EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Enterprise Information on the Go

I was looking at Guy Kowasaki’s blog entry on the Kindle and it got me wondering about other ways of providing information to executives about corporate performance. It looks like the Kindle should easily be able to handle most of the “how’s it going” queries, since this device supports RSS feeds… it should be relatively easy.

For a book reader, I personally like the Sony book reader form factor better -- if I were actually going to buy one of these, but the Kindle looks to be more enterprise friendly, since it has EVDO network built in.

The reason I’ll probably never buy one though is that I have a Windows Mobile phone that I use to access the Internet, read books (using MS reader or MobiReader), email, listen to music, podcasts and even watch movies (when I’m really desperate for entertainment). I’ve been doing this for years. It may be more effective (and easier) to provide the dashboading capabilities on the phone, since everyone keeps theirs with them all the time. Now that InfoPath and other techniques support mobile browsers, we can finally integrate them into workflow.

Unified Communications and Enterprise Latency

Using Unified Communications techniques, the Information technology can enable the enterprise to have knowledge workers located nearly anywhere they want to work, at this point. This provides for greater flexibility for the enterprise as well as the employee.

For the employee it provides for a choice in lifestyle, living where they want to live, as well as reduction in time spent commuting. According to the US census, the average worker spends more than 100 hours a year commuting. During this time they consume approximately 150 gallons of gasoline, which in these days of $3 per gallon of gas is about $500 of after tax income.

For the enterprise, telework allows for greater diversity in the organization, drawing upon individuals from many cultures and perspectives. Diversity of perspective usually allows for more ideas in a shorter period of time – a more innovative and productive environment. It should also reduce costs on office space and other fixed investments. It also enables easier movement of work between locations based upon time zones, hopefully solving the problem more quickly. As new work locations start their day they can be brought into the enterprise processes transparently to the end user.

Unified Communications involves the use of Voice-over IP technologies to provide transparent access to individuals over voice, messaging and video. Where in the past the data and voice networks were managed and accessed separately, we’re moving into an age where information delivery is taking place over the same mechanism regardless of format, based on standards like SIP. Unified communications is becoming the de facto source of the context of the individual: where they are located, what role they’re playing, what they’ve worked on in the past, as well as their availability. The focus will be on “employee identity” at the core. Once an organization makes the transition to the approach it will enable:

• Better access to experts – Pools of expertise can be defined within the enterprise and that pool can be addressed directly. Anyone within that pool can respond as they are available. This will reduce the constraints upon the individual. This pooling approach will also allow for the distribution of work in automated workflows.
• Reduced response time to events – When an event takes place where a decision needs to be made or assistance given, the enterprise can draw upon the context information to send it to the people who are actually available to respond. Escalation techniques can be defined so that response time can be defined and controlled more effectively than ad-hoc relationship based approaches.
• Reduced travel costs – As organizations begin to develop a common understanding of how to access an individual, it will not matter if the person is in the same building, on the same continent or working at home. They are represented in the enterprise in a simple and consistent way that can be accessed reliably.
• Accelerated project delivery – Knowing how to find individuals or groups with equivalent capabilities removes latency from projects. Being able to find the status of the people on the project and pull together a conference call on the fly and reach a consensus quickly will improve the agility of organizations and reduce time to market.

The organizational change management issues associated with this shift definitely need to be understood though. This is not something that should be rolled out at the grass roots level, since it can easily shift into something unsupportable.

When combined with workflow techniques that capture the context of the enterprise, the work environment can be made response while still environmentally conscious. All of this will enable an enterprise to reduce the latency in the decision making process and accelerate value generation.

Green IT - Environmentally Conscious Computing Requires “watt-sizing”

The amount of CO2 emissions produced in the production of electricity used to power and cool today’s computing platforms accounts for 2 percent of the global emissions! Wow, that is an amazing number. I acknowledge that this statistic represents the consumption of electricity that is produced through fossil fuel generation technologies as that production actually yields the CO2 emissions. However, given today’s generation capabilities, IT’s emissions are close to the total CO2 emissions produced by the transportation industry.

Let’s look at this from another perspective, the cost of electricity to the consumer. Recently, the Gartner Group estimated that “large organizations spend between 4 and 10 percent of their total IT budgets on energy costs”. Depending on the organization, that is significant budget…the remaining portion of that statement is astounding “that number may quadruple by 2012”.

Clearly, the amount of energy consumed to provide the information technology support of business is rapidly becoming a true business issue on two fronts, the environment and budget. For Healthcare, this issue has both a physical and monetary dimension. Physically, pollution and the green house effect impacts the health of a growing percentage of our population. Monetarily, this issue impacts the cost of healthcare as sickness usually results in a claim paid, and budget increases are directly proportional to premium amounts.

Electricity is measured based on a factor of Watts consumed over a time period. Most households are familiar with the term Kilowatts per hour, as the electric utility bill is based on this measurement. I offer that “watt-sizing” is a term that represents the ability to vary the electrical consumption utilized for the value it produces. For example, changing a light bulb from 100 watts to 60 watts, when a 60 watt bulb provides adequate light, is a form of “watt-sizing”.

In a recent Green IT conference sponsored by EDS, I learned that hardware vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco, EMC and others are taking on the challenge to provide lower energy costs with higher capacities. Software vendors such as VMware have come up with creative ways to manage multiple applications on the same platform. This technology allows more energy efficient computing to be leveraged at greater applications capacities. These innovations are fantastic from the enabling technology standpoint as they provide more compute capacity at less energy consumption. Most of these innovations are based on the RISC and INTEL chip set and because their physical makeup can run using more efficient fan cooling.

While this is certainly a step in the right direction these technology improvements cannot be realized by the business unless applications currently running on higher energy consuming platforms are architected to be “watt-sized”. Further, the data currently leveraged by these high-energy applications must be converted to a format that can be understood by the new platform. Both are significant challenges, but ones that can certainly be overcome.

There are many paths to allowing applications to take advantage of “cleaner” compute. The journey down each path depends on the starting point. For example, if the starting point is a business application running on mainframe technologies, mainframe emulation technologies exist today that allow you to lift and shift to alternate platforms. If the starting point is a UNIX application, then the possibly exists to run Linux on INTEL. If the starting point is a Windows-based application running on a stand-alone platform, then the possibility exists to run that same application on a shared platform. As far as data is concerned, again, the starting point and the final destination are needed to determine the path. Each path is possible, and there will be bumps in each path and obstacles to overcome, but certainly each path can lead to Greener IT.

This begs the question, is “watt-sizing” a one time event? If I make an investment in moving to Greener IT today using one of the paths above, will I be sheltered from future technology change? We acknowledge that each path is a step in the right direction, but who knows what the future will bring?

One possible investment that could stand the test of time is moving the business logic to a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach. As specified by the Object Management Group, the business specifications are defined in the Platform Independent Model (PIM) for the application. The specifications are then transformed into the enabling technology using the Platform Specific Model (PSM). Tool vendors provide the transformation logic to move from PIM to PSM and, as technology advances, can help bridge the transformation gap. OMG’s standards allow for the movement of the specifications from one vendor’s tool offering to another vendor’s tool offering, thereby shielding the investment to a specific vendor’s offering. The corporations making this shift to MDA have built in a path to leveraging advanced technologies.

Green IT focuses on “environmentally conscious” computing. Corporations now understand that leveraging information technology to support the business initiatives has varying degrees of environmental and economical impacts. In order to lessen these impacts, we must all determine how to leverage the enabling technologies more efficiently. We must make sure that our applications have a clear path to “watt-sizing”.

Orchestrating the Bus Tour for Service-Enabling the Enterprise

Author Jim Collins has devoted much of his professional career to determining the common characteristics, principles and attributes found in great and enduring organizations. In his most recent book, Jim outlines a framework which contains five key principles employed by corporations that he recognizes as moving from “Good to Great”. His writings and “fact-based” conclusions are now largely studied and put into action to help corporations move forward in their transformation strategies.

Jim titles one of his key principles “First Who, then What”. Jim offers that a corporation making the journey from “Good to Great” must first establish a leadership team that can synergize around a common goal. To illustrate his idea, Jim paints a visual of the journey comparing it to a bus ride. He states that you must first ”get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus,” then the passengers will determine the tour to take the bus on. For a corporation, organizing this bus tour is a high risk proposition as the final destination is still unknown. However, if the seats are filled with the right passengers, the final destination will lead to greatness, which in turn, can lead to high reward.

The journey toward service-enabling an enterprise can leverage Jim’s bus ride analogy from two perspectives. First, from a leadership perspective, having the right passengers sitting in the correct seats is critical to ensuring that the journey leads to a destination of true business value. Second, from a technology perspective, having the right bus, that is, the right Enterprise Service Bus to manage and execute the digital services, is vital to controlling the digital enterprise’s success.

Drilling down on this analogy from a leadership perspective, each occupant sitting in the correct seat implies that the passenger plays a specific role in making the tour successful. This analogy easily correlates to the building of the governance board for a Service - Oriented Architecture. The roles include business domain experts, technology subject matter enablers (SMEs), and the Enterprise Architect (EA and tour guide). Once a passenger is assigned their correct seat, the passenger must be empowered to perform the governance role that seat represents.

Business domain expert seats must be filled with team members who have a detailed understanding of the current and future business policies and practices for their functional area of the enterprise. They must embrace the concept of the extended enterprise; understand how to breakdown processes into useful policy “building blocks” and have a sense of vision on how constituents could use the services they invent.

Technology SMEs seats must be filled with team members who understand the technology direction for the corporation. These SMEs are charged with protecting the passengers from becoming road-weary as they read the billboards of too many enabling technologies. Technology SMEs also address the human factors, information management, security and privacy concerns for developing and deploying services.

The Enterprise Architect (EA) serves as the tour guide for this trip. The EA’s formal role is to serve as facilitator of the SOA governance board. The EA is charged with bringing business value to the enterprise through the deployment of the right business and technical strategies and technologies. The successful EA is the tour guide for the journey, giving direction when passengers loose their bearings and ensuring that all passengers follow’s the journey’s “big rules” (governance guidelines and principles). The EA must have the willingness to lead, the mindset to “trust but verify” and the courage to turn-around when the tour takes a wrong turn. Who’s driving the bus? The executive sponsor, whose desire is to see the vision of service-enabling the enterprise become a reality. In this ride the sponsor ensures that progress is being made and that the bus has fuel and continues to be road worthy. The sponsor must realize that this tour takes time to complete, and will, in turn, appreciate the measurable business value that accumulates throughout the successful journey.

Will others join the tour along the way? Absolutely. Service-enabling the enterprise is an “evolution not a revolution”. Progress will likely occur by focusing on a few business functional areas per “excursion” (incremental change). Business domain experts will be added to the team as their area of the enterprise is ready for transformation. Additionally, the tour guide may bring constituents (users) of the services onto the bus so that the team obtains an external perspective of the services to be enabled.

From a technology perspective, the analogy implies that there is a “safe” bus to ride. In Service-Oriented Architecture, services are often invoked by making calls to the Enterprise Service Bus. The passengers of this bus are digital services, and as such, this bus must be ready to deal with the perils of the digital roadway. It must have an engine that can accelerate on command (exceed Service Level Agreements), tires that can handle any terrain (portable), doors that can lock and open at the appropriate times only allowing the trusted passenger to enter (secure). This bus requires signs that are easy to understand (service interfaces), seats that automatically contour to any passenger (service adaptors), and a framework that will not bend under the load of success (scalable). After all, if you choose to start this digital journey you must be ready for any road hazard.Your Enterprise Service Bus will not have the option to pull over to the side of the digital highway and wait for a virtual tow truck!

The successful journey towards service-enabling the enterprise begins with making tough choices and preparing for a longer than usual trip. Enterprises that have properly prepared will enjoy the excursions along the way; enterprises that have not followed the guidance of this tour bus analogy will encounter many road hazards. Be it figuratively or digitally, orchestrating the successful bus tour for service-enabling the enterprise requires that you have the right people leveraging the right bus.

Getting Hip to Electronic Medical Records

Two weeks ago, I underwent a total hip replacement surgery, and fortunately because of the experienced surgeon and his team from Jefferson University Hospital, I am recovering nicely and probably ahead of schedule – actually walking with only a little assistance from a cane. It took me a few days after the surgery to gain the courage to watch a recorded web cast of the same surgery, actually done in 2003 (watch the surgery if you care) on another patient. Amazing. Since I am a little younger than most joint replacement patients, rather than being released to a rehab facility, I was released to rehab from home. My only beef is that, as efficient and precise as the surgery was performed, the opposite occurs with the whole concept of medical records.

I now have a visiting nurse, who with her first visit took out her tablet PC and proceeded to take 30 minutes to enter an entire medical history. Why? I’ve given this information four or five times now in the months and weeks leading up to the surgery. Then the visiting physical therapist came in with her notebook PC a day later and captured yet more information. Guys, let’s get healthcare records management into the 21st century! I thought that HIPAA was the acronym for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act! Reading the standard, one immediately notices that the key objective is to “reduce the administrative costs of providing and paying for health care.”

A little research pointed out that there are some products out there that do help. For example, smartEMR (the EMR stands for Electronic Medical Records) is a “web-based electronic medical records solution that enables physicians to record patient encounters and test interpretations quickly and easily” into their customized clinical knowledge base. It also has a security scheme, reporting, does scheduling and document management, and can trigger billing. Another product, MedicsDocAssistant from Advanced Data Systems, also performs electronic medical records capture and processing. One of its nice features allows patients (with a password) to pre-enter medical record information in advance of their arrival at the practice. How cool.

Now if I can only get my doctors to purchase one of these, or a similar system. According to an article last week in ZDNet Healthcare, only about 10% of doctors nationwide use some type of electronic system. How sad that we can get some of the best medical treatments available, and yet these doctors’ practices are so inefficient?

I’d also like to be able to bring up my own medical records and check them for accuracy, just like I can see my credit report (and HIPAA allows this access to our medical records while at the same time ensuring privacy). I’d like to be able to check my billing, make an appointment, look up my last cholesterol score or blood clotting factor, check my medications, and even leave questions for my doctors. Why isn’t this happening?

And Not Or

I was in an exchange the other day with some folks talking about the increased importance of mobile computing. I couldn’t agree more, but my view may be a bit different. My perspective is that organizations will demand mobile and fixed applications. It’s not a choice between things, but an acceptance of things. The true adoption of mobile devices can have a game changing effect, but it is not about the devices but what we do with them and people want to do those things everywhere.

Microsoft is spending a ton of money on unified communications (the individual’s context) and at the same time focusing on business process, workflow and rules (the enterprise context). The intersection of these contextual perspectives is how we’ll overcome the information overload wave that’s headed our way (if it didn’t hit a long time ago).

I’ve not seen that same amount of interest and effort investment in this intersection from the open source side (but it may be too broad for the isolated pocket view that’s pervasive in the open source space or I could have just missed it). Even so, organizations will need to embrace open source as well as accept the best capabilities of the commercial software market. It is not a choice between those camps, instead it’s among them.

Similarly when looking at green IT, information technology should be about the value delivered and not just code and compute cycles or as one comment stated “humanitarian advantage”, those are a means to an end. We don’t have to choose between delivering value and being green -- when you go on a diet you don’t have to choose between “eating right” and losing weight. Being efficient is adding value, we need to do more of both.

Organizations that will compete effectively in the coming years are going to shift their thinking to “and” and not “or”.

United Nations Meeting Gives Mobile Service Providers More Bandwidth

A UN telecoms meeting decided to give mobile service providers access to bandwidth currently reserved for terrestrial television broadcasts, offering the promise of high-speed Internet access on-the-move anywhere in the world by 2015.

The decision will give manufacturers of wireless equipment greater confidence to develop better and cheaper devices. Telecom service providers show have lower rollout costs for rolling out new networks. Experts believe that networks can be rolled out for less than half of the cost of using higher frequencies, such as the 2.3 to 2.4 gigahertz range that is available in some regions.

Countries agreed to the rule after a month of negotiations that boiled down to a battle between old and new media, broadcasters against telecoms companies, for control of a prime stretch of radio spectrum, the report said.

Consumers in the United States are to gain access to at least some of the spectrum in question by 2009, but it will take an additional six years before those in Europe, Africa, China, Russia and much of the Middle East will have the same access.

A U.S. government auction scheduled for February is expected to fetch up to $15 billion from the sale of bandwidth in the 698 megahertz to 806 megahertz range. This is the same auction where Google was getting so much press.

The same frequencies will be available for mobile services throughout the Americas, India, Japan, Korea and a number of other Asian countries, while the rest of the world will initially use only the 790 megahertz to 862 megahertz range.

The great thing for global IT organizations is that it should enable greater use of the same devices across the globe, improving the quality, cost and availability of service.

Is IT Trying too Hard to Align and Not be Integrated With the Business?

Is IT trying too hard to align and not be integrated with the business?

CIO Insight magazine had a story titled Is Strategic Alignment Still a Priority? One quote from the story is:

"The point...is not to become overly fixated on the goal of alignment at the expense of knowing what you are committing to along the way, with IT, the journey is as critical as the destination.“

Which supports my blog entry on Green IT’s focus being too narrow. A cost cutting perspective is not sufficient. On the other hand, if you don’t have the day-to-day activities under control, you have no right to talk about business integration and strategic discussions. You’ve got to do both.

One of the things the EDS Fellows have been talking about is the need to move to an “and” not an “or” approach to the business. Organizations want mobile solutions and desktop solutions. They want privacy and openness. Low cost commodity solutions and customization and integration. Face it everyone wants it all.

Alignment will not provide the flexibility and business value in the future. Integration and flexibility are required to reap the benefit from the investments. Things change and rigid solutions don’t last, also people don’t know exactly what they want. That’s why waterfall methodologies are ineffective, in general.

Focusing with the business on flexibility, transparency, integration and business value generation is what’s required. Delivering incremental value that support both long and short term needs will be viewed as successful.

Interview by Don Grantham of Sun

A while back I was at the Sun sales conference participating in a panel about technology used. After our panel, I was interviewed by Don Grantham Sun’s EVP of sales. I just noticed they put the interview on line. The focus is primarily on partnerships and how two companies can do more than just one.

Is the Focus on “Green” too Narrow??

I was talking with Jim Pierce of GreenIT08 about how narrow the perspective is of many of the people who talk about Green IT. This was driven home to me twice yesterday when I sat through 2 different industry expert’s discussion. They used phrases like:

Green IT refers to environmentally sound IT. It is the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, and using computers, servers, monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems efficiently and effectively with no or minimal impact on the environment.

I worry about this view that power is power -- implying that IT is a commodity. There are changes that can be made in this area, like ensuring that the data center manager actually knows how much power they consume and gets measured and rewarded accordingly. There is much more that will have real business impact though.

The current focus within many organizations on application portfolio management, that drives infrastructure and apps modernization, should think about value generated/watt. It is value that’s important! These infrastructure only statements add no additional revenue and have only an isolated effect on increasing margin for the enterprise. That to me is not really “green” IT, since their efforts do not add to corporate advantage – the real reason to have IT in the first place. These systems are there to run applications that actually do something; we need to focus on those systems too. Clock cycles are not enough.

Granted it is not as easy to calculate as current flow down a circuit, but who said IT should be easy.

Hard Disk Drives: Bigger and Badder than Ever

In this month’s ACM Queue there was a thorough article covering hard drive failures and the limitations storage currently faces. Now that 1TB hard drives are coming on the market, it brings a whole new meaning to having all your eggs in one basket. New OS capabilities to use storage in ways that minimize risk of loss may be the answer (e.g., ZFS).

FinFET and Other Techniques – Keeping the Ball Rolling

Earlier this week Jeff Wacker (another Fellow) and I were having a discussion about the end of Moore’s Law and what’s being done to extend it as well as the effect of IT. It appears that a decade from now the transistor will look like a distant relative of the ones used today. There are a number of new techniques coming on line now that we’ll soon see the benefits.

The current materials and techniques are just allowing too much current leakage, increasing power consumption without improving capabilities. New techniques like FinFET allows the transistor to be oriented vertically and new more insular (higher k) materials are also helping to reduce the waste.

With the focus on Green computing, you can expect a big push to replace the lumbering big iron with a whole new lean and mean generation of devices. The computers will continue to change their designs, adding more cores and so the software (Operating System and applications) will need to change radically as well.

For those interested there is an entertaining History of the Transistor.

Nanotechnology Enabling a Whole Different Approach to Radio.

We’ve been expecting that the exponential shifts in capability to extend into whole new realms with the coming of Nanotechnology. Here is one that caught my interest. Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have built a radio using a single carbon nanotube.

The carbon nanotube works as an all-in-one antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator for both AM and FM in the 40-400 MHz range. The molecular radio detects radio signals) (Requires Real Player) in a radically new way: mechanically vibrating at the frequency of the radio wave, making it a true nano-electromechanical system (NEMS).

The nanotube is placed in a vacuum and connected to a battery. This covers its tip with negatively charged electrons, and the electric field of the radio wave pushes and pulls the tip. The physicists can tune in a desired frequency by "pulling" on the free tip of the nanotube with a positively charged electrode. The voltage is high enough to pull electrons off the tip of the nanotube and, because the nanotube is simultaneously vibrating, the electron current from the tip is an amplified version of the incoming radio signal. The amplified output of this simple nanotube device is enough to drive a very sensitive earphone.

A whole new approach to radio, a technology that mankind has enjoyed for over a century. "The nanotube radio may lead to radical new applications, such as radio-controlled devices small enough to exist in a human's bloodstream," the authors wrote in a paper published online by the journal Nano Letters.

BrainHealth and service delivery

A group of us went to see the Center for BrainHealth this week. We talked with them about their current experiments in defining/understanding brain health and the possibility of undergoing a brain physical to baseline performance and strengthen weak areas as well as understand change over time.

One of the areas that they’ve been researching is what we’ve been calling attention engineering and understanding the mind’s approach to context vs. detail. We actually have quite a bit of follow up discussion possibilities to understand how enterprise context can be conveyed effectively to the individual through software.

Russell Hulse (Nobel Prize in Physics 1993) participated as well asking questions about how a good systems thinker approaches the problem vs. other types of individuals. Does the system thinker switch between detail and abstract more quickly or effectively? Is this a capability based on nature or nurture?

As information flow becomes more voluminous, these concepts of the right mechanism for the right role and the ability to personalize information delivery will be important. Products that focus on information delivery based on enterprise and individual context are beginning to hit the market.