CIO

2010 Hot Tech Jobs

“Everyone knows someone who loves Honda” commercial in context with Honda Facebook is a prime example how social network channels have changed today’s business.  If any IT executives still thinks that social networking platform is for kids and teenagers, wake up! You have already missed lots of opportunity, try to speed up and catch on.

Social network is integral in today’s sales and marketing for almost all products and services.  Customization of a product or service based on each individual requirement is not a new concept and it has been discussed and implemented in isolation. The challenge faced before was to approximate each individual’s requirements and social network is an approach to approximate individual’s requirement. Once the requirements are understood, social networks are again used to influence individual customers to buy the given product or service. There are quite a few books written to leverage social network to promote and market products and services. To summarize, in today’s challenging market, it is obvious and evident that social network plays major role in selling product and services to consumers and some cases, even to big corporations.

Given this context, current economical circumstances, growth potential, emergence of cloud computing, compliance conformance requirements,

The following IT jobs will have high market demand in 2010..

1. Enterprise Architect – (Thorough understanding of business process management, business strategy, IT strategy, portfolio management, social networking tools ,techniques and its business application and etc)
2. Security Officer/Analyst (Audit, compliance,policy management, Threats from social networking, Identify Management Strategy,proactive incident avoidance – data loss prevention)
3. Network Engineer – (SAN/IPS/BGP/SONET/DNS/Firewall/Load Balancer/NetCache devices/SSL Accelerator/SMTP/SNMP/High availability/Disaster recovery/..)
4. Cloud Architect ( Cloud operating system – like VMVare, Business cloud)
5. Application Architect – (open source technologies,blog – wordpress, blogspot, facebook, youtube, SaaS, twitter, GoogleWave, web services, Rich Internet application – AJAX/Adobe Flex/Microsoft Silverlight)
6. Information Architect (Data Mining, Dataware house, Reporting, business intelligence, text minig, search optimization)
7. ERP specialist (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edward, Oracle financial, Banking – Fidelity, FiServ, Shaw, Phoenix, Hartland, and etc) 
8. Vendor/Contract Management ( ITIL)
9. Program/Project Management (PMBOK, PRINCE frameworks)
10.Smart Phone Application Architecture & Design – (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc)

Technical Architecture Components

In general, infrastructure or data center cost is around 35-40% of an over all IT cost. Due to the high cost absorption in that area, it is prudent for any senior executive in the IT organization to have a better handle on the infrastructure cost.  The industry lacks uniformity in the cost management of IT as a whole and it applies to infrastructure/data center cost. The various cost management structure are available to manage the over all IT cost and it depends on the size and type of an organization. However, the general principle remain the same.

IT infrastructure cost  looked closely for IT cost optimization by every chief information officers. It is essential, particularly during this economical climate, to look the infrastructure cost distribution and study the alternative approaches for cost and competitive advantage. Chief Enterprise architects are directed by CIO and other senior executives to develop an IT infrastructure cost optimization program. To accomplish it, the enterprise architect must understand the high level information of  various components of  infrastructure and develop a technical architectural strategy.  Technical architectural strategy defines the future state and provides a foundation, the blueprint, for the infrastructure/data centre cost optimization program.

For any future state analysis and definition, the current state is studied and understood before a road map is developed to reach the future state.  1. To study the current state, itemize the various components of technical architecture and the service rendered in each components.

Components of technical/infrastructure architecture

  • Hardware
    • Servers
      • Distributed
        • WinTel
          • Linux
          • Windows
        • RISC
          • HP-UX
          • AIX
          • SGI
          • SUN Solaris
      • Mainframe
        • MVS
        • AS/400
    • Disk arrays
      • SAN storage
      • NAS storage
      • Backup
    • Network
      • Logical
        • Extranet
        • Internet
        • Intranet
      • Physical
        • Network Appliances (SSL accelerators, Net Cache devices, XML appliance)
        • Network devices (Routers, Switches, VPN devices, Hubs, Firewall, Wireless,Intrusion prevention)
        • Telephony devices (Dialer, ACDs, IVRs, PBX)
      • External Connectivity
        • SFTP drop box
        • VPN Tunnel
        • T1 line
        • ANX
        • OC3/5 internet connectivity
        • Frames/MPLS
    • Desktop
      • PC
      • Laptop
      • Mobile devices (iPhone, BlackBerry, Smart Phones, pagers)
  • Software
    • System Software
      • Server operating systems
      • Network operating system
      • Storage operating system
      • Desktop operating system
      • Compilers, Interpreters
      • File system management (VSAM, GFS )
      • Name resolution system (DNS)
      • Email servicing system (SMTP)
    • Web infrastructure
      • Application Server
      • Web Server
      • Portal Server
    • Data Administration
      • Database server – OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP)
      • Data ware house
      • Reporting
      • Business Intelligence
    • Office management
      • Microsoft Office/OpenOffice
      • Email client
      • Browser
      • Remote login
      • Security – Virus prevention
    • Service Layer
      • Business process server
      • Message broker
      • Connector – database drivers, bridges,
    • Monitoring and control management
      • Service monitoring
      • Device monitoring
      • Compliance management
        • Data Loss prevention
        • Login monitoring
    • Collaboration Management server
    • Document management server
    • Storage Management Server
    • Emergency Management Service
      • Disaster Recovery Management
      • Business continuity Management
    • Enterprise Resource Planning (it will expand based on the core business)
      • Financials
        • Accounting
        • Management Accounting
          • Cash flow management
          • Fund flow management
      • HR
      • Procurement
  • Data center Services
    • Power grid architecture
    • Power Distribution Units (PDUs)
    • Backup power –
      • Automatic generators
        • Cooling and backup cooling for generators
        • Fuel capacity and distribution management
    • Cooling and heating
      • Backup cooling and heating
    • Wiring management
    • Rack management
    • Physical security
  • Security Service
    • Directory Services
    • Identity Management Services
      • User provisioning
      • Authentication
      • Authorization
      • User management
      • User de-provisioning
    • Network Security
    • Intrusion prevention
    • Firewall protection
    • Layered protection
      • Zoning – web zone, app zone, database zone, messaging zone, Demilitarized zone, file exchange zone

The service offering in each area depends on an enterprise.  Some enterprise has internal teams to provide all these services  and some has outsourced all of them. Mostly, enterprises adopt a hybrid approach with both external service provider and internal teams.  2. Define the future state in terms of strategic objectives like IT simplification, cost optimization, adaptability, agility for new market segment and etc.  3. For each component of the infrastructure, perform a SWOT, cost and new solution analysis and define the road map.

Amazon cloud – A practical experience..

Being a strategist, enterprise architect, chief architect and a leader, I do not believe in setting direction without knowing or approximating the n th step. In one way, it is very mathematical in the approach as similar to dynamic programming. As dynamic programming used computer programs like computer chess programs, estimating the n th step is based on probable choices using intuition and facts. The facts has the highest probability for success than intuition and I prefer to use the fact when fact can be searched and found. Use intuition only when the facts can not be found.

Cloud computing is in every practical enterprise architect’s or IT strategist’s technology road map and the implementation of the cloud computing for any IT organization is the question of when. Cloud computing has enough cloud in the sky and in some area it is already drizzling and in some area it is more than drizzling. It is going to rain and as people say, when it rains, it pours. Same thing is applicable to cloud computing. It is going to rain all over and when it rains, it is going to pour.

To be proactive for any future requirement for the organization (like I did with google apps on gmail), as an enterprise architect leader, I subscribed to the amazon cloud to set up an infrastructure for web hosting.

I would like to summarize my findings in an executive level.

  1. Set up an elastic amazon cloud for a web site is very easy and designed for a non technical person. (Obviously, it is very very easy to set up for a technical person)
  2. Select the stack you would like to have in the cloud. There are numerous infrastructure stack already available and ready to use (like wordpress, LAMP, Identity management and etc). It is also easy to create a custom stack for your use or promote it your stack for a public use.
  3. Create an elastic IP address for the stack created.
  4. Login to the clone (or instance) using ssh and do the necessary configuration
  5. Load the application
  6. Map the domain address to the elastic IP address
  7. If the traffic to the site increases, increases the number of clones (or instances) associated to the dynamic IP address
  8. It cost me $2.18 and my 30 minutes time (cost for my 30 minute is priceless!)

All the above steps were done in less than 30 minutes with out any prior training. The site was launched in 30 minutes. The above steps make me think, why an organization has to have an army of people to set up and support an infrastructure? CXO, if you are reading this blog, do not spend any more of your significant G&A budget on the infrastructure, ask your enterprise architect to look into cloud computing and save significant cost and divert your G&A into innovation, investment management and enterprise architecture!