Adobe ConnectNow

Today I signed up for Adobe ConnectNow service. Adobe ConnectNow is a free web conferencing solution, which can be used by up to three participants (including host). It allows a permanent meeting room to each signed-in user. One can invite others, who are not signed up for this service, to join the online meetings.

I have not yet started to use this service but I guess I will find it useful when I will be travelling. I will post the feedback once I start using this service.

Adobe ConnectNow is one of the free hosted services offered at adobe.com. Other services include collaborative online word processor (Adobe Buzzword), document and file sharing and online PDF creation. I plan to explore these services in days to come.

 

 

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

While surfing, I stumbled upon the web site of MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Launched on October 13, 2006, it focuses on answering one key research question: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individual, group, or computer has ever done before?

It’s indeed an interesting question to investigate. Prof Thomas W. Malone, who is director of this center, has mentioned in his remarks at the official launch that the center will conduct three types of research: case studies, new examples, and systematic experiments, in order to answer this question. The center has published many working papers, which I am planning to read carefully in my next visit to the site.

Million Dollar Consulting

I just finished reading the book titled "Million Dollar Consulting Toolkit" by Alan Weiss. Though I have read quite a few books on consulting, I found this book to be different due to its hands-on approach. It is most useful for those consultants who are working solo but can also be used by consultants working in big consulting practices.

Alan Weiss has built a million dollar consulting practice, as a solo and in this book he has shared everything, right from tips to templates, in this book. When I started reading this book, I was puzzled to see so much nitty-gritty details. But then I found that to be its strength. The book provides field-level guidance in following areas:

• Office and Practice Management
• Sales & Marketing
• Self-Development
• Travel (here you will find a wealth of tips for business travel)
• Project Delivery ( a good number of checklists are here)
• Forms (templates for invoice, expense reimbursement etc, more useful in USA context though can be modified to suit local conditions)
• Financials
• Legal (again USA-specific details though can be adapted to local conditions)
• Advanced marketing (covers publishing, speaking, newsletter, referrals and repeat business)

A must-read for the one who is planning to start as a solo consultant!

Measuring the Impact of Electronic Data Management (EDM) on Information Worker Productivity

I just now finished reading a research brief from MIT Center for Digital Business on measuring the Impact of Electronic Data Management (EDM) on Information Worker Productivity. Authored by Sumit Bhansali and Prof Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT Sloan, this research brief has reported the findings from their project, in which they studied the effects of digitizing work on information workers' time-use and performance at a large insurance firm.

The authors used four complementary data sources:

1. Extensive on-site observation (of 4 managers) and interviews (17 pre-EDM interviews and 20 post-EDM interviews)
   
2. Detailed time use records at three different time points (one pre-EDM and two post-EDM)
   
3. Office-wide surveys (one pre-EDM and one post-EDM)
   
4. Accounting data on multiple intermediate and final performance metrics such as current year closure rate, previous year closure rate, retention rate, YTD loss leakage and YTD average amount per claim on physical therapy cost and chiropractor care cost.
   

Some of the important findings reported are as follows:

• EDM changed task composition at the individual level. EDM led to a significant decline in the substitutable routine labor input and an increase in non-routine cognitive labor input at the information worker level.
  
• EDM caused the "IT-enabled slack", which allowed information workers to spend more time on value-adding communication activities as well for more personal time relaxing and resting at work or at home (less overtime).
  
• Post-EDM, both the quantity and quality of routine informational inputs significantly increased, which in turn increased the productivity and performance of workers performing non-routine tasks that demanded those inputs.
  
• Introduction of EDM got associated with the positive effects on the performance metrics.
  

We all know that introduction of new technologies such as EDM improves employee productivities. Such research projects help establish this proposition with systematic evidence and can help (perhaps!) establish the business case for New Technology Introduction (NTI).

InnoCentive

Today during internet surfing, I stumbled upon web site of InnoCentive Inc and got to know about this interesting venture.

Founded in 2001, InnoCentive has built up a web-based marketplace, where organizations (called as Seekers) submit challenges for individuals (called as Solvers) to solve for financial awards along with professional recognition. InnoCentive's Seekers include commercial, government and non-profit organizations such as Procter & Gamble, Avery Dennison, Pendulum, Eli Lilly and Company, Janssen, Solvay, GlobalGiving and The Rockefeller Foundation. The company claims to have 172,000 registered solvers from 175 countries. Interestingly, till April 7, 2009, $4.1 million has been awarded for 472 solutions. Some noteworthy solutions are as follows:

• In November 2007, the Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI) awarded $20,000 to John Davis for his creative solution for a challenge related to oil spill recovery issues.
  
• An electrical engineer from New Zealand solved the Challenge to create a dual-purpose solar light to serve as both a lamp and a flashlight to be used in African villages and other areas of the world without electricity. The seeker, SunNight Solar in this case, awarded $20,000 to the solver in March 2008.
  
• In late 2007, the TB Alliance, a not-for-profit organization, received solution from two solvers for a Challenge seeking a theoretical solution to simplify the manufacturing process of a current drug compound.
  

There are four types of challenges that Seeker can post:

1. An InnoCentive Ideation Challenge is a broad question formulated to obtain access to new ideas. It's like global brainstorm for producing a breakthrough idea. The submissions are typically about two written pages.
   
2. An InnoCentive Theoretical Challenge contains detailed solution requirements that Solvers must fulfill in their responses. A solution to a Theoretical Challenge should solidify the Solver's concept with detailed descriptions, specifications and requirements necessary to bringing a good idea closer to becoming an actual product or service.
   
3. An InnoCentive RTP (Reduction to Practice) Challenge requires that the Solver submit a validated solution, either in the form of original data or a physical sample.
   
4. An InnoCentive eRFP Challenge is a request for a partner or supplier to provide materials or expertise to help solve a business challenge.
   

The company has provided detailed instructions about IPR requirements for each of these types of challenges. The company earns its revenue from Seekers who pay a fee to post Challenges and, in some cases, also pay a commission on the amount awarded. InnoCentive does not charge Solvers to view Challenges and submit solutions. It also offers to R&D organization its product called InnoCentive@Work, which is a customizable internal web-based community platform.

With its 32 employees and venture funding of $16 million, InnoCentive Inc seems to be a company, which can't be ignored in current innovation-centric global business environment.

Activity Based Performance Measurement (ABPM)

While surfing, I stumbled upon the slides presented during MIT Data Center Workshop on May 20, 2005 by Robert Laubacher of MIT Sloan. The topic is Activity Based Performance Measurement (ABPM). I found this topic interesting and hence made further search and browsing to make following notes:

ABPM can be used to measure value created by new technology or management intervention. It can assess business performance at the activity level and then aggregate these fine-grained metrics upward to the business unit and firm level. ABPM is based on two insights:

1. Calculating the costs of an activity is a matter of decomposing it into constituent parts, determining the cost of each part, and aggregating those costs. The benefits of an activity usually arise from how it affects other activities in the value chain. For example, quality programs reduce product defects and so reduce costs associated with factory rework and staffing customer service units. Higher quality can also increase future sales, due to greater customer satisfaction and enhanced firm reputation.
2. There are common patterns in the types of benefits associated with activities that have similar underlying characteristics. For example, checking the quantity of goods is an activity that takes place at many junctures in the retail supply chain. Quantity checks of this sort occur at the receiving dock of the manufacturer's warehouse, when shipments arrive from the factory; at the manufacturer's loading dock, when shipments are placed on trucks for transportation to the retailer; at the retailer's distribution center, when the truck arrives; and so on, all the way to the point where the consumer makes a store purchase, and the clerk checks the quantity of each item in the shopper's cart.
   

Using ABPM to assess the impact of a new technology like RFID involves four primary steps:

1. Develop potential post-implementation scenarios
2. Identify activities affected by the new technology
3. Map the activities with vs. without the new technology
4. Measure benefits and costs by comparing differences in outcomes of pre- vs. post-implementation activities
   

There are two types of benefits: localized vs. distant benefits. The benefits tied directly to the activities affected by new technology are localized benefits. Other benefits, by contrast, involve connections between activities directly affected and activities that occur within other units of the firm or even within outside firms. The distinction between localized and distant benefits is important because it shapes the extent to which a firm or business unit implementing new technology has direct control over achieving the full benefits of the technology. When most of the benefits are localized, the group implementing the new technology has a high degree of control over whether or not it achieves the benefits. But when many of the benefits are of the distant kind, the implementing group must rely on other business units or supply chain partners to achieve the full potential of new technology.

Though I do not feel I got the full understanding of ABPM, the insights and the other details associated with ABPM are nevertheless useful!

Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007

Today I attended a brief training of Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server (MOPPS) 2007. MOPPS 2007 is part of Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management suite, which also includes Microsoft Office Project Server. It allows creation of a project portfolio, including workflows, hosted centrally, so that the information is available throughout the enterprise, even from a browser (as per Wikipedia entry).

As I understood, the product provides two major modules: builder and optimizer. The scope of training session included only builder module, which is all about maintaining data about projects and resources. Obviously, this data maintenance can be configured to be very systematic hence can become quite useful for gaining visibility into project portfolio. The software allows grouping the projects as per programs, portfolios and organization units. It supports workflow feature, which allows move the project across the stages such as RC&BRD, Reject/Hold, Imp/Dev. The stages are specific to the project class such as application maintenance and application development. The software allows configuring which data fields (grouped as tabs) become editable or read-only or invisible depending on the current stage of the project. That makes the data collection quite disciplined. The examples of groups of data fields include budget cost, benefit estimation, strategic impact, Risk, schedule, cost tracking and document management. Also there is an audit trail, which captures all the user actions for possible review later.

The trainer also showed a feature called dashboard, which as name implies, can show the selective attributes (mainly iconic attributes) of selective projects. There is a similar feature called scorecard, which can show selective attributes of all projects. This scorecard, which is part of Builder module, can also be used for navigating through the projects.

Overall I found this training session useful for getting an awareness of the software product.

Searching Lotus Notes email

At work, I use Lotus Notes email client and found its search reasonably good. But what irritates me the most is searching through archives. Since I am supposed to copy the archive database on CDs, I have created many archive files for different time periods. That has now required me to open each archive and search through it for anything I need. That made me search a tool that can provide an unified search interface for searching through all archive files.

Finally, my search ended with IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search tool. This is an outcome of IBM Alphaworks and one can download the tool from its site. I started using this tool since last Friday and have found it extremely useful.

While installing the tool, it asked for all archive files and local folder for indexing the documents. The tool provides a locally hosted web site for searching through all this data. It's not only keyword search. One can search for telephone numbers, email addresses etc. Actually the tool recognizes the concepts such as email address, telephone number, directions, schedule, call, person etc and hence one can search for them. The sample queries could be something like, "from chetan", "chetan phone", "url icws".

This tool has really enhanced my effectiveness at workplace. I would recommend it to you for enhancing your effectiveness at workplace!!

IT for enforcing process discipline

I was recently reading a blog of Prof Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School where I spotted a very interesting line: (Enterprise) IT can be used to enforce process discipline. I quickly disagreed because IMHO it is only transactional systems (e.g. ERP, HRM, CRM) that can enforce process discipline and not collaboration systems. I also thought that collaboration systems are actually useful when we don't need process discipline. But after a prolonged thinking, I agreed that even collaboration needs process discipline for making it effective and efficient and collaboration systems such as SharePoint can enforce that process discipline.

I would like to get your comments on this thought process.

What is SOA Governance?

This is one of the frequently asked questions to me. While my answer depends on the background and motive of the person asking this question, let me state the general-purpose answer to this question in this blog.

SOA Governance is a subset of IT governance. Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross from MIT have given the definition of IT Governance as "Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT." On similar lines, we can define SOA governance as specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to realize the full value of SOA adoption in an organization.

To better understand SOA governance, let's categorize it as design-time governance and run-time governance. Design-time governance primarily includes business services portfolio planning but sometimes also includes SOA Platform planning. The business services portfolio planning involves establishing answers for following questions:

* Which services to develop?
* Which services to develop first?
* Is this really a new, reusable service?
* Who is going to pay for the development and maintenance of this service?
* Who owns this service?

By establishing answers to these questions, the reuse potential of SOA adoption can be fully exploited thus giving rise to cost reduction and IT flexibility.

The run-time SOA governance involves definition and enforcement of policies for security, SLA monitoring, routing and transformation. While design-time governance focuses on developing right services, run-time governance focuses on ensuring smooth execution of these services as per the expectations.

While governance is more to do with people behavior, some tools can be used to aid the people responsible for governance. One can use service repository as the tool for design-time governance as it stores all metadata related to services at a central location. For run-time governance, one can use a service registry and/or services management tools. Many Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products also provide the functionality for run-time governance.

Benefits of Enterprise Architecture

Once in a while, whenever I get time, I browse certain web sites to check whether anything new has come . I know RSS is a great mechanism to keep oneself updated on what's new on almost all web sites. But still I like this random check on my favorite sites.

One of my such favorite sites is the MIT CISR web site. This site hosts the working papers and research briefings, which are freely accessible. Today while I was going through them, I found one research briefing on Benefits of Enterprise Architecture. I found it very useful as it has given a list of both technology-related and business-related benefits of Enterprise Architecture.

The authors Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill, have described three types of technology-related benefits: IT costs, IT responsiveness and risk management. IT costs benefits include reduction in IT operations unit costs (cost of services such as helpdesk, network capacity and email) and application maintenance cost. IT responsiveness benefit includes reduction in develpment time. Finally, risk management benefits includes the following ones: reduced business risk, improved regulatory compliance, increased disaster tolerance and reduced security breaches.

The business-related benefits include the following:

• shared business platforms - greater data sharing and integrated process standards
• senior management and business unit management satisfaction
• strategic business impact - operational excellence, customer intimacy, product leadership and strategic agility
  

The research briefing also provides details about how maturity level of enterprise architecture help organizations grow these benefits.

Model Value Analysis

Today I read an excerpt of an upcoming book titled "Business Modeling: A Practical Guide to Realizing Business Value" written by David Bridgeland and Ron Zahavi, available on OMG web site. It discusses a very simple technique to ensure that business modeling does not run into trouble due to Model Value Destruction. Many of us must have heard of failed business modeling exercises in our own or our customer organizations. There are various reasons why business modeling projects fail. These include reasons such as model value destruction, scope failures, straight through modeling, creeping complexity, ugly models, and incompetent modelers. Though the book addresses how each of these dangers can be avoided, the available excerpt provides how model value destruction can be avoided with model value analysis.

Value destruction happens when the company takes an action that has a smaller economic
benefit than the cost of the action. Similarly, building some models incur more cost than the benefits that can be generated out of them, thus resulting into model value destruction. It can be avoided by using Model Value Analysis.

Simply put, model value analysis is a summary of the expected costs and the expected benefits, and a comparison of the two, as described in a spreadsheet. One sheet of the spreadsheet should list all the possible benefits of business modeling against which both estimated one-time and annual time savings should be recorded. There are eight benefits of business modeling as given below.

1. Communication
2. Training
3. Persuasion
4. Analysis
5. Compliance Checking
6. Requirements for software development
7. Direct Execution
8. Knowledge Management and reuse

It is not necessary that each modeling exercise should save time (and hence cost) against each one of the benefits listed above though one can discover additional benefits during model value analysis. In the second sheet, one must record all time spent (both one-time and annual) for business modeling against following elements:

1. Constructing the model
2. Socializing the model
3. Maintenance

While hours can be the unit to record both costs and benefits, perhaps dollar value is the better unit to use for comparison by taking into account personnel cost.

While this technique looks so simple, it may consume considerable amount of time and efforts if one employs it for making decision regarding complex business modeling exercise. A good rule of thumb is to spend 1% of the total anticipated modeling time on the model value analysis, to decide whether the other 99% makes economic sense.

BTW, after reading this excerpt, I am now awaiting the release of this book as it seems to have useful content on business modeling. Since it is being published by OMG itself, the quality has to be very good!

IBM's Smart SOA

IBM is spending millions of advertising dollars on promoting what they call as smart SOA. After ignoring for so many months, I finally decided to look into it. Following are my notes that are trying to capture the essence of smart SOA without any IBM advertising!

Smart SOA is a set of guiding principles based on IBM's thousands of real-life deployments and experiences with SOA. IBM defines four approaches for adoption of SOA: Fundamental, Extend End-to-End, Transform and Adapt Dynamically. Fundamental approach involves departmental, very focused projects to meet an individual business need. IBM has defined five entry points as the means to pursue this approach viz. reuse, connectivity, people, process and information. Projects associated with Reuse entry point typically involve creating reusable service-based business components out of existing IT systems. The connectivity entry point links people, processes and information in the business through the use of an intermediary service gateway or bus. The people entry point improves productivity by aggregating services as views, as well as enabling human interaction in the context of the business process. Common projects associated with process entry point include automating and optimizing manual business processes and human workflows. Finally the information entry point provides access as reusable services to complex, heterogeneous data sources within an enterprise.

The Extend end-to-end approach involves collaboration between business and IT to optimize and bring greater innovation to business processes that span the organization and extend beyond it. BPM enabled with SOA along with maintaining integrity across the processes is a major component of this approach. The Transform approach is a broader approach than the earlier ones as it involves using technology for strategic advantage. It is about innovating the business model itself as opposed to the individual end-to-end business processes through which that business model is implemented. Finally Adapt Dynamically approach involves creating a predictive business that responds to market forces in a semi-automated, intelligent way. It embeds a belief that the emerging ideal of rapid transformation in a semi-automated way will become increasingly possible as a critical mass of service providers in the ecosystem adopt SOA to enable the business to respond with agility to business opportunities.

IMHO, the first approach is the one which will be used by majority of enterprises as of today. Few innovative companies will go for second or third approach. The fourth approach seems to be quite futuristic though it provides a grand vision for SOA adoption.

The Keys to BPM Project Success

Today I read an article titled "The Keys to BPM Project Success", written by Derek Miers and published in Jan 2006 issue of BPTrends. This article describes a recipe for execution of a successful BPM project. In this blog, I am trying to capture the steps of the proposed BPM Project Delivery Framework. The article provides quite a few examples while describing these steps, which are worth reading once to get convinced for significance of each of the given steps.

Step 1 – Establish the Steering Group consisting of executive head of the affected business area, CIO or lead IT executive, BPM program manager (or head of BPM CoE, if exists) and senior LOB managers from the functions directly affected. Conduct the initial Steering Group Workshop to obtain formal commitment from the business, linkage between BPM program & strategy of the organization and tactical agreement on the choice of project & consensus on scope.

Step 2: Identify the suitable target process which has relatively low level of maturity, high impact and low complexity. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the selected initial project can complete within 3-6 months.

Step 3: Develop the business case that can be tied back to the Key Business Objectives (KBOs) of the organization. Techniques such as Goal Question Metric (GQM) technique developed by Victor Basili and his colleagues can be used to ensure alignment.

Step 4: Gain executive sponsorship

Step 5: Form the BPM Project Team consisting of BPM Project Manager, Senior User from the affected area, one or more SMEs from the LOB area, Lead Business Analysts and IT Specialists.

Step 6: Understand the process by using techniques such as Role Activity Diagrams (RADs) and Object State Transition Network (OSTN) techniques in addition to flow diagram based approaches.

Step 7: Identify breakthrough opportunities such as potential for faster cycle times, enhanced customer service, channel integration, minimizing the number of times of handling the work items,role rationalization, management and monitoring of personnel performance and better exception management.

Step 8: Develop and prototype on the BPM suite

Step 9: Implement and align organizational change

Besides this recipe for sucess, the article also provides a 16-points list of pitfalls to avoid. In all, the article is a good read of anyone interested and/or involved in initial BPM projects in an organization.

Colligo for SharePoint

Today while surfing the internet, I came across a Canada-based company called Colligo. Among its various products, one that caught my eyes is Colligo Reader. This product can be used to download the sharepoint site contents on the laptop, which can be read offline. It's a free download for personal (non-commercial) use. I have just installed it and downloaded a couple of internal sharepoint sites on my laptop using this product.

Before installing this product, I had an impression that I can now see the entire sharepoint site without being connected to the site over network. However, I then realized that I can only view the document libraries and lists offline using this software. While that has disappointed me a little, I have also figureed out that this itself has a lot of value for any user of sharepoint sites.

Obviously, the paid products from Colligo provide more powerful features such as two-way synchronization and I hope to at least try them out once I get comfortable with the use of Colligo Reader.

Developing Office Applications using SharePoint

Currently I am spending a good amount of time in learning and teaching how SharePoint can be used to develop office applications without coding. What are these office applications? One can define office applications as those applications that are owned by and used by the same department. I contrast them against enterprise applications, which are owned by one department but are used by multiple departments. Let me illustrate this classification with examples. Leave and Attendance System is owned by HR department but used by all of us. On other hand, recruitment application is owned by and used only by recruitment group.

Since Office applications are used by the same people who own them, they are typically easier to develop. Why so? A typical enterprise application becomes complex over a period of time, largely due to the growing exceptions that need to be incorporated and also due to the complex rules of authorization that get embedded in the applications. Since Office Applications are used by the same department, one can have minimal rules of authorization. Also the complex and one-time exceptions can be handled outside the system so that the system can be kept simple enough to maintain easily.

I know this line of thinking makes people uncomfortable. How can one have a system, which does not cover all kinds of exceptions that can arise? My argument is that by insisting on including all exceptions in the system, we end up having systems quite complicated and difficult to maintain over a period of time. For enterprise applications, this complexity is very much justified but not for office applications.

So what is the use of SharePoint in the development of office applications? Yes, one can develop office applications using Excel. Rather Excel has been popular among office workers, largely because office applications can be developed using Excel quite easily. What is missing though is the workflow feature in Excel. Also Excel files with large macros and data become difficult
to manage as they get stored on personal drives of office worker who develops them. Use of SharePoint provides same facility as that of Excel plus it provides workflow thereby giving complete solution framework for development of office applications that too without any coding!

Currently I am involved in development of an internal office application, which will be owned by and used by Training Department. I will continue to post learning from development of this
application on this blog site.

ERP products from India

When we think of ERP product coming from an Indian company, we can think of only Ramco. I just went on their site and found that they have now come up with ERP on Demand, which is nothing but a SaaS offering. What I found interesting on their site is one whitepaper in which they have addressed the security concern, which is associated with any hosted application. They have compared keeping data on capus against in vendor's data center with keeping family valuables in home against in bank's lockers. In India, where bank lockers are perceived to be quite safe to put family valuables, this comparison really connects with Indian psyche. Obviously they have provided quite a few details on the security of their data center and have mentioned their 27001 security certification. It's worth reading this whitepaper fully!

While Tally is a leader in accounting packages in India, its site also mentions an upcoming ERP product, named TallyAscent. It will be interesting to see how much market can be penetrated by TallyAscent.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised to see an ERP product from Godrej Infotech. eNccompass - ERP claims to have leveraged Godrej group's experience of running various manufacturing companies. It seems it has been implemented in various Godrej companies so it must have got matured by now. It will be worth watching its market penetration in coming time.

Billing Boss

While surfing net, I came across this interesting online business solution called Billing Boss. It is a free online invoicing tool, targeted for small businesses and freelancers. One can create, email and track the status of invoices. After watching the small video demo hosted on its site, it looked very easy to use this tool.

Since I neither run a small business nor I am a freelancer, I can't use it. But I guess it will be interesting to see how this site gets used in future.

mentor, trainer, consultant and counceller

Just came across this interesting way to classify mentor, trainer, consultant and counselor. It's as follows:

Mentor or Coach asks solution.
Trainer tells solution.
Consultant tells problem.
Counselor or Therapist asks problems.

One can also make a 2-by-2 matrix to put these roles in each grid!

SAP Enterprise Services Workplace

When I first heard of SAP Enterprise Services Workplace, I wondered why would SAP share complete interface details of its all enterprise services. Today I got some time to look at the website and was amazed by the availability of details available there. It seems to be quite an information overload though I plan to explore it for few days in coming weeks.

The Right Way Towards SOA

While browsing the web site of Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, I came across this interesting article on SOA adoption. Here are my notes:

In this article, the authors have identified two kinds of SOA: Technology SOA and Business SOA. An organization can go for Business SOA only after doing Technology SOA. The focus of Technology SOA is on reuse of technology components and IT productivity leading to faster and cheaper IT. On the other hand, the focus of Business SOA is on rapid reconfiguration of business processes and/or providing trading partners and customers with access into corporate systems, leading to better and faster IT.

The authors have then adapted the MIT CISR research, to construct an SOA maturity model as shown below:

Level 0: Ongoing Service Delivery
Level 1a: New Project Delivery
Level 1b: Governance and Alignment
Level 2: Technology SOA
Level 3: CIO/CxO Relationship
Level 4: Business SOA

It's worth reading the whole article to understand more details about each of these six capabilities.

Learning resources for process modeling using BPMN

Today I found following two very useful learning resources for process modeling using BPMN:

1. process modeling using BPMN - article series
2. process modeling using BPMN - eLearning series

I am still reading them!

Courage as a Skill

The January 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review has focus on the leadership. One of the articles that I read yesterday was from Kathleen K Reardon from USC Marshall School of Business. In this article, the author has argued that courageous action in business is rarely impulsive, rather it is a special kind of calculated risk taking. She has coined a term, "courage calculation", which has been defined as a method of making success more likely while avoiding rash, unproductive or irrational behavior. Following six discrete processes make up the courage calculation:

1. Setting primary and secondary goals, which are reasonably within reach, not pie-in-the-sky ambitions.
   
2. Determining the importance of achieving them
3. Tipping the power balance in your favor
4. Weighing risks against benefits
5. Selecting the proper time for action, which requires a deep sensitivity to one's surroundings and a great deal of patience.
   
6. Developing contingency plans

Let me quote the last para of this article, which very well sums up the entire article.

"In the end, courage in business rests on priorities that serve a personal, an organizational, or a societal philosophy. When this philosophy is buttressed by clear, obtainable primary and secondary goals, an evaluation of their importance, a favorable power base, a careful assessment of risk versus benefits, appropriate timing and well-developed contingency plans, managers are better empowered to make bold moves that serve their organizations, their careers and their own sense of personal worth."

Becoming an architect in a system integrator

My colleague, Amit Unde, recently wrote an article, titled Becoming an architect in a system integrator, in the latest issue of The Architecture Journal. In this article, Amit has described variations of architect role, explained the architect competencies and has provided useful advice to aspiring architects.

Amit has captured following three variations of architect role by putting them on a two-by-two matrix with Technology Focus one one axis and Strategy Focus on the other axis:

1. Technical Architect on higher side of Technology Focus (indicating technology depth) and on lower side of Strategy Focus (indicating project scope).
2. Enterprise Architect on lower side of Technology Focus (indicating technology breadth) and on higher side of Strategy Focus (indicating organization scope).
3. Solution Architect exactly at the center of matrix

While there could be varying opinions on this way of defining architect roles, I tend to agree with these definitions.

Amit has also explained the architecture competencies. He has constructed a pyramid in which the foundation consists of leadership, relationship management and variety of experience. The middle layer for skills consists of domain knowledge, project management, technical acumen and communication skills. Finally the top layer consists of strategic mindset.

The advice for aspiring architects contains pointers to educational resources, certifications and groups and forums. But what are more interesting are the tips on how to choose employer for availing desired development opportunities!

In all, it's a good read for any practicing or aspiring architect.

Our SOA article got published in IT Professional magazine

I co-authored an article titled "Where do you want to go in SOA adoption journey?" some months back. It is now published in IT Professional, which is an IEEE magazine. If you have access to IEEE Digital Library then you can read the article at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6294/4525527/04525540.pdf?tp=&isnumber=&arnumber=4525540

Please share your feedback on the article with me.