I spent sometime this morning to figure out how these four kids form OGL. The back ground bus looked very familiar to me and realized the original of this school bus is in Henry Ford Museum, Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Rosa Parks who sparked a historic civil rights movement was travelling in this bus. She proved that a person can stand up for others by sitting down.
My sincere thanks to google to make us remember her today.
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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.
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”
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Every year, when Nobel price winners are announced, I spend time to understand the contribution made in physics and chemistry (some time in economics area ) I explore the area, winner and number of years they worked in that area, major contribution, winner’s age, degrees they received, their thesis work, their thesis advisor, and finally, application of their contribution in real life. When I immerse into this fascination and one consoling message to me was, all the recipients I studied were at least 10-15-20 years elder than me. There are young scientist in the age group of 25-30 like Prof. Lawerence (for study of x-ray crystallography) got the noble price before their 30’s but it was when my grand father was studying in middle school.
Lately, the Nobel award selection process was challenged in the area of peace and economics. I leave the \ debate to politicians. But in the field of physics and chemistry, the selection process and people who receive the awards are impeccable
This year noble price was given to Prof. Andre Geim and Prof. Konstantin Novoselov for their the study of 2D graphene. Graphene may change the silicon based integrated circuits to a carbon based chips in the future. The next generation iPad will be as thick as a credit card and graphene will play a signficiant role in it.
I sent my congratulation note to both professors.
Prof. Novoselov is of my age . It made me to think a lot during last few days.
Obviously not every one can win a Nobel price. To make a significant contribution, the first step is, we need to find the area we are good at. It sounds easy to find the area we are good at, but, it is not. In most cases, we consider ourself that we are good in lots of area. For significant contribution, should we focus on one thing that we are best at? How a person will decide what they are best at when they are good at lot of areas?
The question is, can we be best at multiple areas to make significant contribution in all those areas? Can a person win a nobel prize in physics and own a company like google and be a sport star ?
All the above questions are about on the results. In my honest opinion, when we focus more on the results of a job/project/program, we will lose focus on current task in hand. The path for your Nobel price is: Follow excellence in the area you are best at, success will chase you. Don’t chase success, you will never fully annex it!!
Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others 