Have you ever heard about the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC)? It’s part of the University of San Diego – situated close to the place where UC4 customers gathered for the annual user conference some weeks ago? They just published a new 2009 Report on American Consumers (entitled “How Much Information?”) trying to create a census of all forms of information an average American consumes in a single day.
Want to guess how much??? It’s 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day.
The New York Times twists the knife in the wound, pointing out that this “doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games.”
But why do we have this voracious appetite for information? The answer is maybe a whole lot simpler than you would think: Because what we mainly eat is instant data and not nutritious information! It seems time for a diet – even on the business side? Because business processes nowadays are accompanied by myriads of event driven data while at the same we have to govern them almost in real-time. In a situation like this data is not enough. What we need are digestible pieces of information combined with pattern recognition capabilities.
Our diet plan is simple. Less junk data and more information bites. If you want to know what we use in the kitchen, get some UC4 Insight on our web. You will like the taste.
It was Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996), one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, who revolutionized our picture of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in claiming that, according to the Paradigm Concept, a mature science experiences alternating phases of normal science and revolutions: “In normal science the key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions that comprise the disciplinary matrix are kept fixed, permitting the cumulative generation of puzzle-solutions, whereas in a scientific revolution the disciplinary matrix undergoes revision, in order to permit the solution of the more serious anomalous puzzles that disturbed the preceding period of normal science.”
What this quotation from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy conceals is that in normal science the questions are also kind of fixed and prefabricated and that during these periods scientists normally just raise questions about which they already know the answers.
Our situation is not normal at all. It is a situation of fundamental change – and this not just because of the crisis. Mark McDonald from Gartner knows this. And he knows about the importance of raising the right questions. Questions which can move us forward: “Great CIOs ask good questions pretty much all the time. A good question is one that creates knowledge and shares understanding. A good question makes both parties smarter. Most questions are not great questions. Helpful yes, but they simply exchange information from one side to the other.”
I don’t want to withhold from you the following rough typology of great questions that Mark McDonald gives …
• Logic checking questions – If that is true, then these other things must be false?
• Implications based questions – So given this issue we are also seeing these other things happening?
• Proof of fact questions – so how do you know the issue is happening and what are the consequences?
• Forward looking questions – so given all of that, what are the next steps or how do you suggest we take?
… also because most process optimization efforts follow the same steps.
“Over the next five years, IT automation will overtake offshoring as the next major efficiency trend in IT.” This is how Ken Jackson, President of Americas at UC4, starts his article about The Dawning of the IT Automation Era. This is surprising just for those who either consider offshoring as the universal answer to all cost reduction challenges or think that cost reduction is the only target of IT automation.
But in a world where IT environments are becoming more and more complex “squeezing every bit of extra cost out of your IT budget” and therefore leaving IT professionals with a “bare bones operating plan” is a tactic which is not sustainable at all. It`s like engaging in a rulebook slowdown while neglecting the fact that IT can really boost your business and ensure accurate service delivery.
The truth behind this is simple: you need money to invest in cost saving technologies. Because keeping IT systems just up and running is not enough. If you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water you have to jointly develop business innovation abilities and cost avoidance strategies.
The answer to complexity is process visibility, and a combination of real-time intelligence and just-in-time execution. This will help you to squeeze instead every bit of value out of your IT budget.
And this is what it’s all about.
For more information on the “several factors contributing to the coming age of IT automation” read Ken Jacksons inspiring article.
It seems a good time for Manifestos, that’s taken for granted, but do we need to wrap the SOA approach into a Manifesto too? Now that the technological benefits of SOA applications over existing legacy applications have been well documented? Now that it is well known that SOA offers business benefits across applications and platforms, including location independent services, a loosely coupled approach providing agility, the dynamic search for other services, and that services are reusable?
According to Joe McKendrick, “SOA is not a thing that you do, and it definitely isn’t a thing that you buy … but something tangible, a style if you will, just as Roman, Greek or Modern are styles of architecture.” This perfectly paraphrases the very first statement of the SOA Manifesto, which philosophically states that service orientation is more an attitude, “a paradigm that frames what you do.”
The good thing about the Manifesto is that it reminds us of the cultural implications of a SOA approach. And that it plays nicely with the principle that states that “SOA is not made out of products”. But on the other hand we should not neglect the technical challenges, of course. Because the situation we are focussing on is the fact that over 50% of the processing in the current application landscape is background processing.
That is why we need interfaces that guarantee the inclusion of background processes into the SOA business process. That is why we need intelligent Workload Automation tools based on Web Services to initiate, monitor, and manage background processes. And that is why UC4 customers prefer an Automation Broker (here is the Whitepaper for Download) to bridge between SOA vision and batch reality than being part of a platonic style symposium.
I am looking forward to your comments!
Here is the video of the announcement:
You can find a complete list of the authors at the bottom of the manifesto, or view a picture of everybody on stage at the signing of the SOA Manifesto.
“Cloud computing is not just one more way to deploy information systems. It represents a total shift in how IT resources are delivered and ultimately will replace most if not all internally-maintained IT infrastructure.” This is how Franc Scavo starts his latest blogpost on “the inexorable dominance of cloud computing” and the raise of utility computing – inspired by a speech by Nicholas Carr at a Cloud Computing conference organized last week in London by Google.
This is, by the way, the same Nicholas Carr who shook the world of many IT managers and CIOs when he published his article “IT doesn’t matter” in the Harvard Business Review in May 2003 – trying to make the case that, from a strategic standpoint, infrastructural technologies will commoditize and become more and more invisible.
Nowadays, and some years later, we´re over this initially offending perspective. We are able to see that the value propositions of SaaS and Cloud computing strategies are significantly better than those of on-premise software. And that both SaaS and the Cloud rely on integrated technologies from an automated backbone. The more invisible, the more mature. The more mature, the better.
It was Nicholas Carr who coined the matching Cloud koan in his blog: “Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything.”
The Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009 we have been attending in Orlando not only endorsed the big hypes aroung virtualization and cloud computing, but also our ongoing investments in service-aware process automation – offering real-time intelligence for just-in-time execution. It matched perfectly that Gartner analyst Roy Schulte and K. Mani Chandy, Professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, used this event to introduce their brand new book called “Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies” about the business drivers, costs and benefits of event-processing applications.
According to Mr. Schulte and Mr. Chandy the new aspirations in situation awareness and reaction accuracy can`t be achieved by simply speeding up traditional business processes or exhorting people to work harder and smarter with conventional applications. Instead they urge companies to make fundamental changes in the architecture of business processes and the application systems that support them by using more of the event-processing discipline. “While a typical business process has time-driven, request-driven and event-driven aspects, event-driven architecture (EDA) is underutilized in system design resulting in slow and inflexible systems,” said Mr. Chandy. “Event-driven systems are intrinsically smart because they are context-aware and run when they detect changes in the business world rather than occurring on a simple schedule or requiring someone to tell them when to run.”
“Event-driven CEP is a kind of near real-time business intelligence (BI), a way of `connecting the dots` to detect threats and opportunities,” explained Mr. Schulte. “By contrast, conventional BI is time-driven or request-driven. Complex events may be reactive, summarizing past events or predictive, identifying things that are likely to happen based on what has happened recently compared with historical patterns.”
Sometimes industry hypes can reciprocally enforce each other and sometimes they even coexist so closely that the question: “Who was first” is verging on the “chicken or the egg causality dilemma”. With “Virtualization” and “Cloud Computing” it’s different. Of course, they do “hype” each other but the concept of cloud computing is not even thinkable without having virtualization technologies in mind. A concept which is defined by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as “a model for enabling convenient, in-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources … that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
I found this definition whilst going through a brand new EMA White Paper titled “Achieving Virtualization Control with Intelligent Service Automation”. In this study EMA researcher Andi Mann develops the supporting argument that an efficient use and dynamic provisioning of resources depends on service-aware automation technologies.
Workloads don’t care whether they are happening on physical or virtual systems. That’s why – according to Andi Mann – an automated virtual service management is the basis of any serious cloud approach. “It sets the stage for well-managed cloud computing services, with two essential components. Firstly, the virtual infrastructure provides a turnkey approach to flexibility, agility, and scalability, and the essential convenient, on-demand configuration of shared computing resources. This is difficult, and perhaps impossible, with a tightly-coupled physical environment. Secondly, intelligent and sophisticated automation is essential to ensuring minimal management effort or service provider interaction, which would be impossible with a manual management approach.”
And that’s why the UC4 Intelligent Service Automation platform is an important building block for cloud computing: 1) It initiates the dynamic distribution of workloads out of the process. 2) It immediately integrates newly-provisioned systems into your daily recurring housekeeping routines for backup and maintenance. 3) It introduces real-time intelligence to Cloud-Computing by acting on not reacting to events inside the applications. And finally 4) it provides an end-to-end view for predictive process management, integrating real and virtual worlds.
“We recently had to replace the server in my office. It was seven years old and one of the hard drives failed. It was not an expenditure I expected to have this year. My IT guy said that my desktop is seven years old. He also informed me that half the machines in the office are between five and eight years old and that I should budget to replace all of them next year. If we did not have a weak economy, I would normally have replaced these machines after five years of service. I think my business is typical of many businesses around the world“. This is how Ronald Roge, chairman of R. W. Roge & Company, one of a highly regarded wealth management firm describes the situation.
The related article from forbes.com is about the IT market and the pent-up demand in many firms due to the crisis in the last year or two. The good news: Concerning 2010 forecasts, the industry’s experts expect the cork to pop this year.
What strikes me is that in the article they talk mainly about IT lifecycles and replacement procedures and not about how technology itself has changed in the last two years. Take virtualization technologies and the role they can play – even in a tense economic situation – as the key to doing more with less; to reducing hardware, space and energy demand and to making your business more available, more agile and more productive.
Of course, not before you have done your management lessons on integrating real and virtual environments in a consistent way. Using VMware it becomes clear that the dynamic provisioning of new systems is not enough. Unless they become part of your automation strategy they remain outside your business processes waiting for costly manual integration.
Talking about the cork which is supposed to pop next year we should also talk about the deadlocks threatening the virtualization issue. We should talk about virtual machine sprawl and costly process interruption at the intersections between virtual instances and physically deployed systems.
And we should underline that it is not enough to find out the status of your server hardware the moment you want to dynamically provision workloads; you have to go deeper – into the application layer that correlates and acts on events to bring real-time intelligence and real-time dynamic to virtual and cloud computing environments. It’s obviously much more than fulfilling IT lifecycles. It’s about considering IT as a strategic asset and not as a cost center.
Have you ever tried rafting? And did you ever feel the adrenaline rush of a wild ride through white water? Processes are like rivers. Floating. That’s common, of course. But let’s dig a bit deeper. And see how and why white water happens.
For a loose definition I would note that white water is not just a matter of speed but the result of different floating velocities. When passing a chute, water speeds up but just for a short time, because it cannot escape, is always part of the river and surrounded by water at a lower speed. This is the reason why maelstroms suddenly occur, marking the interfacing line between two velocities. These maelstroms are not only dangerous, but malicious – forcing you to seriously “read” the water.
Against this background and thinking about virtualization issues, the analogy that processes are like rivers is not that commonplace anymore. This explains perfectly why the creation of virtualization islands – in our new terms: the creation of “virtualization chutes” – doesn’t lead us anywhere from a process point of view and just produces maelstroms which are difficult to handle and threaten operational efficiency.
They work as short chutes but don’t speed up the river as a whole. And so they don’t speed up the end-to-end process from back-office to the customer’s interface. But having customers in mind and SLAs can you seriously talk about processes without thinking end-to-end? Certainly not. And that’s why we need virtualization automation more than ever. To assure that your automation strategy covers all applications and processes in real AND virtual world – and to increase productivity alongside the river.
Process or Business Rule? This is the question Gartner Analyst Jim Sinur raises in one of his latest blogposts. Although this approach appealed to me from the beginning, I could not get rid of the feeling that this kind of comparison was slightly academic – playing with narrow concepts. Because a process is no more a stupid external routine than a business rule can be extracted out of books. And neither is a “process a bunch of rules strung together in a static or dynamic sequence”, nor “act a business rule as simple constraint/boundary to keep processes on track.”
Following the argumentation for both sides, it seems that the answer will not be found by a diplomatic balancing of these points, as suggested. Because the right answer must reflect the dynamic nature of business operations and process composition, I would rather subscribe to James Taylor’s comment: the crown belongs to “neither rules nor process but decisions … You MUST have the process to fulfill the decision – to take the action you decided on – but it is the decision that rules.”
Mark Norton’s comment is along the same lines: “Decisions are the policy-driven specification of how value is created and recognized by each business. For value to be created, a change of state of “something” must be explicitly acknowledged by the organization, and this acknowledgement is a bespoke, decision-centric activity.”
A change of state is what we call an event. And events drive both businesses and operations. Maybe it is events that fit the crown best. The king is dead. Long live the king.
Wolfgang Tonninger
Ralf Paschen
Christian Plaichner
Paul Rosien
