Operational Agility

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A frequent theme on my blog is the ongoing fallout between IT and The Business.  This is often exacerbated by business staff trying to implement their own technology solutions despite IT.

Allan, commenting on my IT vs the business post suggested that the business views IT as “not so much irrelevant as an active hindrance for most (large) organisations”.

Is this driving the rise in so called “Rogue IT” solutions being implemented by business staff?  I want to capture the views from an IT perspective.

Please have your say.  If you want to leave your contact details at the end of the survey (optional) I will send you a copy of the results.  I will also publish them on this blog.

Marc Rix alerted me to a paper he had written on Bottom Line SOA: The Economics of Agility

I am a big fan of SOA and Marc’s writings and he makes a compelling case for the positive business cost/benefits of SOA over P2P architecture.  However, I feel compelled to make a few points to balance the argument slightly.

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The second on my short series of posts reflecting on a recent discussion with Clive Longbottom of Quocirca.

We discussed the success (or otherwise) of SOA implementations.  Now, I must be honest, I am not aware of a single shining example of SOA excellence in the enterprise, but I had presumed the reason was the limited range of industries I come across.  For example, most banks, telecoms, utilities, retailers and the like are so monolithic, the cost of embarking on an enterprise wide SOA initiative wouldn’t get past even the most naiive of capital expenditure committees.  So I have read vendors’ press releases about successful SOA implementations and taken them at face value.

Clive’s view, however, stopped me in my tracks.  He reckoned most SOA “experiments” were nothing more than web services connected together in a point to point architecture!  Picture my face with a look of incredulity on it – no I am more incredulous than that!  I may be dumb but isn’t loose coupling the whole point of SOA?

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Once again I find myself in total agreement with Bill Barr in that businesses want Agile Enterprise Architecture, not Agile Enterprise Architecture.  In other words, what the business cares about is having an agile enterprise, not whether you used an agile process to deliver.

That is not to say that agile processes have no merit.  It’s a bit like using PRINCE2*, for example as a project methodology.  It may help the project team, but looking back, no business cares about the how.  They are only interested in what you deliver.

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What do we mean when we use the term “legacy” application?

Jason Stamper talks about ageing technologies and speculates that even old Java applications could often be considered legacy.

I think we should take a business focussed view of this and I suggest we should ask the following question.

If we re-evaluated, today, would we buy/build this application again?  If the answer is no, then it’s a legacy application.

I have more than a sneaky suspicion that asking the business this direct question would yield some uncomfortable answers.  In fact I would go so far as to suggest that by this definition, many business reps would consider a large number of applications to be “legacy” before they are even live.

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I’ve only recently discovered Bill Barr’s blog (and added it to my blogroll) and found some really interesting views that I felt compelled to post about.

Firstly at Ivory Tower or Crow’s nest? Bill argues for the need for IT architects to take a high level view without retreating into an ivory tower.  I am pretty convinced that the role of an IT architect is to see the bigger (business) picture and always be looking ahead to prepare the matching and necessary infrastructure.

I am equally convinced that “if we could only convince businesses of the value of having a lookout place high enough to see beyond the next quarter ….” then the job of the IT architect would be much simpler.

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Allan Engelhardt is a guy I have worked with and respect a lot.  His knowledge of enterprise IT architecture is way beyond mine and he seems to successfully bridge the gap between IT purity and business need – in other words he is a pragmatist whose focus remains on delivering the end result.

So I found my thoughts provoked by his recent post on The Post GUI Era based on discussion from O’Reilly’s 2007 Emerging Technologies conference.

Now, I wasn’t at the conference but I do think that Allan has barely scratched the surface in this debate.  The theory goes that man wasn’t born understanding GUIs, and more natural interfaces such as speech, for example, are potentially better ways of managing the interface between human beings and technology.

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In my short time in the blogosphere I’ve noticed a common theme around CIOs, IT Architects and others in the IT community concerned with “Rogue” behaviour.

I say rogue behaviour because some posts refer to rogue users, others to rogue solutions, rogue IT etc.

The common point is that if the IT function does not serve the business with what it needs, then you can absolutely guarantee that some rogue behaviour will emanate from the business.  Usually the IT function doesn’t even know about it, until the rogue solution falls over and the business calls in the IT guys who are suddenly landed with a mission critical “system” to mend and support.

So how do we square the circle here?

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Back in 1998, I was doing a Masters degree at Leeds University.  An IT Module on my course posed a question something like “What is the case for transactional websites in UK retail banking?”

Do you remember 1998?  It was the year Netscape announced they were going open source.  Home broadband did not exist in the UK. The vast majority of people did not have a home internet connection of any type and probably almost no-one over the age of 25 regularly used the internet or had a personal email ID.  There was not one single UK bank offering meaningful transactional capabilities on their website.  The internet (or should I say Web 0.1) was only just taking off.

Polls at that time were concluding that only about a third of the British public expected to have online retail banking within 5 years with some really tech savvy people (13% of the population) wanting it within 2 years!  Wow!

About 3,000 words (on paper) later I concluded that there was no current short term ROI case for fully transactional internet banking but it was blatantly obvious that it would take off and any bank that didn’t take the leap of faith and invest, would get left behind both in customer service and cost per transaction.

This unremarkable conclusion somehow managed to get me a good mark for that paper – it seems even more unremarkable today.

So is SOA in the same boat then today, being blatantly obvious but needing a leap of faith?  I don’t think so.

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I had to smile when I read Antique Software by Jason Kolb.

It brought back memories of my schooldays when my mate Paul Bryce (where are you now?) and I tried to get the best from a ZX80 with (I think) 1KB of RAM and a cassette tape recorder attached.  The “PC” (I am pretty sure that term had not yet been coined) was linked to my dad’s black and white portable telly.

We thought we were so cutting edge!

On the one hand it would be a laugh to go back to those days, but imagine no mobile phones, no digital TV, no internet (aggghhhh!) – I guess it would make us realise what a stunning technological revolution my generation has been privileged to witness in the last 30 years!

March 27th - someone at Blue Prism has just pointed out that I am still using technology from the dark ages.  Despite having a super light laptop and a mobile phone, I still find room on my desk for a Casio folding calculator from circa 1985.  Some things just continue to give you good service and a feeling of comfort, and the soft pad of calculator buttons does it for me.