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Predictions for 2008

This year I’m going to go out on the limb a bit further than in the past, and focus on the positive things that will be coming.

1. Mobile Redefinition – The mobile market is going to undergo a significant shift. will have traction on a larger scale, even thought it was on the list of things that didn’t make it in 2007 for PC mag. We’re going to see quite a bit of pre-availability announcements for mobile capabilities based on new spectrum available in 2009. We may even see the rebirth of the carrier on a global scale. The mobile phone market will be in for a major shakeup in 2008 with openness and other competitive pressures becoming prevalent. Some people say that 2007 is the year of the new mobile OS. Next year will be the year the real change precipitates out.
2. Unified communications for home and business will begin to be incorporated in most organizations planning in 2008. It will not be an infrastructure only issue though. It will also provide the central source (service) for personnel/personal context within the enterprise.
3. Broad acceptance of SaaS and web based applications will take place but probably not in ways that we may think. A wider range of businesses will use service based approaches to enable their activities and it will be as controversial as offshoring has been.
4. This will be the year when we see real deliverables for new user interfaces, moving beyond the mouse. Just like the Wii used a new interface to take some old technology and make it new again, we’ll see similar advances on the PC interface. Gestures, voice, displays… it’s time.
5. Personal area networks are going to take on many new features and replace most cords and other transfer techniques. UWB in Bluetooth 3.0 will allow for video conferencing… and other techniques from many smaller more portable devices. This will enable an environmental view of computing – using the capabilities of the area, not just what I bring with me. This will also allow more device collaboration in meeting my needs – smart systems hiding in plain sight.
6. Security will begin to move beyond problem prevention into actual information assurance, assisting organizations and team in responded to events. If it can be effective stopping bad things we should have every expectation that it will enable the right things.
7. We will begin to see wider use of automation in the assembly of software and infrastructure. We’ve been talking about SOA for a while now and quite a few organizations have a software infrastructure set of services available as a foundation for new solutions. We’ll see more effective products assembling those services into solutions that add business value. I’ve said this before, and still believe it.

On the corporate front we’re going to continue to see more virtualization and cores… Now we’re beginning to expect that (shipping 8 core chips by the end of ’08 by more than just Sun?). We’re also going to see Green IT become something talked about in the front office and not just in the back. We’ve barely seen the tip of that iceberg.

I’ve been mentioning workflow for a number of years and we’re beginning to see it move from the desktop into mobile devices and that will be common place by the end of 2008 as various COTS applications incorporate mobile interfaces. Collaboration on mobile devices will also take off as part of Enterprise 2.0 activities.

I doubt that we'll see widespread use of electronic paper techniques in business even though there are some quite interesting capabilities out there now and those devices will drop significantly in price by the end of 2008.

Enterprise 2.0 in 2007

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote an interesting blog entry on Enterprise 2.0 in 2007. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the definition of Enterprise 2.0. I wrote a whitepaper from that perspective for an upcoming Cutter Journal on Enterprise 2.0 - I think Enterprise 2.0 is much more than social computing. Hopefully, it will be out soon.

In Dion’s entry he took a much wider view than most that I’d divide into two major categories.

Adoption - Enterprise 2.0 became a reality in 2007

He states that we’re seeing real applications that can be integrated into business applications. I think the SLAs for those apps seem to still be lagging behind though.

Social networks came of age for business with more organizations using them – the backlash of poor usage is coming back to haunt people as well.

Mobile Web applications for business became nearly ubiquitous. Google announced Android, Microsoft has a number of irons in the fire; we’ll see much more integration into business in 2008.

Tooling

The major software firms began to offer Web 2.0 solutions for businesses – he mentions Oracle, IBM and even Microsoft. Almost all the major software (and minor demonstrations) coming out of MS seems to have a Web 2.0 spin on them. As they mature, we should see some real capabilities across the board.

The Web-based user experience is prepared to take a major leap forward – we’ve seen the demonstration capabilities like JavaFX and Silverlight. Those should be just the tip of the iceberg when compared to what happens when people actually using these capabilities in anger.

End-user mashups platforms (e.g., PopFly, Mashup Composer), and widgets are all beginning to show what they can do to disintermediate systems and weave together new capabilities.

User/business-controlled Web identity began to take hold – this is an area of IT where I expect significant progress in 2008, especially when merged with unified communications techniques to provide real context around the state of the individual.

A Review of the Predictions for 2007

Last year I graded my predictions for 2006, so I thought I’d keep it up by looking back on my predictions for 2007. It’s a little early this year but since I’m looking out the rear view mirror, don’t hold it against me. My predictions for 2008 will be in a few weeks

The predictions for 2007 were:

• Continued focus on virtualization – You can’t throw an adjective without hitting a story about virtualization in any IT magazine. Almost everyone is doing it now. A
• Multi-core – cooler than ever. A
• Concern about processing per watt – I thought about this one but it has far exceeded my expectations. I’ll give myself an A for thinking about it, but not for understanding the implications. I do wish that business value generation entered into the equation more. A
• Offshore market shift – Things are happening here. The dollar is low. The turnover is high. China has yet to enter the offshore resources market in any big way. Model driven development has yet to take off. C
• Redefinition of the mobile market – Once again things are happening. We’re waiting to see what happens with the spectrum auction in 2008 and the actual deployment in 2009. There are new and more kinds of devices all the time. I’ve yet to see it directly tied into many businesses processes the way I hoped. B
• Shift from maintenance to development – I guess this was more of a dream than a realistic prediction. I was hoping that new business value generation was going to win out over inertia, but there is still a long way to go. I have seen a number of interesting tools. They just need to be taken out of the box, assembled, broken and assembled again. That’s progress. D
• Personalization – Personalization activities continue. I’ve seen it being focused on more, but not in any significantly different way since 2006. C+

Three As, a B, two Cs and a D a little better than last year but that may mean I’m playing it too safe

One thing I didn’t see coming was w00t making word of the year. w00t!

Gift of the Year...

This seems to be the year to give GPS based presents for Christmas. I’ve talked with a number of people who already know they are getting a Garmin or TomTom device this year. I’ve had played with GPS devices for years and finally broke down this year to give my family the latest version. Since the bottom seems to have dropped out of the market and you can get some significant functionality (e.g., integration with your cell phone via Bluetooth). Anyway…

My son is in college at the University of Tampa and he had his last swim meet before the holiday break at Delta State in MS. We drove over to pick him up.

Having a GPS in the car definitely made this circuitous trip a bit more comfortable – no running to a gas station asking for directions. This school was literally down in the bayou and there were many hundreds of miles driven on two lane roads to get there. It was interesting, but a bit unnerving for those who don’t usually veer too far off the interstate.

It makes quite a difference to continuously KNOW you are on the right road and have some estimate of how much more time you have left and when the next turn will be.

It is similar to what IT organizations are trying to do with BAM, Balanced Scorecarding and other executive dashboarding techniques – enable the leadership to know they’re on the right path, or turn around before they waste too much time.

Laptops Overtake Desktops - Who Cares?

There have been a couple of stories like this one concerning Laptops overtaking Desktops. That happened inside EDS a long time ago. It does make me wonder about the relationship between the use of intelligent handheld devices and laptops though. I wonder what percentage of emails get read on the handheld device vs. the full function device.

I know my style needs to change. If I can’t get the reader hooked in the first line of text, it probably isn’t going to get read.

I’m sure it is a generational difference as well.

Baby Boomers

• E-mail
• Discussion groups (e.g., Usenet)

Generation X

• Instant messaging
• Web sites
• Cell phones

Generation Y

• Wiki
• Syndication (Blogs, Podcasts)
• Video (e.g. YouTube)
• Social Networking (e.g. Facebook, Second Life)

Next Generation

• Unified Communications (information anywhere)
• Real-time, Rule-based workflow
• Integrated collaboration services

We're clearly moving beyond laptops.

Sun Open Sources Niagara-2 Chip

Sun Microsystems showed that it is taking the open sourcing of its technologies seriously. A while back, it took open source into the hardware domain through the OpenSparc project only three months after the Niagara chips appeared in products. Sun did it again with the SPARC T2 the next generation of the highly parallel-enable architecture.

The T2 chip has 8 cores, each capable of running 8 threads, 4 MB of L2 cache, one x8 PCI Express slot, two 10 Giganit Ethernet ports, based on "Project Neptune" technology, and an on-chip memory controller that can drive eight FB-DIMM memory slots. The T2 chip has 500 million transistors and a 342 square millimeter die size; it is implemented in an 11-layer, 65 nanometer process from Texas Instruments.

I studied and used to work in semiconductor design and manufacture so this kind of thing thrills me. It looks like there is quite a bit of performance and power conservation potential since their still at 65 nm (some of the latest Intel chips are at 45 nm).

The question that comes to mind is “Why?”. I can think of a few reasons:

1. When I was in college, we all ran UNIX because it was free to universities from AT&T. When we got out of school, we infected the organizations where we went to work, because we knew it. Universities will use the open source materials to teach the powerful techniques that were used in the Niagara chip line. I’ve said before that Open Source is about influence not ownership.
2. Other folks will use the technology and keep the SPARC line relevant. We’ve seen commodity processors take over the market and there are areas that a specialized chip set can still address. Having others help is useful – read Wikinomics.
3. What do they have to lose anyway?  They are so far along the road to Rock and giving away your old designs might even slow down the competition, since they could get distracted from where you’re headed. Sun seem to be pretty far ahead on this multi-core stuff.

Moore's Flaw

CIO magazine this month had an article on dealing with complexity. It starts out with a term I’ve never heard before: Moore’s Flaw. This concept is something I’ve blogged about before in an entry about Accelerating complexity. The term though seems ideal since all the extra capability from Moore’s Law causes a never ending cascade of real and possible innovations. More than any organization can possibly understand.

There is quite a bit of material about complexity (like the CIO article). And it does make you ask: Is simplicity a fad? Or is it something that’s required just to keep your head above water. There is no doubt that business that can manage complexity better than their counterpart will have a leg up on their competitors.

The article went into four broad principles for reducing complexity (I‘ve included some of my thoughts as well):

1. Make process central to your IT organization’s approach to technology. I’d take this a little further. CMMi and ITIL are examples of processes that people have talked about for a long time. Many organizations have stated they’ve deployed them. The key thing to look for is if the leadership team uses the deliverables from these processes as part of their decision making process. After all that’s why you should be making the investment, to understand what’s happening better, faster and ideally cheaper than before.
2. You need superior governance of both the technology infrastructure and the business-IT relationship. Governance for SOA is unlike any governance we’ve had before. The whole “Does IT really matter” discussion has as much to do with business-IT governance as anything else. The reason why IT exists is to support the business, when we lose that perspective we lose. If we’re focused on commodity activities to the exclusion of business change. It’s a problem. Addressing Complexity is part of making business change happen.
3. Everything you do must have simplicity as the default expectation. I’d rephrase this a bit. Everything we expect others to act upon must have simplicity as a default expectation. The reason information is shared is for people to do something different once they have it. It needs to be provided in a way they can consume it – attention engineered. That’s part of IT’s responsibility.
4. Your efforts must be on-going. It’s a constant battle.

Why All the Gloom and Doom During the Holiday Season?

I’ve seen a number of reports about Internet collapse and a near term data centre collapse. There’s not been this much concern since the mid 90s. Don’t get me wrong some good will come of it, since the only way to prevent problems like this is to share the symptoms and remedies. It does seem to be interesting timing though, since it always seems to happen about this time of year.

If the Internet backbone were to become overloaded in some catastrophic way where it could not be depended upon, the plans of many highly values companies that deliver all their services over the Internet would be in jeopardy. (You know who you are!) On the other hand they have enough market capitalization that they have the deep pockets to apply to the problem. Right now most companies that provide these services only provide service level agreements within their data center and not from an end user’s perspective. All this talk may change that.

Besides the issue of the overwhelming the Internet through the use of data and power there is also concern about a well targeted terror attack. There have been studies about losing a major Internet hub for years. All of these issues though are well within the domain of an organization’s chief risk officer and business continuity planners. Many scenarios can be planned for and tested against. After all, we’ve seen widespread power outages and zero day attacks before.

Now we have Sun warning of Data center collapse. Yes, there are more and larger data centers. Statistically it is a good bet that one will collapse soon. Someone always wins the lottery. Sun VP Subodh Bapat warning:

You'll see a massive failure in a year. We are going to see a data center failure of that scale.

According to Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos, 2008 will mark the first time companies that virtualize large machines into a parallel computing resource will be a major consumer of compute power. This shift is what Sun has been calling Red Shift.

We're talking about 50,000 sq. ft, 5,000 kW centers now and 500,000 sq. ft, 50,000kW centers over the next ten years.

These are some good sized data centers, but nothing that can’t be tested on a regular basis (and should be tested). When I looked at the comments to some of the articles and blog posts about data center collapse, there was a great deal of concern about the size of the power consumption number – for good cause – but I didn’t see anyone talking about how much more efficient these consolidated data centers are when compared to a highly distributed approach that is a legacy of the .COM era. Yes the power requirements are high, but it should be less than having the various applications and related systems spread out everywhere and underutilized.

We should take all these stories into account and dust off that disaster recovery plan and test it (both paper tests – to make sure we’ve got things covered as well as actual tests to make sure they can be executed).

Server Replacement Decision Made Based on Green Criteria

Australia seems to be a country that is pushing the move to green harder than anywhere else. I mentioned earlier in this blog that Green will be a decision criteria in contracting for service providers. Here is a case where an organization is moving away from HP technology to a more eco-friendly approach by Sun.

“The move away from HP technology is being made as part of a Macquarie effort to reduce its carbon footprint and is a harbinger of things to come for all technology vendors, as computer users join the fight against climate change. “

Another article stated:

“Sun servers running both AMD and Intel processors proved to be up to 60 per cent more energy efficient than other vendor technology.”

The approach was still tied to the organization owning their own computers. Even more could be saved if the market developed a viable utility computing model that everyone felt confident with.

Wayne Turmel was in Town

Wayne Turmel the host of the Cranky Middle Manager podcast was in TX the other day (probably trying to get away from bone chilling Chicago) and he had I had a chance to sit down and talk. I’ve exchange mail and discussions with Wayne for a couple of years now. He has started a company called GreatWebMeetings.com, focused on making the most of virtual meetings. I had to give him a bit of a hard time though, since now that he is starting his own company, can he really be considered middle-management!?!?!

I’ve mentioned that Unified Communications techniques are going to improve the diversity and response time of resources for organizations in solving problems. Wayne is focusing on maximizing the benefit of these new techniques. Based on listening to a couple of the tips Wayne has in the web site, it sounds like he has actually sat through a few web meetings himself. ;-)

It does make me wonder how some of the tried and true face-to-face meeting tools and techniques can be enhanced for this new meeting format. MindManager (a mind mapping tool) was enhanced a few versions back to include a collaboration based approach, and like most there is one primary driver and many watchers.

If meetings behave on-line the way meetings go in the real world, there is a tendency for side conversations (as well as much more multi-tasking, but that’s another issue). In most of the virtual meetings I participate in, the leader turns all those private conversation capabilities off, so we resort running another window with Office Communicator or an equivalent tool running. These side negotiations are often how consensus is reached, since you can’t really see the interaction of the rest of the folks to what is being presented. Whenever we have a fellow’s meeting, I try and set up a group discussion and invite the other fellows so we can exchange our thoughts on what is being presented without disrupting the presenter. It works for some but definitely not all.

There are probably numerous other was that we can change our tooling to take advantage of the on-lined medium and allow teams to subdivide and converge in real-time while maintaining a common meeting thread, much like people will move around a room (or the environment in Second Life).

Randy Mears retires

Randy has been providing a significant volume of the entries on this blog for the last year. He retired from EDS the end of November. That probably means there will be fewer Apple-centric entries. ;-) We’ll keep the flow of ideas and issues affecting the future of IT going on this blog anyway. Good luck Randy...

Is parallel computing still going to use text based languages????

In Second Life the other day there was a session put on by Intel and Dr. Dobb’s Journal on parallel computing.  I was a bit surprised how text language focused everyone was in their thinking on how to capitalize on multi-core development. I asked a few questions about Model Drive Development, but first had to explain what it was before the speaker could answer.

“The session featured Herb Sutter (Architect, Microsoft, and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee) and James Reinders (Chief Evangelist and Threading Guru for Intel Software Products) on key issues and requirements for achieving the promise of parallelization. Preceding the Town Hall, Tim Mattson (Intel Principal Engineer, Designer of the 80 Core test chip parallel application and one of the creators of Open MP) will give a brief introduction on how Intel is managing the transition to a multi-core world.”

I’ve done some work in the past with some languages that supported parallel processing to some degree by their very nature (APL, LISP), and used some threaded environments (Java, .Net) but no experience with the newer languages (Fortress, Erlang). The text based approach really makes me wonder who can handle the complexity and for how long in a production environment. In the Coding Horror blog there was an entry about types of programmers. I agree with the foundational statement that 80% are viewing development as a job and 20% are viewing it as a passion. Most people cannot handle the level of complexity that these languages require – not during development, and definitely not during production support. Now that parallel processing is no longer the exclusive domain of High Performance Computing (HPC), other more accessible techniques will be required.

The only way I see out of this quagmire of complexity is via a model based approach, either using domain specific modeling that is more visual in nature, or other modeling techniques that are in the works. I’ve blogged before that I view most coding as moving to an assembly approach. Having parallel aware components that are assembled together visual seems to be a way of taking advantage of parallel while limiting complexity. Some of the components will need to be written by highly skilled personnel (much like drivers are today), but it should be a small portion of the effort required.

After I wrote this entry, I came across some similar concerns, from a slightly different perspective by Larry O’Brien in a column titled Blowing Bubbles.

I’ve been in a few meetings in Second Life before, but this was the first one I actively participated in, asking questions… Unfortunately, it was disrupted by storms on both coasts, so the speakers had to do most of their interaction via the cell phone.

Goal-oriented computing

One of ways that I believe information technology will be shifting is to become much more enterprise goal-oriented. Money spent on IT is strategic for the enterprise and there was an article in the November IEEE journal titled: Toward the Realization of Policy-Oriented Enterprise Management that backs up this perspective. It describes:

A goal-driven approach to business process composition uses generic, logic-based strategies, descriptions of Web services, and formalized business policies to generate business processes that satisfy the stated business goals. The approach is based on an enterprise physics metaphor, in which business objects are analogous to physical objects and policies are analogous to physical laws.

Much like the balanced scorecard approach is focused on visibility into the cause and effect of activities on initiatives to addressing goals and realize vision. This document takes a more cause and effect view of the use of services in addressing the goals of the enterprise.

As we have greater computational power available and better simulation, business rules and workflow, we can “show the applicability, value and feasibility of using computational logical in modern enterprise management as a next step in software development” , more closely linking business knowledge with the software engineer’s view.

The move to an enterprise goal oriented perspective will be a significant shift in the role of the CIO and perspective of IT within the enterprise.