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1908

TheStar.com | Ideas | 1908: The year of living dangerously

Three books from a century ago suggest that then– as now – fear, paranoia and concern over new technology ruled the day
Aug 03, 2008 04:30 AM

Kenneth Kidd







Feature Writer

The
launch of centuries may be marked by dates with a couple of zeroes, but
this is, strictly speaking, just a matter of mathematical convention.

At
least in the West, those dates scarcely ever mark a real shift in the
course of human history, what we think of as "defining" centuries. That
tends to come later, long after the double zeroes have passed.

What
we now view as recognizably 19th-century – in society, politics and
economics – didn't really get under way until after the Napoleonic Wars
and the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe and
established, at least in relative terms, a long period of peace.

The last century was similarly slow to reveal itself. The Edwardians
certainly knew that change was afoot, but they still had far more in
common with late Victorian society than the kind of world that
developed after the First World War – one truly dominated by
mass-produced automobiles and passenger airplanes, arguably the two
defining technologies of 20th-century life.

So it's tempting,
especially in the wake of dire pronouncements from the Bush
administration, to view 9/11 as the similar launch of a new era. But in
light of history, that may be premature. Chances are we've yet to see,
or at least recognize, the real defining moment of the coming century.

There
are, after all, just too many parallels between today and 1908 –
another threatening time of apprehension, paranoia and new technology –
especially for the superpowers of the day, Britain then and the United
States now.

As it happens, that mood of bewildering uncertainty
and fear looms in the background of three British novels published
almost exactly a century ago: Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), coming on the heels of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), one of whose characters just happens to have been the inspiration for the Unabomber of our times.

And
yet, the novels respond to the public mood in different fashion,
offering a spectrum of emotional reaction that also seems present
today: escapism and longing for a simpler life (Grahame), dark gloom
about the inevitability of horrors to come (Conrad), and a sort of
qualified optimism (Chesterton).

The parallels between Great
Britain at the turn of the last century and the United States today are
broad – superpowers coming to terms with, if not their frailty, then at
least their vulnerability, the passing of any easy sense of
invincibility.

Britain had just emerged from the Boer War, in
which it took three years and a total of 450,000 troops (including
Canadians) to quell a band of rebellious farmers turned guerrillas.

This
was not auspicious. Even such a committed imperialist as Colonial
Secretary Joseph Chamberlain likened the British Empire to a "weary
Titan staggering under the too vast orb of its own fate."

With so
many troops abroad, Britain entered the 20th century gripped by fears
of an imminent French invasion and tales (real and imagined) of German
spies, much of it fomented by pulp fiction and Fleet Street.

Such
was the perceived lack of intelligence about the spying and military
designs of its enemies that by 1909, Britain was creating the Secret
Service Bureau, ancestor of today's MI5 and MI6.

In similar
fashion, the United States now finds itself (and 140,000 troops) mired
in Iraq, overstretched militarily at huge cost ($530 billion U.S. so
far in Iraq alone) and feeling – at least in the public imagination –
more or less alone against the world.

(A recent map of the
planet circulating on the Internet shows the United States as
"AMERICA!!!!" accompanied by "WE R #111111." Less fortunate, at least
in labelling, is the rest of the world: "uninhabited" (Canada),
"pussies" (Europe) and "evil-doers!!" (The Middle East), with the
additional instruction, via arrow, that "bombs go here.")

Having been attacked on its own soil, the United States is still, understandably, awash in fear and paranoia post-9/11.

Nor
is that sense of being potentially vulnerable and unprepared reserved
for the great unwashed. Last month, the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation launched a recruiting drive to attract Arab-speakers, of
which it apparently still has shockingly few.

For most Americans,
in fact, the motives and goals of Muslim extremists are probably
perplexing beyond the basic fact that there are people out there who
hate them and their way of life. That scarcely allays trepidation. What
are terrorists really after, and what might they do to get it?

The
British of 1908 were equally beset, not by Muslim terrorists but by
bomb-wielding anarchists hoping to wipe the slate clean. Anarchists
had, after all, already made an attempt to blow up the Greenwich
Observatory in London, then as much a symbol of the modern world order
as the World Trade Center.

How to react to all this was, at heart, what propelled Grahame, Conrad and Chesterton into print a century ago.

Near the beginning of The Wind in the Willows
– Grahame's great lament for the passing of a cozy pastoral life – the
Water Rat exults to the visiting Mole: "Believe me, my young friend,
there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

Grahame's
is a world full of simple riverside pleasures and the glory of nature –
an Arcadian, organic society where everyone has a place and feels a
responsibility to look out for his neighbour (women, alas, don't figure
prominently). It's a kind of pastoral escapism, but the threats to it
are ever-present, whether in the form of technological advances (the
then-new motor cars so adored by Toad) or those who inhabit the Wild
Wood.

Ratty, in a wonderful bit of English understatement, says
of the weasels, stoats and foxes: "They're all right in a way – I'm
very good friends with them – pass the time of day when we meet, and
all that – but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and
then – well, you can't really trust them, and that's a fact."

This is, of course, because weasels & co. have a noted tendency to, well, eat rats.

Grahame's book may not have been intended as an overt allegory in the way that George Orwell's Animal Farm clearly
was, but Grahame's biographer, Peter Green, writes that the Wild Wood
is "like the urban mob anarchists of every Edwardian upper-middle-class
nightmare."

The whole "messing about in boats" business and even
Toad's caravan and motor-car adventures also comes out of a sturdy
Victorian line of English literature, one that celebrates the
"fun-loving boy" as a kind of ideal person, notes Roger Sale in Fairy Tales and After. (Peter Pan, from the same era, says that he wants "always to be a little boy and have fun.")

They
live in charmed little circles, small spaces away from the horrors of
urban life and industrialization, where "animal etiquette" forbids
anyone from dwelling on "possible trouble ahead," as Mole remarks.
(It's a model that tightly gripped the English imagination until the
boy, as Sale puts it, "gained his apotheosis as a young victim in
Flanders.")

Such longing for escape, to turn the clock back on
such modern worries as global warming, seems increasingly with us
today. It shows in such books about decamping the city as Michael
Korda's Country Matters or Jim Mullen's It Takes a Village Idiot.

But
it may be most present in matters of food. At one point, Ratty sends a
couple of field mice off to the shops to fetch provisions, instructing
them to insist on "fresh, mind" and "only the best," which he defines
as "home-made, no tinned stuff."

In other words, intensely local
food (locavores take note) and likely what we would now call organic,
with an uplifting back-story about its production.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma,
calls today's version "Supermarket Pastoral" – in which the labelling
on "natural" and "organic" foods often makes it seem as if they come
from some idyllic countryside where cows are invariably contented,
wandering free and freely giving. An illusion, in short, we seem to
crave.

Joseph Conrad, the weathered seafarer, has seen too much to believe any escape possible. In The Secret Agent, modelled directly on the anarchist attack in Greenwich, he has no illusions about anything.

Anarchists and spies are running amok in London. There are plots and counterplots, and no one can be sure whom to trust.

The
central character, Adolf Verloc, is a porn-shop owner and double agent,
spying on behalf of an unnamed European embassy, but also feeding
information to the police who, as a result, have a decent track record
preventing anarchist plots from succeeding.

This, however, will
no longer suffice for Verloc's cruel embassy boss, a Mr. Vladimir, who
wants a real explosion, one that will help bring about a pan-European
crackdown on all manner of anarchists and reds.

Vladimir settles
on an attack against science, in the form of Greenwich, and his
reasoning is a chilling peek into the rationale of any terrorist, then
or now:

"What is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so
absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in
fact, mad."

Verloc sets to his task, and nothing but unrelenting
tragedy ensues, as Verloc has, Conrad tells us, "one single amiable
weakness: the idealistic belief in being loved for himself."

He
eventually dies at the hands of his wife, who runs off with another
anarchist, Ossipon, and then commits suicide when Ossipon abandons her,
fearing for his own life.

Conrad's world is all gloom and weary resignation to the realpolitik
horrors of the planet. It's a mindset seemingly not far removed from
many Americans today, when a presumptive Republican nominee, John
McCain, can openly talk about a cruel world in which the U.S. might
have to remain in Iraq for the next 100 years.

For a glimmer of
hope, you have to turn to Chesterton, who similarly weaves a tale of
anarchists – these ones led by a revolutionary council whose members
are all named after days of the week, with the hulking figure of Sunday
at the helm.

Their planned outrage is the assassination of the
Russian czar and the French president, and a kind of frightening farce
ensues when our hero, Thursday, sets out to prevent it from happening.

Here,
too, it's hard to know just who can be trusted: The other members of
the council turn out to be, like Thursday, police officers.

Author and critic Jonathan Lethem likens Chesterton's book to a kind of "perfect midpoint" between Conrad and Grahame.

Thursday
and company endure an anarchist hell, but they also arrive at a country
estate where, fleetingly, "they all agreed that in some unaccountable
way the place reminded them of their boyhood," writes Chesterton.

There is a degree of reassurance.

His tale is subtitled A Nightmare, which suggests it's a horror imagined as much as real, and it has, by definition, already passed.

Yes,
the book is littered with references to the duality of people, good
twinned with evil within them. But there is also a qualified hope. Even
in the face of contrary evidence, Chesterton's characters mostly
believe that the mass of people will, when pressed, do the right and
decent thing.

And there is always a hint of hope in small things,
as when one character remarks: "God forbid that madness should in any
way interrupt friendship."

A measure of that guarded optimism, or
a willingness to be optimistic in the face of much contrary evidence,
also seems at play in the United States today. You can see it in the
emotional response of many Americans (and lately, Europeans) to Barrack
Obama's "Yes, we can" message of hope.

At last report, McCain and
Obama remained virtually tied in the polls, which could serve as a
loose proxy for America's conflicted mood about the future – Grahame's
riverside escape not being on the ballot.

So we're still left
wondering which approach and apparent world view will emerge
triumphant, which man will be the one to face what could be our next
century-defining moment, whenever and whatever that may be.

Yet a canny handicapper could probably do worse than to think, this time around, that event will involve not Europe, but Asia.

August 3, 2008 at 01:54 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology

Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology

There are three categories of IT, each of which provides different organizational capabilities—and demands very different kinds of management interventions.

by Andrew McAfee
In the information era, the best of times are the worst of times. Computer hardware keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more portable; new technologies such as mashups, blogs, wikis, and business analytic systems have captured the imagination; and corporate IT spending has bounced back from the plunge it took in 2001. In 1987, U.S. corporations’ investment in IT per employee averaged $1,500. By 2004, the latest year for which government data are available, that amount had more than tripled to $5,100 per employee. In fact, American companies spend as much on IT each year as they do on offices, warehouses, and factories put together.

However, as IT’s drumbeats become louder, they threaten to overwhelm general managers. One of the biggest problems companies face is coping with the abundance of technologies in the marketplace. It’s hard for executives to figure out what all those systems, applications, and acronyms do, let alone decide which ones they should purchase and how to successfully adopt them. Most managers feel ill equipped to navigate the constantly changing technology landscape and thus involve themselves less and less with IT.

Adding to executives’ diffidence, corporate IT projects have often delivered underwhelming results or been outright failures. Catastrophes—such as the one at American pharmaceutical distributor FoxMeyer Drug, which went into Chapter 11 and was sold in 1997 when a $100 million IT project failed—may be less frequent today than in the past, but frustration, delay, and disappointment are all too common. In 2005, when IT consultancy CSC and the Financial Executives Research Foundation conducted a survey of 782 American executives responsible for IT, 50% of the respondents admitted that “aligning business and IT strategy” was a major problem. The researchers found that 51% of large-scale IT efforts finished later than expected and ran over budget. Only 10% of companies believed they were getting high returns from IT investments; 47% felt that returns were low, negative, or unknown.

Not surprisingly, any fresh IT proposal sparks fiery debates in boardrooms. Some boards say “Why should we bother? IT isn’t strategic, so it doesn’t matter in a competitive sense. We should be minimizing our technology expenditures.” Others argue “Whether IT matters or not, we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves. Companies are becoming virtual, and software is becoming rentable, so why do IT the old-fashioned way?” Thus, executives try to delegate, outsource, rent, rationalize, minimize, and generally remove IT from their already long list of concerns.

Executives need to stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.

But managers who distance themselves from IT abdicate a critical responsibility. Having studied IT for the past 12 years, I believe that executives have three roles to play in managing IT: They must help select technologies, nurture their adoption, and ensure their exploitation. However, managers needn’t do all those things each time they buy a new technology. Different types of IT result in different kinds of organizational change when they are implemented, so executives must tailor their roles to the technologies they’re using. What’s critical, though, is that executives stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.

Building an Effective IT Model

Everyone who has studied companies’ frustrations with IT argues that technology projects are increasingly becoming managerial challenges rather than technical ones. What’s more, a well-run IT department isn’t enough; line managers have important responsibilities in implementing these projects. An insightful CIO once told me, “I can make a project fail, but I can’t make it succeed. For that, I need my [non-IT] business colleagues.” Managers I’ve worked with admit privately that success with IT requires their commitment, but they’re not clear where, when, and how they should get involved.

That’s partly because executives usually operate without a comprehensive model of what IT does for companies, how it can affect organizations, and what managers must do to ensure that IT initiatives succeed. As HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen and Boston University professor Paul R. Carlile point out in their working paper “The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research” (Harvard Business School, February 2005), a good model or theory does two things: It groups important phenomena into categories, and, within categories, it makes statements of cause and effect. Yet even state-of-the-art models of IT’s impact consist only of statements about individual technologies, such as “CRM lets you get closer to customers” and “SCM enables you to reduce inventory.” Such declarations don’t help executives; they’re more akin to sales pitches than statements of fact. These assertions are also silent about why technologies will deliver to companies the benefits they have promised. Why will customers start confessing their deepest desires to your customer relationship management system? Why will suppliers start delivering just in time when you set up a supply chain management system? Existing models don’t help executives choose among technologies, either. Every business wants both to be closer to customers and to keep inventory levels low—but is it better to first invest in CRM or SCM improvements?

One way to build a comprehensive model is to place IT in a historical context. Economists and business historians agree that IT is the latest in a series of general-purpose technologies (GPTs), innovations so important that they cause jumps in an economy’s normal march of progress. Electric power, the transistor, and the laser are examples of GPTs that came about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Companies can incorporate some general purpose technologies, like transistors, into products, and others, like electricity, into processes, but all of them share specific characteristics. The performance of such technologies improves dramatically over time. As people become more familiar with GPTs and let go of their old ways of thinking, they find a great many uses for these innovations. Crucially, general purpose technologies deliver greater benefits as people invent or develop complements that multiply the power, impact, and uses of GPTs. For instance, in 1970, fiber-optic cables enabled companies to employ lasers, which had already been in use for a decade, for data transmission.

The complements of process GPTs are organizational innovations, or changes in the way companies get work done. Research suggests that four organizational complements—better-skilled workers, higher levels of teamwork, redesigned processes, and new decision rights—allow process GPTs to deliver improved performance. For instance, in the early twentieth century, factories in America replaced central motors driven by waterwheels or steam engines with newly invented electric motors. These large motors were connected to a driveshaft, which was connected by belts to the factory’s machines. At first, electric motors were bolted onto the old driveshafts. As time went on, businesses built smaller electric motors and connected one to each machine. The new motors gave companies the freedom to redesign work flows. They were able to build long, low factories instead of high, narrow ones, for example, and to arrange machines in rows that later became assembly lines. However, businesses had to hire workers who were both more skilled and better able to independently make decisions at each station. Once all the organizational complements to electric motors were in place, they maximized the technology’s impact and boosted productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector.

These insights are also true of IT, but with one distinction: Information technologies, my research shows, don’t enjoy the same relationships with the four organizational complements that other process GPTs have. Some information technologies can deliver results without the complements being in place; others allow the complements to emerge over time; and still others impose the complements they need as soon as companies deploy the technologies.

Classifying IT into three types can help leaders understand which technologies they must invest in as well as what they should do to maximize returns.

Based on those variations, we can classify IT into three categories. (See the exhibit “The Three Varieties of Work-Changing IT.”) Each offers companies distinctive capabilities, delivers unique benefits, and triggers organizational changes of different types and magnitudes. This classification can help leaders understand which technologies they must invest in as well as what they should do to maximize returns. It can also indicate which IT initiatives are going to be relatively easy to implement and on which projects executives should focus. In that light, IT management starts to look less like a black art and more like the work of the executive.

The Three Categories of IT

Executives often talk about the revolution that computers have brought about in companies, but, as the IT model I’ve described illustrates, that’s an oversimplification. IT sets off several kinds of revolutions in organizations because technologies fall into three distinct categories.

Function IT. (FIT) includes technologies that make the execution of stand-alone tasks more efficient. Word processors and spreadsheets are the most common examples of this IT category. Design engineers, accountants, doctors, graphic artists, and a host of other specialists and knowledge workers use FIT all the time. People can get the most value from these technologies when their complements are in place but can also use FIT without all of the complements. For instance, an R&D engineer can use a computer-aided design (CAD) program to improve the way he does his work without making any changes in how the rest of the department functions. Furthermore, FITs don’t bring their complements with them. CAD software, for example, doesn’t specify the processes that make the most of its power. Companies must identify the complements FIT needs and either develop them or allow users to create them.

FIT is powerful. Five years ago, Ducati announced that it would enter the MotoGP racing circuit in 2003. Its designers kicked off a project to build a suitable motorcycle in November 2001. They started by using simulation software to build and test virtual engines. The simulations made the team realize that a two-cylinder engine wouldn’t be powerful enough to win races, so it decided to build Ducati’s first four-cylinder engine. The team finished designing the engine in August 2002; a motorcycle powered by the engine was zooming around test tracks two months later; and the project was largely complete by January 2003. The Italian company participated in the MotoGP circuit in 2003 and outperformed most of its rivals: Ducati placed second in the manufacturers’ standings, a ranking of companies that race motorcycles on the circuit, and its riders finished fourth and sixth in the individual standings.

Ducati’s experience with FIT vividly demonstrates the capabilities of this IT category:

• Enhancing experimentation capacity. Ducati’s engineers built thousands of engines and motorcycles and compared their performance without touching a sheet of steel.

• Increasing precision. The company’s designers came to trust the software so much that if test results disagreed with a simulation, they told me, the first reaction was to mistrust the test results.

Network IT. (NIT) provides a means by which people can communicate with one another. Network technologies include e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, and groupware like Lotus Notes. NIT allows people to interact, but it doesn’t define how they should interact. It gives people freedom to experiment instead of telling them what they must do. Unlike FIT, network IT brings complements with it but allows users to implement and modify them over time.

In 2005, investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein introduced three network technologies: messaging software, employee blogs, and a company wiki, a Web site that employees could contribute to or edit without needing permission or HTML skills. DKW’s people generate data, get opinions, and find answers by using the messaging software to contact the firm’s traders and analysts across the world. Many managers write blogs or post comments on others’ blogs. Some DKW directors see the wiki as a way to deal with e-mail overload and encourage their teams to post agendas, to-do lists, and work in progress on the wiki rather than circulating them via e-mail.

As the DKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

Enterprise IT. (EIT) is the type of IT application that companies adopt to restructure interactions among groups of employees or with business partners. Applications that define entire business processes, such as CRM and SCM—as well as technologies, such as electronic data interchange, that automate communications between companies—fall into this category. Unlike network technologies, which percolate from the bottom, enterprise technologies are very much top-down; they are purchased and imposed on organizations by senior management. Companies can’t adopt EIT without introducing new interdependencies, processes, and decision rights. Moreover, companies can’t slowly create the complements to EIT; changes become necessary as soon as the new systems go live.

In 2002, American retail drugstore chain CVS became concerned about the long wait times at its pharmacies and reexamined two steps in its prescription fulfillment process that it had automated. Initially, its pharmacies had performed the first step, a safety check for drug interactions, one hour before the customer’s desired pickup time. After that, it checked whether the insurer would pay for the medicine. Despite automating the process, CVS often was unable to resolve all of the outstanding safety and insurance issues by the promised pickup times, which irritated customers. CVS then decided to reverse the order in which the steps were executed. The change met with resistance from many CVS pharmacists, who felt that since the drug safety check was the more important of the two, it should be the first step in the process. The team that was rolling out the project reasoned with the skeptics but eventually realized that it would not win them all over. So it instructed the pharmacies to perform the insurance review first, when customers dropped off prescriptions, rather than immediately before pickup time. That allowed technicians to work with customers to correct small glitches, such as date of birth errors in health insurance records, that would prevent drug reimbursements and to warn people if they were likely to run into bigger issues, such as the nonpayment of insurance premiums. The new sequence also let CVS’s pharmacists incorporate the safety check into their quality control procedures instead of treating it as a separate step. Redesigning the fulfillment process cut wait times at CVS by as much as 80%, which improved customer satisfaction.

As CVS’s experience shows, EIT’s primary capabilities include the following:

• Redesigning business processes. Because CVS employees couldn’t fill prescriptions until they had completed the two checks in the new sequence, the revamped fulfillment process wasn’t just a good idea in theory—CVS employees had to execute the process in that particular sequence. EIT gives managers confidence that employees will execute processes correctly.

• Standardizing work flows. Once companies identify a complementary business process, they can implement it widely and reliably along with the EIT. CVS rolled out its new process in 4,000 outlets across the United States in less than a year.

• Monitoring activities and events efficiently. EITs can allow managers to get an accurate and up-to-date picture of what’s happening throughout the enterprise, often in something close to real time. CVS’s software lets executives know how many prescriptions are filled every day in each location, how long it takes to fill each prescription, and what kinds of fulfillment problems employees had to tackle.

Managing the Three Types of IT

Across the three IT categories, executives have three tasks. First, they must help select IT applications that will deliver the organizational capabilities they desire. Second, they must lead adoption efforts that result in the creation of complements for those technologies. And third, they must shape the exploitation of IT by ensuring that technologies, capabilities, and complements stay aligned.

IT selection. Companies often select IT applications after one of their executives hears about a new technology and wonders why his or her organization hasn’t invested in it yet. This approach is pervasive. How often do you hear, “Shouldn’t we take a look at Technology X?” or “Why can’t Technology Y do that for us?” Companies will even invest in a technology because everyone else in the industry has purchased it or because it comes with glowing recommendations from consultants, analysts, and journalists.

Trouble is, there’s an endless supply of new applications, partly because of innovation and partly because of clever rebranding. Companies can’t possibly evaluate all the new applications that cross their paths. Another, more fundamental, problem is that this method of choosing applications reflects an outside-in approach: Executives describe a technology that’s available in the outside world and propose that it should be brought into the company. No one stops to think about whether the organization actually needs the capabilities that the technology offers. Between 1999 and 2001, American companies spent $130 billion on IT they never used, according to one estimate. An outside-in mentality was surely behind much of that waste.

A more sensible question for executives to ask is “What do we need IT to do for us?” For instance, they might consider, Do our company’s engineers need to increase their experimentation capacity? Do our sales and marketing departments need to collaborate more often? Do we need to standardize fulfillment processes throughout the world? Managers should also set IT priorities. They must decide, Is it more important to have a single source of employee data or to get weekly reports from the sales force about client contacts? Would the R&D department be better off if it could conduct more simulations or if it had an online space for brainstorming? Would it be more valuable to enhance the enterprise system by adding a layer of analysis software or by extending it to suppliers through a private data exchange? These are tough choices, but they are appropriate ones for top management teams to talk through. (See the sidebar “The IT Dialogue.”)

The IT Dialogue

An inside-out approach puts the spotlight squarely on the business before evaluating the technology landscape; it focuses on the capabilities that IT can provide rather than on the technologies themselves. A discussion among executives about capabilities will highlight what the business most wants to be good at—and it will show whether there’s agreement about what the business needs to be good at. Once the company’s business needs are clear, the technologies it requires will come into focus. Typically, FIT delivers productivity and optimization, NIT increases collaboration, and EIT helps standardize and monitor work. Thus, when executives decide what capabilities they need, they will know what kind of IT to buy and the nature of the initiatives they must manage.

Once the company’s business needs are clear, the technologies it requires will come into focus.

In our 2004 case study “Enterprise IT at Cisco,” two HBS colleagues, F. Warren McFarlan and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld, and I described how Cisco used the inside-out approach to refocus the IT selection process. Cisco realized that there were drawbacks in its IT decision-making process as it was trying to recover in late 2001 from a fall in revenues. CIO Brad Boston found that Cisco had nine order status tools. Each of them used data from different sources, which used different definitions for key terms. As a result, the systems couldn’t give the company a clear picture of its orders. There were similar problems in the sales organization. Boston and his colleagues realized that Cisco needed to improve its standardization and monitoring capabilities, so they selected an upgraded ERP system and a customer database. They also decided to implement the new technologies across the company even though it was costly and time-consuming to do so. The ERP project required three years to implement and cost the company approximately $200 million. Since Cisco couldn’t gain the capabilities it wanted without those technologies, however, it chose to invest in them.

IT adoption. After IT selection, executives’ attention turns to adoption: the hard work of putting the technologies they’ve invested in to productive use. At this stage, managers’ main responsibility is to help create the complements that will maximize IT’s value. FIT doesn’t bring its complements with it, so managers must find ways of identifying them. That’s what BMW’s chief designer, Chris Bangle, did in the late 1990s when he wanted designers to use computer-aided styling (CAS) software in addition to paper, clay, and wood. As Bangle explained to HBS professor Stefan Thomke during an interview, the designers were reluctant to use the software, even though Bangle had hired CAS specialists to work alongside them. One day, Bangle declared that within three months, the CAS team would have to pay for itself—or he would sell the team’s computers. He didn’t twist the designers’ arms; he pressured the CAS specialists and modelers. They helped the designers adopt the software and create new design processes. Bangle knew he couldn’t force the technology’s adoption or merely hope that complements would emerge. He had to allow his team to discover new ways of working—although he could prod it a little.

There’s an interesting dichotomy in executives’ roles when it comes to NIT adoption. Because the use of such technologies is voluntary rather than mandatory, they make users feel more, rather than less, in control of their work. As a result, their adoption isn’t difficult. However, managers still have to intervene with new technologies, such as groupware, wikis, and blogs, by demonstrating how they can be used and by setting norms for participation. Once network technologies are properly established, their use takes off, and the challenge for managers is to refrain from intervening too often or with too heavy a hand.

In stark contrast to FIT and NIT, enterprise IT is hard for companies to adopt. The benefits look great to people at the top, but employees usually dislike EIT technologies. Unlike network technologies, they don’t just enable new ways of working; they dictate them. Enterprise systems define new cross-function business processes, impose the processes on employees without allowing employees to modify them, and bring higher levels of oversight. Most employees don’t like having new processes dictated to them by a piece of software and will use a variety of techniques to prevent the adoption of enterprise technologies. Executives must intervene forcefully throughout EIT adoption efforts because new processes, changed decision rights, and greater interdependence come hand in hand with these technologies.

In fact, the biggest mistake business leaders make is to underestimate resistance when they impose changes in the ways people work. In 2002, a Boston-based hospital set up an IT system that replaced handwritten prescriptions with online orders. The system instantly checked doctors’ prescriptions for harmful doses or drug interactions and transmitted the orders to the hospital pharmacy. Even though studies had demonstrated that the system would reduce medication errors, physicians bitterly resisted. They complained that the computer-based process was slower and less convenient than paper-based ordering and that the built-in error checking didn’t work. They protested so strongly that the hospital was able to roll out the system in only a few departments. Today, most of the doctors continue to write prescriptions on paper and fax them to the hospital’s pharmacy. The system’s champions were caught completely off guard by the doctors’ reaction to the monitoring and standardization capabilities that the hospital sought.

The biggest mistake business leaders make is to underestimate resistance when they impose changes in the ways people work.

EIT adoptions can give rise to several kinds of problems. For example, EIT projects often become delayed as employees and managers negotiate the use of complements, such as new processes, that the technology has imposed. Companies often settle for solutions that are more modest than originally planned and gain only some of the capabilities they had initially sought. Firms may even abandon EIT adoptions altogether. Even worse, some businesses don’t abandon an EIT project when they should, which wreaks havoc on performance. For instance, in the late 1990s, both Hershey and Nike implemented technologies that were a poor fit with their business needs and processes. As a result, the finances and share prices of both companies suffered.

All the successful EIT adoptions I’ve studied have used the same process for avoiding failure, and all the unsuccessful EIT adoptions I’ve studied have not used it: They have decided at the outset how key issues about configuration and other aspects of the adoption will be raised and how they will be settled. The most important participants in this task are not IT specialists or consultants but business leaders from the areas affected by the new technology. The more areas there are, and the more their work is being changed, the more the adoption effort needs a seasoned leader. A midlevel project manager doesn’t have the formal or informal authority required to make and implement these tough decisions. At CVS, for example, the leader of the EIT project was responsible for both IT and store operations, so he had the authority to deploy the new process despite opposition from the chain’s pharmacists. Similarly, despite Cisco’s decentralized culture, the company set up a business process operating committee (BPOC) that consisted of six senior executives and the CIO. The BPOC met throughout the EIT adoption effort to make policy and process decisions and to signal that Cisco wouldn’t back away from establishing the complements that the technology needed even though there was resistance within the organization.

Leaders who successfully implement EIT try to build consensus in the organization, but they’re also willing to push ahead without having everyone on board every step of the way. Their decisive style runs counter to the usual advice about how executives should get users to accept and own new technologies. For example, in 1999, when a mutual fund company set up a CRM system, it asked its salespeople to enter the information about their meetings with brokerages and institutional investors into the system. The sales reps saw this, correctly, as an attempt to capture knowledge that existed only in their heads. They refused to use the system, which delivered little value to anyone for years. The situation changed with the arrival in 2001 of a new sales president, who demanded that reps enter information into the CRM system, threatened to withhold commission payments from those who didn’t, and instructed her direct reports to cross-check the sales reps’ entries against expense reports. The president’s policy was met with stiff opposition, but the reps quickly realized that they had to accede to the demands of the new boss if they wanted to continue working for the company.

IT exploitation. A business leader’s third IT-related responsibility is to extract the maximum benefit from technologies once they are in place.

Companies can best exploit FIT by fine-tuning organizational complements. When HBS professors Marco Iansiti and Alan MacCormack studied the 1995 America’s Cup sailing competition, they found that all of the teams used simulation software to help them design their boat keels. Most teams worked with universities and aerospace companies to build sophisticated simulations and used either mainframes or supercomputers to do the work. They were all beaten by Team New Zealand, which used less powerful workstations but brought the computers down to the docks where its boats were built. The New Zealand team also encouraged experimentation and teamwork and pushed keel modification decisions down the organization. Because the other teams didn’t do all of those things, they couldn’t harness the full power of the FIT.

Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”

Interestingly, EIT’s exploitation is often easier than its adoption. Since the work of imposing new processes is done by this stage, the manager’s task is to leverage already standardized data and work flows. Few employees and managers have problems with that; they’re eager to get the most out of a system that was so much trouble to set up. Exploiting EIT sometimes requires adding a new FIT on top of it. In the mid-1990s, food services giant Sysco implemented an ERP system and data warehouse across its 80 regional businesses. Sysco’s executives realized that because all of the companies were now recording orders in the same way, it was possible to analyze the standardized data to answer two questions: Which customers were most likely to defect? and What other products could it be selling to existing customers? Sysco invested in business intelligence software, which sits on top of the ERP system, extracts data from it, and facilitates its analysis. As a result, salespeople and managers gained something akin to a crystal ball that could provide two critical answers they needed.

Other companies have exploited enterprise systems by extending them to customers, suppliers, and joint-venture partners. That expands businesses’ monitoring capabilities and provides levels of control that they could otherwise have achieved only by employing more people. For instance, the $107 million Argentine grain producer Los Grobo uses an EIT system to track all the work done on its farms. Los Grobo rents most of the fields, and contractors plant, spray, harvest, and oversee them. The contractors enter their activities into Los Grobo’s system through a Web interface, which allows managers and specialists at the company’s Buenos Aires headquarters to make informed decisions about land management and yield improvement. This platform has helped Los Grobo grow its sales at a rate of 40% per year since 2000—without buying more land or hiring as many employees as it used to.

• • •

For a resource to have an impact on a company’s competitive position, it must be valuable, rare, inimitable, and nonsubstitutable. Oil wells and diamond mines meet the test; pencils and paper don’t. What about IT? At first glance, it would seem that all three IT categories fail to meet these criteria. Vendors offer a wide range of FIT, NIT, and EIT, so these technologies are not rare and seem to be highly imitable. However, people often forget that while the software itself might not be any of those things, a successfully implemented system isn’t easy to replicate. Because of the managerial challenges inherent in its implementation, IT meets all four criteria when a company succeeds in applying a technology and, consequently, gains valuable capabilities.

November 5, 2006 at 03:56 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

EMC on expansion tear

EMC on expansion tear - Yahoo! News

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Sun Aug 27, 4:31 PM ET

HOPKINTON, Mass. - Dennis Hoffman has his suit jacket off and a blue marker in hand, ready to sketch his view of the massive transformation at EMC Corp. He begins by writing "CIO."

That would be "chief information officer" — the executive in many companies who determines how technology dollars are spent. But while EMC is well known in tech, it hasn't always had CIOs' ears.

After all, EMC built its business selling data storage hardware. And for many CIOs, the logistics of archiving files on humming disks were easily delegated to storage-specific underlings.

That worked well enough for EMC when its storage gear was a must-have for many companies. But for years the cost of disk space has plummeted, pressuring profits. And with technology becoming increasingly complex, many CIOs are consolidating their vendors to give them "fewer throats to choke," in the words of Hoffman, EMC's vice president for information security.

These factors threatened to squeeze EMC into irrelevance. And so EMC has responded by expanding. It has spent $7 billion buying companies and assets in the past three years, topped by this summer's $2.1 billion deal for RSA Security Inc.

Instead of just providing machines to store business data, the new EMC hopes to secure files from prying eyes, funnel information into Internet applications and track records for regulatory compliance. It wants to scout for problems throughout networks and automate fixes.

"The biggest obstacle we face is what we spent the whole decade of the '90s doing — that EMC is the storage company," said CEO Joe Tucci. "We have to get customers to view us, as we're calling it now, as an information infrastructure company."

But EMC isn't just fighting perceptions. By seeking to be a more intimate (and better-paid) adviser to CIOs, EMC is picking a fight with powerful competitors.

Notably, IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have much bigger staffs of consultants and longer histories of serving as throats for CIOs to choke. IBM and HP are also leading storage vendors, plus they offer servers and other key parts of business systems. EMC relies on partnerships, including one with Dell Inc., to help customers get servers.

That difference is huge to customers like Dr. Fred Clark, CIO for the Medical University of South Carolina.

When the center recently adopted new health care software, Clark decided to run it on IBM servers and replace EMC storage with IBM machines. Clark believes using only IBM systems will ensure better performance. He also likes having just one call to make in case of trouble.

"If you have a single vendor, you have more leverage with them," Clark said. "If they're not performing, we don't pay them, and it doesn't take them long to pick up the phone and say, `What's going on?'"

Meanwhile, rivals such as Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are using their software — already deeply ingrained in corporations — as a sturdy basis from which to reach some of the same fields EMC is targeting, such as document management.

EMC also has to stay ahead of nibbling competitors in data storage who claim that EMC's expansion is making it lose focus.

"It's going to be interesting to see how successful EMC actually is," said analyst Rich Ptak of Ptak, Noel & Associates. "They're faced with the dilemma of moving into a whole new space without losing their core market. They can and will be able to capture a piece of it, but whether or not they're going to move up to the top tier ... is still an open question."

EMC has already taken huge steps. It now gets more revenue from software and services than from hardware. Thanks largely to its $1.7 billion acquisition of Documentum Inc. in 2003, it leads a hot software field known as "enterprise content management," in which disparate documents are brought together for business applications.

"I think they come to the table today with a much better story, a holistic solution," said James Hull, head of engineering services at MasterCard Inc., a large EMC customer.

Analysts say EMC has done well at swallowing its many acquisitions, one of the thorniest tasks in technology. Notably, top executives from several companies bought by EMC have stayed aboard rather than using their newfound wealth to move on.

That might reflect EMC's strategy of trying not to overly mess with the operations of acquired companies. Joseph Walton, who oversees integration, describes it as "protecting the acquired company from EMC."

"They're not coming in telling us how it's going to be," said RSA chief Art Coviello.

The downside can be that, at least at first, many EMC customers find themselves called on by multiple sales people. EMC has moved toward a system in which large customers get a single point of contact. But every new acquisition reshuffles the process.

It is perhaps because of this flux that EMC still struggles to spread the word about where it's headed.

"We have major relevancy that's just not understood," said Mark Lewis, EMC's chief development officer. "It's a cultural change on the outside."

Yet this change might be nothing compared to one EMC survived a few years ago.

Founded in 1979, EMC was part of a seminal shift in computing. Previously, centralized mainframes handled most computing tasks, including storing information. The new era was largely about gaining efficiencies from distributing those resources — first with the rise of flexible servers and then with external data storage machines.

In the 1990s, EMC's top-of-the-line storage devices helped many companies that were moving onto the Web and generating copious digital records. EMC was the decade's best performer on the
New York Stock Exchange.

Then the tech bubble burst, wiping out many customers or their capital. Competitors such as Compaq Computer Corp. grabbed market share with lower-priced storage systems. In just two years, EMC's revenue cratered from $8.9 billion to $5.4 billion. The stock crashed from $100 to $4. One-fourth of the employees had to go.

Suddenly a company with a reputation for arrogance faced humbling questions. Tucci, who had turned around a bankrupt Wang Global in the '90s, found himself with another rebound project after he became EMC's CEO in 2001.

Now, revenue is nearing $11 billion. The stock has spent the past 52 weeks between $9 and $15, and the work force is 28,000, above the dot-com era peak of 24,000.

Some executives credit EMC's hard-charging environment, where a significant chunk of compensation is determined by whether employees meet specific goals set by managers. "EMC people work like their hair's on fire," Hoffman said.

EMC expanded its share of the $16 billion external-disk storage market to 27.3 percent last year, a rise of 1.6 percentage points, according to IDC. That increase equaled the gains posted by HP and IBM combined; HP held 18.5 percent and IBM had 13.7 percent.

But competitors say EMC, perhaps distracted by its overhaul, is leaving them openings. EMC admitted that execution issues this spring left it unable to meet some orders for a new storage system.

IBM and other rivals also cite a concept known as "virtualization." Among other things, it lets network administrators maximize the efficiency of their storage setups.

This would figure to be a natural for EMC, given its storage expertise and its $635 million acquisition of VMWare Inc., a leader in virtualizing the operation of servers.

But EMC was late getting a major storage virtualization product, Invista, off the ground. Executives say EMC was careful in developing Invista rather than rushing it into a young market.

"You put all the (industry's) virtualization revenues in a thimble, you'd have plenty of room for your thumb," Tucci said.

However, even reasonably explained delays may lead to perceptions that EMC can't afford.

"The larger vendors, all included, they're slow to innovate in some of these things," said Toby Ford, chief technical officer of USinternetworking Inc., which has EMC storage but recently bought a virtualized system from 3Pardata Inc., a private vendor backed by Oracle, Symantec Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

One large EMC customer, Steve McCaa, principal technical architect at legal records analyzer Kroll Ontrack Inc., says that if Invista's ongoing development achieves its goals, it should outperform existing virtualization techniques.

Still, he added: "I think Invista development has been a little slower than I would like to have seen." He's not sure whether to blame EMC's perfectionism or the company's transformation.

"I do have a fear that as they try to expand that information focus they're going to lose some of the engineering prowess they've shown in the storage environment," McCaa said.

EMC executives say they're not finished mapping the future, and seem to have some flexibility. The company has no debt. Even with its acquisition spree it has had enough cash to be a big buyer of its own stock — to the tune of $1 billion last year and $3 billion this year.

"If you look at the tools they have, they're pretty far along," said analyst Jasmine Noel at Ptak, Noel. "What they haven't done yet is put the wrapper on it."

August 27, 2006 at 11:34 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

GData

O'Reilly Radar > A Week in the Valley: GData

By nat on July 14, 2006

I spent the week before Where 2.0 visiting companies between San Francisco and San Jose. I've already written about my trips to Ning and Meebo. Next is an account of a meeting with Mark Lucovsky, who was architect of the HailStorm web services product from Microsoft.

I had a great lunch with Chris DiBona and Mark Lukovsky at Google. There's a huge move within Google away from SOAP and even REST-style ad hoc APIs and towards GData instead. The big point for me was that GData is just Atom/RSS for reading, Atom Publishing for writing, and A9 stored queries for searching. They had to specify a bit of glue around sync and so on, but the whole thing is that simple.

The big thing about GData for Google is that it's extremely simple to build into the server-side, so they can offer APIs very easily. This is important as they offer APIs for lots and lots of new stuff. Atom is quietly becoming the standard for reading and writing to Google (RSS for reading as well). They're not saying that in public, but it's happening. Atom is becoming the standard RESTian web services envelope.

They're building APIs to your Google-stored data via GData, and it's all very reminiscent of HailStorm. Mark, of course, was the architect of that. So why's he coming up with more strategies to the same ends? I figure he's hoping Google won't screw it up by being greedy, the way Microsoft did. Microsoft always asks "where's the prioprietary edge?", which is a great strategy for making money but not necessarily the best nurturing technique for open APIs. I did some digging around HailStorm and found these patent applications filed in Europe at the same time as Microsoft was shopping HailStorm as "open". This is a classic proprietary grab: they point and say "look, open APIs!" and then meet with patent lawyers to figure out what bits of the schemas can be patented.

That's the strategy if you want to make money off the use of the APIs and you want to own the services. Google doesn't look at in the same way. I pushed Chris DiBona on Google's take on APIs and he said, "we just want so many developers using straightforward HTTP and XML that it's impossible for someone to introduce anything proprietary that would weaken Google". Google doesn't need the proprietary ownership of the services, they make their money when people use the Internet. The biggest threat to Google isn't that someone else will implement the same Calendar API as Google, it's that someone will make web pages uncrawlable through proprietary extensions to HTML or HTTP. They need web standards so firmly entrenched in common use that nobody can break the Internet from under them, and this pits them against proprietary evilness.

The reaction to the GData APIs for Calendar have been very positive. This is in contrast to HailStorm, of course, which was distrusted and eventually morphed its way through different product names into oblivion. Noting that Mark's trying again with the idea of open APIs to your personal data, I joked that GData should really be "GStorm". Mark deadpanned, "I wanted to call it ShitStorm but it didn't fly with marketing".

July 16, 2006 at 12:38 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

SOA hurdles forcing changes in IT units

Computerworld > SOA hurdles forcing changes in IT units

Staff resistance and new ways of doing development work are some of the barriers that need to be overcome when implementing SOA. Heather Havenstein reports
By Heather Havenstein, Framingham | Monday, 15 May, 2006

Many companies and government agencies that are shifting from client/server technologies to service-oriented architectures are facing technical and cultural challenges that are forcing an overhaul of their IT development groups.

Officials at Wachovia, Railinc and other large US corporate and government organistaions have taken measures to tackle the myriad challenges that come with using SOA technology, including changing roles for developers and architects and a blurring of the lines between IT development and operations groups.

Wachovia’s retail banking division has started work on a new multi-year SOA project to create business processes from web services that can be used in a new call centre application and eventually be reused across the bank’s various customer channels.

The project is the division’s first foray into designing, assembling and managing common business processes that span multiple channels, and the IT department is feeling the pinch of the transition.
This and an earlier, less-complex SOA project are already presenting challenges to Wachovia developers, who must adjust their mindsets from the traditional waterfall development approach to a more iterative one, says Harry Karr, strategic architect for Wachovia’s retail banking division. Using the waterfall approach, developers build monolithic applications in one fell swoop. The iterative approach calls on one group to develop a service, for example, while another builds a client to consume a service, Karr says.

To ease the taxing transition for its application development group, the division brought in new tools for designing a development process and created new IT roles.

“SOA is a set of best practices, a discipline you have to follow,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at consultancy ZapThink. “For the developer, this means there are new rules they have to follow. They don’t want to follow any rules.”

Wachovia used IBM’s Information FrameWork — a set of business models and an information architecture blueprint — in its project to build common processes from services that can be used by all customer channels.

“We haven’t really mastered the business process part of it,” Karr says. “We’re trying to figure out how to do a more iterative approach but also outsource. If we had the business processes modelled ahead of time, that might help us.” In addition to starting the SOA projects, Wachovia plans to begin outsourcing a significant portion of its development and operations staff over the next year.
The bank has also tapped software asset management provider Flashline for its services registry, repository and lifecycle management tools. Those should help its developers model the processes, show dependencies and build reports to help manage and understand the effect of the changes, Karr says.

The project continues to evolve as managers hunt for methods to ease the work. For example, Wachovia’s IT division has added a connectivity layer to its architecture. Karr says the new layer, an enterprise service bus (ESB) from IBM, can handle message orchestration, transformation and routing.

“We’re trying to figure out what types of things we have to have in place so the outsourcers can build in this distributed environment,” he says. “[With the ESB], we can put out some dummy services for the outsourcers to use to test their services with.”

The chief architect of enterprise architecture at a large US-based financial institution, who asked not to be named, said recently that hired developers there are embracing the organisation’s shift to SOA, but veteran mainframe and legacy experts are bucking the change. The plan to use SOA technology “has not been easy for our developers”, the architect says.

To ease the transition, the financial institution created a grass-roots community for its 1,200 developers to share best practices and connect with the owners of web services. In addition, the organisation is helping the mainframe and legacy developers fine-tune their skills while it hires new developers for the SOA project, the architect says.

The institution plans over the next 18 months to create an SOA with sufficient security and performance to extend web services beyond the firewall, the official says.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg says developers often find the cultural changes associated with a move to an SOA more taxing than the technology associated with the shift.

“To move to SOA requires organisational changes across IT and even into lines of business,” he says. “Often, the developers have to work with people they may not have worked with much before.”
As Railinc, which provides supply chain information to 460 US railroads, has taken on more SOA projects, the Association of American Railroads subsidiary has created training programmes for both developers and recipients of the services to show the benefits of the technology.

Over the past two years, Railinc has developed several external web services for its clients — including one that went into production in March to allow railroads to report rail-car repairs.
The latest initiative includes various project teams within IT and the lines of business that are creating reusable services for application development, says Garry Grandlienard, Railinc’s IT director of enterprise architecture. The project is slated for completion by year’s end.

The training sessions aim to show developers and managers the benefits of building an SOA and why they should buy into the concept, Grandlienard says. “They may have to help build something today, but maybe later this year they may be the recipient of the service,” he says. “We have to help them see the bigger picture of why this is a good thing to invest in.”

The state of Kentucky used senior developers in its early SOA projects and is forming an integration governance group and a competency centre to extend training to more of its staff.
The state has built various applications using a service-oriented approach. Among them is an enterprise system that will allow the state’s revenue department to streamline the collection of delinquent taxes and a service to allow the US Department of Justice to query Kentucky’s sex-offender registry.

Kentucky’s IT shop is now moving to tackle its newest SOA challenge — identifying opportunities to re-engineer business processes and creating the associated supporting infrastructure, says Ashiq Zaman, branch manager in the Office of Application Development in the state’s IT department.

The District of Columbia earlier this year went live with an SOA-based system called CapStat, which uses web services to help emergency command centres in Washington and surrounding areas coordinate responses in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

The district also has a programme called DCStat that uses web services to monitor the delivery of municipal services. It has been expanding that programme since the beginning of the year.

Despite those efforts, Dan Thomas, director of the DCStat programme in the district’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, says the city’s developers are still “not the biggest believers” in SOA. “Some of my junior developers think all I am doing is adding overhead and they don’t see the value of the reusability yet,” Thomas says.

To address such scepticism, his group developed a metadata engine to help track down services as they are mixed and matched to build new applications.

The engine associates metadata with data to be used in a service as it is pulled from a source system.

Despite the technical and cultural challenges of SOA, the returns can be substantial, successful users say.

SOA veteran Helvetia Patria Group, an insurance company in Switzerland, has seen a 201% return on investment since launching its SOA six years ago.

Helvetia officials say the SOA project cut IT costs for the company’s internet-based businesses by 59%.

Helvetia overcame the “tough exercise” of bringing developers on board by using a change management programme from Hewlett-Packard, says Didier Beck, director of Helvetia’s eBusiness Centre.

Beck says the HP tools and services helped developers integrate 15 systems into a centralised SOA platform. “The way we are working today is really very different because before, there wasn’t any contact between the different subsidiaries — they had all their own development processes and tools,” he says. “The consequences and impact were really quite high.”

May 14, 2006 at 09:42 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Everything's coming up Drupal

IT Business

What started as a community bulletin board system has become the content management platform of choice for a variety of users. We profile a Canadian enterprise that's used it to launch dozens of sites in less than a year
5/11/2006 5:00:00 PM
by Neil Sutton

A company that owns a slew of radio stations across Canada is now dialed in to an open source content management solution for its 40-plus Web sites.

Standard Interactive, a division of the privately-owned Standard Broadcasting Inc., is using Drupal as a means to manage Web sites for stations like EZRock 1340 AM in Southern B.C. and 97.7 HTZ FM in St. Catherines, Ont.

Standard has rolled out 45 Web sites using Drupal as a backbone over the last six months. The project started in 2004, when the company sought a replacement for the homegrown content management system it had been using. After evaluating various commercially-available tools, “Drupal kind of emerged as the one that had the best architecture and allowed us to do what we needed to do in the limited time frame that we had,” said Rowan Kerr, senior Web programmer for Standard Interactive.

“We started using Drupal because of the module system and APIs it has, letting you add features with very minimal effort. It also has a very flexible themeing system, allowing you to make it look like pretty much anything we want,” he added.

Kerr said he opted for Drupal partly for budgetary reasons – there are no licensing issues to worry about – but also because of the community spirit behind open source. Kerr is active in the Drupal User Group Toronto chapter, an organization that meets once a month to discuss new uses for the software.

The group is planning a “Drupal camp” this Friday – a series of sessions designed to educate new users. “The main focus of it is to get more developers comfortable with using Drupal effectively,” said Jason Diceman, one of the camp's organizers. Diceman runs his own Web consulting business called Co-op Tools. “There's a high demand for Drupal developers. Right now everyone in our community is maxed out in terms of our availability,” he said.

There's little to indicate that an open source tool like Drupal is a threat to established proprietary content management software like EMC's Documentum, said Waterloo, Ont-based Info-Tech Research Group analyst, Carmi Levy, but it is finding its niche.

“It is a very specifically-focused product,” he said. “This really is targeted at enterprises that wouldn't otherwise be allocating the budget for something like this.”

Companies that haven't already substantially invested in a content management solution might consider Drupal as a low-cost alternative. “That's where an open source product like this comes into play,” said Levy.

Currently on version 4.7, Drupal was originally conceived in 2000 as a community-based bulletin board system by Belgian open source programmer Dries Buytaert. It subsequently evolved into a content management system and became the basis for “Deanspace,” which was used to support Howard Dean's U.S. presidential bid in 2004.

Deanspace has since became Civicspace and is probably the best-known variant of Drupal, said Diceman. Developers may patch or hack aspects of Drupal to meet their own needs, he said, but there haven't been too many instances of code fragmentation, or “forking,” within Drupal community.

“From what I can tell, because of the sensibility and good will of the core developers. I think forking often happens when some of the core developers are not open to new people's ideas.”

Using Drupal, Kerr and his team of three IT staff have built standard templates and a common code set, which makes it possible to roll out Web sites at the rate of seven a month. Separate style sheets are used to differentiate the sites. Once a new feature has been built – like charting modules, listener feedback and polls, and content from third-party news feeds – it is immediately available to each of Standard's radio stations.

While Kerr is responsible for maintaining the overall system, stations will determine the actual content that appears on their individual sites. “We wanted them to have ownership,” said Kerr. “There are only four of us, so we would like to have as little involvement as possible in the actual content and day-to-day operation of the sites.”

All new sites that are launched by Standard Interactive will be built entirely on Drupal, said Kerr. But an acquisitive company like Standard Broadcasting may buy more radio stations and find itself with Web sites that are built an on entirely different infrastructure. In that case, “I would imagine we would try to move them over, but it won't be instant. We'll have to evaluate what they have,” said Kerr. “But I think the ultimate goal will be to have everything on Drupal.”

DUG TO's Drupal Camp runs all-day Friday at the Centre for Social Innovation at 215 Spadina in downtown Toronto.

May 12, 2006 at 08:49 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Can There Be Too Much SOA?

Can There Be Too Much SOA? - -

April 24, 2006 10:42AM

Web services and SOA aren't the same thing; Web services is one way to get to the goals of SOA. Launched by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), Web services is a set of standards that combine to create the path to SOA, a path that would be standardized enough for all to follow. With Web services, SOA solutions that would likely be as diverse as SOA definitions could converge on a single dazzling path

There's no question that SOA has what Wall Street calls "Mo," meaning "momentum." It's in the trade press, and the business press, and most important in the planning cross-hairs of a lot of CIOs. SOA, which stands for "Service-Oriented Architecture" is just plain hot, but it's also facing a kind of crisis. It's a crisis we've seen before in networking, but still one that may be hard to overcome, and if SOA can't overcome it, the concept may be marginalized.

What is SOA anyway? "Service Oriented" sounds a lot like a marketing slogan for a car wash or an airline. The basic notion of SOA, as it was originally devised, was that applications could be structured as a series of "services," or pieces of functionality, that would then be assembled as needed. Visualize a graphical user interface with a piece of CRM (customer resource management), a dab of Excel, and maybe a shot of data mining all mixed in.

Or visualize a server farm with a piece of functionality here, another there. A transaction can be a piece of CRM, or maybe materials requirements planning, or both. Publish a service, subscribe to it and others to assemble a capability, a business solution. Maybe you want to think of it as a kind of bus, a universal interface or a highway that information flows on. Drive on at Memphis and go all the way to sunrise in LA. Push a data quantity in and spread it as needed through the business.

All That and More

So which one is SOA? All of them. In fact, more than that, so vendors say. The popularity of the concept of SOA, combined with the wonderful vagueness of the term, lends itself to over-promotion. "Service" is a pretty generic term, after all. There's no shortage of jumpers onto the SOA bandwagon, even if their claim to SOA is as vague as the claims you get out of your average dating service. It's very possible that we've never had such a business commitment to a concept that people so broadly misunderstand. But it's not this semantic SOA purgatory that we're fearing; it's the more tangible problem that could arise in what might be the poster child of SOA implementation: Web services.

Web services and SOA aren't the same thing; Web services is one way to get to the goals of SOA. Launched by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), Web services is a set of standards that combine to create the path to SOA, a path that would be standardized enough for all to follow. With Web services, SOA solutions that would likely be as diverse as SOA definitions could converge on a single dazzling path -- a path paved with standards. The concept is so beautiful it almost makes you cry, but save the crying; we may need it later.

Standardization is a funny thing. Achieving the goal of a single approach often requires serving many masters. Every vendor with a stake in an issue has a stake in standards that impact that issue, and these vendors populate the standards bodies with well-funded contributions. There's an old saying that a "camel is a horse designed by a committee." Get the picture?

Web Services and SOAP

Web services, at the basic level, is a way for a client system to run a software module on a server and pass it a message that represents the data that's supposed to be processed. The module returns a message that represents the result. The whole process has been around for decades, and is based on the idea of a "remote procedure call," a way for one computer to run something on another. In Web services, this is done using a protocol called the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

SOAP is simplicity itself. You send a "service" (the remote module) a message that it processes, and it returns the reply. SOAP software generates the message at the client side, and at the server side activates the software "service" and passes it the message. How easy can you get? Not only that, the format of the message is agreed between client and server and published in an XML schema.

But then standards gurus started to think: How do we address the "service" or the user? Who is this person who's accessing the "service"? Are they allowed to? How about network reliability? Suppose a message gets lost? If we go to the trouble of authenticating a user, should we be able to vouch for that user with other services that need identity assurance? How can we tell if there's enough processing power to perform the service, or where that power might be?

In response to these issues, we've added features, headers, standards for both services and users. All Web services standards start with the prefix "WS-," and we've "WSed" ourselves into a fair flood of new capabilities. It's not that they aren't useful, even necessary. It's just that there are so darn many of them.

Standards Proliferation

Andrew Tannenbaum, an author from "my generation" (which is to say a kinder, gentler time) said that "the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." There's a simple moral here; if you have a bunch of choices of how to implement something that everyone has to agree on a single way to implement, you may as well have not bothered cataloging choices in the first place.

And that's what is happening with Web services, and thus with SOA.

Thirty years ago, the first international data networking standard, X.25, was launched. It was formally debated by international standards-writers, molded and shaped, changed and debated, and eventually settled ... sort of. Many things in X.25 were defined, but many were left to "implementation decisions." Two X.25 devices from two different vendors had about as much chance of going together and working as two builders in the proverbial Tower of Babel, each speaking different languages.

Officials at one health care company told me that they'd counted 71 different Web services implementations, combining different software pieces and standards from different vendors, and that none of them were fully interoperable. Assume that your company picks one, after earnest research. Your supply chain and distribution chain partners follow the process. There are about 14 chances in a thousand that a partner will select your approach. Two partners? 196 chances in a million. Three? Try 2,744 chances in a billion. Get to four and you're about the same range as two different people having the same DNA.

The other problem is that the odds are getting longer, independent of partner count, because the process is adding more and more standards to Web services. Even if there were only a couple of different ways to implement a single new standard, it would double the odds against conformance of everyone to a common interpretation of the total standards set for Web services. Every Web service standard probably exposes a half-dozen implementation interpretations, and many of these are seen as preferring one vendor or another, and each of these preferred vendors is sure to pick their favorite.

IBM, Microsoft, and other companies have recognized the risk of SOA/Web services anarchy, and attempted to create a kind of minimum subset called "WS-Star" (WS-*), a framework of Web services that's supposed to interoperate. Of course, this is viewed by other vendors as a sinister conspiracy to control the Web services market. Not that it would matter; there are plenty of interpretations of even this standard subset of Web services.

Repeating Mistakes of the Past

Those who forget history are condemned to relive it, so they say. The X.25 problems of the past were solved by coercion. Telenet and Tymnet -- two packet data network giants long-forgotten by most -- instituted a program of certification. Equipment vendors could say they were X.25-compatible till they were hoarse, but until they were "Telenet-certified" (or Tymnet, or both), they were barred from connection to the key networks of the time. So maybe we'll have to create certification authorities for Web services to save the universality of SOA.

Who certifies, though? Network operators, including the collection of partners we call "the Internet," simply carry Web services. It's an end-to-end concept, user to user. It may be that a user will end up having to provide the solution for the entire marketplace.

Open Web services -- open SOA -- is like the old concept of electronic data interchange (EDI). Trading partners have, for decades, agreed on formats to exchange commercial transactions for retail orders, shipping and payment.

There's an SOA effort to address EDI, and EDI was standardized by a few key retailers (General Motors, WalMart, etc.) who cut through the debate and told partners to conform or stop doing business.

"WalMart Certified"? In SOA, that may be where we're headed.

April 25, 2006 at 09:41 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

SOA Technology Enters the Mainstream

SOA Technology Enters the Mainstream - Integration -

April 18, 2006 10:34AM

Although SOA certainly has crossed the chasm, there is still work to be done before the technology settles into a steady-state maturity. For example, respondents in a recent survey were divided on what constituted the best strategy for deploying SOA.

Every new technology goes through an early shakeout stage before it crosses the chasm, where it is adopted by mainstream organizations. It's safe to say that service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the services-based approach to information systems have crossed the chasm and are ready for prime time.

According to a recent survey by Research Concepts LLC of Berlin, MA, SOA has already been deployed at more than 50 percent of their organizations. Thirty-three percent have implemented at least one project, and another 20 percent are in the process of implementing their first, while 30 percent are planning an SOA implementation. Only a small minority, 16 percent, have no SOA in their plans. That puts SOA squarely in the I.T. mainstream.

Companies are turning to SOA, according to the survey, for the numerous benefits it delivers for both I.T. and the business itself, starting with greater business process flexibility. Other benefits include greater adaptability of applications, shorter time to deploy new applications, and increased reuse of application components.

Reuse has the potential to deliver substantial hard-dollar savings over time, while faster application deployment enables the organization to quickly seize opportunities. More than half the respondents (58 percent) cited increased customer satisfaction as a primary driver of SOA.

FirstMerit Corp, a financial service firm based in Akron, OH, initially turned to SOA to revamp its Internet banking channel. The services approach allowed it to quickly make its hard-to-use mainframe functionality accessible to customers through the Internet and the Web, explains Larry Shoff, executive vice president and CTO.

The ease with which the company could do that, however, opened up an entirely new opportunity for the company: small-business Internet banking. "We could take what we had done for Internet banking and quickly turn it into a new banking product for small business," says Shoff. That is the power of the SOA approach.

Although SOA certainly has crossed the chasm, there is still work to be done before the technology settles into a steady-state maturity. For example, survey respondents were divided on what constituted the best strategy for deploying SOA. Although 26 percent opted to mix and match SOA products from multiple vendors -- the best-of-breed approach -- almost an equal amount (23 percent) are turning to a single provider for an integrated solution. Even more (29 percent) use a combination of approaches.

FirstMerit, for example, relied primarily on a single vendor, DataDirect, which provided the tools and middleware to turn mainframe applications, primarily CICS functions, into Web services that could be assembled into Microsoft .NET applications by the company's developers. The results were standards-based Web services using WSDL and SOAP.

Despite the success of many companies with SOA, some challenges remain. The biggest of these is security, cited by 66 percent of survey respondents. Other challenges cited by respondents included performance (59 percent), compliance and governance (58 percent), and enforcement of business rules (53 percent).

Standards are critical to the success of SOA. SOA works because it provides a standardized way to access functionality and exchange data that otherwise reside within incompatible systems.

Although key SOA standards, such as SOAP, WSDL, XML, and UDDI, are in place, more are needed. The vast majority of survey respondents (93 percent) felt that the industry needs to speed up the development of standards. Not surprisingly, then, where SOA projects failed to meet expectations, just over half the respondents (51 percent) attributed the problem to insufficient standards.

The best practices for SOA success, according to industry analysts, are straightforward. They include the need to define the business value at the outset, identify enterprise-wide reusable services, focus on the architecture, and plan for security and governance from the start.

Even though more needs to be done, SOA clearly is ready for enterprise prime time, according to the survey respondents. Already large, leading financial services firms have deployed SOA applications that securely handle a million or more transactions a day with the kind of performance and reliability customers expect. Pretty soon everyone will be doing that.

April 21, 2006 at 07:37 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Apple debuts Intel-powered Macs

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple debuts Intel-powered Macs

Apple has started selling the first iMac computers that are powered by Intel's dual processor chip.

The announcement about the availability of the Intel-powered computers was months ahead of the schedule Apple announced in 2005 for the new range.

Apple boss Steve Jobs also launched a newly branded laptop called the MacBook Pro which also uses an Intel processor.

The new generation of iMac would be two to three times faster than the current iMac G5, he said.

The MacBook Pro would be four to five times as fast as the current PowerBook G4, Mr Jobs told Macworld in San Francisco.

The new laptops will not ship until February but the iMacs are available immediately and the price - starting at $1,299 (£929) - will remain the same.

It was widely expected that Apple would use the Macworld platform to announce that Intel-based computers would ship.

The rest of the Mac family will shift to the Intel dual-core Duo chip during the course of the year. It represents the culmination of a fast-moving collaboration between Apple and Intel, and both Steve Jobs and Intel chief executive Paul Otellini were on stage to pat each other on the back.

The shift to Intel was first revealed last year. Previously, Apple machines were powered by PowerPC chips made by IBM and Freescale.

Slice of iLife

The keynote speech from Steve Jobs at Macworld concentrated, as expected, on computers rather than digital entertainment.

In fact, the only announcement of note for its growing family of iPods was a remote control with FM radio capabilities.

HAVE YOUR SAY
Why don't Apple go the whole hog and run Windows XP on their laptops? That way their users could run some useful applications
Adrian Mugridge, Chester, UK

It will allow users to skip tracks and adjust the volume of their iPod without having to have it in their hand. It will also enable them to listen to FM radio stations.

It will be priced at $49 (£28).

The main slice of Mr Jobs' presentation was given over to updates that Apple has made to its suite of digital lifestyle applications, iLife.

iPhoto gains a new application to allow people to take part in what Mr Jobs described as photocasting - basically allowing people to subscribe to a feed of photos from someone else which will automatically update every time new photos are added.

There was a new application for iLife which will allow users to build websites to show off all their rich media.

"Everyone wants to share music, photos, blogs and podcasts over the web and there are applications out there that let you build websites," said Mr Jobs.

"But the easy-to-use ones often build ugly websites so we have created one that is easy to use and builds beautiful websites."

Dubbed iWeb, the application will ship with all new versions of iLife. The price of the package - at $79 (£55) - will remain unchanged.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4600442.stm

January 11, 2006 at 07:22 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (80) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sun unveils first Niagara servers

Sun unveils first Niagara servers - vnunet.com

New systems target web server market
Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 06 Dec 2005
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Sun Microsystems is expected later today to unveil the first servers that use its new UltraSparc T1 processor, previously codenamed Niagara.

The new servers are a "game changer" for Sun, according to Fred Kohout, vice president of marketing at Sun's Scalable Systems Group.

"We think we are five years ahead of the competition," he told vnunet.com. "There is not another system vendor in the world that can field a platform with this kind of performance, power and space efficiency."

The new servers come in the 1U T1000 and the 2U T2000 and target high throughput systems such as web servers and email servers.

The new T1 processor was officially unveiled last month and features up to eight cores with four threads each. This allows it to act as 32 individual processors. In addition to performance, Sun touted the chip's low power consumption.

Online auction website eBay is among the early customers of the system, along with Air France and EDS.

The new servers target systems running on Intel's Xeon processor. Although the T1 systems could also be used to compete with Sun's Galaxy servers powered by AMD's Opteron processors, Kohout emphasised that both target distinctly different markets.

The AMD systems are designed for compute intensive applications such as large databases and analyses. The T1 is built to quickly perform many relatively easy tasks.

While the T1 itself is a new chip architecture, developers will not need to recompile their applications to benefit from the new multi-threading capabilities.

But applications will get even better performance if they use Sun's new Studio 11 development tools designed to support the chip's multi-threading capabilities.

The servers will only support Sun's Solaris operating system for now. The vendor is inviting developers of other operating systems, including Linux and Windows, to port their software to the new server.

The T2000 is currently shipping. Prospective buyers will have to wait until the first quarter of 2006 to purchase the T1000. Prices start at $2,995 for the T1000 and $7,795 for the T2000.

December 7, 2005 at 12:23 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (39) | Top of page | Blog Home

McNealy: Why "Sun Is Back"

McNealy: Why "Sun Is Back"

The CEO believes giving away software will attract developers and customers alike. Still, Sun is under pressure to "put up the numbers"

In recent years, Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) Chief Executive Scott McNealy was widely criticized for sticking too closely to Sun's longtime business model. Its model: Spend big on loads of in-house technologies, from chips to operating software, then try to sell products at a high enough price to cover the investment and still crank out a hefty profit.

He clung to the approach even as corporate buyers started snapping up cheaper machines based on Intel-style microprocessors that ran free open-source software, including the Linux operating system. Until 2003, McNealy kept on pushing only gold-plated systems featuring Sun's own processors, its Solaris operating software, and various other so-called middleware programs that are used to connect and deliver separate applications.

But even if investors still have reason to grouse about Sun's depressed stock price, they certainly can't say McNealy is stuck in the mud anymore. In February, Sun began offering free downloads of Solaris. In September, it announced innovative new servers built around Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD ) Opteron chip.

RECAPTURING PAST GLORIES? The company claims the systems, designed by fellow Sun co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, offer far more performance while running much more coolly than rival machines (see BW Online, 11/14/05, "Sun: Back to High Performance").

And Sun has divulged a radical new chip design -- called Niagara -- that could provide similar benefits for a different class of server. Systems based on these chips, which should be announced by the end of the year, are designed to help big Internet companies such as Google (GOOG ) or Yahoo! (YHOO ) process millions of relatively simple transactions -- say, execute a search. That's in contrast to most processors, which were designed to handle hugely complex computing problems, such as forecasting the weather.

Maybe the most radical change of all came on Nov. 30, when Sun said it would give away almost all of its software products -- either individually or as part of a soup-to-nuts bundle called the Solaris Enterprise System. The goal is to rekindle the virtuous cycle that propelled Sun to greatness in the past.

RISKY MANEUVER. For starters, giving away the software could persuade more entrepreneurs and corporate programmers around the world to develop products to run on Solaris. Beefing up the developer base raises the odds that tomorrow's hot programs will run best on Solaris.

That could lift demand for Sun servers, as occurred in the late 1990s. Then, interest in Solaris and Sun's Java programming language lured buyers to its servers and gave Sun a chance to sell its other products as well.

And even if the software is free, big corporate buyers almost always buy the accompanying large service contracts to ensure they get proper customer support, such as bug fixes. This is how open-source software companies, such as Red Hat (RHAT ), make money. The move puts Sun in sync with the way software is being developed, and with how customers want to pay for it.

Still, it's a huge risk. If Solaris doesn't gain market share or if Sun can't find enough ways to get customers to pay for services to cover the cost of software development, the move could backfire. Sun has yet to win back the allegiance of investors who exited its stock after the Net bubble burst. Despite all McNealy's model-busting announcements in the past few years, Sun shares still sit at just $3.88, down from $4.14 in early December, 2002.

McNealy is nonetheless hopeful. Famous for his outspoken opinions and humor-laced digs at competitors, he has adopted a lower profile since naming Jonathan Schwartz president of Sun in April, 2004. But there's plenty of fight, and fun, remaining in McNealy, as is clear from a Dec. 1 interview with BusinessWeek Computers editor Peter Burrows. Edited excerpts follow:

It has certainly been a busy news week for Sun, given the information that you plan to give away much of your software.
Hey, we've had a busy year! You've got to give us credit for that. How many companies have been as interesting to watch as Sun over the past 18 months -- outside of Google, I suppose.

How can you make money on free software? Isn't 'We'll make it up on volume' one of the oldest formulas in the book for certain failure?
Go ask {CEO] Eric Schmidt over at Google about that. Not too long ago, everyone was wondering, how can they do [all those searches] for free? But there's lots of ways to monetize [heavy usage of a technology]. And if we build a large Solaris community, who do you think is going to benefit the most? Look at Java.

Still, the market data indicate that Sun lost share in servers in the third quarter, while most of your rivals gained.
Look at it this way. We've gone from No 99 -- nowhere -- to No. 4, or maybe even No. 3 in the last three years in sales of x86 (Intel-style chip) servers. And we're growing faster than IBM (IBM ), Dell (DELL ), and HP (HPQ ) combined. No one disputes that.

And we've gone from 0 to 3.4 million downloads of Solaris since February. That is orders of magnitude greater volume than any previous generation of Solaris. That is huge.

Maybe so, but how can you be sure that those downloads are going to turn into real applications, ones that will drive volume for Sun gear?
Programmers don't take the time to download a complete enterprise operating system unless they are going to do something with it. And when they do [create a program and want to run it on their corporate network], their boss is going to say: "Do you have a support contract?" And if it goes into production, the company is going to need some computers to run it on.

But can you make as much money per customer as you currently do?
You mean, what's the razor and what is the razor blade? Well, the software is the razor. The razor blades are the servers, the storage, the memory, the service contracts, the archiving services, the tape cartridges, the integration, the consulting services. The whole deal.

Have you now made all the big changes required to put Sun back on the comeback trail so it can start gaining share and lifting its stock price?
We've completely redone our product line and our strategy. What we need to do now is get the image of the company back to where it was. But we're making progress.

The noise around the company has changed. You haven't asked me: "Is Sun going to survive?” I haven't been asked that in 18 months. Now people ask: "Is Sun back?” Once people are comfortable with that, our sales cycles should get shorter. If we can show a little bit of sustained growth and profitability, we can turn this whole thing around.

So why do you think Sun is the only one of the big computer companies making such bold changes to its business strategy? We don't see IBM giving away its software like this.
It happens to all of us. It happened to us at Sun. We were paralyzed by [the huge success during] the first phase of the Internet [in the 1990s], until someone came and hit us upside the head.

So then we made the move to Opteron, and to open source and to all the other things we've done. Well, Dell and IBM and some of the others are all thinking: 'Hey, we're on a roll.' But Sun is back. Those guys are in trouble, but people just haven't figured it out yet.

But again, it's so hard to know when that day is going to come. The company always has so many interesting technologies and bold initiatives, and you're always so optimistic. For example, you said earlier in this interview that "Sun is back.” Do you really think we're at that point in time? Have you said that before?
Probably every day for the last five years [Laughing]. That's my job.

So far investors don't seem to be buying the story. Why not?
We have to put up the numbers. But a lot of this is also related to what our competitors are saying about us. A lot of this is people kicking us while we're down, and I don't blame them. I'd do it, too. But we'll have our day in the sun.
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December 3, 2005 at 10:12 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

IBM Viper to avoid 'schema chaos'

IT Business

Next DB2 to manage XML data more efficiently, exec says
11/17/2005 5:00:00 PM
by Shane Schick

IBM’s Toronto Software Lab is helping Big Blue prepare a version of its DB2 database that could store XML data more easily.

Early previews of the database, code-named Viper, are being provided this week to attendees of the XML 2005 Conference in Atlanta, though the finished product is not expected until next year. Key to Viper’s features is the ability to manage and integrate native extensible markup language (XML) data and relational data.

Right now most databases store XML as a file or a “blob” in a cell, which can require reformatting as a large object in the system. Extracting that XML data for analytic purposes can be time-consuming and not necessarily true to the way the data was organized.

Berni Schiefer, manager of DB UDB performance, benchmarks and solutions development, at IBM’s Toronto Software Lab, said Viper will allow applications to use XQuery, or SQL to retrieve the data, rather than creating separate applications to pull from relational and XML repositories.

“Think of it as having two streams coming into a box and two coming out. DB2 provides wiring that lets you take incoming streams and mix and match them with outgoing streams,” he said.

With traditional databases, “you almost have to think ahead of all the variations you might expect – we call that ‘schema chaos,’” Schiefer said. “When you have schema chaos, the traditional relational model is not the ideal fit.”

For Viper beta testers such as SkyTide, which makes software to analyze XML data, the benefits could be very important, according to John Morrell, vice-president of product marketing, in San Mateo, Calif.

“One of the big gaps in the market to effectively manage XML data they’re acquiring with a lot of the other relational data,” he said. “As it grows from five to 15 per cent of corporate data, it becomes an important asset. You need to manage it.”

IBM’s chief rival in the database market is still Oracle, which according to IDC data released earlier this year, continues to command 41.3 per cent of the market. Oracle has spent the last three years pushing 10g, a database focused on allowing enterprises to balance computing work loads by creating grids of IT resources.

Viper doesn’t compete with that approach, but will offer autonomic or self-managing capabilities that will let the database configure itself for various environments, such as SAP, Microsoft or Oracle. It will also make sure the right amount of memory is available for various jobs, Schiefer said, such as an overnight batch job.

“Think of a car with a fuel injection system where the computer knows how much gas to shoot into the engine at the right time to maximize the amount of energy,” he said. “We’re constantly taking sensors in the database where the demands are and using a metric that we call ‘unit of goodness per byte of memory’ to know who would be the most valuable recipient in order to optimize the throughput.”

IBM’s other main database rival, Microsoft, released the 2005 version of its SQL database last week.

November 18, 2005 at 12:07 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Katrina crisis sends Canadian IT firms into action

IT Business

Vendors are applying traditional applications in some unconventional ways to assist with relief efforts following the hurricane's wave of destruction. Find how who's helping, and how
9/7/2005 5:00:00 PM
by Neil Sutton

Canadian technology companies are pitching in to help relief efforts around Hurricane Katrina, in some cases jury-rigging applications that are most often found in the enterprise to track and aid victims of the crisis.

For one Ottawa-based software provider, it was a question of turning a case management tool commonly used by insurance companies into a database that could connect the homeless with those who are willing to open their doors.

Customer Expressions was contacted by a newly-formed organization called Operation: Share Your Home, based in Baton Rouge, La. The group was put together to help find accommodation for those who lost their own homes in the devastation caused by the hurricane.

“I’m not sure how they knew of us . . . but they had been aware of us and knew what the software could do,” said Joe Gerard, vice-president of sales and marketing for Customer Expressions.

“The people that started this group down there were trying to slap together a database where you could enter the information. It had the functionality to record stuff but that was (all). It wouldn’t have had any workflow tools or searching to allow them to go through and figure out how to match these people up,” he said.

Within a few days of being contacted, Customer Expressions built a module for Operation: Share Your Home – a Web portal where people that were willing to make some room in their homes register their names and addresses. The site also allows them to specify how many people they can take, how long they’d be able to stay and even details like age and gender preferences and whether they would allow alcohol to be consumed in their homes.

The site went live on Saturday. It’s too soon to tell how many people have been matched to their temporary abodes, said Gerard, but more than 10,000 willing participants have put their names down. Most of those people are close to the affected areas, but some offers have come from as far away as Illinois. At press time, a spokesperson for Operation: Share Your Home was unreachable since phone lines in Baton Rouge were down due to the hurricane.

Tugboat Enterprises, a Powell River, B.C.-based data recovery company aims to aid businesses affected by the disaster. Using the company’s Lifeboat software, users can retrieve data from a non-booting computer by attaching a working machine and accessing the hard drive directly.

“We’re making that available free of charge to anybody whose business is down,” said Gordon Wilson, president of Tugboat. “That’ll be anybody from a small, home-based business to large companies who need to access and retrieve data very quickly.

Wilson initially thought he would offer his product for free until Sept. 16, but the response was such that he has extended the deadline until the end of the month.

“We were just absolutely blown away by the magnitude of the devastation,” he said. “Beyond the human tragedy and loss of real estate, people who are in business and marginally affected even, are going to suffer significant costs in data recovery.”

The software works with Windows-based machines and is available as a download from the company’s Web site or through a Florida-based distributor that can ship the disks directly. Users can register online and once their IP address is verified as originating from an affected area, they can download and install Lifeboat.

“There may be some people that might scam it, but for the handful or few dozen that might, so what? We’re not going to not do it for the few people that are trying to take advantage,” said Wilson.

Ottawa-based Protus IP Solutions is aiding the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort by working with one of the best-known disaster relief agencies, the American Red Cross. Protus is providing the organization its voice-mail, e-mail and fax broadcasting services so it can communicate effectively between its 140 offices and in some cases with residents in Louisiana and Mississippi that were directly affected by the tragedy.

“What they’re doing is simply using our fax and voice broadcasting systems to deliver one message to all these different places at once so it’s a consistent message, it’s timely and reaches everybody at the same time,” said Steve Adams, vice-president of sales and marketing for Protus.

Protus’s broadcast tools have been used in disaster relief efforts in the past, he added, or for other areas like informing a population about school closings. They’re also used by enterprises as customer service tools. Protus is now offering its service for free to any of its existing customers in the affected states, said Adams. “We just want to make it as easy as possible for them to continue to use the service.”

All three of the Canadian technology companies are providing their services for free as part of the Katrina clean-up efforts. They’re also aware that a little good will in a crisis can go a long way.

Joe Gerard of Customer Expressions said that his company will investigate a business model around future applications of its product in disaster areas. The company has pledged free support for Operation: Share Your Home for as long as the organization needs it but “what we’re looking at now is whether we can make money off this someday. We’ve donated the time and effort and software (this time).”

Tugboat came into existence only last year, so the company wants to get off to a good start and generate some buzz, said Wilson. The current iteration of Lifeboat is a client-based recovery solution, but the company is working on a networked version.

“We have four other products in the stream and two more than are on the drawing board. From our point of view, not only does it help people out, but because we’re a new company, it’s important for us to get known and it’s important for us to get known in a good light,” said Wilson. “The more we can do to help people, the better off we’ll be.”

September 8, 2005 at 04:33 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

AJAX - wikipedia entry

Ajax (programming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ajax or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of:

* HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for presenting information
* The Document Obje