At a UK IT conference, a senior IBM analyst provided some clues on what IT services will become in the future which were in short :
- 70% of 2005 CIO budget was labour
- Operations labour will be 73% of CIO labour budgets by 2008
- Application development will decline at –10% CGR to 2008
- If this trend continues, there will be not development budget left by …2012!
The first one recalled me a discussion I had with a senior consultant in France who defended the view that the best IT performance indicator was staff number. By this time I was not really convinced since I expected that IT value might curb staff importance in the discussion.
In the 80’s and the 90’s, information systems viewed the world as enterprise centric. All business facts and events the enterprise ought to manage, were entered into the system by employees or captured by technical equipements like sensors.
By these times, enterprises were compared to complex living systems made of people and machines. They need at the same times programs and psychology, that was in short the H A Simon point of view when he work out the decision process. Information systems should support all aspects of the enterprise brain, especially they should cater for a virtual machine which help to understanding events, to taking the right decision, to leading the required operations. This cannot be achieved without dealing with the question of reality representation. Beside technology, this is the main question addressed by researchers and developers.
Marcus Evans conference in Paris, March 2008
March 18, 2008
Last Thursday, I attended to a Marcus Evans conference in Paris on Enterprise Architecture. For those who are not familiar with, Marcus Evans is definitely not a new pub name, but a very serious organisation in the conferences business. Once a year, they use to cover the topic of Enterprise Architecture local ongoings which attracts more or less the same actors, attendees and speakers.
I like it, because most of the time, people present their feedbacks : successes, drawbacks and outcomes. I am always impressed because project managers used to be very talented when they talk about their projects. This time the purpose was : “Enterprise Architecture, 7 years after”.
Since 1996, France settled the practice of “Urbanisme” based on City Organisation paradigm which is fairly closed to Enterprise architecture.The principles are to group information functionalities according to the type of resources they require. For instance, operational functions require transaction oriented resources with high availability, while external exchange functions require resources for managing and securing exchanges with actors located outside Information system.
When SOA appeared, “Urbanisme” dodged the new questions it brougth forward : for instance how to identify the services ? how to identify service operations ? These were among the subjects addressed by the conference speakers.
The first, Michel Brouant, Architecture Manager at Unédic, presented the roadmap of the Unedic and Assedic systems merging. The timetable was impressive : four months for setting up the roadmap due to few systems overlaps except for support processes like human resources, accounting and so on… three years of duration.
The roadmap combined 3 types of projects : Accessing IS (agent, customer, partners), streamlining systems, business functions like master data…
In a context with a lot of organisational questions left, the success came from a mature team which already had tools like systems maps and inventories. These helps to boost as is assessment.
Rafaël Gutierrez, Project Manager at Environment State department, presented the implementation of a generic Business Process Management engine. The approach of rolling out quickly such a service and connecting systems after, allows to start quickly with simple projects and skip more easily to more complex projects.
Nicolas Bogucki, Chief Architect at INA, presented the tool out of a tool which automate some parts systems mapping. It helps as well as functional and business mapping. The project choose Telelogic System Architect because it allows to customise metamodel and support automation like VBA.
Christophe Rémy-Neris, Editing Domain Director at Canal Plus, presented the benefits of SOA for a migration projects.
Stephan Chraibi, IT Strategy and Architecture Director at Aviva, presented a global project which allow to rearrange and group systems using virtualization technology.
Then François Rougier, CIO at MACIF, presented a system architecture evolution project toward multichannel customers relationship management. His model spans 4 layers = business systems which provide basic services, business procedures which orchestrate services, system procedures specific to a channel and human interface. He seeks the target of maximising service reuse, since his cost model shows that return on investment increase as services are reused. His main issue was to manage changes of services .
The last speaker has been Olivier Guerin, Director of “Urbanisation and SOA Strategy” at Dreamsoft. He developed the point of view that “Urbanisme” practise and SOA are tightly linked. He draw the prospect that “Urbanisme” helps to succeed in SOA.
The day finished with a round table on more feedbacks regarding SOA projects.
The conference presenter was Claude Durand, Strategy Director at Osiatis. He fare well in introducing and concluding briefly each presentation and in boosting questions and answers sessions.
The lesson of this day may be to demonstrate that the steps to SOA don’t always start with business transformation projects. It requires also a maturity level of technical infrastructure. Projects which contribute to improve technical architecture, may be a lever for the SOA roadmap. However even such projects need to be supported by a strong business case.
Wishes 2008 and global IS outlook
January 2, 2008
I wish all IT managers an happy new year. Health and wealth for you and your families. I hope for all of you many IT businesses in 2008. This is just what i discuss in the short outlook below. Feel free to put your feed-back.
With credit crunch crisis, the rich world fears to slow-down. It expects that buoyant emerging markets will buy its exports and help to recapitalise. As companies are struggling for their bottomline, they use to invest on projects which streamline their business process. This means budget increase for IT Divisions. Moreover, in many cases this kind of ROI rely on IT efficiency.
Then, this new year appears to start in a good shape for IT people, at least in Europe, for the bulk of companies.
Regarding the market,
Consolidation in Business Intelligence solutions put pressure on prices. Customers are almost captive and have poor ways to challenge offers. On the other side, editors are able to cater for integrated solutions. Oracle with AIA provides a full fledged built-in SOA system when a building blocks approach did not succeed to fuel valuable services development.
Virtualization solutions are more mature and show real opportunities of streamlining IT process.
Open-Source solutions become more credible option for big companies. They may be a serious strategic option for challenging giants of software.
Saas services develop, but are often bought by Business divisions. It is not a so good news, since it weakens IT divisions role and make Companies less able to roll out a strong IT policy.
Web 2.0 knocked the door of companies but it did not get in by now.
In conclusion,
2008 starts with good outlooks for IT. Streamlining tendency give to IT Division a more strategic role which may help to improve IT perception. Challenge for CIO’s will be to balance the job to do with budgets. Slow projects will result in slow ROI which impacts directly the bottomlines.
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by 2012 40% of today’s enterprise architecture programs will be stopped
September 24, 2007
I’ve just read this prediction in the next Gartner summit announcement. I am feeling really desperate since I’ve just discovered that I may lead my customers to wrong decisions. They may find themselves in right to complain saying : you are leading us in bad ways without ROI hopes and worse toward failures. OK. Do I consider enterprise architecture projects should go beyond IT departements and help to solve business challenge ? Yes for years, since I am an Architect. Moreover, all architects I know share the same way of thinking.
But what’s wrong then ?
In one of its posts, SOA ROI in Question ? , Dave Linthicum quote the study of Nucleus Research stating that only 37% of enterprises have achieved a positive ROI from SOA deployments. It is even worse.
The question is in both cases how to achieve a positive ROI. I am very curious to discover the approach Gartner group will promote in a way to avoid usual biaises with shared resources (post in french). But not only ! The question belongs as well to software editors who have used extensively SOA marketing and have in the same time provided poor features, not too far from the old RPC (Remote Procedure Calls). They should be as well questionned since they have misleaded CEO’s regarding some of their investments.
Close to Enterprise Architects, software editors have to provide not only fondation components but business software wich may be iintegrated into an Enterpise architectured system.
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EA models and software models
September 4, 2006
Before EA come out, software architecture already used modelling to manage software matching of user requirements.
Software models break down requirements in functions and associate them with components. Then, one requirement may be in relation with many components as many requirements may be associated with one component.
In the case of one requirement relying on more than one component, all them perform a collaborative work which means many messages to be exchanged, some of them internally, some of them outwardly.
A message is, at least, a query about a part of an object state or an event notification to an object for changing its state.
The same may happen between functional components, regarded from the business point of view, and technical components regarded from developers point of view.
Developer is keen to connect its technical work with user requirements and business to show how the previous support the last one.
When development finishes, it has to be componentized for preparing deployment. Deployment packages contain logical components which are deployed on physical computers.
Basically, EA reuses the same approach but one scale larger since it encompasses all projects. EA provides the framework to glueing software models.
