Low carbon computing: a view to 2050 and beyond : JISC.

Put it in your Christmas reading.

Anyway, being laid low means that I missed out on the FSD STG meeting in London. I’m hoping I can get a debrief from someone before everyone heads off for the Christmas break, as in my opinion, it was billed to be a fairly important meeting in the life of the current programme.

One bonus of being out of back-to-back meetings all week, however, has been that I’ve actually had some thinking space to sort out a view on a few projects that I’d like to take a look at. One particular area of interest at the moment is around Force.com and the Force platform for basic apps such as leave management and/or project management. I think there’ll be some work on that over the Christmas period for kicks. Back in the office, we’ve recently gone live with Oracle Financials (e-Business Suite) and are starting up a new internet strategy piece which will pick up pace pretty quickly in Q1 2010.

On the architecture front we’ve been busy getting a quick fix on the as-is view of our landscape at the moment. This is mainly to give us a reasonably efficient way of viewing and assessing the immediate concerns we have over systems coming up for renewal or EOL. Believe it or not, this whole-Earth view of what we’re running is something that has never really been successful in the past. More on that another time.

I, on the other hand, have been spending the weekend in Madison, WI with @jimphelps talking over lots of fun architecture-related stuff.  We’re heading to Denver in the morning and will no doubt have to work hard to catch up with the others already immersed in Conference Fever.

Maturity is a somewhat amorphous subject to deal with across the various domains that use the term so freely.  There are the ‘classic’ maturity models for Development, Acquisition, Services and People from Carnegie Mellon’s SEI.  Then there’s Enterprise Architecture itself (though I still can’t quite understand why assessing how mature you are at EA is really all that useful for discussing with a sponsor), and now SOA.  There’s a risk that in adopting maturity for the sake of it which can end up putting you square back in a ‘feeding the beast’ position – something that’s been echoed in recent conversations from Forrester’s Gene Leganza and BCIT’s Leo de Sousa out on Twitter, but has been around as a theme for quite some time.

Anyhoo – here’s the release for OG:

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24, 2009 – The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on open standards and global interoperability within and between enterprises, today announced the availability of two new industry standards: the Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) and SOA Governance Framework. OSIMM will provide an industry recognized maturity model for advancing the continuing adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing within and across businesses. The SOA Governance Framework is a free guide for organizations to apply proven governance standards that will accelerate service-oriented architecture success rates.

“These are two very different standards that are both important for the deployment of SOA within large organizations,” said Dr. Chris Harding, forum director for SOA and semantic interoperability at The Open Group. “Enterprises use OSIMM when considering adopting SOA, to help them determine what level of SOA is appropriate to their needs and capabilities. They use the SOA Governance Framework once they have adopted SOA, to help them determine how to organize themselves to use it to their best advantage. Together, the standards enable enterprises to accelerate SOA deployment and generate direct business value much sooner.”

OSIMM

As more organizations continue to embrace the use of services as the foundation for their next-generation IT infrastructures, it is increasingly important for them to assess their maturity within a complete SOA migration path and identify how to maximize business benefits from their adoptions. Many SOA maturity models exist today, however an industry-recognized adoption model and terminology based on open standards are both required for companies to realize the full potential of SOA. OSIMM leverages proven best practices within the industry, helping IT practitioners create a roadmap for their incremental adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing. Additionally, the model will help organizations achieve advanced levels of service integration that are specifically in line with their unique migration path and business goals.

“IBM is very pleased with today’s announcement of the Open Service Integration Maturity Model standard which provides our customers with the ability to identify business goals and assess associated usage of services when creating SOA solutions,” said Kerrie Holley, IBM fellow and worldwide chief technology officer of SOA Center of Excellence in Global Business Services. “OSIMM sets the foundation for an iterative, roadmap-based approach to deploying services aligned with organizational objectives. With standardization, customers are assured they can use these powerful concepts across diverse heterogeneous environments. IBM strongly supports OSIMM and its use in helping our customers as they execute on their services roadmap.”

“The principles of service-orientation are crucial to achieving Boundaryless Information Flow™,” said Ron Tolido, chief technology officer, Capgemini Continental Europe and Asia Pacific. “Therefore we are committed to creating standards such as the Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model that will help our clients to benefit more and more from SOA.”

“With our extensive experience helping clients in their efforts to achieve business value through service orientation, we understand that transforming an organization’s behavior requires maturity beyond the underlying technology,” says Scott A. Rosenberger, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “We support efforts like The Open Group’s OSIMM that can help organizations prepare to evolve to the type of Services Thinking necessary to achieve true value from services and the growing cloud movement.”

The first version of the OSIMM Technical Standard is available for download here: http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/catalog/c092.htm.

SOA Governance Framework

Industry adoption of SOA validates the importance of good governance practices in assuring that organizations reach and surpass their intended goals. The SOA Governance Framework was developed by The Open Group SOA Work Group to ensure enterprises can benefit from proven best practices without having to invest in developing a framework of their own, thereby reducing the overall risk associated with SOA. Unlike other governance frameworks that are focused on IT rather than enterprise architecture or SOA, such as ValIT and COBIT (from ISACA), and ITIL, the new framework provides specific guidance for governance of SOA.

“The SOA Governance Framework will be a very valuable instrument for Capgemini to support our SOA engagements,” continued Tolido. “We believe SOA is a key enabler to achieve both cost-effective solutions and a high level of flexibility and openness. Working from proven and innovative best practices – captured in an open governance framework – will further accelerate our approach.”

“Organizations can reduce cost, minimize risk and accelerate the deployment of governance programs by applying the proven standards and best practices outlined in the SOA Governance Framework,” said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, vice president of Applications Services at EDS, an HP company. “As one of the key contributors to the SOA Governance Framework, we continue to collaborate with The Open Group to develop SOA standards that promote the adoption of leading-edge technologies and methods.”

“In today’s industry there is a broad consensus that without appropriate SOA governance, it is impossible to fully realize the benefits of the SOA approach,” said Rares Pateanu, vice-president, Architecture, CGI. “CGI welcomes the release of The Open Group SOA Governance Framework Technical Standard. We have contributed to the creation of this framework, because we believe that an open standard of governance will facilitate a common understanding, vocabulary and approach for optimizing governance in our engagements and maximizing the value of SOA for our clients.”

“The Open Group SOA Governance Framework standardization is a significant milestone for enterprises looking for faster, more reliable ways to exploit SOA for their business objectives,” said Karla Norsworthy, vice president of Software Standards, IBM. “It provides guidance and methods to oversee the planning, building and managing of SOA solutions. With this framework, customers will be able to leverage the knowledge and experience gained by IBM and our Open Group partners in thousands of successful SOA deployments and accelerate the time to value for their SOA projects.”

The SOA Governance Framework is available immediately, free of charge from The Open Group at http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/catalog/c093.htm.

Alternative IT Sourcing Strategies: From the Campus to the Cloud

Abstract

This 2009 ECAR research study explores a multitude of strategies used by colleges and university information technology organizations to deliver the breadth of technologies and services required by their institutions. Findings illustrate that although total outsourcing of institutional technology organizations is rare, so is self-operation of all IT functions and services. The study focuses on “alternative sourcing,” which is defined as the range of options institutions have for providing technology services or operating technology functions aside from doing it themselves. This includes traditional outsourcing of all or part of the IT organization, accessing cloud services and externally managed applications, development environments, or hardware via the Internet, and use of contractors and consultants as a part of the IT organization. The study is informed by 372 responses to a survey of EDUCAUSE member institutions, interviews with 20 senior IT leaders, consultation with focus groups, and three case studies.

A start page for the subject is available at:  Enterprise Workflow – ITANA – Internet2 Wiki.

Application Platform Strategies Blog: Participate in Burton Group’s BPM Contextual Research Project.

During the second half of 2009, Burton Group is conducting a qualitative research project to assess business, cultural, and technology trends driving business process management (BPM) efforts within the enterprise. We want to understand how organizations are deriving value from BPM. We want to gain insight into the factors that enable them to succeed, and the barriers causing failure. What is the set of product requirements that enable effective and efficient business process design, implementation, integration, execution, monitoring, and management?

A mix of face-to-face and telephone interviews will be the methods used for data collection. Our goal is to have an open-ended dialog with participants from business units and IT groups. The project is open to Burton Group clients and non-clients alike. Some participant roles we are looking to interview include:

· Line-of-business managers

· IT managers, architects and project leaders involved in BPM efforts

· Process and Quality Subject Matter Experts

· Executive sponsors of initiatives related to BPM

“Gartner said that enterprise architects must be ready to embrace the inversion of control. Where in the past, they controlled all EA decision making, they must now accept that that business units demand more autonomy.”

Why all the fuss?  Well, it turns out that Gartner have discovered that we EA types have been going about things in completely the wrong way in the past few years, and the ‘Emergent’ deal they have come up with means that we have to shift our game.  Essentially, we’ve all been navigating with the map held upside down for far too long.

There’s not much to add that hasn’t already been well covered by @leodesousa (Leo de Sousa, BCIT) and @richter858 has (John Townsend, LJMU) who have both responded in posts from the perspective of #EAinHE.  Both generally confirm that there’s not really anything new in what Gartner are saying – to us at least.

Mike Rollings from Burton Group seemed to be first past the post in responding to the release with a post entitled “Gartner wakes out of an EA induced coma…”, which I think succinctly sums up the overall reaction to the post.  He’s also blogged a round-up of comments from other people across different EA groups.  Others (on the back channel) responded with genuine surprise to find that we’d actually had control in first place.

Certainly from our perspective, we’ve never really subscribed or believed in totally immersion in a particular framework for our use, as it’s just too much pain for ‘small’ (read: small and/or immature) enterprises to gain traction with.  Nor have we set out for the total control from the centre – that just wouldn’t work for our kind of institution across all services.  It works in some cases, but as the operational model we have isn’t a one-size fits all view, it takes more finessing to generate useful outcomes.  Gartner’s ‘new’ stance is one that fits more closely with what we’ve been doing all along, or at least what we *think* we’ve been doing at least.

In summary, I think we’re back to the stalwart of any EA event where the very definition of EA is discussed at some length.  There is a simple solution to this predicament of searching for meaning in what we do which might help everyone relax in to just getting on with the job.  Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant At The End of The Universe wrote:

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe Enterprise Architecture is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

And relax…