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Did SOA die or do we just suck at architecture?

Burton Group Analyst Anne Thomas Manes wrote a great article yesterday called SOA is Dead, Long Live Services.  If you just read headlines, you might think that she is denouncing SOA as a failed architecture.  But if you read the entire article you will find that what Anne is really denouncing is the term SOA and the failed approaches that most organizations have used to try to implement it.

Although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.

I wrote a post on CIO.com several months ago called the Top 10 Reasons Why People Make SOA Fail.  My message was that SOA is disruptive and transformational.  It requires vision, leadership, organizational change management, and exceptionally talented architects and engineers.  Dave Linthicum summed it up in his post when he stated:

So what went wrong?

First, there are not enough qualified architects to go around, and you’ll find that most of the core mistakes were made by people calling themselves “architects,” who lack the key skills for moving an enterprise towards SOA. They did not engage consultants or get the training they needed, and ran around in circles for a few years until somebody pulled their budgets.

Second, the big consulting firms drove many SOA projects into the ground by focusing more on tactics and billable hours than results and short- and long-term value.

Third, the vendors focused too much on selling and not enough on the solution. They put forth the notion that SOA is something they have to sell, not something you do.

Finally, the hype was just too much for those charged with SOA to resist. Projects selected the technology first, then the approach and architecture. That’s completely backwards.

As much as I agree with Anne’s article, I fear that the attention will now shift towards the next exciting technologies like mashups, cloud computing, Saas, and others and we will repeat our mistakes.  Two years from now we will be blogging about the death of cloud computing and mashups if we don’t take a step back and review our lessons learned.  When you bowl it down, what is the real problem here?

In my opinion, we suck at architecture! Why do we suck at architecture?  Let me count the ways.

1. We think process is a bad thing and it slows us down.  Well bad processes are bad, but good processes can guide us through the proper steps that lead us to successful implementations.  But there is a balance between process and agility.
2. We are impatient.  Many executives, especially in publicly traded companies don’t have the stomach to wait a year or two or more to reap the long term benefits of a service-oriented approach.  They want results and they want them now.  So we skip steps like identifying the organizational impacts, implementing governance, and acquiring the proper talent and wind up with a hodge podge of services that are built wrong and are unmanaged.
3. We don’t understand what an architect really is.  How many people do you know that have the title of architect?  How many of these same people have a clue on how to architect an enterprise system.  I laugh when I see job openings for a .Net architect.  What does that mean?  Is this person capable of architecting a .Net framework to be used by the .Net community?  No, this person knows .Net real well.  That’s not an architect, that’s a “senior, sr. developer”.
4. We don’t understand what architecture really is.  I am a member of many LinkedIn groups that focus on architecture.  There is so much discussion on what the value of EA is and hundreds of different answers.  If we can’t agree on the value of EA amongst ourselves, how in the world is the CEO or CFO going to support an EA initiative?  There are so many good frameworks out there (Zachman, TOGAF, E2AF, etc.) yet it seems that we are trying to reinvent the wheel.  Pick one, tweak it to your organization’s needs, and follow it.  It is not rocket science.
5. We lose sight of the value and argue semantics.  I am also in many yahoo groups (SOA, Cloud computing, etc.) and the discussions are so discouraging that I don’t even participate.  There are so many religious wars like Rest vs. Web Services, this vendor vs that vendor, and myths being discussed as facts.  What we really need is to discuss what has worked an what has not.  What are the best practices, the gotchas, the case studies, etc.  We should be helping each other succeed instead of fighting over semantics.  No wonder the business often takes matters into their own hands.  How did we become a Dilbert cartoon anyways?
6. We lack leadership skills and emotional intelligence.  When was the last time you saw IT leadership who excelled in Technology, Business, and People Skills?  Your lucky if they are good at two of these but to deliver transformational technology based initiatives they need to be skilled in all three (see The Missing Link in IT).

But these are not SOA specific issues.  IT has historically struggled with enterprise wide initiatives because they require more than just technology to implement.  Look at IT’s track record delivering ERP, CRM, new software development lifecycles (SDLC), agile, six sigma initiatives, etc.  All of these require an organization, not just IT, to change behavior, standardize, and work in harmony to achieve a common set of goals.  To make matters harder, we still need to keep the business running in the mean time.

The Cop Out

So now that we have declare SOA dead, we can forge ahead and start creating all kinds of ungoverned services, mashups, and cloud applications.  But guess what, like SOA we will wind up spending more money on solutions that don’t solve our problems unless we invest in architecture.  It reminds me of day trading and the the housing bubble.  People fall for the get rich quick scams and think they are winning the game until it all comes crumbling down.  Like a good long term mutual fund, SOA is a long term investment that lays the foundation for long term success.  The day traders and house buyers where living high on the hog early on but when the market corrected itself many where left broke.  The day trading bars disappeared, the real estate agents closed shop, and the hype died.  That’s what I see in IT.  SOA was the stock that went up 150 points in one day or the condo that you could flip for $50K in 3 months.  So we bought ESBs, hired consultants, and wrote a ton of web services.  There were some quick wins.  But then we needed to make changes to these services and  things broke.  Worse yet, because we didn’t take the time to architect the data layer, a business request caused us to make changes to 35 services instead of making a configuration change in the data services layer.  Even worse, we lost track of which version of the service we changed and who it impacted.  We made the change and broke other applications.  You get the picture.  We day traded instead of architected.  Guess what? We failed.  But we blamed SOA, the vendors, the analysts.  It couldn’t have been our fault could it?

So my question to the industry is when are we going to admit that we will continue to fail until we invest in enterprise architecture? EA frameworks do not only address technology.  EA starts with the business and ultimately defines which people, processes, and technologies that are required to help the business meet its goals.  Included in any good EA framework is the transition plan (I call it organization change management plan) required to successfully implement the appropriate solutions.

So the choice is ours.  We can invest in EA or we can have the analysts declare our next strategy dead two years from now.  I choose EA.  What do you choose?

The Greek’s 2009 Technology Predictions

I just read a post from Dana Gardner where he highlights 2009 predictions from leading analysts. I agree with most of these predictions but I’d like to add my own. I am by no means an industry analyst, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night :-}

The Greek’s Top 5 predictions/trends for 2009

1. Reduction in IT spending causes companies to start to be more fiscally responsible and take a more portfolio management approach to project prioritization, budgeting, and software selection. Expect a rise in adoption of open source software, especially in medium sized companies. Companies will think twice about spending enormous amounts of money on ERP, CRM, SOA solutions and especially development tools when most of their needs can be meet from open source equivalents.
2. Mobile computing will be king. More applications, products, and services will be geared towards mobile devices. More advertising, information sharing, and consumer tracking will be done on cell phones. Cell phones will start looking more and more like a universal smart card as the year goes on. Marketers will realize this and spam SMS messages will be on the rise. Location aware applications will start making headway in 2009.
3. Cloud Computing, especially PaaS and IaaS, will become widely accepted and the vendors will close some of the gaps in security, reliability, and privacy. There will be companies that rush into the cloud with no vision and no architecture and will have disastrous results. Of course the blame will fall on the technology or the vendors rather than the poor planning of the implementors. There will also be many success stories, especially with startups. Some of your biggest competitors are these startups who can go from concept to production with little capital.
4. Many US IT shops will sit on the sidelines buried in legacy and culture lock-in as foreign countries and startups (both here and abroad) start implementing game changing solutions leveraging the cloud, SOA, open source, and Web 2.0. 2009 is a critical year where those who embrace these technology trends start to create huge competitive advantages against those who don’t. This is kind of like the NFL draft where it takes a good 3 or 4 years to evaluate the players picked on draft day and determine if the draft was a success or a bust. Those who innovate now and do it successfully will look a lot different in 3 years than those who don’t. Let’s hope your company doesn’t draft like the Detroit Lions.
5. More IT people will lose their jobs to outsourcing due to rising health care costs, decreasing IT budgets, and outdated skill sets. As companies move towards newer technologies, many IT professionals who resist it and have not upgraded their skills will be left in the dust and forever bound to maintaining legacy systems. Those not up to speed on where technology is going will start paving their own path to extinction like the Y2K Cobol programmers. Those who do stay abreast and leverage social networks will create huge opportunities for themselves and demand top salaries and consulting rates.

Those are my predictions. I think 2009 is a crucial year for both companies and individuals. As bleak as things look at times, this year is ripe for opportunities for the wise and innovative. Remember that some of the biggest and best companies were started in a down economy. Have a great New Year and may you all realize your full potential in 2009!

The Best of the Greek in 2008

2008 was a great year for me personally.  My social network expanded and created many new opportunities for me including numerous public appearances, guest blogs, and interviews (all tracked here) as well as a great 3 month stint as a blogger for CIO.com’s SOA Drill Down blog.  My first post for CIO.com (Top 10 Reasons why People are Making SOA Fail) happened to be my most popular and was actually published in the October edition of the print version of the magazine.

In July I left corporate IT after 23 years and set out on my own.  I created Kavis Technology Consulting where I have helped clients understand SOA and have spoken to audiences about managing Organization Change.

In November I joined a startup as the CTO/Chief Architect and am having a blast building the architecture from scratch.  In 2009, look for more posts about “As A Service” (Software, Platform, and Infrastructure).

The year in blogging was a good one.  I wrote my first quarterly post on BPMInstitute.org which was a BPM case study on CERN and how they leveraged ActiveVos to automate numerous business processes.

And finally, I have assembled my top 10 posts from 2008. The Microsoft Free post was viewed over 100,000 times in the first week.  It was Digg’d, Slashdot’d, Stumbled, and on every other major social bookmarking software.

1. Microsoft Free - 1 year later

2. The Battle for the RIA Throne:  Flex vs. Silverlight

3. Do You have an Architect Personality?

4. EA, SOA, & Change

5. 10 Reasons Why Enterprise Initiatives Fail

6. EA and Ivory Towers

7. Explaining the Value of EA

8. The future is in the Clouds

9. Debunking Open Source Myths (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

10. Why an Open Source SOA Stack makes sense

That wraps up 2008.  I am looking forward to 2009 and writing more about cloud computing, security, SOA, and enterprise architecture.  Happy New Year!

Social Networking: Accelerate the Learning Curve

Every day the I find myself amazed at the amount of information that I can obtain and the speed at which I can learn about technology by leveraging social software. By using a variety of tools, I can tap into a network of several hundred individuals that I am directly connected to. Each of them have their personal networks at their disposal resulting in a viral network of millions of resources that I can tap into for knowledge sharing.

Over the last decade I have worked on three major enterprise technology initiatives that required extensive research on my part. One of the major differences in my approach is directly related to the size of my social network at the time of the project. The better my social network was, the easier I obtained information and the quicker I came up to speed in the technology.

Project 1 - Enterprise Portal Implementation

This project took place in 2001.  At that time my network consisted only of current and former employees from companies that I have worked for and from vendors that I had worked with.  Much of my research was obtained from Google Searches, books and trade magazines, conferences, and paid research like Gartner.  The disadvantages of this strategy is that it is a pull strategy where I had to know what to search for.  Another disadvantage is that most of the information that I was able to obtain was vendor marketing material and very high level in nature.  It took a tremendous amount of time on my part to get up to speed  and most of the “real” learning occurred after the product was purchased.  In other words, we learned a lot the hard way when things didn’t work as advertised.  I did not have any people in my network that had experience with this technology so I was on my own.

Project 2 - SOA & BPM

This project took place in 2005.  By then I was subscribing to blogs,  digging into wikis, and using social bookmarking tools like Digg and Del.icio.us in addition to the methods of the past.  A few months into the project I started blogging which is when my social network took off.  All of the sudden I was collaborating with practitioners all over the world.  Now the vendors could not hide behind the marketing slides because I was able to access real world information on how these technologies really worked (or didn’t work).  I was also able to collaborate with technical people within consulting firms,  software companies, and within businesses leveraging these technologies  who could answer deep technical questions in my language.  This collaboration happened near real time without having to schedule meetings two weeks out.  Unfortunately, my company did not allow us to use social networking platforms, chat, teleconferencing and other tools so much of the communications occurred in forums, blog comments, emails, etc.  But the ability to learn from practitioners allowed me to be much more knowledgeable about the technology than I was in the previous project.  This was a shift away from pull technology where I had to know what to search for.  Now I could listen to conversations and discover things to research further.

Project 3 - Cloud Computing

This project is taking place now.  In addition, I am now in a startup and in charge of all technology which means I can use any and all social software at my disposal.  I live on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and use Skype, DimDim, and GTalk to communicate real time with many people within or new to my network.  Over the past few weeks I have started following numerous cloud and security specialists and some of them are following me.  Between my blogs about clouds and my tweets which are questions or links to proposed architectural diagrams, I am brainstorming real time with experts in various areas of expertise.  Although my startup consists of only three people at this time, in reality I am working with dozens of people in a collaborative fashion.  When I want to know something about a product or tool I talk directly to CTOs, Product Managers, and architects and bypass the entire marketing and sales discussions.  I estimate that the amount of knowledge I have acquired in the last 2 months is equivalent of what I learned in 6 months with limited access to social software on my  SOA/BPM project and 12 months on my Enterprise Portal project where I did not use any social software.  Now my research is more of a push than a pull.  I fill my Google reader with searches of key words and phrases on Twitter, I follow numerous blogs from both practitioners and technical blogs from creators of the vendor products.  I follow various industry analysts and listen to them on a daily basis as they discuss emerging trends and practitioner interviews in real time.  It is like thousands of people are having discussions and I am able to observe and participate in all of them!

Is not just the tools, it’s the network

The tools play a role in the speed at which you can acquire information.  The more methods of acquiring knowledge, the better.  And chat, video conferencing, and the like provide for richer and more complete conversations in real time.  But the key differentiator is the size and quality of the network.  My network has grown substantially over the years and I have become a known entity on the web.  I now have direct access to some of the greatest minds in the industry, something I was never privileged to before.

If you don’t have a valuable network, you are reinventing the wheel!

So what I have learned form this experience is that without a valuable network, I was forced to discover the best practices of the portal technology by trial and error.  Was I successful? Yes.  Did it take too long and cost more than I thought it would? Definitely!  We learned may things the hard way.  This is what I see happening with SOA, BPM, and Cloud Computing.  IT shops that ban social software are relying too much on their vendors and trade shows to teach them about these technologies.  They are missing out on unbiased information on best practices and missing the opportunity to collaborate with experts.  I remember from my corporate life the sometimes hostile resentment to social networking tools.  Now that I am free from the tight controls of corporate America, I feel sorry for those colleagues who are being handicapped by corporate constraints.

I know it’s the end of the year and some corporations have some cash to spend before they close out the books for the year.  My recommendation is to use this cash to invest in collaboration technologies so that the staff can increase both the speed and depth of their knowledge acquisition.

Think like a Startup and you too can Deploy in the Clouds

A lot of people are still trying to figure out if cloud computing makes sense for big corporations with years of legacy baggage. At the same time, almost everybody understands that cloud computing is a no-brainer for startups due to reasons such as low cost to entry and speed to market. What cloud computing is doing is making startups a huge competitive threat for some enterprises because they can move from concept to production in a fraction of time and cost that monolithic corporations can.

My advice, start thinking like a startup!

Here are two examples of how to act like a startup:

Scenario #1 - Your company has asked you to build a new product or service from scratch.

Solution - Build a team of hard working and open minded individuals and create a startup atmosphere. Give them an aggressive timeline, a limited budget, and make them work offsite (another location or from home). Remove all of the corporate barriers and let them get creative. Give them the requirement that the software must be able to run at any location in case you switch cloud providers (this should also allow you to run it on premise if you find the clouds are not for you).

Advantages - (1) Reduces the politics and corporate obstacles that slow down innovation. (2) Trying this with something new rather than legacy is less risk. Besides, it can be built for the clouds as opposed to be rigged for the clouds. (3) The team should feel empowered and motivated which are two key elements in successful change initiatives.

Scenario #2 - Your company has asked you to reengineer an existing product and service.

Solution - Build the team like I mentioned in scenario #1.  With most reengineering efforts, there will be some amount of time that the new system will have to run parallel with the existing system for validation purposes. What better way to run parallel than to run the new system in the clouds!

Advantages - (1) Lowers risk by leaving existing system untouched and not putting additional strains on existing infrastructure. (2) Great opportunity to gather key performance and financial metrics to build a business case for more cloud computing initiatives!!!

What are some scenarios that you can think of?

Clearing up the Cloud picture

There is so much confusion (and fear) about what the term Cloud Computing means and what it really is.  Now that everybody kind of “gets” SOA, the new buzzword that people can’t grasp is Cloud Computing.  Everyday I see the same questions being asked in LinkedIn like What is the difference between Cloud Computing and SaaS?  A simple question like this will get 100 different answers.  So this is my attempt to clear the fog on Cloud Computing in a simple non-technical way (sorry for boring those that already know this stuff).

Here is a picture that shows a high level view of different types of cloud computing.

From Cloud Computing

This picture is very basic but shows different types of companies leveraging the cloud model. You can also see that some types of computing are a subset of the cloud. Let’s talk about the different types and what they represent (forgive me as I reuse some slides from a previous presentation).

From Cloud Computing

First you have the Internet which we are all familiar with. When the Internet first became the buzz, a lot of the same confusion and fears that surround cloud computing today were being discussed back then. How is it secure? Who owns the infrastructure? How do I control it? Early adapters saw the opportunity to reduce costs by moving brick and mortar operations to the Internet and increase revenue by providing services and goods 24×7x365. This following picture shows some major web sites that leveraged the Internet (or should I say Cloud 1.0 to be hip).

From Cloud Computing

Then came Software as a Service which was pioneered by companies like Google and SalesForce.com. With SaaS, instead of buying shrink wrapped software that you must install on your infrastructure, patch, administer, and do all of those other non-value added tasks, you simply “lease” the rights to use the services that are provided. In the case of Google and services like GMail, you get it for free.

From Cloud Computing

Companies like Google, SalesForce.com, and Amazon have built out huge datacenters in multiple locations with an enormous amount of capacity. They cannot afford to have a huge spike of traffic take their sites down and risk losing millions of dollars a day. At some point, these companies realized that they could offer their excess capacity for a fee to other companies to use. These companies would be able to take advantage of world class production environments that are proven to withstand millions of concurrent users. This is what is known as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The difference is the platform.

From Cloud Computing

PaaS providers like Google’s App Engine and Force.com allow you to build your own applications on top of virtual server instances but restrict you to using their development languages. For Google it is Python, for Microsoft’s Azure it is .Net, for Force.com it is Appexchange.  One could argue whether Facebook should be classified as PaaS. I put it there because they now provide a full development platform for running applications on Facebook.  Checkout this Facebook App by Starbuck’s.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) removes this limitation and gives you the ability to create virtual servers and develop in whatever you choose. The most popular IaaS vendor is Amazon who is in my opinion the leader in innovation and maturity in the cloud computing space.

From Cloud Computing

So when people ask me what cloud computing is, I include all of these different models into my definition. “In the Cloud” to me means leveraging infrastructure off-premise. With SaaS solutions, the underlying infrastructure is hidden from you. With PaaS, you manage the amount of virtual server instances you use but you must use the technologies required by the provider. With IaaS, you manage the resources you use and are free to leverage whatever technologies you choose to deploy on.

Here are a few other useful resources that show a fairly complete list of vendors and the niche they fill.

Peter Laird -  Visual map of cloud computing

Markus Klem -  Cloud Classification diagrams

John Willis - Tools to use in the Cloud

John lists a number of vendors who provide a wide variety of tools to manage, configure, monitor, and scale including open source alternatives.

Check these resources out.  I hope this gives you all a clear picture of what Cloud Computing is.  The benefits and the risks are blog topics within themselves.  I’ll save that for another day!

An Agile Architecture Strategy

I have been blogging for quite some time about SOA and Event Processing and have recently been getting more experience with Cloud Computing. The last few weeks I did a series of posts on agile SOA:

• Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines
• Agile SOA: The Flexibility of Business Processes
• Agile SOA: Leveraging Data Services
• Enterprise Mashups: The Icing on your SOA

Today I completed a nice presentation on Slideshare called Agile Architecture which combines SOA, EDA, and Cloud Computing in a strategy to support the ever demanding needs of our dynamic business environment. I have the luxury of starting from scratch because we are in startup mode and do not have the burden of years of legacy systems and legacy cultures. The goals of our architecture are many, but here are a few key goals that speak to the topic of agile:

Podcast: SOA and Change

Back in September I shared with all of you the presentation I gave about SOA and Organization Change Management. Today I am happy to share the podcast from that discussion that took place at the quarterly SOA Consortium meeting in Orlando. Here are the slides.

And here is the podcast that goes with it.

The panel discussion at the tail end of the presentation is fantastic. There were a lot of great questions and many lessons learned shared from experts like Todd Biske, Brenda Michelson, Frank Bowen from IBM, and others. If you have the time, listen to this podcast. Failure to recognize and counteract the resistance to change is the number one cause of failure for all enterprise initiatives, not just SOA.

Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines

If you have been following my blog recently you would have seen my previous posts that discuss the benefits of the various layers of the stack (mashups, data services, business processes). Although many IT folks talk about the benefits of SOA in terms of code reuse, the real benefit is in the ability for IT to adapt their systems at the speed that the business is changing. One of the best ways to accomplish this feat is to put tools in the hands of the business to empower them to dynamically alter the business rules as they change in real time.

In the old days we built systems with rigid rules and users were forced to adopt to the “laws of the system”. Today, users are king and they expect systems to adapt to the way they need to use them. In order to satisfy today’s tech savvy users we must build dynamic and customizable systems. We also need to make sure that IT does not become a bottle neck and hinder the rate of change that occurs within the business. The answer is simple, abstract the business rules into its own layer within the architecture and empower your users with the appropriate permissions to make the necessary changes in a timely manner.

Let’s discuss the following order process example that I used in the post about business processes.

Now what if we had different rules on what a good credit score is? What if those rules were dynamic? Do we want to hard code these rules in the system and accept change requests from the business to every time they change or would we rather abstract them and give the business a tool to change them as needed? I’ll vote for the later! Here is the same business process integrated with a business rule engine (BRE).

Here is a simple example of how the business can set up rules to apply different criteria to different customers.

In this example you can see that Gold customers get special treatment and will be allowed to proceed regardless of their credit score. Other tiers have higher standards applied to them. Now let’s say that due to the credit crisis the company decides to apply stricter criteria on their customers and raise the minimum at each level by 20 points. The business can simply make these changes from the business rules engine interface which is most likely done from a browser. If the company wanted to add a Platinum user type, they simply add a record to the customer type table and the appropriate rule for Platinum customers in the BRE. Done! No change request, no priority setting, no change control board, no development, no testing, no rollout!

I also used a callout to point to a business rule lookup at the fulfillment process. Let’s say that our company is an eCommerce seller for many different wholesalers. We may sell books, music, appliances, clothes, etc. but we are simply the middle man and don’t own the inventory. Instead we sell, take a cut, and trigger transactions to the appropriate wholesaler for distribution. Each wholesaler has a unique set of business rules for their fulfillment process. In addition, we may add and remove wholesalers several times during the year. We have a standard business process for dealing with fulfillment but different wholesalers may have different rules due to industry specific or geographic requirements (age limitations, state laws, tax rules, etc.). Once again, an appropriate business person with the proper permissions should be able to make these changes as necessary without having to deal with IT.

Business rules have their place and purpose but they also come with some baggage. Like any other layer within the architecture, business rules need to be administered, maintained, and governed. Business rules need some level of change control, backup/recovery, and auditing like any other artifact. Most BREs either provide that functionality as well or hook up with other tools that manage artifacts (CMDBs, governance tools, etc.). But business rules are only worth the hassle if the business environment is dynamic. If the rules are static in nature, it is probably not worth the effort from an architectural stand point to create an abstract business rules layer complete with the appropriate security, auditing capabilities, etc.

The higher up the stack we go the more opportunities we create for the business to become agile. Business Rules create the ultimate flexibility and agility that most of today’s businesses require. Implementing a BRE in your SOA is another great step towards IT becoming an enabler instead of a cost center!

Are IT Leaders Missing the Boat?

I have spent a lot of time recently questioning the leadership of IT organizations who become a cost center due to a “keeping the lights on” mentality and have asked the question Are we Sleeping at the Wheel?. The other day I stumbled across a great article (thanks to some of my pals from Twitter land) that really hits the nail on the head. This is a must read article that brings to light what I think is the main reason why many IT leaders are missing the boat on emerging technology trends. The article is written by Steve Andriole is called Managing IT: Changing Our Minds (About Everything) and discusses how IT leaders who have been around a while have to let go of solutions of the past and totally change the way they think. Here are a few excerpts…

Here’s the deal. The world has changed – forever. First, hierarchical management structures will weaken as we continue to globally decentralize our business units. We have to change the way we think about control, standardization and the overall governance we bring to technology acquisition, deployment and support.

Here is his thoughts on Open Source which I have been championing for quite some time…

Open source is here to stay. Even the established vendors have “embraced” open standards. They have no choice. Do you?

And what about cloud computing?

We need to change how we think about cloud computing from an incremental shift in technology offerings to a whole new way of acquiring, delivering and supporting digital technology

Here is my favorite…

Debating endlessly about whether or not open software, cloud computing or SaaS have any merit is a waste of time – and most likely a diversionary tactic designed to slow – if not outright kill – the pace of change.

Please take the time to read the entire article. I think the message is an important one. If you are an IT leader who is missing the boat, you need to reevaluate your positions on the emerging technologies and solutions. If you don’t you are damning your organization to more years of fire fighting and being a bottleneck to the progress of the business. Don’t miss the boat!

Copyright Kavis Technology Consulting