Kevin Mullins

Web 2.0 patterns flowing into Enterprise 2.0

In December I wrote about my understanding of Web 2.0. In January and February I touched on SOA, BPM, EIM and Enterprise 2.0. I have been skeptical about WEB 2.0 adoption in the Enterprise and look forward to Enterprise 2.0 strategies to be introduced in business. This past week ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe wrote about the new studies and reports that show a movement toward some Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 strategies, however points out that there many discussions occurring at the Senior C-level, and there is already a movement started at the ground level surrounding blogs and wiki's. To read more .......

More results on use of Web 2.0 in business emerge by ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe-- The last few weeks have seen a series of interesting new reports, studies, and papers on the past, present, and future of Web 2.0 concepts and applications as applied to businesses. Most notable for many industry watchers have been fairly rigorous new works by McKinsey & Company as well as Forrester, whom have each released the results of broad surveys of executives in various industries. The focus of both surveys was to capture a picture of the interests, activities, motivators for Web 2.0 adoption of several thousand C-level executives in medium to large companies...........

"Effective Web 2.0 in the enterprise, whether that's basic Enterprise 2.0 or a much broader and expansive view of Web 2.0 design patterns and business models which I've called Product Development 2.0 for lack of a better term, actually requires the active support of both the users on the ground as well as the top levels of an organization to really take off. Business are structured much differently that the consumer Web and major impediments to use of Web 2.0 production and consumption scenarios exist. This include lack of good enterprise search, mountains of closed legacy systems, the challenge of securing highly open, deeply integrated applications, and conflicting data models (XML, relational data, rich media, and more.) These are all challenges to the ultimate success of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, even to the point that some organizations are increasingly at risk of IT users doing so much themselves that the IT department can begin to lose control." Read full article

I see this move to Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 as a change in Computer Information strategy and philosophy. We have worked thru the days of punch cards, green terminals, closed systems, open systems, client server, static web strategies, and now we are moving beyond that to a Web Services - Service Oriented Architecture that is secure enough for the Enterprise and flexible enough to allow input and refinement from many more sources within Enterprise.

Technorati : Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

Event Monitoring and Support Tools

I have responsibility for both the Unix Operations and the Windows Operation within our company, and I struggle to find tools that work well in both environments. Both groups work autonomously and do a great job of supporting their respective environments, however as our responsibilities grow, I would like to find consistent tools for maintaining, monitoring and supporting our environments.

Two tools that do work in both environments are BMC Patrol for performance gathering and HP Openview for event notification and monitoring. We are not using Openview to monitor our network, instead we use it for system and event monitoring. We have a decent baseline of monitored events, however we struggle with event escalation especially when new errors or a new event occurs. We have installed IBM Director on the IBM nodes and it passes Hardware events to Openview, and we have scripted certain events which also hand off to Openview. There still is a lot of refinement needed in our process as many events enter Openview and are not reacted to because the criticality level is identified incorrectly or the followup and escalation are not defined in Openview. We are looking to reduce the number of system outages that impact our user community by improving our event escalation and notification.

Another tool that is in use in on our Unix platform is Tripwire.Tripwire is an auditing tool that will identify changes in files and will enable you to better track changes in your environment. We have started looking the Tripwire on the Wintel side and hope to have it deployed within a month.

I am open to others thoughts and experiences surrounding event monitoring and event notification in a multi-OS environment and would be glad to discuss this in detail.

Technorati : Infrastructure, Microsoft, Support, System Administration, Unix

More on BPM and SOA

As a manager of applications delivery and infrastructure support, I see a trend in application development and delivery around BPM and SOA. I have identified a couple video-casts from the ZDNet network that are related to BPM and SOA and are relevant to the shift in application delivery toward a service oriented architecture. Please check it out .......

Matthew Quinn, the vice president of product strategy and management at Tibco talks about Business Process Management BPM in his white-board session What is BPM. Matt talks about BPM as end to end control and management of the flow of work in the enterprise

Dan Farber of ZDNet and Behind the Lines fame, provides an overview of SOA in his whitebait session on What is SOA. Dan talks about Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) as a loosely coupled set of services that are flexible and can be replace with any other service. These services provide lower cost, easy integration, and are faster to change and replace, according to Dan, that's SOA.

Dan has another video-cast that talks about SOA for the Masses, where he talks about SOA as a group of smaller independent services (opposed to Larger Applications) that talk to each other and build and deliver flexible applications. These services move from high cost and high complexity applications to easier less complex services that non-technical folks can develop.

Bill Roth, from BEA Systems talks about SOA and why SOA is for Real. Bill talks about how Java is moving us out of the older client server model and into a applications infrastructure model. Bill comments on how 3 of every 4 IT dollars are spent gluing older applications together, and feels that we can reduce these costs and solve this problem thru a SOA, which includes services for messaging, data and security services.

To watch more ZDNET White-board videos, follow this link

Technorati : Enterprise Web 2.0, Infrastructure, SOA, Web 2.0

Daylight Savings Time Patches

Most IT managers are aware of the change in Daylight Savings Time and the impact this will have on our environments. I think we can all agree that it is not going to crash our systems or impact us in a manner similar to that predicted for Y2K, however our challenge as Technical Managers is to ensure that our computer systems remain up, available and in sync from a time perspective.

These days with enterprise wide domain controllers, email, calendaring, blackberries, and multiple gadgets you do not want to have a problem with time synchronization.

Here is a list of some of the critical patches you may need for your environment:

- Windows Server Patches

- Windows Exchange Patches

- Blackberry Patches

Good Luck .....

Technorati : Infrastructure, Microsoft, System Administration, network-administration

Enterprise Web 2.0

Last month I wrote a post on Web 2.0 where I attempted to explain Web 2.0. I pointed out that we see tremendous support and adoption of Web 2.0 applications on the consumer/internet side, but the adoption within the enterprise has been slow and somewhat cautious. In my definition of WEB 2.0, the focus of WEB 2.0 is the web interface, and in enterprise applications, the interface (web or other) is just on piece of the application puzzle.

Last week I started piecing together a topology strategy that I labeled a SOA topology. I tried to document each piece of this topology and came to the realization that I was wrong and SOA is not the topology but a architecture and a real piece of the Application Delivery puzzle. I realizing that there is more to application delivery than Web 2.0 and SOA and my User->Portal->BPM->SOA->EIM model is more of a methodology than a topology, and this methodology already has a name: Enterprise Web 2.0

David Precopio, a strategic and technical Marketing Executive from cio20.com writes about Enterprise Web 2.0 and defines Enterprise Web 2.0 as:

Enterprise Web 2.0 -is a complete business methodology that increases collaboration and access to information and people, enhances the end-user experience by embracing the latest web technologies, and takes advantage of legacy applications and data either through prepackaged applications or through composite web applications built on and with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Application Integration.

After reading David's blog cio20.com, I realized that SOA is an architecture built around Web 2.0, Business Process Management and some sort of DataBase Integration. I can see the shift in the industry away from older client server and web 1.0 technologies toward Enterprise Web 2.0 methodologies, however I realize that most large Enterprise's move very slowly and their rate of Technology adoption is 2 to 3 years behind the smaller more agile businesses.

Another source of good Enterprise Web 2.0 discussions and strategy is Dion Hinchcliffe's Enterprise Web 2.0 blog at ZDNet. This week Dion writes about how enterprises are not jumping at Web 2.0 applications but points out that big software firms are starting to get into the game and they will influence the enterprise......

Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0 by ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe -- While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world. That didn't stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies -- from Ajax to social networking -- would actually be to the business world. However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead and experiment or conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out. That's because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run in the vast majority of the business world haven't had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.

Finally, I am really beginning to understand this methodology. My interest comes from my attempt to understand how these applications will be designed, developed and deployed, and identifying what the impact will be to our organization. I see adoption at the enterprise level as limited and restricted by older rigid applications that make porting to a Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy difficult. In my opinion, the best strategy will be to build new applications using Enterprise Web 2.0 methodologies and stay away from a porting or wrapping strategy that will force you to adopt a half and half strategy that includes a Web 2.0 front-end and an older application for your back end.

Please feel free to comment .....

Technorati : BPM, Enterprise Web 2.0, SOA

SOA Refinement and Application Delivery

In my last post I spoke of exploring an SOA model and all of the components that I think are part of an SOA model. If I make any mistakes or should you disagree with my though process or this model, please feel free to comment or send email to me at kevin@kmmm.net.

Here is the model from my last post:

Users -> Portal -> BPM -> SOA -> EIM

Users: We all know what users are, most of us are users of one application or another. Users are the folks in the Call Center, or in accounting, or doing order entry. In a non-enterprise environment they are the folks looking at Utube or connecting to Linken-In.

Portal: Portals have really changed in the last 10 years to be flexible, with user configurable interfaces and no client side installations, portal have grown past Client Server repositories to flexible front ends, configure by Applications Support folks.

A good example of a portal is the Liferay Portal. The Liferay Portal is an open source enterprise portal with integrated security and many variations for flexible deployment. It is an off-the-shelf Portal that will allow most companies to be up in running in hours as opposed to developing Portal technologies within the enterprise.

Here is Wikipedia's definition of an Enterprise Information Portal:

Enterprise Information Portals are one of the most popular ways in which enterprises can allow their employees and customers to search and access corporate information. It is a single gateway for users, such as employees, customers and company's partners to log into and retrieve corporate information, company history and other services or resources.

BPM: Business Process Management: When I think of BPM I think of Business process refinement. In large enterprise's, I see BPM as a Workflow, built into applications or a Workflows built into a process.

Here is Wikipedia's definition of BPM:

The term Business Process Management (or BPM) refers to activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes. While such improvements are hardly new, software tools called business process management systems (BPM systems) have made such activities faster and cheaper. BPM systems monitor the execution of the business processes so that managers can analyze and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch. BPM differs from business process re engineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at one-off revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolution.

SOA: Service Oriented Architecture.

Kevin's definition of SOA: SOA is a flexible application development and deployment strategy. It is an architecture and a topology that introduces new business tasks and applications into the enterprise in a consistent flexible manner.

Wikipedia Definition of SOA:

Service-oriented architecture (SOA [pronounced "sō-uh" or "es-ō-ā"]) describes a software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of business processes and software users. Resources on a network^[1] in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.^[2]

A service-oriented architecture is not tied to a specific technology. It may be implemented using a wide range of technologies, including REST, RPC, DCOM, CORBA or Web Services. to read more follow SOA link.

EIM: Enterprise Information Management

EIM overview and whitepapers from TechRepublic:

A coherent EIM strategy is a fundamental requirement for managing the huge volumes of data businesses accumulate. An EIM strategy will allow business users to have access to many and different types of information coming from multiple data sources across the enterprise. The information can then be accessed, in many cases, through an information portal being fed with data from operational data stores.

Application deployment and SOA

I work in a application delivery and support group and I am very familiar with Network and Operating system setup and support. I understand the tiered architecture approach and the majority of the applications that I support are Client Server based, with my team supporting the middle tier.

Recently while sitting in a long 2 hour meeting, I had a conversation with our Application Architect concerning SOA, and Web 2.0. I was looking for examples of Web 2.0 and SOA in our infrastructure and at first he was somewhat reluctant to talk about SOA but I pressed him further and we agreed to meet after the meeting to discuss.

Once we met, I told him about my blog and I explained that I was interested in better understanding real word examples of SOA as opposed to digging into any possible new application strategies introduced by our recent merger. He understood and told me that there were more components in a SOA topology than just Web 2.0 and SOA.

We spoke about how older applications had been designed and written to complete 10 to 15 different but similar tasks. In a SOA topology, each one of the 10 to 15 different tasks are broken down into an individual task and delivered as flexible services. He stepped thru the following Application Model within a SOA topology:

Users -> Portal -> BPM -> SOA -> EIM

In the next couple of weeks, I am going to attempt to dive into this model and share my recent understanding of an SOA topology, and try and give real examples of each component.

Predictions for 2007

Wikipedia describes a prediction as a forecast that is a statement or claim that a particular event will occur in the future . My predictions are closer to my opinions than statements of fact. My opinions are formed from reading and listening to many technical and managerial blogs and podcasts.

Here are my predictions - opinions for 2007:

1) Web 2.0 adoption will continue to grow especially on customer facing sites. Established companies will start to incorporate functionality for feedback and community support around their products.

2) Web 2.0 companies are creating opportunities and not a Dot-Com bubble.

The Wall Street Journal Online invited two technology venture capitalists, who were active in the dot-com days and have invested in the current crop of startups, to debate the topic. Todd Dagres spent nearly a decade at Battery Ventures before starting Spark Capital last year. David Hornik, a partner at August Capital and a former Silicon Valley attorney, writes the popular VentureBlog. Todd Dagres supports that theory that the current Web 2.0 activity is another dot-com bubble and David Hornik opposes Todd stating that this new Internet Web 2.0 activity is an opportunity for progress.

Some Web 2.0 companies may not make it in 2007 however this surge in Technology and surge in spending is good of the economy and good for the Technology Industry.

3) Industry adoption of Web 3.0 functionality or whatever it will be called will not happen until sometime after 2007.

Ken Rutkowski from Ken Radio calls Second Life a Web 3.0 application, however given the complexity defining Web 2.0 and the debate surrounding adoption, I think it's too early to define a company or an application as Web 3.0. My guess is that there will be a lot of discussion surrounding this topic in 2007.

4) Virtualization will continue to grow in 2007

In my opinion, server Virtualization is already mainstream. We will see continued growth in the software applications space, the software testing space and in the storage space. I also think that competition between Vmware and Microsoft will heat up in this space.

5) Continued growth in Voice Over IP (VOIP)

VOIP works great in a nice controlled environment where folks can monitor usage and network performance, however I am still skeptical about Global-Enterprise level VOIP over the INTERNET. Sure Skye works and is very useful on a Business trip, however I would be very skeptical delivering Skye to the CEO of a large global company. I see more development in this space before VOIP is ready for the global enterprise.

6) Email is not dead.

Email may change, however I see it growing in 2007 before plateauing in 2008. Web 2.0 adoption and the Internet usage is still growing, which drives email requests and requirements. In the coming years we may move to more of a voice, video, IM or SMS means of communication, however that is far in the future.

Also, email is embedded in the fabric of all support organizations. We receive hundreds of alerts and events every day. The consumer experience may change, but email will remain at the heart of all support organizations.

7) The convergence of Video, Movies, TV Shows, and Podcasts onto the Internet will continue. The Internet is another delivery mechanism for Content suppliers and they have finally realized that fact.

8) Adoption of Web Based OS's and applications will grow. Products like goowy, youOS, and eyeOS offer community based services that can be useful to many SBM's.

Your comments are welcome .....

Happy New Year