Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

When Anne Thomas Manes (of the Burton Group) famously declared in January of 2009 that "SOA is dead", everyone rushed around to understand what she meant. Being that a year later she's still giving presentations on SOA Governance and other SOA topics, clearly she didn't mean that SOA was a failed technology. (There are plenty of IT technologies that come along with much hype but never quite translate into practical usage patterns or benefits for Enterprise IT, and therefore fade away as quickly as they arrived.) Today when I'm talking with IT organizations the majority are doing some level of SOA. So clearly SOA has moved along the adoption curve. The innovators struggled with it but got and touted their early advantage. The early adopters picked it up and integrated it into their enterprise IT model. We're clearly past even the early majority and a good way into the late majority. The late majority are organizations that 2 years ago weren't consider...

I had a chat with a former co-worker at a US Fortune 50 about IT direction, what is the status for the people there now? Leading in to the conversation is the fact they formerly had a US $1 BILLION dollar IT budget, 5,000 US IT workers and another 2,000 positions outsourced (to India). First they cut that budget to $800 million, then cut a straight 25% of the US IT workforce... Friend: I miss you so much in the office... these people will chase their tales for months, its insane. Akiva: So basicaly Company has pulled back from IT being strategic to just another basic function they have to put up with? Friend: Its funny because everyone is frustrated... they all want it done the "right" way... but won't invest the money to do it that way. So we spin round and round trying to find a cheap, but "right" way to do it and it never happens. Today I'm chasing another department to get 'free' services that they don't give away free (without internal c...

While I was working as a senior manager in a Fortune 500 IT department, we went through a recession, and a few years later through the U.S. outsourcing offshoring trend. During the 2001 recession, management reacted with reasonable downturn planning. Business management requested a certain level of cutbacks (say 7%) and IT listed projects that could reasonably be cancelled. Things difficult to cut back (without very serious planning) such as operations - keeping the lights on, normal systems maintenance & support operations, planned regulatory system work, and required upgrades (due to vendors end-of-support-life), these were all off limits. New development and system enhancements were on the line. IT management also reacted in a normal downturn mode. Middle IT management had gotten a bit fat, so they trimmed middle management. For the remainder, they turned to their managers and instructed them to lifeboat. Those employees who weren't considered key - who weren't a subject...

Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf (IT analyst) wrote... Today I visited a client whose IT budget is no more than 1.6% of its revenues. His boss asked him to cut 20% of the capital investment and 10% of the operational budget (a total of 10% compared to budget 2008). In order to do this the company will stop projects that could have increased revenues, some that could reduce costs and some cuts would increase the risk of IT failures. Now my thoughts: By cutting 0.16% of revenues (as expenses) the company lost much more. Does it make sense to cut IT without a real analysis??? Clearly this company has designated IT as a pure expense center and utility service provider. As far as the business management is concerned, IT is no different than: Facilities Management - Tell them to cut and they can eliminate the office plants and cut back on window cleaning. Cleaning Service - Tell them to cut back and have a somewhat less clean office. Security Service - Lock a few more doors inconveniencing how peopl...

Jim Sinur at the Gartner Blog network writes... BPM portends to make process work easy and some activities / technologies are fairly simple to work with in process improvement. Process modeling is a great example of this principle. While getting the correct process model and getting all stakeholders to agree to it is certainly a challenge, but the BPM tools supporting process modeling are deceptively easy to work with in the modeling arena. Business professionals get real excited when they see their processes and find ways to cut costs and time out of them. It’s all good, right? The problem is that this gives business professionals the impression that this is pretty easy stuff. When the processes involve composite processes that require significant IT support to complete, things do not move that fast. BPM actually gives the false impression that things are easier than they look... It gets much more difficult when the some of the process goes below the water line a needs web service or...