The Cloud is a Natural Evolution of IT

Cloud computing is bringing us closer than ever to providing IT as utility, where users no longer need to know or care about how the IT services are provided, and only want to know that they are reliably there—just like turning on the light.

This rent-an-IT model of cloud computing can apply to any portion of an organization’s IT architecture, as follows:

• Service architecture—for application systems, there is “software as a service” (SaaS) such as Google Apps suite for office-productivity or Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. And for developing those systems, there is “platform as a service” (PaaS) such as Google Apps Engine (GAE) or the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE).
• Information architecture—for storing the data used in systems, there is “storage as a service” such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
  
• Technology architecture—for hosting systems, there is “infrastructure as a service” such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  

The big advantage to using hosted IT or cloud computing is that it provides on-demand information technology—again like your electricity usage; the juice is there when you need it. Additionally, by outsourcing to specialist IT providers, you can generally get more efficiency, economy, and agility in providing IT your organization.

Of course, there are challenges that include ownership, security, privacy, and a cultural shift from a vertical (stovepiped) to horizontal (enterprise and common services) mindset.

From my perspective, cloud computing is a natural evolution in our IT service provision:

1. At first, we did everything in-house, ourselves—with our own employees, equipment, and facilities. This was generally very expensive in terms of finding and maintaining employees with the right skill sets, and developing and maintaining all our own systems and technology infrastructure, securing it, patching it, upgrading it, and so on.
   
2. So then came, the hiring of contractors to support our in-house staff; this helped alleviate some of the hiring and training issues on the organization. But it wasn’t enough to make us cost-efficient, especially since we were still managing all our own systems and technologies for our organization as a stovepipe.
3. Next, we moved to a managed services model, where we out-sourced vast chunks of our IT—from our helpdesk to desktop support, from data centers to applications development, and even to security and more. But apparently that didn’t go far enough, because we were still buying, building, and maintaining our own IT instances for our organization, but now employing call centers and data centers in far-flung places.
4. And finally, the realization has emerged that we do not need to provide IT services either with our own or contracted staff, but rather we can rely on IT cloud providers who will manage our information technology and that of tens, hundreds, and thousands of others and provide it seamlessly over the Internet, so that we all benefit from a more scalable and unified service provision model.
   

The cloud computing model takes the CIO/CTO and their staffs out of the fire-fighting mode of IT management and into the drivers seat for managing IT strategically, innovatively, and with a focus on the specific mission needs of their organization.

The Cloud is a Natural Evolution of IT

Information: Knowledge or B.S.?

With modern technology and the Internet, there is more information out there than ever before in human history. Some argue there is too much information or that it is too disorganized and hence we have “information overload.”

The fact that information itself has become a problem is validated by the fact that Google is world’s #1 brand with a market capitalization of almost $100 billion. As we know the mission statement of Google is to “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The key to making information useful is not just organizing it and making it accessible, but also to make sure that it is based on good data—and not the proverbial, “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO).

There are two types of garbage information:

1. Incorrect, incomplete, or dated
2. Misleading /propagandistic or an outright lie

When information is not reliable, it causes confusion, rather than bringing clarity. And then, the information can actually result in worse decision making, then if you didn’t have it in the first place. This is an enterprise architecture that is not only worthless, but is harmful or poison to the enterprise.

Generally, in enterprise architecture, we are optimistic about human nature and focus on #1, i.e., we assume that people mean to provide objective and complete data and try to ensure that they can do that. But unfortunately there is a darker side to human nature that we must grapple with, and that is #2.

Misinformation by accident or by intent is used in organizations all the time to make poor investment decisions. Just think how many non-standardized, non-interoperable, costly tools your organization has bought because someone provided “information” or developed a business case, which “clearly demonstrated” that is was a great investment with a high ROI. Everyone wants their toys!

Wired Magazine, February 2009, talks about disinformation in the information age in “Manufacturing Confusion: How more information leads to less knowledge” (Clive Thompson).

Thompson writes about Robert Proctor, a historian of science from Stanford, who coined the word “Agnotology,” or “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.” Proctor theorizes that “people always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out. But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop hearing about what’s true and what’s not.” Thompson offers as examples:

1. “Bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product.”
2. Financial firms creating fancy-dancy financial instruments like “credit-default swaps [which] were designed not merely to dilute risk but to dilute knowledge; after they changed hands and been serially securitized, no one knew what they were worth.”

We have all heard the saying that “numbers are fungible” and we are also all cautious about “spin doctors” who appear in the media telling their side of the story rather than the truth.

So it seems that despite the advances wrought by the information revolution, we have some new challenges on our hands: not just incorrect information but people who literally seek to promote its opposite.

So we need to get the facts straight. And that means not only capturing valuable information, but also eliminating bias so that we are not making investment decisions on the basis of B.S.

Information: Knowledge or B.S.?

A Learning Environment and Enterprise Architecture

One of the things that make an organization (or a person) succeed or fail is its ability to learn and grow.

A child learns at home and in school and grows to become a productive adult human being. An organization begins as a start-up and grows and matures into a bustling successful organization based on the combined talents and wisdom of its people; new people are brought on board to meet the growth and to pollinate the organization with the knowledge, skills, and abilities it needs to meet emerging challenges.

The underlying architecture for growth and success is continued learning for self and an ongoing stream of new, bright, and innovative individuals to feed the organization’s thirst for ideas and remain competitive.

Organizations can hire or train people to bring in creativity and intellect; they can also cross pollinate talent with other enterprises and thereby share the talent.

The Wall Street Journal, 19 November 2008, reports that “Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.”

“At Proctor & Gamble Co., the corporate culture is so rigid, employees jokingly call themselves “Proctoids.” In contrast, Google Inc. staffers are urged to wander the halls on company-provided scooters and brainstorm on public whiteboards. Now, odd this couple things they have something to gain from one another—so they‘ve started swapping employees. So far, about two-dozen have spent weeks dipping into each other’s staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where plans get hammered out.”

What are these two corporate juggernauts swapping staff?

P&G is trying to learn and change from being primarily TV-centric in its advertising to moving its pitch to the internet (P&G spends $2.36 billion in television advertising versus $78.6 million online—just 2%--even though ”consumers ages 18 to 27 say they use the Internet nearly 13 hours a week, compared to viewing 10 hour of TV”).

Google wants to learn how to snare a bigger slice of advertising revenue from big corporations like P&G, which happens to be the largest advertising spender in the world. Although Google “controls 74% of so-called ‘search term’ advertising spending…TV snags nearly 40% of the world’s total advertising spending.”

Anyway, the job swap started in January and is going great. For example, P&G started “an online campaign inviting people to make spoof videos of P&G’s ‘Talking Stain’ TV ad and post them to YouTube. And Google job-swappers “have started adopting P&G lingo” One Google job-swapper stated “This is going to get so much easier, now that I’m learning their language.”

Change won’t happen overnight. “Consumer-product companies have been among the slowest to adopt online marketing because the traditional form of marketing, including TV and newspaper fliers are still reasonably effective,” but learning what are the new possibilities is playing a big role in changing the mindset for the future.

Indeed, enterprise architecture is not just about technology, but about business processes and human beings (the big three--people, process and technology). It’s about learning to do things better, faster, and cheaper. Underscore the learning!

A Learning Environment and Enterprise Architecture

Speed versus Accuracy and Enterprise Architecture

What’s more important speed or accuracy when it comes to developing and implementing a enterprise architecture?’

On one hand, if your target architecture and transition plans are inaccurate, then you are leading your organization down the wrong business and IT path. One the other hand, if your architecture is not timely, then you are serving up outdated plans and strategy to the organization to no avail.

The Wall Street Journal, 12 November 2008, has an interesting article on an innovative Google “Flu-Bug Tracker” that I think sheds some light on this issue.

Google has a free web service at www.google.org/flutrends that “uses computers to crunch millions of Internet searches people make for keywords that might be related to the flu—for instance ‘cough’ or ‘fever’. It displays the results on a map of the U.S. and shows a chart of changes in flu activity around the country.”

The Google Flu Trend data is meaningful because of strong correlation found between those searching flu related keywords and those actually coming down with the flu as reported by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) one to two weeks later.

“In any given year, between 5% and 20% of Americans catch the flu.”

By getting advance warning of flu trends out to CDC and the public, Google may help provide an early warning for outbreaks. “For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918).” (http://www.google.org/about/flutrends/how.html)

So speed of information is crucial here to early warning—helping people and saving lives. However, the Google Flu Trend information, based on tracking keyword searches, is not as accurate as capturing actual cases of the flu confirmed by laboratory testing.

So like with enterprise architecture, you have a trade-off between speed and accuracy.

With the Flu Trends data, “what they lose in accuracy, the site may make up in speed…reducing that time is crucial for combating influenza, which can manifest itself one to three days after a person comes into contact with the virus.”

Ms. Finelli of the CDC stated: “If you get data that’s not very timely one or two weeks old, it’s possible that the outbreak has already peaked.”

So is there a lesson here for enterprise architects?

Speed and agility is crucial in the making valuable decisions for the organizations in the marketplace, as it is in helping people in their healthcare. Trying to get all or completely accurate information to do an enterprise architecture or strategic plan is like trying to get 100% confirmed cases of the flu—if you wait until you have complete and perfect information, it will be too late to respond effectively.

It’s sort of like the adage “analysis paralysis”—if you keep analyzing and mulling over the data never making a decision, you are essentially paralyzed into non-action.

So it is crucial to get good-enough data that allows you to extrapolate and make decisions that are timely and effective. Of course, you can always course correct as you get more and better information and you get a clearer picture. But don’t wait till everyone in the enterprise has a confirmed case of the proverbial flu to start taking reasonable action.

Speed versus Accuracy and Enterprise Architecture

Online Medical Data and Enterprise Architecture

We all need access to information. In our personal lives, what’s more important than easy access to our financial and medical records?

In the case of financial records, these are generally all maintained online now. From your banking to your brokerage, from the online deposit of your paycheck to online bill pay. However, what about our medical records?

Generally speaking medical records are not available online and not easy to access. But why are medical records lagging behind financial ones in terms of their technology enablement? Is it that there is not bona fide need? Or is it that the technology is immature?

MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008, reports that “Google and Microsoft are offering rival programs that let people manage their own health information.”

Google Health (released in May) and Microsoft HealthVault (launched in October) “allow consumers to store and manage their personal medical data online. Users will be able to gather information from doctors, hospitals, and testing laboratories and share it with new medical providers, making it easier to coordinate care for complicated conditions and spot potential drug interactions or other problems.”

However, based on a 2007 poll “just 2 percent of all respondents said they had created and maintained medical records on their own computers, and just 1 percent reported using a ‘personal health record that is stored on the Internet.”

So the issues are?

1. New software—Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are relatively new and haven’t caught on yet.
2. Paper records—“many doctors still do not use electronic records and others are unwilling or unable to transfer data to patients in electronic form.”
3. Privacy—online medical data services are “not covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), under which hospitals, doctors, and third-party payers typically cannot release information without a patient’s consent.”
4. Sensitivity—“medical information—histories of mental illness, paternity tests, genetic information—can be far more sensitive than browsing histories or even financial records.”

From an enterprise architecture standpoint, these issues really do not make a whole lot of sense to me as being showstoppers to moving medical records online.

Firstly, there is a genuine need for medical records to be digitized and made more accessible and easy to use by patients and medical providers. Just think about being wheeled into an emergency room (possibly unconscious); wouldn’t it be nice if the emergency room physician could access your medical records before they start treating you from a pretty much blank state?

Also, have you ever wondered about the archaic paper filing system your doctor uses—you know the oodles of forms you have to fill out every time you go to a new doctor, the indecipherable notes your doctors jots down on freebee paper from the pharmaceutical companies (with their logos on it), the file folders with the colored stickers that office administers attach to them for tracking purposes, and the double and triple deep, wall to ceiling file shelves on rollers that they manipulate to store and access the records. Talking about crazy!

Further, the technology solutions are available. If we can manage the bits and bytes of our financial records discretely and securely, surely the same can be said of medical records.

I’ve got to conclude that there is a cultural issue here that is impeding the transformation to online medical records, and I don’t believe that the reluctance is coming from the patients’ side, because we are living and breathing digital information transformation daily and for the most part, we are addicted to it and love it. People are still screaming for more.

We’ve got to get the medical community to get off the dime; so that they recognize the importance to the consumer of their medical information and that they treat that information as belonging to the patient as opposed to being owned by them. Whether the medical community is holding back because they want to maintain the aura of medical mystery to what they do (have you ever tried to tell your doctor that you looked up something medical on the internet and see their reaction?) or that they want to hold onto their patients by controlling their medical records—either way we are not providing the patient/consumers the service they want and deserve, particularly when health and life are at stake.

Medical records are a prime area for transformation and they need a desperate dose of enterprise architecture to transform the sad state of affairs.

Online Medical Data and Enterprise Architecture

Ask the User and Enterprise Architecture

The best way to find out what the end-user wants is to ask them.

The Wall Street Journal, 25 January 2008 reports on Ask.com that “Ask Searches for Answer to Luring New Users.”

Since 2006, Ask.com spent $140 million to Google’s $34 million on advertising between Jan. 2006 and September 2007, yet Google’s market share of the internet search business stands at 58.4% to Ask’s 4.3%, and “Ask’s market share hasn’t grown in the past couple of years, while Google’s…has seen its dominance increase.

Google is beating Ask based on “superior technology and word of mouth,” so the advertising is a moot point.

Jim Safka, the new head of Ask says that to understand the discrepancy, “the first step is figuring out who uses Ask today and what they use it for. We are not going to take wild swings.”

Apparently, Ask took some wild swings in the past without asking their users and ended up getting rid of the “Jeeves” from their original name Ask Jeeves.Com and getting rid of the “friendly butler designed to answer any question user posed him.”

Ask also goofed on a number of marketing campaigns which didn’t resonate with end-users, like “one campaign named ‘Use Tools, Feel Human’ [that] featured a primate [who] evolves into a human by using Ask.com.”

While “Ask’s market share continues to weaken,” Mr. Safka says that “Consumes are smart. If you look at the data and listen to them, the answer ends up being obvious.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, it is critical to ask the user what they want and understand their needs. One of the principles of User-centric EA is that we are focused on developing useful and usable products and services for the end-user; we do not build any information products that do not have a clear end-user and use. In contrast, traditional EA is often user blind and as a result develops “artifacts” that are difficult to understand and apply. Like Ask.com is learning, if you don’t understand your user’s needs, you end up with a lot of shelfware—whether it’s EA or search engines.

Ask the User and Enterprise Architecture

Google and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric Enterprise architecture is about capturing, processing, organizing, and effectively presenting business and technology information to make it valuable and actionable by the organization for planning and governance.

Google is a company that epitomizes this mission.

After reading a recent article in Harvard Business Review, April 2008, I came to really appreciate their amazing business practices and found many connections with User-centric EA.

1. Organizing information--Google’s mission [is] ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’” Similarly in User-centric EA, we seek to organize the enterprise’s information and make it useful, usable, easy to understand, and readily accessible to aid decision making.
2. Business and technology go hand-in-hand—“Technology and strategy, at Google, are inseparable and mutually permeable—making it hard to say whether technology is the DNA of its strategy or the other way around.” Similarly, EA is the synthesis of business and technology in the organization, where business drives technology, rather than doing technology for technology’s sake.
3. Long-term approach—“CEO Eric Schmidt has estimated that it will take 300 years to achieve the mission of organizing the world’s information…it illustrates Google’s long-term approach to building value and capability.” Similarly, EA is a planning and governance function. EA plans span many years, usually at least 5 years, but depending on the mission, as long as 20 years for business/IT projects with long research and development cycles like in military and space domains.
4. Architectural control—“Architectural control resides in Google’s ability to track the significance of any new service, its ability to choose to provide or not provide the service, and its role as a key contributor to the service’s functional value.” This is achieved by network infrastructure consisting of approximately one million computers and a target audience of 132 million customers globally on which they can test and launch applications. In EA, control is exercised through a sound governance process that ensures sound IT investments are selected or not.
5. Useful and usable—“The emphasis in this process is not on identifying the perfect offering, but rather on creating multiple potential useful offerings and letting the market decide which is best…among the company’s design principles are…usefulness first, usability later.” In User-centric EA, we also focus on the useful and usable products (although not in sequence). The point being that the EA must have clear value to the organization and its decision makers; we shun developing organizational shelfware or conducting ivory tower efforts.
6. Data underscores decision making—“A key ingredient of innovation at the company is the extensive, aggressive use of data and testing to support ideas.” EA also relies on data (business and technical) for planning and governance. This is the nature of developing, maintaining, and leveraging use of EA through information products that establish the baseline, target, and transition plan of the organization. A viable plan is not one that is pulled from a hat, but one that is data-driven and vetted with executives, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders. Further, EA provides business intelligence for governance and decision making.
7. Human capital—“If a company actually embraced—rather than merely paid lip service to—the idea that its people are its most important asset, it would treat employees much the way Google does.” This concept is embedded User-centric EA, where the architecture is driven by the needs and requirements of the users. Further, Human Capital is a distinct perspective in User-centric EA, where people are viewed as the hub for all business and IT success.

In short, Google is a highly User-centric EA-driven organization and is a model for many of its core tenets.

Google and Enterprise Architecture

An Online Only World and Enterprise Architecture

How long will it be before the internet becomes our primary means of storing personal data and running software applications (web-based)?

MIT Technology Review, 3 December 2007, reports that one core vision for the evolution of technology (that of Google) is that we are moving from a computer-based technical environment to an online-only world, where “digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet”—this is called cloud computing.

Already, users can perform many applications and storage functions online. For example:

• “Google Calendar organizes events,
• Picasa stores pictures,
• YouTube holds videos,
• Gmail stores email, and
• Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.”
  

Moreover, MIT Technology Review reports that it is rumored that Google is working on an umbrella application that will pull these disparate offerings together for a holistic cloud computing solution.

What’s the advantage of cloud computing?

A computer hard drive is no longer important. Accessibility to one’s information is limited only by one’s access to the internet, which is becoming virtually ubiquitous, and information can be shared with others easily. “The digital stuff that’s valuable… [is] equally accessible from his home computer, a public internet café, or a web-enabled phone.”

What are some of the issues with cloud computing?

• Privacy—“user privacy …becomes especially important if Google serves ads that correspond to all personal information, as it does in Gmail.”
• Encryption—“Google’s encryption mechanisms aren’t flawless. There have been tales of people logging into Gmail and pulling up someone else’s account.”
• Copyright—“one of the advantages of storing data in the cloud is that it can easily be shared with other people, but sharing files such as copyrighted music and movies is generally illegal.”
• Connectivity—“a repository to online data isn’t useful if there’s no Internet connection to be had, or if the signal is spotty.”

Still Google’s vision is for “moving applications and data to the internet, Google is helping make the computer disappear.” Human-computer interaction has evolved from using command lines to graphical user interface to a web browser environment. “It’s about letting the computer get out of our way so we can work with other people and share our information.”

Of course, Google’s vision of an online-only world isn’t without challenge: Microsoft counters that “it’s always going to be a combination of [online and offline], and the solution that wins is going to be the one that does the best job with both.” So Microsoft is building capability for users “to keep some files on hard drives, and maintain that privacy, while still letting them access those files remotely.”

I will not predict a winner-take-all in this architecture battle of online and offline data and applications. However, I will say that we can definitely anticipate that information sharing, accessibility, privacy, and security will be centerpieces of what consumers care about and demand in a digital world. Online or offline these expectations will drive future technology evolution and implementation.

An Online Only World and Enterprise Architecture