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US Library of Congress – Knowledge Management Where are you in your Organization’s journey ?

1280px-Library_of_Congress_by_Carol_M._Highsmith

 

The US Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries where knowledge of most facets of humanity such as arts, science , astronomy , folklore, traditions , math,architecture etal is stored and preserved over years. This has survived many a century or two as we march in the 21st century and is a laudable effort in knowledge management by any standards. When you want an organization to be built that it wants built to last kind of foundations then it is imperative that the knowledge management surrounding it should be quite solid and future looking.

Knowledge management is an essential component to the Enterprise transformation exercise. The reason being if you are not sure where you currently are then it is not possible to go where you want to go ? It is like having a blueprint of what artifacts you have on your product portfolio and get to know how they all fit in.

Knowledge is like data in a database and management often would how you would manage the data and give meaningful information around it. Knowledge management would be about easy retrieval of information which would mean that you have to a good job of configuration management system around it this is a given and true of all configuration management systems.

Typically in an organization knowledge management would involve storing design documents, code , configurations , tar/war files and all such information that is useful to them and would need to retook at them from time to time.But most often in companies you have people asking around saying do we have an RFP to respond to that client request. Do we have an reference architecture document that would help us is not reinventing the wheel and respond to the client from a similar geography without having to go through specific region specific customization needs. What this means that all of this promotes for greater reuse and reduction of rework and help more better time of an organization’s time and resources.

Do you know what all can be stored in an Organization’s repository ?

1. Industry Standards Information

2. Internal Standards Document

3. Project Closure Documents

4. Governance Log Details

5. Artifacts of all kinds in a company ( code , docs ( SRS , user stories (if you are an agile shop ), architecture specs , business process docs, diagrams,matrices,catalogs)

6. Solution Specific Artifacts

7. Reference Architecture models for the product or service that you are positioning yourself.If you are new to reference architecture then here is a link to a video explaining the same.

8. Have you ever thought of linking this knowledge base to the extent that the information sharing makes sense to your client , partners and vendors ecosystem giving all the IP protection , NDA etal in place.

This is exactly what enterprise continuum in TOGAF paves way for and help an organization create a knowledge ecosystem that will help organization make faster procurement decisions, buy v/s build decisions and simply provide for agility during business transformations.Enterprise Continuum in TOGAF is a concept that has provisions for all of the above and is indicative of how an enterprise should structure its assets if you want to thrive in the knowledge economy. If you know what you have well then you can go ahead and add / subtract the features needed. Most companies at times think it is an overhead along with their day to day run the business model to keep their knowledge base updated.

Most often unit / organization heads have this moment of ground shifting from under their feet when asked “How are we go from this product to the next version of the product?” or “What is the effort involved in getting this product multi currency enabled?. These questions become much easier to answer if you have a strong knowledge management practice. These facts cannot be gathered on their finger tips but with working towards a culture where the knowledge within the company is available to one and all and most important easily structured and retrievable would decide how good it is at business agility and moving ahead.

Image Credit : wiki

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Is it time to throw away your Product Baseline ?

throw_baseline_togaf

Baseline as per the wikipedia is an agreed description of the attributes of a product, at a point in time, which serves as a basis for defining change.

Most of us can relate to that statement which means the product or solution has come to a certain maturity in abstraction of its features and now you can call that a baseline. Some companies work a great deal to arrive at a baseline which is what they have worked over months , years to finally arrive at one milestone in their journey and call it the baseline. Now the title is why do some companies decide to throw it away. We shall see how and why this happens ?

Togaf has a concept of going about iterations on how you can go from one state to another in your organization transformation journey. There is a baseline first and target first approach when you go about iterating across its phases for architecture development.

bfirst_togaf

Baseline First : Firstly you go about considering the edifice for building future work is your current baseline and then it becomes the starting point for doing any work henceforth. What this means is that you as an organization has significant has accumulated a lot of collective knowledge and arrived at the baseline which is still relevant and useful in going about the organization churns.Lets say you are a n oil and gas major and all the data models,process workflows,architecture documents ( business,data,application and technology) are at a point where they need further pruning and tailoring to meet the new market realities. And hence any work that you do keeping this as the basis will end up being called as baseline first approach.

tfirst_togaf

Target First Approach : With disruption in every industry at times your baseline becomes completing irrelevant and new forms of transacting , doing business gets precedence. Examples of this would be Banking industry being caught in the wallet war from google,apple etal and further danger from the block chain , bitcoin and newer forms of currency exchange without the middleman. When this is more true for your current state then the baseline or the accumulated knowledge in the organization is found to be not very useful to go ahead with the organization transitions.

In reality this is not very true as there could be pockets sometimes huge areas of the existing knowledge base that can be turned / fine tuned to better meet market or product relevancy in the market. In the case of bitcoin based transactions disrupting banking for example the banking fundamentals such as credit / debit still would remain the same. But again it is upto the organization to see what parts of the baseline is relevant in your journey and then use it to your advantage. This needs good brain storming withing the company weighing the pros and cons and then take it forward.

What’s true in practice

Reminded of a joke that was going on in a company .They estimated that they would need a 100 developers working on the baseline for about 1.5 years to overhaul the product and make it market ready then there was a side remark saying give us 30 developers “throw away your baseline and we’ll rewrite the product afresh in six months.

So the fact of the matter is throw parts of your baseline away where it makes sense keep the ones that aid your transformation. This needs sound existing knowledge of your baseline and also where you want to go. Many organization find this to the biggest challenge “Where are we going and how ?”

Having the clarity of baseline first and target first approach helps …..

Would love to hear from you on what occasions did you have to chuck away your baseline if not great. If so how much of it was throw away and what portions could you keep ?

Image Credit : https://www.flickr.com/photos/strelka/

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Does my team understands the BIG Picture ? What can I do about it ?

Get to hear this question from Senior IT folks , Head of Engineering Units , Product Heads , Vice Presidents , Directors when I talk to them during consulting and training engagements . and is quite a common rant from people in charge of gearing their teams efforts of producing a product or a solution. Help teams with getting answers to these questions ( list is not exhaustive enough but indicative) during my TOGAF workshops coupled with real world experience of having seen how companies ( big and small) come to terms with these issues .

When you are developing software eventually ending up in a product or service , there are a few things you wish everyone in the team was or is made aware of.

bigpicture

Questions that the senior most in the team have or the stakeholders have with respect to their teams.

  1. Does my team know what product or solution they efforts are going into ?
  2. Do they know the customer context in which their application is going to be used ?
  3. Do they have any idea on how the customer is going to be deploying the software ?
  4. Do they have any idea on how the software will be customized at site ?
  5. Do they have any idea of how the project will be measured in terms of business outcomes of the project instead of technical prowess alone ?
  6. Do the teams have the knowledge on what is perceived as waste with regard to the requirements that are thrown at them ?
  7. Do they have the knowledge of how to produce just enough architecture or design ?
  8. Do they understand that abstraction is a key asset for an IT professional as they progress along their career path ?
  9. Do they understand what it means to have a separation of concerns in the architecture across the layers.
  10. Do they understand that business architecture is taking a lot of precedence these days and technology is being leveraged to serve the needs ?
  11. Do they know how to slice and dice the architecture or design to produce a Minimum Viable Product or Potentially Shippable Increment ?
  12. Post slicing and dicing the architecture do they know how to put the pieces back and ensure economies of scale in terms of best effort of people , process and technology.
  13. Do they know that the smartest person is not in the room with regard to their requirements if they are continously being changed .
  14. Do they know that external factors and standard can influence the way they go about their work. How can they be proactive here ?
  15. What is best in terms of delivering software these days that which can avoid the blame game and make everyone accountable ?
  16. Do they have a common repository where all the artifacts can be stored in the organization and this reflects the current state and not just created to impress the internal or external auditors ?
  17. Do they know how an idea can be taken all the way from strategy to execution and what are the layers during this process ?
  18. Are they stuck too much on the solution instead of exploring all possible ways of addressing a solution which can result in better customer satisfaction ?
  19. Do they understand that architectures have a short shelf live and should produce ones with that in mind instead of aiming for built to last solutions ?
  20. Built to last should be an architecture goal instead of being a design goal , designs can change .Does the team know this for a fact ?
  21. Do they understand the logical separation across various architectures and how to go about creating deliverables across sprints or scrum cycles whichever may be your organization’s way of doing things ?
  22. Do they constant understand how to innovate in iterations instead of thinking innovation big bang ?
  23. Do they understand the customer needs enough with a bit of design thinking spiced up along in the way they look at solving things.
  24. Do they understand how to fail fast and fail forward ?
  25. Finally do they understand the BIG PICTURE ? DO YOU HAVE SOMEONE in the team who is helping the team understand the BIG Picture ?
  26. Do they understand the complexities of how software which started at a module level and end up being complex as it progress and loses its extensible nature ?
  27. Do they understand the realities / needs of enterprise grade applications or software and are they design and architecture efforts aligned in that direction ?

The above list is not complete but details the issues that senior folks grapple with who are in charge on producing / delivering software. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Picture Courtesy : Flickr Amanda Slater

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Eturnti Enterprise Consulting is an Open Group member and has achieved Accreditation on its course on TOGAF® Framework

eturnti_togaf9

Happy to share that Eturnti Enterprise Consulting is now an Open Group TOGAF® 9 Standard Version 9.1 accredited training partner.

Look forward to spreading the TOGAF® Standard Version 9.1 framework body of knowledge  across people doing business transformations , IT / digital migrations , overhauling their IT infrastructure/landscape and in short wanting to go from point A to point B in their individual organizational journeys….

TOGAF® is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.

 

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Using TOGAF® Framework as Tool for Business Transformation….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFEUyBiXE0I&feature=youtu.be

Joint introductory webinar with KnowledgeHut on 23 Jan 2015.

Like all presentations mostly end up starting with a glitch , this one also started with one . Please watch it from 3:51 onwards.

Overview:

Business is always in a constant state of flux- more so these days, with disruption happening all around. How do you move from your AS IS state to TO BE architecture in your enterprise transformational journey? What mix and match of people, processes and technology will you blend together, and in what proportion, to drive enterprise value to deliver transformational results? TOGAF® framwork has a suite of tools that can help architects to chalk out the architectural roadmap for enterprise success. This talk will also focus on how agility is an underlying thread in this framework, and how value is delivered incrementally, making the process robust and bankable.

This webinar is an introductory session to walk one through how TOGAF® as an enterprise architecture framework has proven best practices that can be used to drive results.

Key Takeaways:

Exposes the audience to the features of TOGAF® framework which help plug business technology gaps.
– How TOGAF® Standard has agility at its core to drive transformational results.
– Why it is a good skill and knowledge for a seasoned IT professional to have in their kitty.

References / Acknowledgements

1. www.opengroup.com/togaf
2. http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Industry-Solutions-and-Trends/Meatballs-and-Spaghetti-how-to-untangle-the-cloud/ba-p/121808
3. Roger Sessions — http:/msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479371.aspx/

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SDET a step towards creating a self Organizing team…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9Id9jUj10w

Who is an SDET ( Software Developer Engineer in Test / Software Design Engineer in Test) ? Initially started at Microsoft many companies have these job titles these days. Watch a short video on how this role forms one step towards moving self organizing teams. A pure tester alone or developer alone role is fast fading and instead one needs to be a mix of both. End goal is to ship highest quality code just as in engineering , we cannot say that the bridge has only 50 % quality , the engineers lacked focus when it was built. Similarly SDET is redefining the software engineering practice.

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With Open Source One needs to be Generous -OSI days Bangalore 2014

OSIdays

Attended the OSI days Bangalore. One of the places where it makes sense to host a conference where you can find a large numbers of people on any technology under the sun. Open source unifies the birds working on different tech stacks .NET , JAVA , ROR, PHP, LAMP,MEAN folks [ how mean or cheap can you get 🙂 with open source ] etc. Scripting all shades and Mobile App developers worth their app.

It was organized by EFY the magazine company primarily with other Open source vendors / sponsors with their stalls.Microsoft had a big stall along with Oracle and HP all out there hustling and trading their wares enticing developers to get hooked on their bandwagon. Microsoft had a dev camp where a set of exercises were loaded onto PCs which was open to developers to type , program the exercises and get a real world feel of how quick or easy it is to get your app moment. There were applications ranging from test programs to play around with Mongo DB, windows HTML mobile applications. Nice way to get developers to at least take a peek at your offerings.

And there were goodies like T-shirts, portable chargers and like to make it worth somebody’s time to try them.

It is not about who makes the box anymore.

HP Helium was out their doing their social marketing around the Helium Open Stack cloud. They have a strong private cloud offering with Open Stack as the standard and a lot of evangelizing around that was there to see.Tweet to get early bird prizes,quizzes,selfies randomly picked and prizes ranged from HP tablets to laptops in some cases. Over all it was a big change to see traditional companies playing the social game well , getting public attention on social media. With game changing and disruptive technologies all around HP has thrown their hat in the cloud arena with the Helium offering. As it is now “It is no longer about who makes the box”.The infrastructure game has changed forever with cloud adoption. Nobody wants the CAPEX with an expensive box in their premises unless it has a strong rational these days.The only way HP can push their Hardware capability into the markets is for people to go the private cloud way and then push their servers where it has a business use case. Overall a lot of action happening on the front with HP having partnered with Cloud foundry to make it happen among other key cloud initiatives Good to see large companies stepping up their game or risk being outpaced. Microsoft adopting the cloud game with Office 365 was spot on and help them stay in the game. Sure HP played their social media strategy well here and more so get developers to talk about you and the market will follow suit.

Notable misses from an Open Source conference were Redhat,Google,Python community but nevertheless it was a good representation overall. May be it is all that you can squeeze into a two day program with back to back parallel sessions.

Some random takeaways

1. Companies of all sizes and shapes are adopting open source. Some large companies now have an open source practice, Wipro had a stall there.

2. People choose the technology stack based on what they are comfortable while building products and not necessarily the best out there for a given problem. It is difficult for one to know what is good with rapid technology changes.

3. The shelf life of any product built with Open Stack is only a few months to a year. Then on they either get upgraded or move to something better.

4.Mostly backend business logic is still written in good old C,C++,Python,Java,COBOL and people do not tamper with them although new technology intrusion is always enticing.

5. GoLang preferred against Python where concurrency was an issue.Although Python measured up against GoLang with no CPU latency being there.

6. A lot of product ideas being thrown around and some folks detailed what their journey was like. Good comment was when someone said you adopted SMART technologies to get here, the response was it took us several years to get SMART. So it was never a overnight thing.

7.Stackoverflow and user forums for the Open Source technologies apart from Google GOD solved people steer clear of roadblocks and bottlenecks during their open source journey.

8. Although getting people to adopt open source is hard with no support but once the team adopts to the stack it works great and an unmatched ROI. Else your TCO is eaten away by the hardware/software vendors whom you are depended on. One mention here is a tool called sendy which costs around 60$ but once configured and setup you can send mail blasts to your email list for a lifetime with that initial cost.

9. You need to be generous to allow people to use your stuff for free and this promotes your to leverage on the collective strengths of an intelligent community whom you can bank on for updates , fixes , issues etc.

10. Leveraging  Open Source is a two way street it always works with both the parties being benefited Once you have an enhancement that serves the larger community you contribute back into the pool. Opportunity here is a two way street.

People pay for the shiny stuff large user base gets you marketing

You need to be generous to allow a large percentage of people to use and benefit from your goodies. Evernote , all the cloud storage option providers ( gmail, one drive, dropbox) all of these fall into this category. They get their revenues based on the premium few users and good ad strategy for them to allow people to use their stuff. This is more popular as the freemium model, keep a large part of it free but for the shiny wares on your stack charge a premium. You need to give to get back. It works the other way also as you can almost crowd source efforts on your development if the open source takes off. You do not have to employ the services of people by employing people to take care of enhancements , future releases, bug fixes. This is a good advertising strategy for people who do not have ad revenues. Keep your product free , get people to comment on it crib and better still have them validate it for you free and then decide which of the features of the product you want people to pay for it. Quite disruptive coming to think of it , if its well executed.

 

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Moving from Strategy to Execution -TOGAF

All enterprise architecture frameworks talk about this. TOGAF also has prescriptions for moving from strategy to execution. Here is a short snippet explaining the process and involves addressing various concerns generally such as domain , data , application and technology without going into all the details. Togaf calls going through this famously as BDAT. ( Business , Data , Application and Technology). More details here.

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ROI on TOGAF Certification for an IT Professional….

 

TOGAF_ROI

Most often get asked this question by experienced, very experienced and people with little experience folks on what happens to my career if you are certified in TOGAF 9.x ( version immaterial) . For that matter lets look at what is the value add from get that additional degree or title against your name that you get out of any certification or a degree.Most often you still need real world experience with it to make sense of any learning be it certifications or degrees.Some thoughts on what motivates people to look at acquiring these ….

1. Your resume looks impressive.                                                                                                           2. Potential job offers may flow for you in that direction                                                                           3. May get me a pay hike or increase or a lateral or job move.                                                             4. Gain knowledge and become a trusted authority or person and look like a seasoned IT professional who can now talk the same mumbo/jumbo and gain professional respect.                   5.Currently do not have the title of an architect / Want to move along the career as an architect and may be the certification can help                                                                                                   6.Have been entrenched deep down with a specific technology and domain and look forward to see the whole picture.

While the above are some common concerns. Lets look at the value proposition of TOGAF though not covering all aspects in its entirety.

TOGAF Elevator Pitch

TOGAF value explained in an elevator pitch can be stated as it is a methodology to manage your architecture while moving from AS IS to TO BE state. Mind you , your AS IS can be anything from that reflects your current IT landscape. You can be in anywhere on your journey towards accomplishing your mission and how do you go towards getting there all the while caring about agility and not keeping an eye on cost and accountability on your IT spend.

TOGAF helps one understand the nuances of IT transformations(digital is more cool now) and what is involved.

What does getting certified in TOGAF mean ? Industry values experience when it comes to solve complex problems out there at that the customer has. You as an architect has to step in and do the magic of having the right mix of people, process and technology to deliver what is needed to ease the end user pain point. Companies in the least value a person who has such certifications with the idea that such an exposure will help a person at least think in that direction instead of being raw with no experience except for some deep dive experience in say one particular area. It helps you have a T profile for an architect. Helps one scale from a solution architect to an enterprise architect. It helps you to look at the problem from a broader perspective of how it impacts the stakeholders in the company , outside , skills , technology and process to have them all work towards your mission /vision as a company.

A fool with a tool is still a fool – TOGAF No Exception

It is akin to a person clearing PMP need not necessarily be a good manager. As any framework it does expose people to a good set of principles while dealing with people , process and technology and the inherent value in applying them in practice. At the outset it is too general but with applying the organization context to it , it becomes meaningful. Which augurs with the sentiment that a fool with the tool is still a fool. Mere knowing the framework without knowing how it can be tailored for an organization is what makes it abstract for people not having the relevant experience in business and IT transformations. The other reason also being the maturity of the organization who tend to relate the pieces of the framework by the book in a prescriptive fashion without checking on what suits their organization context. Same with agile prescriptions where have heard people say scrum says so we do it. Not really checking on how much of it is really relevant in their particular context. Scrum purists may dismiss this as SCRUM BUT , reality is different and not necessarily by the book. Togaf does not inherently project itself as having a strong agile backdrop to it. But the principles are very much there and it is for the practitioners to present that flavor to the end audience with agility at its core.

Customer Sentiment – What do you know about my problem and context ?

As can be known from experience there can be no single silver bullet to IT transformations , each customer is a case study in itself. The larger the portfolio , the more difficult it is to straight jacket it into a group. Experience comes by walking alongside the customer apart from the knowledge at hand.They call this as Management by Walking Around ( MBWA) instead of an MBA alone.  TOGAF exposes architects to a methodology which mature organizations have used as best practice and earned value. Many of the companies in the fortune list have used it extensively and have tailored them to suit their stack and solve their individual issues. 

 

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Eturnti Consulting is now an Open Group Member

 

EturntiConsulting

Eturnti Consulting is now an Open Group Member and have the commercial license to consult and train on TOGAF 9.1. Being part of the Open Group provides you privilege access to whitepapers and content produced from thought leaders from all across the industry. One key benefit to being part of the group is it happens to be vendor neutral and and focused towards any technology platform although the open standards contribute to making companies leverage on the common strength of the best practices gathered from across diverse verticals and industry segments. You need a tribe to grow your sphere of influence and being seen having a strong presence in your area of interest. Being part of a larger community helps you banking on the common strength of the community and has the advantage of taking your offerings to a larger audience. Apart from having used some Open Group standards for SOA, ARM 4.0 (application response time measurement) , Security and has a bankable list of assets which can be a ready reference when confronted with some industry issue that you end up dealing with for the first time. Learning from the past experience of certain projects and collective strength of the community is a good way forward for reaffirming your gut on certain things especially when you as an organization does not have prior experience in that area and want assistance.

Looking forward to leveraging the benefits of the Open Group for meaning dialogues and partnerships with organizations.