Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others

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  • Application Portfolio Assessment – Key metrics and its measurement technique

    Quality attributes of a system are few key metrics used to perform the application portfolio assessment. Quality attributes like maturity, adaptability, flexibility, availability, stability are quite a few frequently used metrics in the application portfolio assessment. All of them are subjective metrics and can not be measured directly. All of these metrics are measured through various other observed parameters. Among the listed quality attributes maturity and stability are predominately used in the assessment.

    Let me propose how the maturity and stability of the systems can be measured in the landscape to perform the assessment. The purpose of the application portfolio assessment is to rank the system in various categories (same as the Boston consulting methodology). In simpler words, the list of applications which are cash cows to the company, list of applications which are dogs, list of applications which are stars and “?” question mark.

    The idea is, as an enterprise architect and IT strategist, you want to make sure all the cash cow applications are stable, matured and in general, has very low risk. Measuring the stability and maturity are very subjective and often it is difficult to present the realistic picture in the exercise.

    Stability represents the availability of the system. If a system is stable means that it is running in a solid platform provides a better high availability. The availability of the system can be measured by collecting the number of outages occurred, number of preventive measures (emergency change controls), number of special care taken (like special jobs, running jobs manually which are planned to run as per the schedule), number of upgrades and technology architecture. All these factors come together to derive the probability of the system failure in a given time. The probability translates to the stability of the system. If the probability of failure is negligible, then the system is very stable and if the probability of failure is very high and then the system is very unstable.

    Maturity represents the obsolescences of the system. Technology and functional obsolescences are two parameters represents how much of the functionality of the systems are continued to be used by the end users, and how technology obsolescences presents the number of legacy technologies being used in the system. If the technologies used in the systems are kept up to date and fully supported by the software providers, then the technology obsolescence is considered very low. The functional obsolescence can be calculated by counting the number of functional points in the system and total number of functional points that are being used. More the number of functional points not being used by the end user the more the functional obsolescence is. More functional obsolescence is less the system maturity is.

    Stability and maturity of the system can be used by the above proposed approach.

  • Strategiest View of Google’s Browser Chrome..

    Delivery of Google’s innovation mission continues and recent launch of google’s browser is an another prime example of their commitment in the innovation. There are already lots of articles surrounding Google’s Chrome and even an article suggested that chrome captured 2.74% market share in a day. I do not believe it and did not do any factual data analysis to verify it. It could be accurate statement for a smaller population but the analysis must be skewed and do not present the whole true market share.

    Like millions of the curious people, I down loaded the Chrome on the day it was launched and played around it.

    My immediate end user reaction on Chrome:

    • Very simple
    • Like the logo (Google’s predominant color in the logo)
    • Most visited page is already a window (same as alt-tab in windows) in my first page. Very user friendly
    • Integrated search with URL edit box
    • History of web search is integral of the first page
    • Major plugins works
    • Looked almost same as the first version of IE in windows 95, when I was extensively using Netscape browsers
    • Looked like extension of the google main page.

    My immediate technologist reaction on Chrome:

    • Very light weight
    • Will be easily portal to many platforms (including Mobile platform)

    Strategist perspective of Chrome:

    • Google is on the right strategic path on launching the Chrome as their browser
    • It is a stepping stone for google to completely dominate the next generation web
    • Stepping stone to eliminate the notion of personal computer
    • Cycling back to the mainframe environment. Yes, Ramba 3270, a thin dumb client and sends every thing to the mainframe to process. Chrome will be next generation 3270 will be sending everything to google to process it
    • Chrome will be running in mobile devices like blackberry and the enterprise email will be running in google (gmail) and you will be connected all the time. You are already connected all the time through some means. In the future, it all will be google platform.
    • An another browser war started, this time, Microsoft will be tasting their own medicine

    Economist perspective of Chrome:

    • If this continues, google will control the government in 20 years.
    • Some body like Microsoft should react faster to keep up the pace of google, else soon they will grow so big to become monopoly in the technology domain and at the same time make all of us addicted to their technology. (20 years from now, Hail Google!! Hail Google!! will be universal national anthem for every nation in the planet Earth)

  • Youtube Web Server

    I like youtube.com, I benefit from youtube.com by watching videos and contributing to it by posting my lecture series. It is very sad to hear that $1.6 Billion Google investment is still struggling to figure out a business model to make money in spite of burning at least $1.5 million a month in bandwidth cost. Here are few high level thoughts to Tim Armstrong’s team on how to make youtube.com as a profit center:

    • Youtube.com as a corporate product to support internal training, video help,
    • Turn youtube.com into the world biggest movie theater – Release all new movies in youtube and charge the viewer (similar concept as hulu)
    • Divide youtube.com users into – free users (public tv viewers) and paid viewers (cable or satellite tv viewers)

    I’m sure folks at San Bruno are thinking similar to the above..

    The original indent of the post is to provide feedback to the youtube.com operational team on intermittent internal server error occurred in the youtube.com. Mostly, internal server error occurs when the web server is unable to successfully establish the connectivity to the application server. The load module (app server plugin) failed to successfully connect to the next node. I provided the time stamp in my screen shot.

    As an end user, I can be all most cent percent sure that google search engine with pagerank algorithm is not incorporated in youtube.com. The metadata used to return the videos for a search operations are ok. Since the end users are used to get a better search results in the google, the expectation are same in the youtube.com. This could be an area where the engineering team at San Bruno can look into..

    One think is clear that youtube.com is using apache web server..