latoga labs

For the past few months, I have been working with two well know Financial Services firms around “SOA” initiatives. I put quotes around SOA because different terms describing services are used in each firm for various reasons (usually politically in nature). At the core, each firm is looking at how to use services to facilitate greater levels of reuse within their development organizations. One interesting fact to note is each firm’s primary driver: one is doing this to reduce the rate of increase in IT spend, the other is hoping to increase the velocity of their application development cycles (shorten the cycles to get products out faster).

One of the most interesting aspects that has come out of this work is the acute awareness of the social aspects of SOA and how important that is for the success of any initiative. (Steve Vinoski has written a wonderful article about the Social Side of Services).

Firm A has invested considerably in socializing the concepts of SOA and reuse through out their organization (up to the highest levels of management). They have a very clear plan on how to implement services across their organization; understanding of new positions that will need to be added to ensure services succeed; functional technical areas that will need to be addressed to enable services; mechanisms to measure the amount of reuse in order to track their progress; programs to educate the developers on services and reuse. All this work was done by the Office of the CTO and took time and effort to put in place, but Firm A realized the need for this and made this investment.

Firm B decided over a year ago that they needed to do SOA based on all the hype in the market place. This decision was made by the business side of the house versus the technology side. Services were soon showing up in project requirements the business side was sending over to the IT Development groups. There was no real centralized planning or coordination with regards to services. Now IT is playing catchup and trying to make sense of all services currently out there. One of the big problems they have is that most of the services that are available are not really reusable by most others, just services internal functionally from applications.

Doing a postmortem on Firm B’s services, you see a number of number of mis-steps that has been taken with their SOA initiative. One issue is the fact that the business side of the house needs to provide functional requirements, not technical requirements. A second, more important, issues is that fact that Firm B totally ignored the social side of SOA…they never took into account the political, organization, and cultural changes that need to be implemented to make SOA really work for them. They never did an analysis of how services could benefit their application environment.

While on paper Firm B has been doing SOA much long than Firm A, Firm A will see value from SOA much sooner than FirmB. In this case, a little investment will go a long way for Firm A.

It’s still amazes me how much technology development or implementation (even at large companies) occurs without taking into consider the social impact of the technology. Even when it’s the social impact of technology on techies (i.e., developers or managers of technology).

I’m curious to hear from others with regards to the social techniques in use within their organizations when it comes to SOA or technology in general…

I just happened to surf over to the Sun website today and ran across Proejct Blackbox. a quote from the website: “Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized data center–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.”

I didn’t spend more than 10 seconds thinking about this before I thought…that doesn’t make sense. The whole concept of a ‘portable’ data center for quick capacity addition make sense. Take a shipping container, insert a cooling system, power system (with one huge plug!), and 1U servers and presto…instant portable mini-data center.

The problem…why in the world would you paint the thing black? (I’ll get to the logos in a bit)

Let me see if I remember back to my high school physics courses….black absorbs light, white reflects it….got it. Big steel container with hot computers running inside of it. The container is designed to just be dropped off in the parking lot next to your data center…most likely in the direct sun. Let’s paint it black so it get even hotter and paint a big Sun Log on it so everyone knows what it is (psst: guys…ever wonder why most of your customer’s data centers don’t have big signs out front that says “XYZ Corp. Data Center”?)

This seems to be a great example of Marketing taking over a technology project and making bad decisions based on the need to add value (note: I have worked in marketing, and have great friends who are marketing wizards…). Let’s hope that common and business sense takes over for Sun on this project before this prototype goes into production.

This weekend was a series of technology distractions…something that happens from time to time much to the chagrin of my ever growing “not done yet” list…

Somehow, I discovered that Google finally ported their mobile Google Maps to the Palm OS. When was this released and how was it that I missed it until now?!?

Google maps running on a BlackBerry was one of the envy’s of mine since I first saw it. To have the power of Google Maps in my Palm Treo while traveling would be pure luxury. Especially with the nature of business sales travel…rushing to a meeting without directions, sudden changes to schedules, new customer locations, not knowing where the nearest Peet’s Coffee is…oh how business travel has changed with technology.

After using Google Maps for the past few days, I think it has made to the list of “must haves” for my Treo. The real time traffic info was a life saver already. And the satellite imagery is as cool as always…I was amazed at the zoom level on the phone…it almost seems to allow a closer zoom than Google Maps online. I guess I finally have to get around to trimming that tree in the front yard and figuring out who’s white car that is in my driveway?

Today I came across the new Treo 680 smart phone. The latest phone in the Treo line is targeted to be a “low cost” Treo for the masses. Treonauts has a wonderful review of the new phone. Upon first review, there isn’t a whole lot of new features in this phone other than the obvious change in form factor and color options. It makes sense that a phone targeted at the masses wouldn’t have a whole lot of new capabilities. The questions that immediately come to my mind is why has it take Palm so long to come out with this phone? There was a substantial gap between the Treo 650 and the next Treo Phone. I would have expected the 680 to have been along within a year of the 650.

I have been a palm user since about 1998 and an addict to my Palm 650 since the first day I had it. Finally, mobile email, my phone, and all the palm apps that I have embedded into my life in a single device! Sure, there are issues with the 650 (speaker not loud enough, lack of an easy way to switch from ring to vibrate to silent, wholly inadequate built in mail applicaiton) but it was a Palm! And Palm would fix those usability issues with the next phone right (well, not with the 70X series, but surely with the 680…can’t wait to get my hands on one to find out…)

But why was I addicted? It’s not because the Treo is the best phone or the best phone/PDA combo. The primary reason I have been addicted to my 650 is the fact that it runs the Palm OS. I have been using the PalmOS for so long that the thought of switching to a different platform scares me because of the all the applications and data that lives on my 650 and how dependant I have become upon them. Thinking of how much time it would take to integrate a new device into my work flow as well as converting the 10,000+ contacts scares me.

The real question that the 680 raises from me is the viability of the palm platform. What was the cause of the significant gap in time between the 650 and the 700 or 680? There are rumors flying around like crazy about Palm pushing Microsoft to let them develop a more “palm like” interface to Windows Mobile; of Palm porting the PalmOS to Linux; etc.

The real question is, should I start suffering through the pain of a conversion off of Palm?