply some sense of maturity.  Indeed, many now seem to understand what EA is, at least to some extent.  There is confusion of course — about scope, models, value and many other things — but the term is not going away and the discipline isn’t either.  Granted, the people may change, but even in these tough economic times we haven’t seen a huge push to just stop EA work altogether.  Maybe this constant level is enough for now.

Still, it should worry us that it seems to be declining.  Maybe this is just that searches are declining, but other metrics (like attendance at EA conferences, etc.) are up.  The more mature, the less searching?  Only newbies search?  Hmm.  Not sure this really means much.

How about I leave the “trend for trends” topic by suggesting instead that EA practitioners look at trends, specifically trends in EA value delivery.  Many will push hard for metrics to describe most importantly how EA provides a valueable service to the business.  But, let’s not forget to show trends in those KPIs — how a given KPI’s measurement has changed over time.  Metrics are often best used for not just the snapshot in time, but the longer term over many years trends.  We want to show that EA is increasingly delivering a valuable service to the enterprise, even if the search term shows a consistent decline.  We’d like our value trends to go up!  So, if you have good stories for using such KPIs over time, do tell.

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On a side note: to see who at Gartner is blogging on “enterprise architecture,” try this google search: enterprise architecture site:blogs.gartner.com

However, one technique that is now visible online for all of us to view is the US Federal Government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) consolidation of agency EA reports.   OMB has been collecting EA data from the agencies for a while now, and along with the common EA content (process, information, applications, infrastructure, etc.) mapped to the FEA reference models (PRM, BRM, SRM, DRM, TRM), they have also collected spend info in these categories.  

OMB is very interested in the money — and see’s EA as a way to control spend better than before.  Basically: have a plan to spend, then spend according to the plan.  EA is a big part of the basic “architect, invest, implement” mantra I hear at the  Chief Architect Forum (CAF) meetings I get to attend locally here in the Washington DC area.

Now this data has been collected and represented in a way that we can all see how the spend in IT is allocated to the FEA BRM (business reference model) categories: 

VUE-IT (Visualization to Understand Expenditures in Information Technology)

For example, you can see how much each of 11 agencies spent (2008) and plans to spend (2009) on “Disaster Preparedness and Planning” and that DHS is spending 81% of the total ($178M).  You can continue to drill down into how the Dept of Interior is spending their 2% to see that it comes from 3 bureaus, that one (National Park Service) is spending on fire effects monitoring databases, and from there you can call up the Dept of Interior OMB-300 and see more detail on the IQCS application.

This certainly is visibility and transparency of spending info.  We can all view it in VUE-IT.  

While I wanted to make sure to highlight this new public approach to EA, I also wanted to ask some questions:

• Is this something you CAN do in your enterprise?  I bet not.
• Is this something you WANT to do in your enterprise?  I bet some of your stakeholders would like this (CFO, for example).
• What would it take for you to do this?  Lots of new work, EA tools, etc. at least.

But, mostly, I’d like to see you answer this question: Is this a critically important thing for EA to do?

To get started, I suppose it’s good to set a few goals for my efforts.  Among the things I’d really like to do are these:

1. Link to interesting EA content available online — to help those who don’t look around as much as I do
2. Highlight EA approaches that are different — good and bad, IMHO (note: Gartner’s official opinions will published as normal — my comments here will not be official Gartner positions, but I’ll refer those who are clients to such material as a courtesy).
3. Have some fun — life in EA shouldn’t be boring or drudgery

I’ll let these goals for my efforts inspire me and see where I go with it.  I hope those who read will comment to make things even more interesting.  Thanks.