Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

It's been a while since I blogged here - in fact almost 18 months! In that time I have left Fronde and joined Mighty River power as Group IS Enterprise Manager, setting up and leading a team of Enterprise Architects. The job has been focused on Enterprise Architecture, IT Portfolio and Governance and has kept me more than busy.

These days I've new finally found some renewed energy for blogging around my professional interests. Find it at http://www.thestrategicarchitect.com/ ("The Strategic Architect"). This blog will be primary focused on Enterprise Architecture, Portfolio and IT Governance topics. Additionally I'll be blogging on strategic technology that is on my radar. Despite some technology aspects on the new blog, my primarily focus will be about helping achieve better business outcomes through information technology.

Feedback and comments appreciated...

What a cool article – how to simulate a windows service under ASP.NET. What's novel is the solution the author came up with – using cache timeout!!! Robust and extendable - I really appreciate this type of "out of the box" solution thinking. Omar, want to come and work in New Zealand????

Since Gianpaolo blogged me blogging/recording him I thought I'd do the decent thing and blog him back. Must be something to do with the state of my mind today J Oh and hobbits – yes hobbits are relevant to this post…!

Following the canning of the PDC 2007 this year, it has been announced that PDC 2008 will in October 2008. I personally went to PDC 2003, but did not manage to get to PDC 2005. For those who don't what PDC is it's the "Professional Developers Conference" for Microsoft Technologies. Don't let the rather misleading name fool you, as much as there is a developer focus it's also focused heavily on architects and future planning. PDC is completely different to the Microsoft TechEd conferences as it focus on the future roadmap of Microsoft technologies (often years into the future) and focuses on demonstrating working prototypes. In PDC 2003 I got my first copy of Vista (Then called Longhorn) with working versions of all the current .NET 3.0 framework including a then working prototype of WinFX. I was completely blown away at that point with the technology Microsoft had planned – and as we know Microsoft took another 4 years to fully release Vista. So that gives you a taste of the type of information you're going to get wind off. I hope to be there!

Interesting to see that Telelogic is offering a Carnegie Mellon certified Enterprise Architects program in this part of the world. The program consists of three courses (and I imagine some certification) to end up becomming a Carnegie Mellon certified Enterprise Architect.

Looks interesting, but certainly a big dent in any training budget.

Good article from Joel Spolsky on 5 easy ways that software projects fail. I really like this article as Joel articulates the common problems of software development very well. This article was forwarded to me from a person inside my company with the subject "Harsh Words from Joel Spolsky". Personally I don't think they are harsh enough and my thoughts on the article are as follows:

"This is really obvious stuff in my opinion. 

Our industry is littered with many people who do not have a proper education in IT, let alone being trained in managing projects properly. Many of these people are put in charge of making decisions or signing off decisions around projects and typically end up making ignorant simplistic decisions. Often many of the stakeholders of projects can be like this and the failure is in getting them to realise the implications of a situation that creates many of the problems discussed in this article. 

Ask a surgeon - does he/she do half an eye operation because it costs less? 

Does a civil engineer design half a bridge because of a deadline constraint? 

A big part of this is immaturity in our industry and not following many of the standards set in other professions such as engineering, law and medicine. It's all basic planning techniques and basic acknowledgement of the complexity of a problem. And it often stems from people who simply did not know what they are doing and would never admit it."

I hope I don't offend anyone – certainly not my intention. But I have to say I do feel very passionately about this issue and believe many roots of the issue stem from poor education in our industry around broad (or horizontal) skills. Feel free to publish your thoughts as comments…

I posted on the weekend a new ARCast NZ podcast on Interaction Design which I recorded with Phil Cockfield. This is my favourite to date and looks at how the concept of interaction design works with the concepts of IT architecture. The overview of the session:

Join Lukas Svoboda and Phil Cockfield as they discuss the concept of Interaction Design (ID) and how it fits with the discipline of Software Architecture. The relationship between ID and Agile Software Development is also discussed as well as the notion that Interaction Design is the missing link in Architecture. Lastly Phil discusses how an Architect can get into using Interactive Design approaches to help develop architectures for software today.

Okay this is a pretty technical post, but it does have an important enterprise implications. The proxy file (convention is to use proxy.pac) is a javascript file that defines how web browsers can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server for fetching a given URL. This is very useful to use in a company where you might have different proxy servers in different geographies and you want the person's web browser to automatically use the right proxy server. The file can also do things like turn off the use of a proxy server if it isn't in the currently used network. This is very useful for laptop users who might use their laptops on a home network at the end of the day. So in summary a proxy.pac file stops you from having to reconfigure proxy settings for your browser every time you change networks.

http://nscsysop.hypermart.net/proxypac.html - good examples on how to write complex proxies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config - Wikipedia Resource

http://wiki.garylaw.net/doku.php?id=technical:automatic_proxy_configuration – Lots of details and resources here

As posted on Eric Newcomer's Weblog, WS-TX 1.1, the group of standards consisting of WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity has now become an OASIS standard.

Very interesting webcast on how SalesForce.com does integration. It's a good example how a SaaS offering like SalesForce.com can provide an effective platform for integration. This is perfect for the majority of business who are contemplating a SaaS offerings but have existing applications to integrate. I found the Google demonstration particularly fascinating - Certainly add more fire to rumours of SalesForce.com and Google moving ahead together. SalesForce.com market cap is 5.6 billion which Google could quite happily buy given the amount of cash they have. However people I've talked to in the know speculate that acquisition is unlikely but partnership is more realistic. Watch that space I say. One last random thought, imagine putting Apple into this mix. The combination of Apple/SalesForce/Google would be a very serious challenge to Microsoft both in the consumer and business spaces. A combination like this would be an end-to-end turnkey platform for both consumers and businesses and in the process a very massive threat to Microsoft...

Good article on Computerworld regarding the architecture aspect of SOA and how it is the most important part. Very interesting article by Galen Gruman.

Absolutely brilliant article by Frank Hayes Framingham over at Computerworld on software commoditization, very rational and very much on the ball. I think I agree with almost all parts of the article, which is very rare for me with a trade article J

I've posted a new ARCast (Architecture Pod Cast) with John Bernhard, Enterprise Architect of AirNZ on the topic "The role of the Architect to Challenge". Find it at www.arcast.co.nz . I also worked out how to setup a RSS stream for podcasting only, it's added to the navigation links or you can find it here J

TIP: For you architects out there looking for independent industry support and certification keep an eye on IASA – an international body who is getting involved in some interesting Architect certifications.

So last night I ran the Great Fronde ECM event. We had a reasonable turn out of people and the event was a resounding success. One of the proposals I floated with the audience was to setup a vendor-independent, integrator-independent NZ ECM online community and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Another principal here at Fronde will probably end up front and running it with help from me to get it up and running. If you are keen to be part of this community, drop me a line on LUKAS AT FRONDE DOT COM.

The 5 guiding principals of Enterprise Architecture - This is right on the money from my experiences of doing Enterprise Architecture:

No Strategic Vison, No EA: If you know where you are, but you don't know where to go. Don't plan a journey.

Good is Good Enough: An Enterprise Architect knows he has achieved the perfect solution not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

The Only Constant is Dynamics: Dynamics is the only constant while adaptiveness is the natural variable, so plan for this constant.

Pure Logic is the ruin of the Spirit: Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit and creativity delivers unexpected opportunities, so use your creativity.

Be Enterprising: If you want to create an Enterprise Architecture, don't drum up the architects to collect information and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless value creating possibilities of the enterprise.

On Wednesday the 2^nd of May I'll be hosting an event on Enterprise Content Management with Helen Rayner from Telecom and Clark Thomborson from Auckland University. It should be a really interesting event with Helen and Clark presenting as they are ECM experts in industry and academia respectively.

Full details including speaker bios are at the Fronde News Website but a taste is below:

The Great Fronde Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Event

Date: Wednesday May the 2nd 2007 Times: 4:30pm to 6:00pm Venue: Fronde, Level 7, 131 Queen Street, Auckland

Overwhelmed by mountains of information and yet not able to locate anything useful? Feeling alone trying to outline information management strategies and drive the implementation of content management solutions? Confused about how to organise and manage content in your organisation? Come and hear from a panel of information management experts and users on how they have addressed the situation and what results they have achieved. Learn from the collective experiences and best practices, and understand the capabilities of the technology to better manage your information assets.

Our Panelists are Professor Clark Thomborson, ECM expert from the University of Auckland, Helen Rayner, Information Manager Policy & Strategy for Telecom and Lukas Svoboda, Principal Consultant at Fronde. The panel will go through theoretical and practical aspects of Enterprise Content Management as well as demonstrate some of the features in Microsoft's latest ECM offering – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

To book: To book yourself on this event please phone Wendy Watson on 09 377 2400 or email her at Wendy dot Watson at Fronde dot com

Further Information: If you would like to know further details on this event please phone Lukas Svoboda on 09 377 2400 or email him at Lukas dot Svoboda at Fronde dot com

Tomorrow and Friday I'm chairing the 2nd Annual brightstar IT Archtiecture conference. This conference attracts the cream of Architecture speakers in NZ and is limited to a small audience. More information can be found here at Brightstar.

My new pet project has gone live tonight: ARCast NZ. Check it out at the following address:  http://www.arcast.co.nz/

ARCast NZ is an official offshoot of Ron Jacobs' International ARCast. Since 2005, Ron Jacobs has been interviewing architects all around the globe and giving insight into the world of architecture. ARCast NZ is hosted by yours truly and is focused on the software and infrastructure architecture community in New Zealand. I intend to do at least one cast a month looking at relevant issues in the local NZ architecture community.

Recently Ron Jacobs, (Blog is here) toured New Zealand to give a couple of talks to usergroups on Service Orientation and a few other interesting topics. Ron as part of his job at Microsoft runs Arcast - a community podcast for Architecture and Architects in the Microsoft space. While he was NZ, we caught up and he interviewed me for Arcast. It all came about from a conversation I had with him after one of his talks - that basically I said SOA needs to become more radical and more pervasive as a design and technology philosophy. The overview of the talk is:

"When web services first came about, most people wondered if they were really the right way to go. After all performance wasn't great for some things and the wire format of text/xml was rather large and bulky. Over time we came to think of SOA and web services as the same and developed ways of thinking about architecture that worked in this model. With the release of WCF however, this point of view is changing. Now it is possible to think of your applications as a collection of services both internally and externally. A radical concept you say? Why yes, it most definitely is and that is why today we bring you an SOA Radical - Lukas Svoboda. "

The Arcast post and topic overview is here, and you can download the podcast directly from here. Also currently listed at the top of the Microsoft Resource Architecture Centre

Thank you to the fine people at Microsoft Community Support - I've been confirmed as an Architect Microsoft MVP again for 2007. For information on what an MVP see the Wikipedia listing, the Microsoft MVP faq and my MVP profile. My profile is a *little* out of date.

Mai-lan's Visio Blog on MSDN blogs has an excellent stencil for basic web service design including the famous "Microsoft" Web Services icon. I use it a lot personally in my diagrams as an image and it's good to finally find it as a vector based visio icon. Find it on this blog post

I've been confirmed for "Implementing a Successful SOA - Realising Service Orientation" - A two day SOA workshop I'll be giving in Auckland and Wellington during Oct/Nov in association with BrightStar training. BrightStar are the wonderful folks who ran the three conferences I chaired in the last few years (two SOA and one general Architecture). Rather than being a conference this is a two day workshop to really get your head into SOA with yours truly. It represents over 4 years of active experience as an Enterprise and Strategic architect implementing real world SOAs for several key New Zealand companies such as Farmers Trading company and NZ Immigration Service. It brings all my thinking on SOA into two days of theory, background and practical advise on how to get into SOA. If this interests you jump along to the Brightstar site and register. There is a good discount for early bird registrations.

The course outline is as follows:

COURSE OUTLINE

Day One

What is Service-Orientation?
• Industry trends over the last five years
• Fundamental service orientation principles and tenets
• The relation of service-orientation and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• The definition of SOA from multiple viewpoints
• SOA as an IT philosophy

Service-Orientation as a Practical Theory
• What are services?
• The theory and detailed breakdown of a SOA

SOA - What are the Standards?
• Implementing SOA with web services
• Web services - standards and current status
• Technology implementation of these standards

Model-Driven Development and its Relationship to SOA
• Exploring model-driven development
• Detailing model-driven architecture
• What is contract-first development?
• Pros & cons of contract-first development
• The application of model-driven development of SOA

How SOA Affects your Architecture and Development Team
• How developers and architects need to think differently
• Training, personal development and SOA skills training
• Gaining buy-in from your IT team

Day Two

Prescriptive Guidance - The Microsoft SOA
• The Microsoft Technology Stack
• Microsoft SOA philosophy
• Practical guidance

SOA Case Studies: Objectives, Obstacles & Solutions
• Review of several NZ SOA case studies
• Issues and challenges
• Lessons learned: What went right? What went wrong?
• Identifying patterns which will work for you

Service Oriented Architecture and the Open Source Community
• The Open Source Technology Stack
• The Java Technology Stack
• Practical guidance

Service Oriented Management (SOM)
• Revealing SOM
• How does SOM affect your current IT operation?
• Successfully aligning SOM to your business

Aligning Architecture, Management and Governance
• Understanding the holy grail of implementing  SOA
• What is SOG (Service-Oriented Governance)?
• Realising service-orientation - Architecture, Management and Governance

As promised, here is my presentation from TechEd 2006 - How to Get Your Grandmother Building Missile Defense Systems. The files are 2 Meg downloads each.

ARC213-SVOBODA-Part1.zip (2.1 MB)

ARC213-SVOBODA-Part2.zip (1.97 MB)