Category Archives: JimPhelps

Measuring the value of projects

Jason Uppal of Quickresponse gave a talk on Building Enterprise Architects at the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Summit. He mentioned that Toyota judges project success based on

three corporate objectives:

Profit from the Program
Market Share
Learning

These facets got me thinking about our post project reviews. We tend to measure our projects on whether or not they were done on-time and under-budget. We have post-project reviews that ask, “how could we run projects better in the future” but they are focused on the project process. We don’t really evaluate the project on a set of facets. So we evaluate “What” and “How” but not “Why”.

As I think about this, I think the interesting facets for us would be:

  • Did this reduce costs over the long run – e.g. have a reasonable ROI
  • Did this “improve” the enterprise architecture – did it reduce redundancy, reduce complexity, advance strategic initiatives
  • What did we learn about the enterprise in the process?

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Old meets new – You can follow the New York Times on Twitter

I just discovered that there are several twitter feeds for the New York Times. These feeds include a main New York Times feed at

http://twitter.com/nytimes

along with several specific feeds:

You can find most of them by going to the main URL and look at the “following” list on the lower right hand corner. You can then follow the NYT stories as they are published in each section in twitter. Pretty cool.

This continues with the general trend of “the content I want, where I want it, how I want it, when I want it”. The great mash-up continues.

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Traditional music at dinner

We had traditional Chinese and Mongolian music at dinner. It was really cool. I won’t guess at the instruments other than to say, there were three musicians: a woman playing something that looks like a hammered dulcimer, a guy who played bowed stringed instruments and guy who played flutes.

I was listening to one song and thinking, “It sounds like it is about a river”. One of the bus/wait people went buy singing along. I stopped him (Kenny) on his way past again and asked him, “What is this song about”. He told me it is a great song, a beautiful song. “It is about the moon and the river.” Then he hustled back to his job. Amazing that those kinds of things can come through music regardless of the culture.

I really wanted to Kenny to sit down and sing and tell me about the songs. Unfortunately (for me), he had a day job he needed to keep.

I’ll post pictures and maybe movies when I get home.

It was really great. I was tempted to stay and listen until they quit.

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EA Practitioners – EA Best Practice Management

Several speakers this afternoon.

Seven Traits of Effective Enterprise Architecture (EA)
Speaker number 1: Mark Denne, Partner, Accenture
Business Alignment – Must define its value in terms of the business measured in the business’ currency. You must show that there are savings when you do EA.

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Keynote from EA Practitioners: SOA and EA – in the real world

David Linthicum of Zapthink is speaking. http://theopengroup.org/sf2008/linthicum.html
Conference materials live at http://www.opengroup.org/conference-live

David Linthicum wrote, “Enterprise Application Integration”

Dysfunctional architectures that are currently deployed have led to enterprise that are locked up and unable to really improve because of the complexity. The activities ahave all be driven by tactical needs not strategic needs.

Enterprise Architecture are raising their hands and saying we need a “master city plan” but they don’t get the budgets or support so they end up acting tactically also.

Need to convince people that the SOA technology and strategic planning are important. Need to start with the business case. The business drivers: Reduction of integration expense, increase in reuse, greater visibility, business empowerment and increase in business agility.

“Think big, start small, succeed often”.

Building support:

Need to find a champion, a LOB manager, CIO, management-level architect or other architect.
Need to build the business case and show ROI though the calculation can be difficult because there is no historical data (SOA implementations), it is difficult to differentiate between a well-architected SOA vs. non-SOA architecture and what do you gain from agility.

We are trying to decompose the enterprise into functional primitive behaviors that we can then re-orchistrate as we need to. We don’t do code level re-use, that has never work. We deal with behaviors that are put behind a neutral dial-tone that lots of different technologies can take advantage of.

Business Intelligence: Visibility into data, business processes and into levels of compliance. Once we have these services that are communicating outside of their technology stack, then we can peer into the interactions and information. We can then deliver that information in any number of ways: a spreadsheet, a dashboard on a blackberry. This is “sex-in-the-screen kind of stuff” the C-levels love.

Agility: Need to identify the need for agility for the business itself.

When not to apply SOA: when business requirements are stable, when the IT environment is homogeneous, when current tools provide sufficient visibility, when performance requirements call for efficiency over flexibility. Don’t be led by VDA – Vendor Driven Architecture.

JBOWS – Just a Bunch Of Web Services – nothing is solved when all you do is build a bunch of web services. Service enabling is not where you gain from SOA. It is the consumption and re-use where the gains come. You must design for re-use.

Start with the business requirements and architectural planning, then back the technology into the problem domain. You cannot buy SOA, it is something you do not something you buy. If you buy and ESB and a bolt it onto the enterprise, you will just make things worse. Note that governance and security are systemic as is performance engineering.

Architecture should be: implementation-independent so that is it stable as technology changes, business process-indpendent so it stays stable as business changes.

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Enterprise Architecture as an Academic Study

From the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Francisco.

I had breakfast with David Jackson from Boston university. David is working on building a consortium of business schools who will offer something like an Executive Master’s of Enterprise Architecture degree. This would be similar to Executive MBA programs in that students would be coming in with real life experience.

Two parts of this are interesting to me.

The first is the tools and techniques that end up codified as part of the curriculum. What they teach will lead the students towards being certified (via the Open Group’s EA Certification program) Enterprise Architect. That certification requires at least two years of real-life experience. The certification also includes demonstrated proficiencies in a variety of tools and techniques.

When people start entering the market who are certified with these skills and knowledge of these tools, that will drive the adoption of the standards. Hopefully, rigorous yet simple tools will grow out of this market.

The second will be the “blow-back” force to the ERP vendors. These ERP vendors will need to demonstrate how their products fit in multiple architectures rather than provide a complete architecture in and of themselves. At least that’s what I hope.

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Dinner out at a local restaurant ups my belief in humanity

Last night I ate dinner a local Japanese restaurant. I was walking from the hotel down to North Beach. It was nasty, windy, raining so I was thinking that maybe I should turn around and eat at the hotel. I went past this little Japanese restaurant – Hotaru (1059 Powell St, Google Street View helped me find the name) Hotaro or something like that. It was nasty so I decided to forgo my usual rule for restaurant selection (learned from a colleague – find the first restaurant that looks good enough then go to the next better looking restaurant) and dive back in.

A little four year-old girl, Rosemary, brought me my menu. Roy, a 15 month old, toddled around holding onto an elderly woman’s hands. A younger woman sat braiding another older woman’s hair. The woman with Roy said, “look at my Sister’s hair”. Everyone looked up and cooed appreciation. There was much discussion of how the young lady did her hair and the fact that she did it without a rubber band.

A man walked it and the elderly woman with Roy asked, “are you Willard’s brother? I’ve seen you at the library.” “Yes. This is Willard’s niece, Christine” he answered pointing out the young lady that he entered with. “Where is Willard?” ‘He is parking the car.’ “We haven’t seen Willard for a while.” ‘He usually comes early after work.’

Willard walked in a couple of minutes later. Everyone said hi. WIllard took up Roy and played with him. He introduced Rosemary to Christine. Others diners came in and said hi. Everyone moved around from table to table, chatting and catching up. I was quickly brought into the conversation.

It was a wonderful neighborhood hang out for these China town people. They walk over drive in from around the city to meet up and chat on evenings when they don’t want to cook. Everyone listened patiently to the elderly woman describe how she was just laid off from her job. They jointly watched the owners children while she ran the restaurant.

It was really a wonderful step into a welcoming local scene.

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Etsy – On-line store for hand-made items

Etsy (http://www.etsy.com) is a store where crafters can sell their objects to the public. Etsy also supports spaces for the crafters to work and share their skills and ideas.

The Etsy website also has cool navigation methods for finding objects. There is a color search system that lets you pick a color to start with. You can then throw and move the objects around to view and sort them. There is a geo-locater for you to search for crafters near you. Very clever web design as well as fun stuff.

Below is a video that describes Etsy. I know that I’ll be doing shopping at their store – it is too much fun.

http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fetsy%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F408975&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf

From Laughing Squid.

Black Bean and Chorizo Soup

This was dinner last night. It worked out well especially for a “found this in the freezer” dinner. Note: I did not measure out the ingredients exactly. Somethings are pretty easy – a can of X is a can of X. Other things were by eye and taste.

Ingredients

2 Chorizo Sausages – cut into 1/4 lengthwise then chopped to 1/4 inch long pieces
2 small onions diced (about 1 cup diced onion)
1/2 red bell pepper diced
4 small carrots peeled and sliced (about 1 cup)
3 cloves of garlic minced
1 Tbls butter
3 Cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 14oz Can of Hominy – drained and rinsed
1 14oz Can Petite Diced Tomatoes – drained (save the juice for something else)
1 Tbls Chili Powder
1 tsp Cayenne Pepper
1 Tbls Buffalo Chipotle Hot Sauce (the best, most useful stuff)
2 tsp Dried Mexican Oregano
2 Cups cooked black beans (we had made these the day before), drained
1 tsp Sugar
Salt and Pepper

Garnish: Avocado and Lime

  1. Melt the butter in a large sauce pan over medium heat. Cook until the butter stops foaming
  2. Add the onions, bell pepper and carrot and a pinch of kosher salt. Cook, stirring often, until the vegis are soft. (about 5 minutes)
  3. Add the chorizo and cook until the fat starts to render out of the sausage (about 5 minutes)
  4. Add the garlic, chili powder and oregano and cook until fragrant (about a minute)
  5. Add the broth and bring to a boil
  6. Add the hominy, tomatoes and beans and stir to combine
  7. Add the hot sauce and cayenne and taste for spiciness. Adjust these for the level of heat and smokiness that you want
  8. Add the sugar. Note: this won’t make it sweet it will just balance out the smokey flavors.
  9. Simmer partially covered for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  10. Near the end of the cooking time, add a healthy grind of black pepper and test for salt.
  11. Finish in the bowl with chopped avocado and a squeeze of lime.

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