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Ring in 2016 with Innovating in your Enterprises….

How will you go under the hood and find potential for innovation in your enterprise? The talk of shades of TOGAF® Standard thrown in which as a framework has places where you can make way for innovating in companies…

Innovation in Enterprises – How do you go about the same _ from Eturnti on Vimeo.

It is all around and unless you take action and find your innovation potential and align your best efforts in that direction, you as a company can effectively be a thing of the past. What best practices, challenges within and outside the organization will you have to face to get past this? How will you get people to accept a culture of innovation which is disruptive and acceptable in the market? How lean can you become to challenge your own status quo? We will look at a typical banking software company who can start looking at a lot of surround offerings by running parallel experiments instead of just being seen as a banking software player. The idea is to exploit the interface product boundaries and potentially also innovate in more than one industry.

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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….

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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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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Architecture Partitioning and why do you need it ?

Architecture partitioning is a concept used most enterprise architecture frameworks often to separate concerns on how you partition your architecture based on various concerns. You can have the concerns such as length,breadth, time and domain as the parameters for slicing your architecture. Recently wrote a white paper for using enterprise architecture for being used in rural governance for rolling out micro finance solution to the rural population. Let’s say the architecture has lending, savings , schemes , offers and subsidy modules as different parts to the micro finance architecture as shown in the figure below. These parts form a part of your vertical slicing. You can go ahead and partition your architecture based on the vertical slicing which includes generally functional features of your architecture. Horizontal slicing your architecture means slicing your architecture based on technical features or features that are generally non functional . But it can also mean features that cut across horizontally across your architectures features.

architecture_partioning

For the sake of discussion  relating to rural governance in India let’s say Aadhaar ID being on similar lines to SSID in the US. Although there is still a lot of hue and cry on loopholes in the system on account of Aadhaar ID and the debate that it is not functional in the practical sense on many aspects. All said and done let’s put those issues behind us and say it is approved in full measure. As per the Aadhaar mandate there needs to be a case where savings account of people for whom government would roll out subsidies so rolling out such a feature would require the below steps.

These features are central to every functional features and cut across domains. So they would generally be horizontal features.

1. Linking all savings accounts of people in need of subsidies .

2. Releasing the actual subsidy to the accounts of the account holders.

3. Let’s we want bio metric authentication for accessing all functional modules that have integrated with Aadhaar ID and since this concerns across all modules it can also become a part of horizontal partitioning.

Togaf Architecture Partitioning

architecture_partioning_togaf

 Courtesy :  www.opengroup.org/togaf9.1

As seen in the picture above from the open group Togaf 9.1 website, it shows how architecture can be partitioned right from strategy architecture to segment architecture to capability or solution architecture. You can compartmentalize your architecture concerns into one of the following partitions. This would be the length wise partitioning . You can partition your architecture based on architecture domains(business,data,application and technical) of your architecture and that would be the breadth aspect to architecture. You can plan your architecture work based on time based iterations and that would the architecture time based iterations.

Issues with moving directly to Solution Architecture 

Some companies directly get into the solution architecture phase without much investment in the enterprise architecture phase based on their needs. A mature organization is able to move seamlessly from strategy to the solution architecture without issues. The issue is if you move directly to solution architecture then you have a tendency not to abstract common pieces of work that can be useful across other engagements and you can lose out on a reference model for your architecture. It would be more like you may have to specifically tailor a solution every time there is a need for one instead of driving the changes from strategy in which case your drivers , goal and objectives are well defined for your architecture. Ideally a mature organization is one where strategy and grounds up work are in tandem and gel well. In disconnected scenarios they would in silos where strategy is not well understood by the ground force and so such organizations do not invest in strategy due to pressures of quicker delivery. As an organization you will be judged by how well you can move from strategy to solution and vice versa in the long run. There are no doubts that a strategy well executed and understood by one and all in the organization is better than having no strategy at all. This would lead to chaotic processes and finally no accountability on overall architectural pieces and their execution.

These are recommendations from standard frameworks such as Togaf use what suits your context to enable you to better manage your architecture iterations.

Architectural Partitioning on the Server Side used in many deployment scenarios.

serverside_arch_partioning

In a typical web deployment architecture the server side components can be partitioned based on server side functionality offered. This can be factored in the design across all tiers starting from the browser end till the database. Having a modular design of course helps in big monolithic architecture , big ball of mud. So breaking up the modules on the server side helps avoid big ball of mud scenarios and also helps server side dependencies well. Instead of creating one executable or war file on the server side it can be deployed as many different war , ear files if you are coming from the J2EE side of things. Similar logic applies for .NET and other technology stacks. How do you design for modular architecture end to end is in itself needs a detailed treatment. But this is to drive home the point that architecture partitioning as a term can also be looked at for creating modular architectures among other things discussed above.

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Open Group Conference 2014 Bangalore – Where is EA now ?

opengroup

Was at the open group conference at Bangalore and spoke on “Enterprise Architecture and Keeping your business relevant”. Was off to native and could manage to attend the second day of the conference at Phillips Innovation Campus.

Initial Talk was by Jason Uppal on how EA was used to solve problems in the heath care industry and his experience in the same with some case studies.

Some interesting perspectives on initiatives from the Open Group to take Togaf body of knowledge to colleges along with Computer Society of India and an effort to popularize it apart from being used by the industry alone.India ranks third in the list of Togaf certified candidates and increasing year on year. This was briefed by James of the Open Group.

EA and the Developing World

Far away countries such as Finland and Brunei are also adopting Togaf and there is growing list of developing countries such as Mongolia  which also is adopting Togaf for overall streaming lining of IT services. This was presented by Vish Vishwanath of CC and C solutions.He also walked through the penetration of EA in these markets and how EA can significantly be used to solve newer technology adoption issues. Developing countries will have to go through the same curve where EA can play a good role in packaging and getting your business / IT strategy right. This market is hugely untapped and really be a good case in point to explore and would most likely a candidate where future success stories would be crafted. 

Keeping Your Product/Solution Relevant

Spoke on using EA to help keeping the business relevant. Touched upon how a reference architecture helps create a north star to follow. How a large company can stay agile and make quick turn around as it is said making “Making an Elephant Dance”. Most large corporations are now focusing on learning this key skill. Gave a brief presentation with 18 list of TODO’s for a company (product/solution). Irrespective of the size of the company the ability to dance to various market and customer tunes is what helps it stay on top of the curve. The presentation details are shared here. All of the slides have 18 TODOs listed ( in no specific order ) and each category needs a deep dive into what can fit well for an organization specific context. Overall a handpicked set of initiatives that help a product or a solution to be relevant in today’s times. Even implementing a few of these initiatives to a reasonable degree of seriousness can create the hockey stick effect on your annual performance report , which is the last slide of the presentation. 

opengroup_2014

Commoditization of EA

That apart there was a talk on how EA is being packaged and off shored an IBM perspective by Sreekanth. This dealt with the issues of putting solution architecture work miles away from where it is being consumed and how technology has progressed in making this happen. How customer’s are now adopting this mode of delivery and look forward to having a robust process framework around this to help with getting predictable and estimates for the same. Ideally they would like to have better control on the work pieces assigned to the team off shored to and be able to estimate and bill accordingly. As a lot of things are new on this front as always it takes sometime to stabilize things on this front. Have come across SAP and other vendors opting for a packaged implementation points sort of a things which is like a work break down structure for your activity at customer location. World is indeed getting flat including off shoring innovation work  till the point that you are not sure your idea is going to fly. In which case more clarity emerges and all trial and product pivoting also is getting off shored.

There was a talk by Hari from TCS on a case study of who they used Archiemate to map customer requirements and showcase value to the customer end user on use of the same. This is a neat initiative that is picking up momentum on tying together business and IT together. UML is for techies and not all business nuances can be conveyed using the same. The business folks are not UML friendly and a free format diagramming visual standard such Archiemate is useful in helping bridging the gap between the two.

Disconnect between Archiemate and Togaf : For people entirely new to these they need to be treated separately and does not pose a problem. For folks coming from the Togaf world there seems to be a missing perspective ( data ) which archiemate has across all the layers and gives primary prominence to Business , Application and Technology at least in the views. The data part of the details are implicit across the visual representation of Archiemate and quite embedded as a part of Business , Application and Technology instead of being treated separate. Quite understandable as bringing data architecture at a overview level can pose the trees get coverage instead of the forest. Anyway it is a step to bridge the divide between business and IT. Have heard about how this standard is helping many approach architecture diagrams without being overwhelmed at the outset with semantics of the new standard or other intricacies of UML which for a person from the business would be hard to scale upto. Certain regions have a good adoption of this standard and certain countries are ok with BPMN / UML or arbitary or No UML as it is referred to where every organization creates a standard that suits its needs the best with legends etc.

A weekend well spent discussing things that matter and can change lives and our part in the same.Attending conferences always keeps you relevant and of course helps one in keeping abreast of what is happening around.