Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

It is with anguish that I read that Fronde has made a loss of $2.9 Million for the first half financial year of 2007. I'm not personally wanting to criticise Fronde, but it does give some idea as to the issues that have been facing at Fronde over the last year. I was certainly sold on the growth strategy when I took up the role of Principal Consultant at Fronde. I also see that Jim Donovan has coped some flack on his blog over the result. Although Jim is no longer the CEO of Fronde it is on his watch that this result has occurred. It's tough to deal with the issue as it's very personal and although Jim was the CEO, the board and the senior managers must also take some responsibility. However as hard as it is I'm sure Fronde will work through it and get better and stronger.

Thanks to the latest IASA newsletter, I've been reading today an interesting article on IT Transformation from Information Week based around some comments from HP's CIO Randy Mott.

The best line is "Choosing is Loosing" - A comment specifically aimed at why incremental IT transformation approaches don't work.

As in the words of a colleague of mine: "It's a bit like taking 5 years to have a sex-change operation - not pretty!". The article is a great read strategy-wise. However I don’t think it completely reflects the IT situations we typically have in NZ with our smaller size. Draw your own conclusions!

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????

It's official! I'm leaving Fronde as a Principal Consultant to take up a Senior IT position at Mighty River Power as Manager of Enterprise Architecture. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my family, friends and confidantes in the IT industry for helping me with my decision – I'm sure I bugged some of you far too many times asking for advice. Thanks lads and ladies  - Bronwyn, Adam, Jon, Scott, Mark to name a few!

I had been thinking for a while about moving out of services. My thoughts were that I wanted to concentrate on a single environment and strategy to drive a longer term plan than what I had experienced as a Principal in services in recent years. During this time of contemplation the opportunity with Mighty River Power came up and I've taken the bull by the horns and decided to jump in. My first day is the 21^st of Jan 2008.

I was just catching up on WLAN standards as I'm wondering what the best standard is for my upgraded WLAN at home. I ended up came across this well written resource on about.com on WLAN standard. It explains all the standards, the history, the pros and cons and is quite up to date. Useful!

Okay, a very quick note on Zune 2 first impressions - IT ROCKS! WOW! More on this later once I've played more, but I'm really impressed with this device. Very very impressed!

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…!

Although the Zune 2 is not available in NZ, I've managed to score one of these devices. According to UPS it's already landed in NZ and hopefully being sent to me shortly. I previous had an opportunity to get the original Zune but it really didn't tickle my fancy. The Zune 2 looks good, finally comes in black, is small and has a whole host of features that make it worthwhile. It's interesting to note that's it's receiving a lot of positive press for being a real iPOD contender. I'll post more once I've played with it. Otherwise, here are some interesting links on the Zune 2 I've been reading in my lunch hour:

Five things Microsoft did right with the Zune 2 (The comments from Apple Fans and Anti Apple Fans make interesting and funny reading!)

Walter Mossberg's Review of the Zune 2

Wired Zune 2 Review

Gizmodo news on Zune 2

Some design speculation on the "Zune 3"

Zune 2 FAQ

Zune 2 versus iPOD comparison charts

Paul Thurott Zune 2 Review (A lot of good history on the Zune here).

Okay, I guess this is slightly off topic for this blog but it's strategic for me!

Check out my post on the "Lukardo" (AKA as a Frontado). A coffee creation i had the pleasure of "refining" (rather than strickly creating) recently. 

Over on ARCast NZ, I've just published a podcast with Gianpaolo Carraro on Software plus Services from an Architecture perspective. The talk covers the following topics plus more:

• What is the difference between "Software plus Services" and "Software as a Service"
• Explore the different audiences of S+S/SaaS: Builders, Hosters and Enterprise Consumers
• Explore the focus of many SaaS providers around purely being web based applications
• How Microsoft technologies aid S+S initiatives
• The significance of SOA to S+S/SaaS

Gianpaolo is the director of Architecture Strategy at Microsoft and focuses on thought leadership and best practices around various architectural trends such as SaaS/S+S and SOA.

An excellent article on the InfoQ on the The Seven Fallacies of Business Process Execution. This article demonstrates and discusses many of the issues with Business Process Execution models. Clearly after many years of promise from the vendors we have yet to see seamless execution based on analysis models. The discussion around the mismatch between BPMN (the Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL (the Business Process Execution Language) is particularly interesting.

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!

Not that I'm changing things drastically but I'm focusing my blog a bit more on the what the "newish" titles says: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology. Most of the topics are/will be focused on doing good IT (Strategy, Architecture and Governance) and the interesting technologies that either align with this or just generally catch my attention. Hopefully most of my recent postings have already been consistent with this.

I'm also thinking about moving blog platforms. Currently I'm running this on the .NET 1.1 of DasBlog. I like the control I've had with this software but it is starting the lack a few features. Any suggestions from any other bloggers out there? I'm open to either a hosted offering where I can use my own domain cheaply or changing blog software on my machine. The key requirements are as many useful web 2.0 blog features as possible and the ability to easily migrate all my existing posts.

Slightly offtopic from this blog, but if your interested have a look at my personal blog for my results of movember here and some more movember fun and games here.

I must say, InfoQ is doing a really good job of covering enterprise development with plenty of interesting articles on SOA. There is a really good interview from Jim Webber from Thoughtworks (The same company Martin Fowler works for these days). He talks quite a bit about MEST (Message Exchange State Transfer) and an useful "standard" to support MEST called SSDL. The main jest of SSDL is that it is a replacement for WSDL (Web Services Description Languages) based on SOAP that gets you out of the Request/Response hell that WSDL creates. SSDL allows you define much more complex web service interactions such as sending two requests to a web service and get 5 responses back. It's also interesting to note that there is a SSDL open source implementation done by Patric Fornasier of National ICT Australia as a research project called SOYA. It's built on top of Windows Communication Foundation and looks very interesting. Suffice to say I'm going to be be playing a bit with this shortly.

The interview with Jim can be found here: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jim-webber-qcon-london

More on SSDL can be found here: http://www.ssdl.org/

Lastly, you can find SOYA here: http://soya.sourceforge.net/

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.

Some cool comments I really appreciate from Mark Carroll on the recent ARCast I did recently with Ron Jacobs. Mark Carroll for those who don't know is the Architect in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Strategy group here in New Zealand.

It has been a interesting week for articles on Computerworld I must say. It's been a while since I read it mainly because I've been very busy on a customer assignment and I was in recent times a little disappointed at the accuracy of some of the reporting. So I'm certainly finding some of the more controversial articles quite interesting this week.

Another one that stands out is this article on Poaching Talent, profiling comments on Simpl's CEO Bennett Medary's new Blog. The article quotes some interesting comments such as:

Medary says "vendors with the deepest pockets target and 'buy' specific talent required for immediate deployment to meet new or unfulfilled commitments. This often has the secondary effect of wounding the competition (and their customers) — killing two birds with one stone.

"Neither response is good for the industry or its credibility with customers!"

In a remark that appears to be targeted at Gen-i he comments: "Vendors with 50 - 60 vacancies each month do not have time for graduate programmes and other long term training/recruitment approaches! We have had a number of key staff specifically targeted by one large vendor recently, and my industry colleagues assure me that we are not alone."

Medary concludes offering to sign mutual non-poaching clauses with anyone "and publish who is and who is not willing to do the same".

Signing non-poaching clauses is no solution in my book. I think companies (and this is not targeted at Simpl) have to think seriously about how they look after and develop their staff. Medary starts to hit it on the nail with the comment "Vendors with 50 - 60 vacancies each month do not have time for graduate programmes and other long term training/recruitment approaches". I think this is exactly right - IT services companies must be putting in plenty of time and effort in keep staff by developing them. I think as long as someone is getting good money and good development then most people generally don't leave where they are working. Me personally I've found many of the large NZ SIs I've worked at are actually quite poor at growing peoples careers or they only do it with a small "key" subsection of their staff.

My experience as a manager in this industry is that if you don't provide challenge for good workers they will end up leaving for challenge somewhere else. When I ran the Microsoft practice at Optimation this was one of my primary concerns - get good work for people that’s a bit of out the box and make sure people have specific tailored career development programs for the individual. It's definitely no use taking a once size fits all approach. One tool I used quite a bit was learning profiling - i.e. working out the ways people learn knowledge. I figured that if I could work out how people learn, then I could probably work out a good development program. Some examples of this practically: One team member who learnt by working on the job doing super challenging customer work and had no patience for training and another one who liked solid work, but preferred structured training courses as he typically could apply better if he had the underlining theory drilled into him. As you can imagine I put together quite different development programs for each person.

A wise man in this industry once taught me that when people come work for you that if you develop them for their life careers then they probably will want to stay working with you for a good while. I truly believe this from firsthand experience and I honestly believe this is the best way to stop poaching. Oh and share options don't hurt either not that any System Integrators in NZ have caught onto this.

Knowing Rod, knowing what Xero is up to and knowing that SaaS is still proving to be a hard sell to many people, I find this Computerworld article very interesting where Rod disputes a US analyst’s take on SaaS. The analyst recently visited New Zealand.

Personally I generally agree with the Analyst's take on SaaS. It is still a low priority for larger firms in general and I still think SaaS is mainly stuck in the SME segment. Certainly my reading in New Zealand at the moment.

I personally think the SaaS movement will just end up forcing two things:

1. Dominant software sector incumbents to provide low cost/opex offerings (Watch the SaaS start-ups sweat when that happens)

2. More software gets offered as a web solution in addtion to desktop solutions. I think Google is probably the best model for this at the moment. They have really excelled in this area. It reminds me in the late nineties when Oracle was rabbiting on about thin clients and the end of Microsoft's dominance in software commodities. Well it still hasn't happened and Google still hasn't made it happen it despite producing some very good SaaS software. The interesting things to watch are the fact the Microsoft is investing big time in software frameworks that provide high useability on the internet. You can bet your bottom dollar they are hedging their bets and co-developing all the future products using this technology.

14-Nov: UPDATE FROM ROD (From Comments): "The article in computerworld did not accurately reflect the discussion. I agreed with Ken on many thing sand he agreed with the potential of SaaS especially in the SMB space".

Interesting comment from Rod there - Funny how computerworld distorted things! Rods comments sound much more like what I'd expect.

I've posted another architecture podcast (ARCast :)) on www.arcast.co.nz - this one is a recording I did with Ron Jacobs as part of his recent trip to New Zealand.  You can find the specific entry here or go straight to the podcast feed.

So as part of the Movember initiative for Men's Health I'm growing a wicked Mexican/Hulk Hogan Mo. It's all for a great cause and I will be posting my progress pictures on www.kiwibohemian.com.

Here is the official blurb - and if you can find it in your heart to sponsor me and donate a little money I'd be very appreciative J. No amount too small J :

Hi All,

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I'll be growin a Mo. It's all for a good cause - men's health and the fight against prostate cancer. Why...

• Every year in New Zealand 2,656 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 600 die of the disease, making prostate cancer the second largest cause of male cancer deaths, after lung cancer.
• The average life expectancy of a man in New Zealand is 4 years less than a woman.

To sponsor my Mo please go to http://www.movember.com/nz/donate, enter my registration number which is 128658 and your credit card details. Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the "Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand" clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 128658. Please mail cheques to: Movember, PO Box 87 150, Meadowbank 1742, Auckland. All donations over $5 are tax deductible.

All donations are made directly to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand who will use the funds to create awareness, increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer, fund research and scholarship programs.

For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had and can check out the detail at: Fundraising Outcomes.

Movember culminates at the end of the month at the Gala Partés. These glamorous and groomed events will see Tom Selleck and Borat look-a-likes battle it out for their chance to take home the prestigious Man of Movember title. If you would like to be part of this great night you'll need to purchase a Gala Parté ticket.

Cheers,

Lukas

More info is available at www.movember.com.

Movember is proudly grown by Holden, L&P, The Rock, Tui and Schick.

Movember a proud partner of the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand.

I've blogged a bit about using Wiki's recently and for my current customer I've been using Jive Software's Clearspace X (Version 1.6). This was certainly not a personal choice but rather a case of using an existing Wiki and social networking environment.

Over the last few weeks I've used Clearspace extensively to create an methods framework.  I would have created over 40 documents in the wiki and collaborated with several people on another 15 or so documents.

It's definitely been a mixed bag as I do like Clearspace and how it designed. I do like the simple workflow engine and the nice use of Ajax. I have to say though Clearspace has quite a few niggly bugs that make even basic content creation in Wiki documents difficult in certain circumstances and there are a couple of missing features which would really help me. I'm not sure how much of it is to do with my customers setup of Clearspace or direct issues in Clearspace itself.

Judge for yourself as I thought I would publish some my issues (and some workarounds) to hopefully help other people (Note these are very clearspace specific):

1. There are random problems with some of the text editors particularly for the homepage content - the general document wiki editors have less issues but I've seen some funny formatting problems with the formatted text box in the homepage of my wiki space. One strange thing I found is that once the formatted text box on the homepage got over about 6 paragraphs I could no longer edit it. It just would display the edit box but with no text to edit. I added three formatted text boxes to the homepage to get around this.

2. There does not seem to be any easy way to consolidate an entire wiki site into one document in Clearspace. My work around for this was to spider the site and run a PDF converter offline. Not ideal but it works.

3. In some cases images in pages don't resize properly and there is wrap around scrollbar that occurs. Workaround is to manually resize images or remove any URL stuffing in between the image formatting.

4. In general image resize after upload produces strangely grainy pictures. I know this could probably work a bit better but I've seen this on other wiki's too. Workaround is to create/resize your images to smaller sizes.

5. Wiki Images do not appear in PDFs. This is the number one issue for me - consistently PDFs from Wiki pages do not have images I upload to the wiki pages. It only works if I add images the first time I edit the document. Any images uploaded after the first edit while they appear in the wiki page do not appear in the PDFs. Very strange bug...

6. Spell Checker issues - I've stopped using the spell checker as it every time I use it ruins all my formatting and just rolls all the content together as one long string. Very weird, but this is a consistent problem. I couldn't seem to find a workaround for it.

7. Widgets errors on home page - widgets positioning getting mixed up. I've had this happen a few times when I setup a home page. Widgets would end up in place different to where I placed them. It seemed quite random and at other times it was fine.

8. Wiki pages do not like file URLs (e.g. file:// rather than http://) and once placed in and saved in a wiki page, the page just drops the URL. Very nasty. The workaround was to drop in an html page as a attachment. The html file when opened redirects to the file:// resource. Messy, but works.

I have used Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 and Confluence for creating similar content - It's my belief they are better products out of the box wiki wise. None the less, I have completed my framework using Clearspace and will continue to use it.

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'm currently working on a large IT Governance framework for a customer and as I was doing some research on the philosophies behind governance and change management when I came across a excellent wikipedia reference on Systems Thinking. The more I read and re-read the article the more I find the "thinking of Systems thinking" to be a useful for background for SOA. It provides some philosophical clues as to why and how service oriented architectures can used to glue and manage systems together both within an internal systems and it's parts and between systems. Definitely the thinking article for today.