The second part (part II) of the event was panel discussion. The panel members provided very intriguing ideas, message and concept. I learnt few new things from the panel discussion.

Third part of the event; each table was given a topic and asked to discuss about the topic and present it to everyone.  My table got the topic: “Future of analytics” and I was nominated unanimously to represent our table.  My contribution to the table topic was that the future will depend on the social media and social networks. Other’s contribution was mainly on geo-fencing and its role in the analytics.  Since I was nominated to represent the table, I was structuring my thoughts on how to represent our views while listening to other table topics. Mr. May run out of time and our table was omitted and our views on the topic was not heard. I decided to display my structured thought in my blog. This is how I would have presented.

The panel discussion provided great insights and I learned few new things from the panel members. Top two things I fully agree with panel members are:

1.  Successes of IT organization are measured by its capability and capacity to execute and innovate.
2. Most critical differentiating factor of a successful IT organization is not adapting the latest technology trends like: cloud computing, mobile computing, service oriented architecture, integrated identity management. Most critical differentiating factor of a successful IT organization; “right people at the right job”. People are the one who make things happen in an organization.

I would like to augment my view to the above points; vision without a plan is a dream and plan without a vision is a run around. People are the one who make things happen, not technology.

To be futurist and strategist, these are the few concepts to keep in mind (a repeat from my last blog post)
1. Timing is everything
2. Learn history and study current (identify the driving factors)
3. Unleash the core and its dependencies – Understand what really matters and its dependencies.
4. Connect the dots

Timing is everything:
Imagine that if  iPhone was launched 12 years ago. We would have connected to the apple store via dial-up (AOL) to down load angry bird. Data plan would have cost us $500 a month and connection speed would have frustated a lot. All other external factors would have made iPhone under PALM category.
Learn history and study current:
As far we know, when Grog in 5000BC used two sticks and rocks to graph the upward trend in sales of his new invention, the wheel, the concept “analytics” was born. Almost took seven thousand years to make a leap in this area.  What did we learn from the history? Analytics played a significant role for a mega success like Romans, Henry Ford and others. Those who understand the deep meaning of analytics made everlasting impact. Current expectation is, let the system make decisions  and receive confirmation from end user to execute the plan.  Trust over the system and acceptance of system generated decision have been increasing. Adoption to this model is accelerating.  Navigation system in the car is a prime example for the current state.
Unleash the core and its dependencies:
People are the one who make things happen and in the most of the profit and non-profit organization, people are direct or indirect consumer of goods and service. It is extremely essential to understand people to define or approximate the future. How people view the world? People define the world based on what they see and hear. World is blue when they view through blue glass and it is red when they view through red glass. Deeper view: for decades, the world has been defined numerous times every day by each individual through the social network. Historically, the social network was through snail mail, family gathering, corporate functions, bars and other occasional events. With the advancement of the technologies like smart phones, global networks, wireless networks, software tools, the social networking happens instantaneously. We are defining, redefining our world based on the instantaneous connection through invisible cosmic social network fiber. It becomes an addiction because we wanted to know what is happening around the world we defined. So facebook is addictive.
Connect the dots:
Advancement of wireless network, mobile platform, social media, and end user computing devices led to higher sophistication and at the same rate people’s mechanical monotonic life style has raised up by few notches.  They don’t have interest or time to view the product or service’s sales offering when they don’t need or not in the mood. At the same, they want to make an instantaneous execution of a decision when a systematic analysis was already performed and a decision is presented with highest level of confidence.
Conclusion:
The future of analytics will be presenting decision to you and by click of a button (or slide of a screen) you can execute the decision. For example, based on the social interaction,system will identify a consumer interest and capacity and capability;skiing during January time frame, received  hefty bonus during x-mas time and carry over vacation from the previous year should be taken before first quarter. System will be presented an offer; 5 day ski trip to the best place with lowest possible rate, with best possible quality. Once you confirm the acceptance of the recommendation/decision, everything will be taken care by the system. Once the consumer enter Denver for skiing, geo-fencing will kick in and based on the interest, pattern, spend behavior the most suitable offers applicable at Denver during that vacation time will be presented by consumer’s car while the consumer driving from Denver airport to Breckenridge ski resort.

All internet name space are managed and controlled by ICANN and it is not-for-profit cooperation with participants from all over the world. The main objective is to develop policy on the internet’s unique identifiers.
History was made in this week when ICANN approved an open name space for the top level domain. It means an internet name space can have top level domains like .bank, .school, .college, .university or trademark names like .td, .starbucks, .google, .microsoft or personal names like .gates, .raji, .darshan, .deepak and etc.

There is around 350 page document published by ICANN on guidelines and procurement process to acquire new top level domains.

Pros & Cons analysis:

1. Security++++: Open top level domain name spaces will minimize web site phishing. In the current top level domain, there are lots of website phishing threats. In the current environment, it is easy to create a fake sites that impersonalize the legitmate site.  Retaining the ownership of the top level domain by the corporation completely eliminates the phishing threats.

2.Social Network++:Provides a local platform to establish communities.  Brand based communities will be established within brand site. It may be linked back to existing social networks. As the adoption of the brand based communities grows, the social networking sites like facebook will be devalued.  Potential monopoly threat from facebook will be reduced due to the emerging brand based community sites.

3.Startup+:Provides an opportunities for new start ups. Sites like .cars, .motorcycle, .banks, .autoloan will be owned by domain managers who already exist in the market (like godaddy.com) or new Startup Company can own these domains and sell the domain sub-domains. There will be intense land grab competition to acquire the common names like .cars, .computer, .tablet, .mobile and etc. It also provides an opportunity for new startup to provide full servicing in that space. For instance, if a new company owns .autoloan, they can sell the sub-domain to smaller banks, credit unions and also they can sell auto loan platform to them. It will boost the business cloud offering in the market.  There are numerous startup business opportunties.

1. Cost—–The initial registration cost is $180K and yearly fees is around $25K. There is no gurantee that the application will be approved for all applicants and if the application is rejected the application fee will not be refunded. Cost may be affordable for fortune 100 companies to register their brand. The cost may not be affordable for a startup and it has a very significant risk to reach zero value for the initial capital investment.

2.Historical data—-:.job top level domain was available for last few years. It didn’t make a significant impact to the jobs sites.

3. User Experience–:Pagerank assignment to the existing sites will have an impact if the top level domains are changed. There are technical solution to redirect the existing domains to redirect to a new top level domains.  However, the non technical end user will be confused with new top level domains.

Recommendation:
1.Corporation to buy the top level domain to retain their brand identity in the internet.
2. Corporations to buy the top level domains who are in the race to reach the dominance in a market place (like tablet, universal single sign on, and etc) to grab top level immediately.
3. Service providers who are in  dominance in a market place (like autoloan) or close to dominance are to buy the top level domains to minimize or eliminate the future potential market risk.
4. Startups who are getting into the  full service spectrum are to buy the top level domains.

• Releastic approach to embrace, adopt and implement  cloud computing in banking and finance industry
• Innovation strategy
• Mobile Platform strategy
• Reference architecture for mobile platform rapid application development.

Here is a short summary on how my  blog performanced  in 2010. The following report is automatically created by wordpress.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 20 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 123 posts. There were 22 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 14th with 173 views. The most popular post that day was Different types of architects.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were linkedin.com, chiefarchitect.squarespace.com, google.com, youtube.com, and google.co.in.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for types of architects, how to become an enterprise architect, enterprise architecture as strategy, it strategy framework, and different types of architects.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Different types of architects August 2008
8 comments

How to become an enterprise architect ? August 2008
8 comments

IT Strategy – General framework June 2008

Software System Architecture definition process August 2008
2 comments

About me June 2008
9 comments

Application portfolio management drives technology road map definition and hence the first step is to perform application portfolio management. In the application portfolio management, the applications in the landscape are assigned in to four different categories. Members of each categories depends on IT and business strategies and the categories are:

1.Replace, 2.Retain, 3.Sundown and 4.Introduce

Follow the enterprise sundown procedure for applications under sundown. Now, group the applications which are in the categories under replace, retain and introduce. Create an enterprise business process map and align the applications under the business process map. Align all the technologies used for each application. At this point, a holistic high level chart which maps business processes to set of applications and set of applications to technologies will be established. To attain ultimate end results, this chart or map should be kept high level and focus on the major items in both application and technology layer. 

A successful, practical and value added enterprise architect will strike a good balance on capturing key information in this step and avoid details. For instance, there is no focus on items like 2 Mac work stations being used by Marketing to create corporate font or no focus on items like a Lotus Notes system being used by five users in a field location.

 A general approach to map the application landscape categories to technology landscape categories is given below.
Retain: Evaluate the technology used of the retained applications and ensure it meets the technology roadmap principle
Replace: Perform – Build Vs Buy analysis. For build or buy solution – ensure it adhere to technology road map principle. Follow the sun down procedure for the current application
Introduce: Perform – Build Vs buy analysis. For build or buy solution – ensure the solution adhere to technology road map principle.

Basic principle in defining the technology road map is distinguishing differentiating and commodity technologies in the landscape.  The simple idea of categorizing the technology stack into these categories is as follows.

• Investment  in differentiating technologies
• Optimize the cost in commodity technologies

Differentiator and commodity depends on type of industry. For instance, for banking and finance industry, the key differentiators are security, compliance, investor confidence and investment management. Whereas, for energy and utility sector, the key differentiators are safety, security, green technologies and energy efficiency.  For any profit organization, the corporate strategy, IT strategy, finance strategy and etc are reflection of competitive strategy. Conceptually the differentiator factors for each industry can be analyzed but competitive strategy of the organization defines the attributes of differentiators within the market sector.

Ideally, the differentiators from competitive strategy transform into corporate strategy and infused into each organization strategy. The strategy alignment ensures unidirectional execution across the entire corporation.

In a recent project scenario I worked on, the following are top seven differentiating and commodity technologies for a company in banking and finance market sector.

The top 7 differentiating technology areas are: 1.Security, 2.Compliance, 3.IT Service Mgmt, 4.Integration, 5.Dataware house, 6.Back office and 7.Private Cloud.

The top 7 commodity technology areas are: 1.Operating System, 2.Application Server, 3.Web Server, 4.Database Server, 5.Desktop, 6.Storage and 7.Collaboration 

The outcome of the technology roadmap is to have a positive net value in terms of cost, flexibility, security, adaptability, agility and sustainability. A solid technology implementation plan is created with strong foundation of principles, alignment with corporate direction, executive sponsorship, and senior leadership endorsement. These are key required qualities to execute a plan successfully.  

Secrets for technology roadmap execution

 Integrate the architecture team part of the technology delivery team.

 Bring the industry best product experts to implement technology road map. Take time to on broad the best expert with great positive attitude and learning aptitude to the architecture team.

 The attitude of the experts plays a major role to implement technology roadmap successfully.Since commodity technologies will be replaced, the current support team of the current commodity technologies will demonstrate strong resistance to introduce and implement the replacement technologies. Industry experts with deep knowledge and great positive attitude will defeat the resistance of current support teams and infuse confidence in them.

Conduct technology forum discussions and participate in all enterprise or departmental town hall meetings and explain the reason and rationale for technology changes to the developers, application managers and illustrate the measurable value of new technology road map.

Bring the market research analyst and research documents to the organization and provide evidence and case studies on the selected technology roadmap’s success stories in the industry. 

Identify low hanging fruits, implement it quickly and celebrate success. 

Ensure the implementation teams understand that failure is not an option.

Ensure the implementation teams understand that there is no fall back plans available in case of failure to implement the new technology.

 Ensure the implementation teams does not look back and second guess all the technology decisions made. At the same time, assign in-house industry experts to the implementation teams to overcome any technical challenges they face. For complex technical problems, engage the premier support team immediately to augment in-house industry experts to uncover and solve complex technical problems.

 Engage the experts and define detail architecture to cover scalability and high availability.

 Finally, engrain “MAKE IT HAPPEN” mindset to the technology implementation teams.

 All the above steps are not just a theory. Above framework was followed and technology roadmap was defined and it was successfully implemented in less than 8 months for a large company in banking and finance sector. we “MADE IT HAPPEN”

PRINTABLE VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE: click the link

What is a balanced agile plan?
It is a plan dynamically changes based on the requirements and has a good balance on accomplishing compliance requirements, exceeding end customer expectation and full filling the project objectives.

Create a balanced agile plan for the open source implementation.

In this step, strategist or architects makes a case for technology investment plan. Differentiating technology requires investment and others category technology requires cost reduction or optimization. Objective in this step is to have net saving projection to the over all IT operating cost.

At end of this step, you will have the list of technologies which requires cost reduction and investment. In the next blog, I will write on the frame work to reduce technology cost.

(Note: If you want to follow the story of IT strategy formation in the absence of business strategy, please start from this blog post)

First step in introducing a change is to have courage to talk to executives of the organization and get their blessings for your ideas. The philosophy is, people will listen to your idea when you tell them nicely and you will have their blessings if it is a good one. The rank you hold in the organization does not matter and you will be able to connect with them, make them listen and get their blessings.  Result of the attempt to make the connection with your idea with your ideas  may be career threatening but,  as a strategy person, you need that courage to take the risk to make that change in the organization.

Reduction in operating cost of an IT organization is an easy sell. If someone has an idea to reduce the operating cost by 20-25% with out the reduction of services nor resources, then you will get everyone’s attention in the board room. Open source platform would be a good starting point if it is not fully maximized in the organization. Receive conceptually concurrence on embracing and encouraging open source platform in the organization. If that   is accomplished, that is a great starting point for a long road to reach the end goal – increase the value of an IT organization.

It goes back to the abstract strategy approach  “think big, start small and run fast”.

Once open source platform adoption is agreed than the next step is to show results. Look for a commercial software product that has significant on-going maintenance cost. It could be due to license, complexity, resource availability, hardware  or others. Identify an area carefully and diligently analyze the cause for higher cost. Study the availability of open source equivalent and its capabilities, capacity, supportability and maturity. Compare and contrast it with commercial product. If it is feasible to show cost saving with the open source replacement, identify technical resources and perform end-to-end proof of concept and show the results to the senior management. 

When people run fast, it is assumed that you reach the destination sooner. Generally, the audience does not have the curiosity to inquire the distance you run.  When you do a first proof of concept to prove your first idea of a long road, the time taken to accomplish it is very important. Don’t take more than 5 weeks to complete the proof of concept to show the results. Draft an implementation plan with risk.

Details on how to receive concurrence on open source adoption from senior and executive management will be in my next post..

Identification of successful business strategy in a dynamically evolving consumer and financial markets is extremely challenging and sometimes, it is impossible. Look back in few years, take business strategies of top companies and their result today, and hence the evidence of extreme complexity and challenge exist in defining successful business strategy for an organization in a dynamic market.

IT strategy supports business strategy in spite of the out come of the business strategy. True. However, the point is, some times business strategy can not be defined clearly or it does not exist and in that case, how the IT strategy should be defined.

In the absence of business strategy, IT strategy is to increase the value of IT organization.  Now the questions are, what is IT valuation and how to measure it, and finally how to increase it?

I had the opportunity to work with a purchase accounting project for a well known demerger in the auto industry.  I noticed, there is a significant market opportunity for a IT valuation model in spite of 3 of  big 4 consulting and accounting companies were heavily involved in that project. So I developed a simple IT valuation model to determine the fair market value of an IT organization to readjust the book value of IT assets.

To simplify it, let me put a different spin to IT valuation. Purchase accounting occurs after a merger or demerger occurs. But, before a merger or acquisitions occurs, an organization is evaluated for its market value. That includes tangible and intangible assets. The tangible assets are mostly fixed assets and over the years, valuation process for the tangible assets is more matured. Most of the IT valuation comes from intangible assets.  For a pure technology companies like Microsoft, Intel, the intangible assets of the organization can be quantified by patents, copy rights, trade mark and etc. For an IT organization supports a business function in banking and finance, oil and gas and etc, the intangible asset valuation is challenging.

In those scenarios, the intangible assets are:

• An organization ability to adapt to market change in terms of capacity & capabilities. ie scale up or down infrastructure based on future requirements
• An organization ability to develop a rapid applications for future requirement – skill set, processes, knowledge
• An organization’s efficient operating cost mode –  in terms of license, hardware depreciation
• An organization’s IT general controls and management – IT risk management, Security Management, compliance management

The above intangible assets of an organization improves the value of IT organization. It will be reflected  in case of merger or an acquisition.  In the absence of clearly defined business strategy, take the above strategic objectives of  IT strategy and plan.

The above IT strategy will reduce the cost, improve the over all reliability, flexibility, security and adaptability  of an IT organization. It requires investment and the question is how a CIO can justify the ROI for the above initiative.Biggest advantage of the above approach is, the initiative does not require any additional incremental cost. Since it has very high ROI, it will sponsor the project from its saving and improves the value of IT organization. When there is no clearly defined business strategy then the IT strategy is to improve the value of IT organization.

If any one interested to understand the granular details of the above IT strategy, practical difficulties of framing the strategy, actual results and etc. More blog postings will follow to provide the details of the above steps. Mean time, if you’re impatience and you need immediate information,  please do not hesitate to contact me.

Since no body has visited planet Boron, you may take your skies or bikes  or  ski jet or new toys or all of them.  Again, it sounds simple and intuitive.   The same simple and intuitive concept applies to technology landscape. When you have clear direction on  business and IT strategies , it is straight forward to pack your technology landscape  for your business venture.  If the business/IT  strategy is not clearly defined,  it is better to have multiple options in your technology landscape.

Let us say, the business strategy of a captive finance company is to support the parent automotive company to promote the product sale through financial services to dealers and consumer. Assume that the IT strategy of the captive finance is to simplify IT landscape, reduce cost, be agile and be efficient.  In the highest level, business and IT strategy are clearly defined. For this instance, the Model T technology landscape is very suitable. Let us say the made up business & IT strategies apply to companies like BWM Finance, Daimler Finance, Toyoto Financial and etc.  They requires Model T technology landscape.

Model T –  Technology Landscape:

Build all application landscape based on one technology platform. One technology platform that supports multiple fronts like web application, desktop, desktop, virtualization, database, operating system, middle ware, collaboration, enterprise applications, backend systems. The technology platform which support all fronts is Microsoft platform. Develop every thing on Microsoft platform. It means, there is no mainframe, no Unix (- HP-Ux, SUN, AIX) , no AS/400, no Linux, no open source. End to end technology will be under one platform. It will provide significant cost advantage and  efficient from operation stand point. Microsoft platform is just an example for Model T – Technology landscape. It could be OpenSource, IBM (no desktop option), Oracle (no desktop option), AS/400 (no desktop option), Z/OS (no desktop option).  The risk is, if the platform provider changes their strategy or go under, it posses significant risk to the organization. At the same time, probability of risk becoming an issue in next 5-10 years is very low for company like Microsoft.

Model Perp – Technology Landscape

Perp is a math symbol looks like inverted ‘T’. Model perp is opposite of Model T. When the business strategy and IT strategy can’t be clearly defined for any unforeseen reasons, then model Perp is more suitable. Model Perp is to have combination of platforms in your technology landscape. It includes but not limited to open source, Microsoft platform, Enterprise resource planning software, cloud based solution, ASP, enterprise platform – Mainframe, AS/400 and etc. The risk is lower, cost is higher (cost of MIPS for mainframe is higher than cost of Intel processor to run Windows or Linux) and flexibility is higher.

If you are getting ready for your trip to planet boron in your organization, select Model Perp technology landscape. If you are getting ready to Denver for a skiing trip during x-mas holidays, just pack your Model T skies and forget your bike.

Differentiating Technologies:

• Security Technologies
  • Identity Management
    • User provisioning & de-provisioning
    • Access management
    • Role Management – Role mining, engineering
    • Federation - Service & Identity
  • Data loss prevention
  • Network security - intrusion prevention, firewall, load balancer, proxy server,
  • Managed File Transfer
• Integration Technologies
  • XML Appliance
  • SOA/Cloud security appliance
• Internal tools for compliance
  • Service Desk
  • incident & problem management
  • Release Mangement  – Source code control management
  • ITIL
• Collaboration Platform
  • Web 2.0  – blog, wiki, corporate twitter – for both internal and external users
  • Email – integration with iPhone, blackberry
• Next generation platform
  • Application running in iPad, iPhone,
  • Virtual desktop

Note: This page is used for google’s page rank emprical analysis. The links will be created based on the random graph created.  This is node #2 which has the key word:  xysivabodzinyx , xysivabodzinxy . As per the graph, it links to page 1