Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others

recent posts

about

Just curious

  • iPod of the car industry

    Few years ago, when I saw iPod for the first time, like many, I was stunned for its design, simplicity and quality. I had at least 5-6 different cell phones in my life and each of the cell phone manual was around 150 pages and when I got the iPod few years ago, the manual for that iPod was 2 pages. When I brought up this to my close friends during my Sunday chat sessions, some of them argued with me that iPod  and cell phone functionalities are different and hence the significance in the manual size. Those friends were speech less when Apple came up with iPhone.

    I was wondering, why Sony did not come up with something similar like iPod. They dominate this market for so long and why they were not the first one to come up with something similar to iPod.

    After some study, as I understand, most of the Japanese companies use the Japanese management style in all strategic and operational management. The key approach, as I understand, Japanese management style is more on consensus building. If there are 5 members in a team, all of them HAS to agree on the direction, approach, next steps before an action is taken. It makes a fundamental assumptions that all the 5 members are subject matter expert and kind of have an idea of the future prediction through approximation.

    Obviously this management style is to limit the agility, innovation and time consuming. Statistically, this style proven to produce better quality products. In other hand, quick to market approach management style is proven to be more innovative but lack quality.

    In Walter Chrysler biography, Chrysler stated one of main reason for his success and innovation was: make quick decision ,observe the results and adapt instead of taking long time to make a decision and realize it was not the right decision. Historically Chrysler company proven to produce most innovative car product in the car industry. Walter Chrysler management style is other spectrum of Japanese management style.

    It appears, based on the recent JD power survey and consumer reports, American cars quality have been improving a lot but long way to go. They are on the right track. Particularly, Ford has been producing high quality product with best fuel mileage in last year. Like Ford, if the other American car companies figure out a way to drastically improve the quality of their product AND keep the innovation which has been in their roots they are going to produce the iPod of the car industry.

    I wonder, the Japanese car companies are making any adjustment to their management style to be more innovative to achieve what Sony failed to do so.

  • Captive Financial Business cloud

    Let us say a company FinCo is to provide captive financial business services (BPO – Business Process Outsourcing) to smaller banks or credit unions, the implementation of the service delivery can be hosted in the cloud and can be sold as a business cloud or implemented in the cloud depends on the FinCo’s business model.

    The various captive financial business services that can be provided as the business cloud:

    • Captive financial business process management – Develop a standard business life cycle and design & implement the business processes in the cloud. The standard captive financial business processes can be extended for the customized business processes for each bank or credit union customers or even a captive financial
    • Score card development – The major pieces are FICO score (almost 350+ attributes) and internal credit model
    • Base Residual Risk model for the collateral (car)
    • Base Pricing Model – Based on the company’s score card , residual risk of the collateral (car) and marketing strategy
    • Loan origination – (From customer inquiry to discounting/booking the loan in the portfolio system)
    • Floor planning – (whole sale inventory management, insurance, consignment, electronic fund transfer and etc)
    • Remarketing (after market life cycle)
    • Asset based securitization

    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 #6 which has the key word:  xysivabodzinyx , xysivabodzinxy . As per the graph, it links to page 5

  • Cloud Computing Architect

    Due to the information over load and power full search engines like google.com, bing.com, the authentic information is freely available for almost any topic ranging from quantum mechanics to cloud computing. An average person can have a decent conversation about any topic with a minimum effort. It is real challenge to determine a real expert in any field in the current information over load.

    Experts are not born but they are made. Before an expert becomes an expert they are beginners searching information to get familiar with the topic. In the information over load, a beginner can easily be represented as an expert.

    Cloud computing has lots of attention in the current business environment, and IT executives really struggle to differentiate the cloud computing architect with a person JUST knows the right buzz words. A guidelines to differentiate an cloud computing architect and a person JUST knows the right buzz words with basic knowledge about cloud computing.

    Cloud computing Architect:

    1. In depth understanding of cloud computing tool box –

    • Understands the existence and usage of various technical and business cloud environment
    • Understands the technical and business stack type in each cloud and usage of those stack for cloning
    • Understands each logical and physical unit of the stack (like storage, database, BPMS, OWL, UML, business services like loan origination, consultative service, collection and etc)
    • Understands behind the scene technology (like cloud operating system, virtualization, storage area network, data transfer rate, raid type, data redundancy, disaster recovery plan and etc). Some argue, understanding behind the scene technology is not required for an architect. In my strong opinion, that is the differentiator between an architect (expert or evangelist ) and novice (quick concept exposed person). It helps the expert to pick right solution for the right problem.

    2. Enterprise view of the cloud –

    • Various possible integration of cloud solutions
    • Latency between each cloud solutions

    3. Solution design –

    • Various possible instantiation of the enterprise view of cloud

    4. Solution delivery

    • This is the most important aspect of a cloud computing architect. First 3 area focuses on the various solution design and its components. The solution delivery focuses on solving a business problem using the packaged cloud solution. It is business problem and solution matching exercise. To illustrate the role of an cloud computing architect let me take a very practical simple example. Let us say, a company wants to sell loan (retail or lease)organization as a service to a smaller banks or credit unions.  For this business problem, the solution provider (let us say the company name is FinCo) has to understand the common business process involved in loan organization and customized loan organization for each customer (bank or credit unit) and both common and customized loan organization needs to be implemented using the technology stack like LAMP, Messaging, persistence database and etc. The common loan organization also be imaged for deployment. Common loan organization can be an cloud solution and it is ready to use. When a Finco, get a new customer, it can deploy the common solution in the cloud and made necessary modification to customize the customer needs.Deploying a solution using the loan organization cloud can be done by a sales or presale technical team. The architecture of the loan organization stack in the cloud will be done by the cloud computing architect.