IT Landscape

Twitter in enterprise

In last few weeks, there has been increased attention to Twitter micro blogging concept and technology since president elect Barack Obama’s twitter account was hacked along with few other celeberties.  Micro blogging was a dismissed concept in its infancy stage and due to its adaption particularly by the teens  it gained its popularity and benefit visualization was accomplished in a short time span.

Micro blogging is a compontent of web 2.0 and web 2.0 has been seriously considered by enterprises to maximize the benefits.  Vivek Kundra was promoting Twitter in the public office and there are major benefits of micro blogging in the emergency operation.

My views on how Twitter can be applied to an enterprise.

  1. Twitter can be used to communicate the status of various team members tasks in Agile software development methodology.
  2. Twitter can be used to keep the key stakeholder updated on the recent progress in production outages resolution (part of incident management)
  3. Twitter can be used to keep the team members up to date on execution of a major projects when teams are spread across the states, countries and continents
  4. Twitter can be used to understand what employees really LOVE to do. (All HR policies must be applied before enterprise uses this information for its use)

How EA can assist in the global economical crisis?

Economist and financial analyst says the current economical condition is the worst since great depression. The crisis exist in all fronts. The magnitude of global issues are very high. The financial & economical growth are not bright in near future. Companies are looking for cost optimization and eliminating discretionary spending in all areas.

Enterprise architects can play a signficant role in any organization to optimize the current spend and provide facts based data to eliminate the discretionary spending. Enterprise architects are the best qualified and well suited person to perform this role since they understand holistic view of organization from financial, organization, application, business, information and infrastructure perspective.

Potential cost optimization areas where enterprise architects can assist an organization

  • Contract negogiation with existing providers (software, hardware, maintenace and enhancement, right sourcing, contractor, professional services)
  • Application portfolio assessment – Sundown or eliminate applications in the landscape does not add signficant value to core business processes
  • Technology simplification – Eliminate and reduce the technologies in the landscape
  • Sourcing strategy – Bundle the applciation for cost effective service offering
  • Reduce technological complexity – Migrate the enterprise software (like IBM websphere or BEA weblogic, IBM DB2, Oracle, Portal server and etc)usage to open source software
  • Maximize  Web 2.0 technology for corporate colloboration- (Use Wiki, Blogs, youtube and etc)
  • Assist business teams in optimizing the business processes – reduce steps in return reduce head counts
  • Explore to migrate current licensing models to the term based licenses to improve the cash flow of organization

Patterns in software engineering – An Introduction

What is a pattern? (in software engineering world)

A predefined solution for a problem for the given context.

Key words in the above definition is problem, solution and the context.

What are the different categories of the patterns ? (in software engineering)

  • Analysis patterns
  • Design patterns
  • Architectural patterns
  • Technology patterns
  • Integration patterns

Why do we use the patterns?

Objective of patterns is to enhance

  • Reusabililty
  • Repeatability

in return will fetch

  • Cost efficiency
  • Agility (time to market)

Where the pattern concepts started in general ?

The pattern concept has been in use for thousands of years. In the building architecture and design, we have been using the patterns quite extensively. Ancient buildings like pyramids, roman collegium and lot more used the patterns in the implementation. For instance, the pillars used in ancient temples built in Thailand, India and etc are patterns. They did not design the pillars every time. The pillars are to hold the load of the building. We can notice the reusability and repeatability of the pillars in multiple places in those ancient building architecture which in returned improved the ancients to be effective and quick.

What are the types of patterns in each category?

There are conceptual, logical and physical patterns in each category. Conceptual patterns are very high level solution for the given problem at the given context. Physical patterns spells out the implementation solution for the given problem at the given context. Logical patterns are between physical and conceptual.