This, my slightly captivated audience, should serve as enough of a warning to all of you; especially if you are information technologists who believe that the phenomenon of the Cloud and Cloud Computing are just evolutionary steps from message oriented middleware, integration brokers, application platform suites, enterprise service Buses, SOA Suites, Etc.. If you believe that simply putting an enterprise service bus on an external server hosted by your local Internet service provider, will give you the capability to offer the same functionalities (including elasticity, flexibility and agility) as true Cloud platforms, then you are mistaken.  And you have made a mortal error if you fail to see the evolutionary trail of enterprise infrastructure and middleware has dwindled.

I fully expect to see that the chasm, which may be more like a deep bottomless pit, between enterprise stuff and true infrastructure for Cloud services, filled with the bodies and careers of men, women and analyst (sometimes we can be above sexuality) who failed to detect and comprehend the radical shift in existence necessary to consume and provide the proper mechanisms and methodologies necessary for survival in this new era of Cloud services and Cloud Computing.

In turn this means the fight for leadership in Cloud platform and Cloud service infrastructure markets is far from over and there are no incumbent leaders or even visionaries.  So if you provide application integration technology today by all means adapt your technology for Cloud service infrastructure but be forewarned; your competitors will come from the world of integrated service environments, multi-enterprise collaborative gateways, manage file transfer technologies, Web 2.0 platforms, productivity suites, business process management suites and even entire operating systems. Take nothing for granted.  Unlike SOA and to a lesser extent BPM, the Consumerisation of the IT will not let enterprise infrastructure and middleware providers and vendors dilute and shift the Cloud’s core value proposition, strengths and legacy has a defining shift in information technology.

• An IT guy in the room
• When I’m getting a new cell phone (to prove I’m smarter than the sales guy)
• At the hotel bar (preferably after the conference)
• In seat 2B when seat 2A is occupied by someone much better looking than I

But here’s a suggestion. Let’s concentrate on solving our problems and achieving the desired outcome and not focus all of our attention on HOW the problem is solved. Doing so will get us thinking about all the options for getting the desired result. Maybe its SaaS, maybe its an appliance, maybe it’s a custom app or ff you happen to work in a city where it costs you 10 bucks a week for knowledge worker, maybe your application integration is a shared desk with a set of in and outboxes. Maybe your database is a very tall and thick file cabinet. All you really do is keep your workers performing at a high level (meeting SLAs), have a group of other workers validating the result (Validation) and you lock the front door and if sometimes you lock the file cabinets. (Privacy) Oh and by the way you still have a successful, growing business and your R&D budget is twice your IT spend.

It’s all about the result. For example my colleague David Mitchell Smith (Cloud guru) prefers red wine. David Cearly, (another Cloud guru) prefers single malt scotch and I prefer a tall frosty 40 oz. bottle of Ole English. At the end of the night we all get a little tipsy and that’s the desired result; who cares how we get there. OK maybe that’s not a good analogy. OK here’s another… You need visibility into your sales pipe and your IT shop says they need to integrate Salesforce.com with you backend SAP system. They want to do this with an appliance from Cast Iron, fine. Or maybe they prefer to do so with Software AG’s webMethods Fabric, that’s cool too. You just want to know how much it will cost, how fast it can be done and most of all you want a guarantee that the result is visibility into your entire sales pipe. By the way I don’t unilaterally advocate one approach over the other (different strokes for different folks, call us if you really want our recommendation), all I really care about is that you get the results you want.

This is what makes Cloud Computing so cool. Since I get what I need as a service, I’m reluctant to care about what’s underneath. All I care about is getting my result, correctly, securely and on time. Some may say this is overly simplistic but those are the same folks who check their power transformers, wood poles, underground piping, CAT 5 converters, and transformation drums (don’t ask). I prefer to leave all that stuff to the electric company; holding them responsible for when my “frige don’t get cold and lights don’t turn on”.

So from my pickup truck in front of the feed store in Tampa, I offer my “down south county boy” mantra for all you consumers of Cloud services:

• I don’t care how you do the transformation, just GIT ‘ER DONE, and GIT ‘ER DONE correctly.
• I don’t care how you do the workflow GIT ‘ER DONE and make sure it gets to whom it supposed to, when it’s supposed to.

• I don’t care if it’s a web services or a FORTRAN script, GIT ‘ER DONE
• Encrypt the hell outta it, leave a junkyard dog by the servers running the Oracle apps, heck even require your employees use that fancy iris scanning authentication, I don’t care just GIT ‘ER DONE and GIT ‘ER DONE securely and protect my stuff!

Seriously think about the outcome and its impact on the business. Think about the business process and the business service. But don’t get bogged down on the implementation until you figured the rest out. Yep the devil is in the details, but don’t confront him until you have to.

So the other day I was surfing the web and a colleague who shall remain nameless sent me a link to a humorous video that had been making its way around the web. It seems that the content was quite adult and one of the two stars let a little gas slip. Oh how immature! But still funny in a MAD magazine sorta way. When I clicked through I found myself on a site that was much like You Tube but was 100% adult content. The advertisements were off to the sides, the content was free and the community was vibrant and very much participating. While I won’t share the name of the site (I don’t need the Google crawlers logging it) I will tell you a little research and the owners of the site was a company that started out distributing VHS tapes, then DVDs and now giving the content away.  After a few emails with the owner it became evident that it’s the same ole game plan that the adult industry has followed from day one.   

When the adult industry realized that less and less people were buying content (in any form), they gave it away for free and monetized the communities built around the content. Viewers that preferred a certain type of film clip were bought together in an effort to share their favorite clips. Specific advertisements and value added services were added to the community and bingo, revenue streams opened up again. Utilizing current technologies and deployment models for storing and playing media (cloud storage) and hosted search, provisioning and account management capabilities (many adult sites will leverage existing email accounts) have kept these firms lean and clean; without traditional IT departments and razor focus of their business models.

Taking cues from the adult industry isn’t something new; it’s just something we don’t want to admit. But lets face it, the tipping point in the VHS vs. Beta discussions came down to the adult industry (it was cheaper). The tipping point for Blue Ray vs. HD DVD came down to a decision from the manufacturer to not grant a license to adult companies. Some of the trends are large like the above; some are small… think DIVX, downloadable flash and avatars. While we saw some adult content come into virtual worlds like Second Life, most of that was via end users and NOT larger adult companies. (In fact many had already tried virtual worlds and passed on the idea for various reasons.)

Just something to think about and I volunteer to lead that research agenda and chair that conference. Any helpers out there?

-f

And in my Google browser

I was ordering from eBay

Because I am to busy to go to a real mall (Hey I never said this would rhyme!)

After using PayPal to send money to 5 different sellers in a 24hr chain, the governance mechanisms of PayPal kicked off processes that sent emails to the seller that said…

Ahhh wherever eBay and the PayPal guys learned it they learned well! Looking at my virtually inactive PayPal account that was over foyur years old but seldom used, PayPal’s monitoring systems showed some strange transactions all within the same 24 hour period. I mean could it really be Frank Kenney that bought:

• A new bass guitar,
• Refills for Propellerhead’s Reason,
• A Gwen Stefani L.A.M.B. watch and bracelet,
• A limited addition DVD of Duran Duran’s Rio (Ohhh don’t start! YOU KNOW YOU WANT A COPY),
• And some perfume???

I mean no interactions for the better part of 2 years then a flurry of activity. So here I am getting emails from sellers telling me that they were not going to send my presents out until PayPal said it was ok. All in all the process worked very well. In fact it worked too well.

But I did authorize the purchases and they were paid from my checking accounts. Hmmm so much like air travel and the dreaded “SSSS” (The airlines way of flagging you to the TSA) I was on a list that I didn’t deserve to be on. Worse yet with eight days until Christmas there was a real chance that I would not have the gifts in time. Oh what to do?

Oh, I called the 800 number, authenticated my self and a very nice man, very quickly executed a process that removed me from the bad guys list and sent out emails to the sellers. Problem solved.

Moral of the story? Automated governance processes are way cool! In fact if it wasn’t me buying all that merchandise, then I would be ecstatic that PayPal stopped the entire process and more importantly protected my money. The best policies and processes are those that have very clearly defined exceptions.

I would like to thank all of Gartner’s clients and associates who helped us stay successful and I look forward to another 400K of travel. Seriously, lets do it again.

Oh by the way… Cloud Governance…. Hehehe you know you want to know more… Stay tuned!

-f

——————————————————————————cut here

To the CIO, CEO, CFO, CTO and shareholders,

As a result of the following I can now only deduce that SOA is a failure and any attempts at SOA will result in failure. Under my direction:

• I have failed to associate our SOA initiatives with our business needs, therefore I cannot show any value for the hundreds of services we have created ,
• I have failed to properly create and support an SOA Center of Excellence, Steering Committee or Competency Center,
• I have failed to enlist the executive staff as true supporters and evangelistscfor our SOA efforts.
• I chose to buy an ESB prior to truly understanding our SOA infrastructure needs (In reality this wasn’t my fault, the vendor said it was super duper necessary)
• I have failed to provide my developers incentives to reuse artifacts,
• It was not my responsibility to follow what was going on next door where there was a separate team dealing with BPM, I mean they are two different initiatives,
• I firmly believe that SOA is nothing more than fancy CORBA or COM.

Despite all of the things I have NOT done, SOA has failed. My additional failure to recognize and implement best practices that have been proven successful in many other companies worldwide also play into the failure of SOA.

Oh well, we should move on and try something new. On the bright side 70% of our initiatives fail anyway. The failure of SOA is SOA’s fault not mine.

Thanks for understanding and I’d like to declare in advance that Cloud Computing, Virtualization and SaaS will be failures under my direction as well.

Thanks for listening

XXXXXX

Project Manager, EA Artchitect, Lead Developer (Choose One)

———————————————————————-cut here

Email this to the largest DL you can find, and rejoice in the fact that you are not alone. Many others feel the same way.

 -f

 P.S. You failed, not SOA. Now go resign.

1)      CEO Karl-Heinz Streibach opened the session with a discussion about alignment. Interesting he took down an unfamiliar part discuss the fact that while IT and business has to be aligned, it’s the business that needs to work better at aligning itself. We aren’t just talking about B2B but the domain to domain silos that need to be broken down. The good news is that he was hitting on a new topic that many companies are struggling on. The bad news is I don’t believe that we are going to solve this issue by rolling out the same products and methodologies that have been tried before. Let’s elevate the conversation from BPM and BI into something larger…

2)      Next up Enrico Benni gave an informative session on a number of topics around globalization. He gave great examples of why companies have to place a large effort on having a presence where they do business, not just depend on a foreign support and call center. The most interesting aspect of his presentation though was around IT talent and the fact that it exists globally.

3)      Mark Cressy, from Liberty Mutual gave a great presentation that basically highlighted that there was a need to have an ultimate view of the customer as it relates to the value change. He’s also targeted internal change from drivers outside the organization, like B2B partners.

4)      Then I moderated a panel with Avid, Liberty Mutual, Avnet, and Dish Network. Here are my findings:

a.       Each one of the CIOs had some driver to align business and IT

b.      Each one of the CIOs had at least 1 SOA CoE if not multiple ones

c.       The panel was split on how to deal with changing the culture at their companies; 2 CIOs were all about punishment and the other two were about rewarding good behavior. I still believe its about having and doing both

5)      Jim Adamczyk from Accenture came up next and hit on a few points worth repeating.

a.       The success of transforming business and IT will depend on-

                                                               i.      Visibility

                                                             ii.      Being inspirational

                                                            iii.      Being realistic

                                                           iv.      Being targeted

                                                             v.      Being consistent.

b.      The concept of a Business Process Factory that provides interfaces with IT for service creation, design and maintenance.

c.       Since IT however bad is still the best way to cross all the silos in your business CIO and COO should lead the charge.

All in all it was a decent 1^st day. As I talk to clients I will try to bring you more as the week progresses.

Thanks

-f

I know that most SOA infrastructure and most services enter the company and are deployed under the cover of a new business application or middleware deployment. If this is the case, should we all be talking about how best to use our SOAs?

Let’s say that aloud, “We already have an SOA, how do we best leverage it to be agile etc…”

An interesting question and there are many answers. The few that I do know is this:

• Mash Up technologies should help you stick your hands into your SOA and play with it’s innards to do exciting things. And that should be everything from assembling strategic mission critical business compositions to assembling a quickie tactical sales application and everything in between.
• Governance technologies should be in place for constraints but most of all for visibility. You can’t use the toys unless you can find them.
• Innovation and Vision is the most important factor because anyone can use a process that came installed with the services but vision is what helps create the process that makes a million dollars.

Oh and from the side of my brain that puts ‘Cloud’ in front of everything, Cloud applications and services become extremely important as they should be considered part of this SOA ‘body’.

So this Halloween, lets get gory and bloody. Lets open up our SOAs and dig a little. With just the right amount of innovation and vision, you could transform your business and bring your SOA to life!

Treat or Treat!

Frank

PS Thanks Chor-Ching, from JackBe for being the sounding board!

1) It’s great to hear less of the where do I start in SOA discussions. (if you are still asking, Jeff Schulman has an excellent presentation on where to start)

2) It’s interesting that the question is now, “I know we need governance right away but should we buy the technologies in your Magic Quadrant?” This points to the understanding that governance is pertinent even in the most simple SOA but a fear of overspending. So if you weren’t at Symposium or you don’t ask me the question, here is the answer. SOA Governance technologies are basically split into a few key areas:

i. Registry Repository- for visibility

ii. Policy Management- for enforcement., creation and integration of policy

iii. Validation: for assurance that the service in facts does what its supposed to.

In some cases you will have to make an investment in commercial tools. But for the most basic of deployments use:

i. A spreadsheet- for a simple Registry Repository providing visibility. Host it on a shared server for access.

ii. The existing management technologies associated with the execution container, or app server. This will at the very least let you monitor incoming evocations.

This should be enough to provide feedback to the competency center or center of excellence and help them show the value of an SOA to the business.

More soon…

]]> http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/2008/10/18/a-few-thoughts-on-this-years-us-fall-symposium/feed/ 0 http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/2008/10/08/trust-me%e2%80%a6-700b-bailout-means-you-betta-think-governance/ http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/2008/10/08/trust-me%e2%80%a6-700b-bailout-means-you-betta-think-governance/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:26:39 +0000 Frank Kenney http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/?p=14 Or Why Governance = Oversight = Compliance = Regulations or whatever you want to call it.

Read this:

Unregulated swaps hastened Wall Street collapse

By JOHN DUNBAR – 

WASHINGTON (AP) — It can be a fine line between investing and gambling. But in Las Vegas, you know the odds. On Wall Street, that’s not always the case.

Especially when it comes to the $62 trillion market in arcane financial contracts known as “credit default swaps.”

“Moreover,” adds Michael Greenberger, former director of trading and markets for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, “Las Vegas is regulated.”

These swaps are increasingly being blamed for the near-collapse of insurance giant American International Group Inc., the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers, and the downfall of other investment houses and financial institutions.

Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday accused AIG of opening “a casino in London” when it began dealing in these complex derivative contracts. The Federal Reserve came to AIG’s rescue three weeks ago with an $85 billion line of credit; so far the company has tapped it for $61 billion.

So what are credit default swaps and how have they caused all this trouble?

The swaps are a form of insurance, but they aren’t regulated that way.

 

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hOsN_qL-c8hjW8BvU160ZYwhYB8AD93LSV480

 And here’s some free advice from your favorite Gartner analyst… You’d better start thinking of MFT for:

• All your processes
• Ease of reporting
• CYA

Want to know more? Click here…