Let's Enjoy Coffee

Good story -

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went into the kitchen. He returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal- some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite – and asked them to help themselves to coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, you were more concerned about comparing your cups but what you really wanted was coffee. Yet you spent all your time eyeing each other's cups.

Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to contain Life, but cannot really change the quality of Life. Sometimes, by over concentrating on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee."

Empires Of The Mind by Denis Waitley

I am currently reading "Empires of the Mind" by Denis Waitley.

Few excellent excerpts from the book -

Y'day natural resources defined power. Today knowledge is power.
Y'day hierarchy was the model. Today synergy is the mandate.
Y'day leaders commanded and controlled. Today leaders empower and coach.
Y'day employees took orders. Today teams make decision.

Book defines three prejudices to avoid
- The Rut of Average
- The Rut of Conventional Wisdom
- The Rut of Group-Think

A Leader's Critical Traits
- Self confidence
- Mental toughness
- Ambition to achieve

Life is like a field of newly fallen snow;
where I choose to walk, every step will show.

The Four legs of Value
- A sense of Belonging
- A sense of Individual Identity
- A sense of Worthiness
- A sense of Control & Competence

The 3-D vision of Leaders
- Viewing failures as not to be repeated learning experiences.
- Reinforcing past success to nourish confidence for taking new risks.
- Imagining future successes as real, despite the unknowns.

CIO/CTO Office and Enterprise Architecture

I have limited knowledge and trying to understand the synergy between CTO/CIO office and Enterprise Architecture.

There are multiple support units in IT organization who helps delivery teams to reduce cost and better align with business. Units like Quality, System Operations, Security, Enterprise Architecture, Testing, Business Analyst, Data Engineering, Application Engineering and PMO office. How CIO/CTO office provides the common platform where all these team representative meets to evaluate the current state of IT and defines and leads to the future state?

Next question is to whom Head of Enterprise Architecture reports and how the CTO/CIO could extract optimum benefits from EA team. There are still unanswered questions like whether EA aligns better with Business or Delivery teams. A tilt towards business make EA more like Business Architects and other tilt towards the Delivery team moves EA's to Consultancy role. The focus of EA shifts from enterprise to projects. This wide spectrum is challenge, opportunity and concern for EA teams.

Again with my limited knowledge, I think most companies don't have EA function and who possesses this function are still trying to find a suitable place to fit the EA in organization chart.

Note: In above blog, I have typically avoided the differences between CIO and CTO. For more details on differences, please refer following links - Whatever happened to CTO role? and CIO vs CTO. Secondly, I have excluded product organizations from discussion and talking about IT organizations.

SOA Repository

Todd Biske blog on Master Metadata/Policy Management escalates the very valid point in space of SOA.

Repository/Registry is one of the building blocks on SOA roadmap for any Enterprise. Foundation of SOA is based on Loosely Coupled principle. Vendor specific central repository violates the SOA driving principle.

Enterprises should create standards & guidelines for the central repository and moreover, for the services which could be added in repository itself.

Please see blog entry Empty Registry Syndrome for more details.

My chance to donate $25

James McGovern posts India, Outsourcing and Morality promises to donate $25 for track backs.

Not going into details of benefits and risks of outsourcing to India. I want to put forward my opinion.

Newton principle - For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

On similar lines, it is also true that For every action, there are positive and negative reactions. Please also put forward the positive reactions. It will help us to find whether glass is half empty or half full.

Story about a sweet couple (OOAD and Business Analyst)

Once upon time, technologist OOAD met visionary BA. We all know opposite attracts, they were surprised to see the differences among each other. OOAD used to do work without thinking and BA only thinks and no work.

But they were destined to work together for many years. As time passes by, they fell in love with each other. Now both of them are trying to live together and are blessed with two prodigy sons. Currently, these kids are undergoing training in big enterprises.

Let me tell you little bit about them before introducing -
1. Put both of them on any project and forget about project. Only God knows when they will deliver it.

2. It is hard to measure how much work they have completed.

3. They take guidance from their parents but their way of working is totally different.

4. Both of them are very naughty and it is quite hard to understand what they are delivering.

5. They are too young and new to world. It is hard to have confidence in them. Sometime it gives impression that they will fail.

Some wisdom - give them space and time, let them grow with time and they are destined to change the world. Trust them. Two sons are SOA and Enterprise Architecture.

Attended SOA conference

SOA conference was organized by iCMG and Clive Finkelstein, MD, IES presented his views on Enterprise SOA. It encompasses sessions on EAI concepts, SOA & Web Services, Rapid Delivery using SOA and BPM, New Directions for ERP & Legacy.

I am quite impressed by Sunil Dutt Jha, CEO of iCMG.

Avoid burning your hands

Please avoid reading this entry if you think you are creative enough to find a new way to burn hand.

It is desirable nowadays that Architect not only know the Patterns but also Anti-Patterns. Similarly, understand the benefits of SOA and adopt it. But also be sure to research on pitfalls and risk associated with SOA.

Few points to avoid burning hands with SOA flame -
1. No Big Bang - Avoid this theory in Software industry, this is root of hundreds of failures.
2. SOA is concept - Never in software industry, there was a concept which has such an impact. Try to find the right technique to realize the concept in real world. Web Service is not only one.
3. Sell SOA - Everyone in enterprise is stakeholder of SOA. Sell to everyone for success.
4. Never ending SOA - Find out where your Enterprise stand in SOA maturity model.
5. Think end to end - Every project has functional and non functional requirement. Don't miss SOA non functional requirements - Performance and Security.

Who is this Enterprise Architect?

A good white paper from Guy Hoffman on role of Enterprise Architect.
Who is this Enterprise Architect?

Attended PMP training

Another enriching experience, I attended PMP training conducted by Upendra Giri, Founder CEO of www.astrowix.com.

To envisage the entire project life cycle is an art. A effective monitoring and controlling is integral part during execution of the project. It is absolutely necessary for on time delivery with high quality. It looks quite basic and simple principle. But it is missing in multiple projects.

Now, I better understand the words like PERT & CPM, Status reporting benefits, Costing & Scoping, Communication plan, Lead and Lag, Resource levelling, Leadership styles, Assessment and Mitigation plan for Risk, Procurement, activity & resource planning etc

I scored 162 out of 200 (Highest in training class). Little bit confused, do I go for PMP certification from Project Management Institute. It is very well appreciated certificate. But as an Architect, how it will benefit me?

Attended Agile session

Today, I attended excellent Agile session conducted by NCR Agile User Group (NAUG). It was well received and lot of good discussion happened around Scrum & XP.

There were people from different companies. They are using different processes and methodologies in their respective projects. It was nice experince to listen different views.

Few discussion points were
Pair programming - It was hard to convince about Pair Programming productivity. Pair programming creates impression of more effort in comparison to traditional way of software development. It is true if one consider only a single sprint. But it would not hold true for complete project lifecycle. It reduces effort due to better quality output of pair programming.

Duration of Sprint - Good discussion happened on duration of Sprint. Scrum recommends almost fixed 4 weeks sprints with daily scrum meeting.

Rework or Refactor - A new name to rework in Agile is refactor. Is it possible to avoid this in traditional methodology? Refactor is going to survive and will promote Test Driven Development along with it.

One of major practice of Agile methodology is continuous feedback from Customer. It may be difficult to find customer who wants to work in such close collaboration mode as required by Agile.

Who makes more MONEY in IT - Manager OR Architect ?

Architect dont talk about Money ;) They are saints who dont care about it.

Let's discuss about the common IT employee. He works for multiple reasons like fun, interest, satisfaction, no other choice, family, company, status, habbit, money etc. Now he has a choice to select management or technical ladder. One ladder takes to Manager role and other to Architect role. Both need management and leadership qualities. Out of multiple reasons, Money was one. Now question before IT employee is - Who makes more Money ?

I would love to know what we feel/experience across IT world.

Embracing Agilism

My view on How come Enterprise Architects don't embrace agilism?

Two ways to adopt the change in corporate world, bottom up or top down. Bottom up approach means someone unknown in enterprise adopt a new tactics to improve the conventional procedure. It is adopted by small project and benefits are published at enterprise level. In this case, change is accepted slowly or sometimes never.

Secondly, in top down approach, management decide to change the things for better and publish new guidelines to be followed by corporate. Change is easily accepted in this approach. But no one in top wants to take risk which comes packaged with change.

In both the approach one needs a leadership quality to spread the benefits of change. Take a case of Agile methodology, its like a change.

Agile is gaining momentum. Corporate are trying its best practices like Test Driven Development etc. Mostly, its happening through bottom up approach. A slow approach. It is not easy to change the whole process in one go. Big Enterprises are embracing agilism in bits and pieces to find the benefits.

First impression of SOA on Business user

Is Business user ready to accept delay in response? Is it matter to Business user whether the services consumed runs on old legacy architecture or hyped SOA architecture? What all matters to Business user is usability? Any upgradation in technology should improve the functionality and quality attributes. First step towards SOA impacts performance. Decoupling of components/services with help of XML creates overhead in terms of XML processing, transformation and routing of messages. All these steps eats up significant processing time of request.

First step towards SOA doesn't create positive impression on business user. It becomes difficult to sell SOA to business stakeholders. Short term hurdles stops adoption of long term benefits of SOA.

SOA looks quite similar to Remote Entity bean concept in EJB 1.0. Conceptually, both are suitable for ideal scenarios. They attract purist who wants to follow the architect principles without business value. One may say Entity beans were fine grained domain objects and SOA are business services. Session beans orchestrate entity beans, similarly BPM orchestrate business services. Does any thing like local interfaces concept will emerge in SOA world?

SOA makes sense in case of B2B and services which are exposed to external clients. But within scope of Enterprise, do we want to consume slow business services. Its a call between performance vs flexibility. Lets see who wins or we are able to find the win win situation in time.

Long term vision vs Short term goal

Sometimes, there exists a conflict between Long term vision and short term goal. To achieve short term goal, project team compromises with Long term vision of product/program. It looks most practical to divert from the correct path and take short cut to deliver.

Occasionally, project team wants to ignore the long term vision in order to mitigate the impact on short term goal. Project Management and Business requires solutions as early as possible. Over here, it becomes responsibility of architecture team to explain , convince, mentor, motivate, communicate, enforce and sell the correct path and produce standards & guidelines for the benefits of project in long term. It helps stakeholders to take informed decision.

A mature and motivated IT team keeps moving on correct path to achieve the Long term vision. IT team always needs support from the management and business stakeholders. Does this holds true for Enterprise SOA ?