by Dana Gardner
May 29, 2007 at 8:49 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Innovator Interviews, Podcasts, SOA
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
When the hype curve descends, advocacy takes over. And so it is with the SOA Consortium, formed earlier this year to establish SOA as a business productivity benefit and to glean proven adoption paths and proof-points from primarily end-users and enterprises. The advocacy group’s approach combines input from enterprises and vendors to promote the business strategy value for services oriented architecture (SOA).
Join noted IT analysts Joe McKendrick, Tony Baer, and Jim Kobielus for our podcast discussion on the goals and opportunities for the SOA Consortium with Dr. Richard Soley, the chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG) and also executive director of the consortium. I’ll be your host.
In June, SOA Consortium will begin holding quarterly CIO Summits with a small number of CIOs and CTOs from government agencies, large corporations, as well as non-governmental organizations.
OMG began the consortium with bevy of heavy-hitting companies — Avis, Bank of America, CellExchange, WebEx, BEA, Cisco, IBM, SAP, HP and Wells Fargo — and has grown already. The consortium, separate from OMG, is tasked with creating a community around SOA, and is not a standards group. “We strongly believe that SOA isn’t a technology at all, but rather an approach to achieve business agility. It’s not a technology, but rather a business strategy, says Soley.
Here are some additional excerpts:
Our SOA group at OMG has been focused on modeling SOA, modeling for software assurance, and modeling for software producibility, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations like W3C and OASIS that are doing a great job designing the protocols and languages at the pipe level — how do we connect the systems together?
That hasn’t been our primary focus in over a decade. So we are not in that space. The advocacy group is exactly that — it’s an advocacy group. How do we help the CIO? And, we call this “Corner Office SOA.” How do we help the CIO get the news across to the rest of the C-suite that this is not a technology but a business strategy, and a business strategy that can deliver agility and a better bottom line?
[Also] … How do we help the enterprise architect, the domain architect, the data architect get the word across to his alter ego in the line of business that this is a business strategy and not a technology and it’s something he needs to pay attention to?
We are currently running 3-to-1 end-users to vendors, and that’s because the focus is on this advocacy activity. It’s not on whose SOA infrastructure we should buy and “Our Web service is cool,” or any of those questions. I am guessing that we are actually going to be more like 5-to-1 or 10-to-1 end-users to vendors eventually.
IT has traditionally focused in most organizations on what are the right tools to achieve what lines of business are telling us we need to achieve. Sure, there are going to be tools and there are going to be technologies and there are going to be frameworks to help you implement the SOA strategy, but it’s the other way around. It’s “What is it we need to achieve?” And, what we need to achieve is fairly easy to explain, right? What we need to achieve is capturing business processes, so that we can find them, so that we can make them more efficient, and so that we can reuse them — and this is nothing new.
What’s new here is the message that we are not just talking about workflow. We are not just talking about processes that can be automated. We are talking about any of the processes, especially customer-facing, but any value-chain processes within the organization that we might want to reuse.
Listen to the entire podcast, or read the full transcript for more IT analysis and SOA insights. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.
Analysts examine SOA Consortium [47:35m]:
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by Paula Thornton
May 26, 2007 at 10:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I dropped the reference to “Management” here to break the inherent inference to corresponding technologies.
Back in April, Bill Ives addressed the question, “What is the Role of ECM in Enterprise 2.0?” A number of relevant comments were added, including one where I suggested a great piece on Content Management 2.0, which includes a great list of 2.0 principles useful for any 2.0 discussion.
To immerse readers in related conversations going on among content management practitioners, I share my responses to what started out as a usability discussion (limited to membership, the discussion started with an announcement of a related piece, authored by one of the members).
05-07-07 I have no issues with James list other than it’s a list. All of the client situations I’ve run into, even if they’d had the list, they still likely would have not made a purchasing decision based on any of these items. Why? They don’t necessarily really understand what it ‘means’. That is, they’d turn around and ask the vendor if they can address all of these issues and the vendor will invariably say ‘yes’.
A more effective list would effectively be one that begins to break down all of the specific issues with various interfaces and the level of effort required to implement an effective experience.
05-08-07 James said: “While a richer interface does address a number of the issues”
Hold the phone. There seems to be an implied alignment in this statement of 2.0 to ‘richer interface’. Not so. Clearly the piece from the link in my earlier post (which was originally posted via this list but I guessed that many have not read it) suggests otherwise. Let me copy some of it here for your viewing pleasure. Note that ‘rich’ is .5 of the 6 (it’s only half of point 4). [Included a portion of earlier reference here to the list, toward bottom of page. The authors are on the list and had posted the link...but I don't think many understood its significance as no conversation ensued.]
05-24-07 Walking along the same line of thought that Tim introduced [addressing the correlation between web sites and hierarchical navigation he stated: It's my observation that the human mind likes to make geographic analogies...when speaking of a web page...the word "space" creeps into the lingo], I drop the big question: who cares? Step away from the car…
Start with an analogy…say you drove to work this morning. You may not have been able to take the shortest route. All the variables notwithstanding there was one very critical issue: the infrastructure only supported certain routes — you can’t build your own roads. That’s not the case in the digital world and we need to NEVER forget it.
Here’s the short version of my advice: 1) Focus on taxonomies and other ’structure’ for optimizing search. 2) Make sure that whatever is needed to support the primary scenarios are in place (and are featured in weighted relevancy — more important scenario support is more evident and less important scenarios are less evident), 3) Work to improve the relevancy and ‘velocity to understanding/action’ of the content itself, 4) drive directly to content through any and every means possible (ala. direct channel access which circumvents navigation altogether).
Start paying attention to these items which are more important and you’ll forget all about the slow road to yesterday.
05-26-07 As to Yair’s comments I suggest the answer is ‘both’ (hierarchy vs vector) and neither. I just started reading David Weinberger’s new book “Everything is Miscellaneous” last night. It reinforces my earlier comments…remember that we’re talking digital.
We need to structure things in a way that they can be ALL they can be (anything to anyone depending on their perspective).
If I can add a real world situation, this morning I was working on my genealogy. Due to the fabulous nature of all that is going on right now, I was able to tie several of my ‘known’ ancestors altogether into the same family…aligning yet another critical figure in the early 1600 settlement of colonial Canada as my 9th great grandfather. The problem was that I stumbled onto this fact just by my own intuition and deduction because the spelling of the last name has over 15 variations.
The challenge with our ’structures’ today is that we focus on the structures (do not suppose I’m suggesting they’re not important — I’m fighting a battle to get such focus into a current effort). The truly untapped value from a digital perspective is not in the individual units (ala. the content), but in the relationships which can establish ‘different’ structures. This is clearly not a hierarchical problem set — hierarchical is but one dimension for one perspective. Reality is far more dynamic.
Choosing to focus on the hierarchical, leaves a limited view of the possiblities. The current hierarchical structure of the software by which I store information of my relatives plays against my needs. Even though there is a field which captures alternate name spellings, it still took my ‘inference’ to make the necessary connections. What my brain did can be easily replicated. It’s a simple problem, but it continues to be twarted by hierarchical thinking applied to problem sets.
Inference…3.0 thinking.
05-26-07 Tim mentioned saving searches. I’ve thought through this recently. I remember how valuable the tool Copernic was to me in the mid-90’s. I could not only do a search, I could filter out what was not relevant and only save what was relevant. I used these saved collections (which could be generated html pages), to send ‘filtered’ relevant content for managers to review (I was serving as a research librarian in this way…although it was not an intended role).
Today, I do the same thing via my del.icio.us collections. There is key difference here from my former scenario. Often times I had to conduct multiple searches to find all the relevant materials. I would then manually reconstruct a ‘total’ html file that combined the results of the various searches before sending the file. But the results were ‘fixed’ and was a reflection of the results that came forth at that point in time. Data warehousing taught us that sometimes those ’snapshots’ in time, however, are relevant — suggesting the ‘both’ principle again, both ‘fixed’ and ‘dynamic’ (I’ll defer from launching into my perspectives on the fundamental principles of endless groupings of continuums along which the points converge based on the ‘collective’ of the relevant set of continuums, all being influenced by one another and the situations/environments/time, all to arrive at a point in time decision — ala. the new science of economics, including behavioral economics).
Therefore, there is value not only in the searches themselves, but in the references to the content (ala. the relationships). With del.icio.us, tagging inherently creates a variety of relationships — in the earlier scenarios, the content was hardwired to a fixed results set (although, this would not have to have been the case if Copernic had simply stored a ‘template’ of the xml or some other layer which represented the relevancy of my results set — capturing the attributes of the things I excluded and the attributes of the things I included to approximate the search again).
Moral: Rethink the problem from a different perspective.
by Bill Ives
May 24, 2007 at 11:59 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Paula Thorton recently wrote in Experience Design 2.0, “2.0 thinking is more dynamic — it requires deconstructing the ‘barriers’ and identifying the conditions by which the barriers can be removed. The planning for the Rave event embraced this concept.” I would agree. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 open up greater possibilities for a number of other good design principles.
For example, last November Paul Graham spoke at the Berkman Center. As the notice said, “In a recent essay, “Taste for Makers,” Paul argues that successful design, from math to software to painting, relies on the same aesthetic principles. Taste is therefore not a matter of subjectively appreciating fine works but is a required capability for creating great software or useful events. I tend to judge event design from an aesthetic, as much as a pedagogical, view.
The essay shares some very interesting design principles that apply to software design, as well as art, that can be useful for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. Paul has experience in both art and software. Here are a few concepts from the piece. Good design is simple. Good design solves the right problem. Good design is suggestive. I have found that the best examples of both software and events follow these criteria. There are many more principles carefully defined with examples.
Wikis are a good example of these concepts. Brian Lamb quoted Charlie Mingus in his essay on wikis. “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. “ This should be one of the guiding principles in designing enterprise 2.0 applications, using wikis or other tools. Take a look at what Paul wrote. It is full of good reminders.
by Paula Thornton
May 23, 2007 at 2:20 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Forgive the mixing of metaphors…
While there are announcements all the time, occassionally one seems like it might sway a neuron or two. I was struck that way by the proclamation of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, that Web 2.0 is the future and that Cisco is “moving our company as fast as we can to collaboration and Web 2.0“, at Interop 07 keynote [related video, 6:21 edited]
I think the difference is not just the talk, but the commitment of action, and the correspondingly claimed velocity toward that goal. He also reiterated that this is a people problem, not a technology problem. This latter message was echoed in the panel discussions from the recent RAVE (I’ve got great notes I plan to share and comment on shortly).
John’s been spinning his Web 2.0 religion more recently. See related coverage: CRN, CRN: collaboration, Giga OM, Computerworld.
by Dana Gardner
May 23, 2007 at 6:38 am · Filed under
Innovator Interviews, Podcasts, Social Computing, Sponsored Post
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS
Effective information-sharing across the distribution of goods — visibility into transportation supply chains and distribution networks — is a vital part of the information revolution and the knowledge economy.
Global and local players in the total distribution channel are constantly looking for reductions in cost, efficiency improvements, and slashed time to distribution — all of which can substantially reduce the total cost of an overall production and distribution activity, and heighten customer service and satisfaction.
UPS started with tracking on the Web in the early 1990s and today supports online tracking in 63 countries. UPS has extended basic services to cover broad supply chain visibility for shippers, receivers, importers, and exporters — both residential and commercial — through its traditional U.S. small package services, as well as via global UPS Freight, Air, and Ocean Freight Services.
I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that examines the market trends driving the need for greater supply chain technology and efficiency, as well as the visibility services UPS has in place. Joining me was Jim Rice, director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program at MIT; Stephanie Callaway, director of customer technology marketing at UPS; Frank Deen is the shipping manager at Rackmount Solutions, and John Schaffer, president of TrueWave.
Here are some excerpts:
… Companies and leaders [are] concerned … about continuity — business continuity. We saw that destructions like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 caused a lot of companies to start recognizing that their supply chains are genuinely at risk.
A lot of vulnerabilities were always there, but weren’t very apparent or evident. So, there’s a fair amount of recognition about this vulnerability. Right now, there is some work going on in that some companies are planning to make their supply chains more resilient and trying to actively manage risks.
The companies are concerned with optimal supply chain design, and this takes in the aspect of outsourcing. How much outsourcing do we use? How much of that do we even think of putting offshore, trying to reduce cycle time, cost, and uncertainty in the system? That will ultimately enable them to be much more responsive to spikes and drops in demand.
Companies continue to squeeze their supply chain to lean it out, and make it more efficient and more effective. There are a lot of drivers in the industry right now that affect the price of sundry industries differently.
A lot of it comes down to having relationships with customers and suppliers. They would be open and free to share the information that ultimately will help both organizations to make better decisions, reduce uncertainty in the system, and take out some of the cost and uncertainty. That makes the system potentially much more efficient.
Some of these capabilities are becoming more readily available for large companies, and hopefully in the near term, to small- and medium-sized enterprises. The challenges aren’t simple, but I think there are some tools and processes emerging that are going to make this much more possible in the future, and therefore get us a little closer to that Nirvana of the synchronized supply chain.
Initially, when we started doing this, because we were shipping from so many locations, even though it was being shipped on our account, we would have to contact each one of those shipping points, each warehouse, each manufacturer to get tracking numbers to send to our customers. Of course, now we are able to have that information sent directly to the customer when the product ships. They get an email with that information.
Plus, on UPS Quantum View, we are able to pull up a report every day that shows everything that has been shipped out on our account, whether from our local warehouse or any of those other locations. We’re able to have that tracking number and see the exact progress of that package — when it was picked up, where it’s at currently, when it’s expected to be delivered, and the address that it’s expected to be delivered to. When a customer calls and asks a question about it, we are able to go to that and immediately give them an answer that provides a comfort level that we are keeping track of their merchandise that they are waiting to get.
We could get to the markets, but we couldn’t do in a way that allowed our customers to have visibility into the process. There’s a lot of uncertainty when you are shipping internationally. When you have visibility into the process from point A to point B, it really changes the dynamic quite a bit. One of the tools that Stephanie was discussing, Quantum View Manage, allows us to see if there are problems along the way. Then we can communicate with our customers in such a way that we can set the proper expectations.
Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: UPS
Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.
UPS provides greater supply chain technology and efficiency [37:36m]:
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