trends – eturnti

Open Group Conference 2014 Bangalore – Where is EA now ?

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.

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.

A Multi-Hued 2013 is behind us – Welcome 2014

At the outset wishing friends , well wishers , clients , customers , contacts on linkedIn and twitter ,colleagues and ex-colleagues a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Every year brings its own shares of highs and lows , learning , lessons and at times keeping you guessing as to what is around the corner.

Quite a lot of things happened in 2013. It is now behind us and few moments left before we would be woken up into a brand new year. A small concise and brief list of things that touched me personally.

1. Became an adept smart phone user and started using many features. Realized that smart is not all that smart when it comes to power usage. It can’t have it all for now before we have some smart battery that replaces this nuisance otherwise a really smart add on which most of the population will sooner or later use.

2. Started using twitter and the 140 words is really a quick and dirty way to learn on things of your interest. You may wonder how is this possible , you can try twitter may be personally may be a late entry. But it is easy to understand what is happening in your arena if follow folks of your interest. No where in the history of mankind are people distanced by a tweet away. You can almost tweet anyone high or low from any country or race and voice your opinion.

3. The lonely boy fifteen as referred by Guy Kawasaki in one of his talks literally illustrates the power of the social media. Was able to voice my opinion on my twitter on two occasions where I expressed my displeasure on certain customer experience with products. Both the occasions the companies got back and try to win back the dissatisfied customer. This emphasized the power of social media where any brand is only as good as the last user experience. Good for the end users that big brands can no longer push things at them without a certain responsibility.

4. Lessons in how to run things by yourself when you start small ( www.eturnti.com). All things need to start somewhere and this was a step in that direction. All learnings here give you a perspective of how it is to step outside and view things differently and more importantly make things happen. Thanks all clients and customers and folks who supported here and helped bring work to the table when it mattered.

5. An increase in the number of linkedIn contacts from all sections of the industry. Some people seriously interested in making connections others simply to extend the connection to tell their story (eturnti included). It is a good medium to showcase what you have to offer and tell your story .

6. Got to brush shoulders with people who have tasted success big and small and more importantly are out their to make a dent in the universe as Steve Jobs calls it. It is a humbling and learning experience to know all of them had started in a shack with no formal office / sophistication and no funding in the case of a few. Some funny cases of how people started out and some accidental entrepreneurs.

7.Every client is book in itself. What do you have to offer that he/she is interested in is a good question to ask before trying to sell your ware ?. Most of them have very specific needs and are rarely satisfied with an umbrella offering. Get specific and also distance yourself where you are not able to add value to the customer is a lesson here.

8. The young and old have started using technology. My family has a good exchange of messages on whatszapp apart from facebook. Who knows next it might well be snapchat. Anyway here have a see if the technology catches up before you get to use it. Bitcoin might eventually be the order of a cashless world . If that were to make things safe then you have cyber theives adding to the complexity. So always stay hungry and stay foolish before you are challenged.

9. You can almost sell anything these days including yoga and doctor services online which were thought of as the last things to be made available online as you need a personal presence. The world is shrinking and it is up to us to get our act in order to stay in tune with the new world order.

10. Meet people outside your area of influence it enhances your own sphere in ways that you thought not possible. Try it and find it out for yourself.

A robot will fly sometime soon from flipkart, amazon , ebay to gift your next New Year gift. This is not a distant thing as things stand today. We will be soon surrounded by robots . Be human and stay young at heart and keep staying foolish.

About Us

All organisations have an innate intelligence which enabled them to become an organisation in the first place. Most often organisations who reach some height do not get their steps right in terms of moving in the turns often failing to tap their intelligence. Intelligence in organisations and enterprises is hidden and disconnected and at times do not augment the need of the hour. The fallout would be enterprises fail to step up to the current challenges which once enabled them to stay ahead of the curve no longer seem to work. We often see what works to maintain a company of 10 is not enough when the numbers go up. We have all sorts of challenges right from knowledge management, isolated knowledge pockets, non modular legacy, all pieces glued together,scaling up the build , hit the right numbers on performance , get the architecture right , do we have people with the right skills and knowledge and many more.

All of these need to tap the organisational intelligence at various points and dovetail them to align with the business and eventually technology needs to enable this to provide value to the business, stakeholders and customers.