Cloud Computing Parallelism

Computing Heads for the Clouds

Today, more transistors are being produced annually than grains of rice -- and at a lower cost!

The challenge for IT is figuring out what to do with all that computing power. That means harnessing parallelism.

Supercomputers exploited parallelism by using the power of mathematics to breakdown matrix-oriented problems into multiple subproblems that could be worked on simultaneously. Taking advantage of its underlying mathematical foundation, Relational DBMS vendors have long been able to decompose queries into sets of operations that could be performed in parallel running on independent processors.

It was Google, however, who most successfully has figured out how to employ high-performance parallel programming techniques to power its search engine by connecting together a million, cheap PC-like servers into what's effectively the world's largest supercomputer. The Google cloud helps ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second.

Traditionally, supercomputers have been used mainly by research labs owned by the military, government intelligence agencies, universities and very large companies. The problems they've historically tackled have generally involved enormously complex calculations for such tasks as simulating nuclear explosions, predicting climate change, or designing airplanes.

Cloud computing aims to apply supercomputer power -- measured in the tens of trillions of computations per second -- in a way that users can tap through the Web by spreading data-processing chores across large groups of networked servers.

"Google and the Wisdom of Clouds" describes how Google, teamed with IBM, is introducing students, researchers, and entrepreneurs with the immense power of Google-style computing.

Unlike traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.

The software at the heart of Google computing is called "MapReduce." MapReduce delivers Google's speed and industrial heft. It divides each task into hundreds, or even thousands, of tasks, and distributes them to legions of computers. In a fraction of a second, as each one comes back with its nugget of information, MapReduce quickly assembles the responses into an answer.

There's an open-source version of the MapReduce architecture of cloud computing called "Hadoop." The team that developed Hadoop belonged to a company, Nutch, that got acquired. Oddly, they are now working within the walls of Yahoo, which was counting on the MapReduce offspring to give its own computers a touch of Google magic. Hadoop, though, remains open source.

What will computing clouds look like? They'll function as huge virtual laboratories "curating" troves of data. All sorts of business models are sure to evolve. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to compare the cloud-based supercomputer data centers to the prohibitively expensive particle accelerators known as cyclotrons. "There are only a few cyclotrons in physics," he says. "And every one if them is important, because if you're a top-flight physicist you need to be at the lab where that cyclotron is being run. That's where history's going to be made; that's where the inventions are going to come." As Mark Dean, head of IBM's research operation in Almaden, Calif., says, in the future using these new cloud computing labs, "you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else."

As Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Amazon lead the world in building massive cloud computing data centers with massively parallel processing capabilities, the only constraints may be finding enough electricity to power their truly amazing infrastructures.

President Bush And The National Debt

On the day President Bush took office, the National Debt stood at $5.7 trillion dollars. Six and a half years later, the National Debt is $8.8 trillion –- an increase of $3.1 trillion dollars since January 20, 2001. That amounts to a jump of 54% during Mr. Bush's watch. The National Debt has gone up more on his watch than under any other president.

The National Debt costs taxpayers $247.3 billion in interest payments. If you wanted to pay it off, dividing it equally among the U.S. population (estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be 302,103,675), it would come to $29,245.82 for every man, woman and child

Racking Brains To Ease Iraqi Pains

With 2006 drawing to a close, America's Iraq disaster has turned into a war that even President George W. Bush has finally admitted we're not winning. Looking ahead to the future, historians will ponder and debate over who are the people responsible for this debacle.

• Clearly, Vice President Dick Cheney is going to be remembered as being both the most powerful and the most destructive vice president in U.S. history. His obsession with executive power, his secretive style, his manipulation of intelligence, his fear mongering, his advocacy of torture, his questioning of the patriotism of political foes, all pale by comparison to the role Cheney played that led America into a preemptive war against Iraq.


• Condolezza Rice was an abject failure as national security adviser. She has not performed much better as Secretary of State.


• Rice's hapless predecessor, Colin Powell, allowed himself to be used to support a war he never truly believed in. He understood from the get go that the Iraq war was going to be a huge mistake describing it, as he did, using the Pottery Barn analogy that says "if you break you own it."


• Beyond his enigmatic, obstructionist, and devious personality, Rumsfeld's decision to under-man the Iraqi invasion force essentially cost the U.S. any hope of winning a war against insurgents.


• Finally, there's President Bush, himself, who leaves behind a double-edged legacy. On one side there's a terrible failure of leadership, while on the other there's near total lack of accountability.

It's extremely unlikely that the problems in Iraq are going to be solved militarily. Rather, what's needed are new ideas on how to find political solutions. Obviously, something considerably more is needed beyond what was put forth as recommendations by the Baker-Hamilton commission.

David Apgar, author of "Risk Intelligence: Learning to Manage What We Don't Know." published a fascinating Boston Globe editorial entitled "A two-state solution for Iraq?" He proposes a two-way partition. Below is an edited excerpt describing his proposal:

The new border would run from southwest to northeast roughly through Baghdad's airport. The state to the northwest would include all 5 million Kurds and nearly all 5 million Sunni. It would include all of Baghdad and all the 2 million to 3 million urban and suburban Shi'a in its vicinity. It would also include all of the northern oil fields. In contrast, the state to the southeast would be a purely Shi'ite state, including all the Shi'a of the rural south and Basra and all of the major Shi'ite holy sites. Naturally, it would also include the southern oil fields. But it would include no part of metropolitan Baghdad with the exception of access to the airport. This southeastern state draws together the most-traditional elements of Iraq's Shi'ite community and none of Iraq's least-traditional, Baghdad-based Shi'a, to observe a mild version of sharia law. It would maintain cordial if not intimate relations with Iran, would become very rich from oil, and would function as a sort of Saudi-style guardian of the world's most important Shi'ite holy sites. On the other hand, a polyglot state such as proposed for the northwest, centered in the major metropolitan area of Baghdad, would probably focus on industrializing its agricultural and refining sectors and becoming a trade center for the Middle East. Living in today's Iraq are four major communities -- the southern Shi'a, the Sunni community, the Kurdish community and the metropolitan Shi'a most closely associated with al-Sadr. The most traditional people in Iraq are probably the Shi'a who live south and east of Baghdad, perhaps reflecting their proximity to the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. These are the people who arguably suffered the greatest hardship under Saddam. A homogeneous state of their own would seem to provide them the widest scope to adjust their government's jurisdiction over religious as well as civil life. It would also seem to provide them the greatest protection from any hostile coalition of less-traditional groups from the north. For Iraq's Sunni community, the establishment of a northwestern state immediately solves two problems. Instead of being a 20 percent minority dominated by a Shi'ite population simmering with understandable resentment toward Sunni rule under Saddam, Iraq's Sunni would find themselves a 40 percent plurality. And instead of questionable access to oil in Shi'ite and Kurdish states under one possible three-way partition, the Sunni community would enjoy shared but uncompromised access to all the reserves of northwestern Iraq. For Iraq's Kurdish community, a northwestern state would solve two big problems. Like the Sunni, Kurds would enjoy shared but uncompromised access to all the oil reserves near Kirkuk in the north. More important, however, is the fact that their state would be largely free from unreasonable threats from Turkey. It is true that Kurds would represent a 40 percent plurality of the new state. Sixty percent of that state, however, would be Arab, which simultaneously eliminates the danger of a purely Kurdish border state from the Turkish perspective -- and ensures political support from other Arab states. Perhaps the most important reason to consider a two-state partition, however, derives from the needs of the urban Shi'a of Baghdad -- and perhaps even the ambitions of al-Sadr himself. A two-state partition arguably offers the best possible development solution for the inhabitants of places such as Sadr City. These Shi'a would comprise 20 percent of the population of the northern state. They would inevitably be the kingmakers of the northwestern state supporting Kurdish and Sunni political parties depending on the attention those parties paid to the development needs of Baghdad's urban poor. More immediately, they would no longer represent the vanguard -- and an easily attacked one, at that -- of a community of 15 million Shi'a threatening the livelihood of Iraq's Sunnis. As a minority of 2 million to 3 million Shi'a in the northwestern state, they would instead be a potential political ally for both Kurds and Sunnis, and might well play a role similar to the minority Shi'ite population of Syria. The reasons insurgents attack them today would be gone. [click here to read entire editorial]

Top Three Trends for 2007

This time of year pundits like me love to make prognostications predicting the forthcoming trends for the upcoming year. Below are my top three picks:

#1. AJAX

AJAX is that part of Web 2.0 that will absolutely, positively have a significant impact on computing in 2007.

Even Microsoft has jumped onto the AJAX bandwagon. For instance, check out how they have drastically redesigned their company's home page www.microsoft.com by using AJAX to load content dynamically when the user clicks on items in the floating menu to the right of the page. Dynamically loaded content gets displayed in a floating panel that appears over the top of the rest of the page, which gets dimmed and cannot be clicked while the panel is visible.

To the user the interface is the system!!!

AJAX provides the rich client behavior that was so predominant before Web browsers became popular. With AJAX, gone is the notion of constantly having to refresh an entire web page for each transaction. With dynamic reloading of portions of web pages, transmitting only a small amount of data to the client, the resulting user experience is faster, richer, and arguably better functionality.

Google has long been an ardent AJAX supporter. For example, see Google Maps which enables users to drag a map to move it in various directions, or Google Suggest which provides suggestions from the server as users type, showing in a drop-down a list of search terms that may be of interest.

Invest in AJAX in 2007. Rich clients are worth it. Display terminals like IBM 3270s displaced keypunch machines. Character-based terminals like DEC VT100s displaced 3270s. Character-based PCs with memory-mapped I/O like MS-DOS displaced VT100s. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) like Windows displaced MS-DOS. GUI browsers like IE displaced PC-based GUI apps (because web servers were so awesome). The next major user interface revolution is happening now. It's called AJAX!

# 2: Service-Oriented Architecture

Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, BEA, and just about every other software vendor are all now singing the same exact tune -- that SOA represents their next-generation IT development and deployment strategy. Of course, the $64,000 question still remains "What's a service?"

The software industry has been promising reusable components ever since the invention of subroutines. The problem invariably boils down to the age old dilemma of how does a developer "find" a software module to be reused. If the process of discovery takes as long as creating entirely new software, the developer always opts for the latter, especially if the reusable software is perceived as being unlikely to handle 100% of the requirements for the new task at hand.

Software reuse -- whether we're talking a service, a component, an object, a module, a subroutine, a macro, or whatever, -- is always, in fact, a two-part issue: 1) finding the software to be reused; and 2) being able to modify the software to handle non-generic special cases. The first challenge is one of figuring out how to organize, classify, and categorize the software to be reused so that it can be readily found. The second question involves supporting techniques for either adding new functionality to software to be reused, or overriding existing functionality.

Fundamentally, SOA's success will largely depend on evolutionary advancements that can extend software components beyond SOA's predecessor technology, object-oriented programming. The big breakthrough that SOA delivers is in the way that it uses the Internet's underlying Web infrastructure in place of OO's CORBA and DCOM object request brokers. XML is the key enabling technology that makes all this possible.

One of the keys to building successful SOA-based systems is to exploit the abstract semantic relationship that reflects the continuum between generic and specific. In other words, SOA needs to allow developers to create general-purpose building blocks that can easily be extended to handle special cases. This is accomplished by supporting mechanisms for developers to add new functionality or override existing functionality.

Another critical aspect of SOA pertains to business process modeling. Whereas services represent the core components of SOA, developers still need to be able to find those services in order to reuse them. It just so happens that the most reusable facets of any information system are its business events. A specific business event triggers a business process which itself is a set of distinct steps, some of which must be performed in sequence, others of which may be able to be performed in parallel. Furthermore, some process steps are conditionally performed based on the results of prior activities. One key to SOA's success depends on its ability to organize, classify, and categorize services based around business events (so that those services can be easily discovered).

#3. Cloud Computing

Servers reside in an Internet cloud somewhere and it doesn't matter how you access the cloud whether you have a PC or a Mac or a Blackberry or a cell telephone or whatever. Nowadays this notion of cloud computing is often being referred to as SaaS which stands for Software as a Service.

The pendulum in computing relentlessly swings back and forth between personal and shared machines. The very first computers, such as ENIAC, were single user systems. Those computation workhorses were soon followed by sharable mainframe computers like IBM's System/360. Next came minicomputers from companies like DEC which were, once again, primarily single-user systems. Soon, however, minicomputers became much more powerful enabling them to be shared by multiple different users simultaneously, where each user had his or her own virtual machine, and the shared resources were controlled by a sophisticated operating system such as UNIX or VAX/VMS (or various other derivatives of MIT's Project Multics). Minicomputers, though, soon were obsoleted by personal computers which gave each virtual machine user their own physical machine to control. But, PC users still wanted to share data and resources just as they had previously been able to do on their shared systems. That demand led to the advent of client/server computing. The ultimate winner in the client/server war was the World Wide Web which itself is evolving into cloud computing especially as behemoths such as Google and Microsoft build massive data centers with massive parallel processing capabilities constrained only by their ability to find enough electricity to power their truly amazing infrastructures (see The Information Factories).

That's my list of predictions for 2007. Check back next year to see if I got it right. If you're a gambler, then wager that those who will win big in the upcoming year are IT organizations that bet the ranch on AJAX, SOA, and SaaS.

Happy New Year from the ITscout!

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

"What we have here is a failure to communicate."

— Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"

Paul Newman might as well have been the spokesperson for Enterprise Architects everywhere!!! At its very core the age old problem plaguing Enterprise Architecture currently is, and always has been, the frustration caused by the inability of business people and IT people to communicate effectively.

Click anywhere on the excerpt below to read Flashmap Systems' just published whitepaper entitled "A Failure to Communicate."

"...ITatlas takes a different approach to EA by recognizing that the presentation of the architectural information to be communicated is as critical to the success of an EA program as its collection and capture. In other words, not only does architectural information need to be available in an appropriate format, but also the delivery of that information needs to be so intuitive that someone with little or no training will feel comfortable accessing it. Getting the right information to the correct person at the proper time often means targeting audiences where individuals have neither the time nor the inclination to attend a training class or read a user manual...."

Read full whitepaper:
http://www.flashmapsystems.com/pdfs/wp_communication.pdf

Prosuming

In 1979, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer" to describe the open source-like phenomenon of people producing what they consume. The term applies to individuals who prefer to be involved in designing the things they purchase. In other words, new products and/or services are created by combining together the roles of producer and consumer.

Prosuming has rapidly grown right along with the explosion of emerging technologies for digitally making and editing music, videos, and photo images. Especially important is the ability to easily share finished products over the Internet.

The hottest new way to prosume comes from a Web 2.0 development called mashups which enable people to seamlessly combine content from more than one source into an integrated experience. And, of course, the granddaddy of prosuming is open source software which allows programmers to read and modify source code for a piece of software thereby improving it, adapting it, as well as fixing bugs.

Prosumers are passionate about the technology they use for their creative pursuits. Money isn't usually the central goal for prosumers. Rather, it's the satisfaction that comes from people learning something from other people.

Bush's Three Strikes and You're Out Legacy

Perhaps because George W. Bush was once part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, it's fitting that his presidential administration's legacy will most likely be remembered by the baseball metaphor Three Strikes and You're Out.

Incompetency will be the overriding theme most historians will use to describe George Bush #43.

1. Strike One was the incompetency exhibited during Hurricane Katrina.


2. Strike Two was the incompetency demonstrated by his prosecution of the war in Iraq.


3. Strike Three will be felt most profoundly in the future due to the incompetency manifested by the reckless budget deficits and trade deficits racked up under Bush's watch.

Over time, Strike Two will be seen as far worse than Strike One, and Strike Three will be, by far, the worst of all. The American government simply cannot continue to spend more money than it collects in taxes and the American economy cannot continue to indefinitely import more than it exports.

Under the law, three strikes has come to mean mandatory imprisonment for someone convicted of a serious criminal offense on three or more separate occasions. From the purview of history, three strikes means Bush will be remembered as one of the most awful presidents America has ever had. It's hard to imagine that any of his predecessors have either been more incompetent or done more lasting damage.

We Should Have Just "Shocked and Awed"

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group delivered, in stark terms, a broad indictment that U.S. policy in Iraq is not working. The panel, headed by former secretary of state Jim Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, describes our situation there as "grave and deteriorating."


As Homer Simpson might say, "Doh!"

Tell us something we don't already know!

Most people now agree we should never have gotten into this war in the first place. But once our troops did invade Iraq, we should have just stuck with our initial shock and awe warfare strategy. During those early days of the conflict, the ways in which this war was waged were indeed remarkable. American troops reached Baghdad in record-breaking time.

Bush's mistake was not bringing the troops home immediately after he raised the now infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. We should have left Iraq then and there leaving behind the simple message that America can really kick some ass when it wants to.

How in the world did George W. Bush get himself into the business of nation building? I suppose Haliburton might have gotten itself rich, but America has gotten herself into another Vietnam-like quagmire. The main difference is there's no draft this time around.

The problem with asymmetric warfare is that military power doesn't work against an enemy who uses civilians as a shield. How do you prevail against an enemy whose primary objective is anarchy?

During World War II, America was determined to achieve victory at any cost. Military leaders were willing to kill civilians, if necessary. Consider Dresden or Hiroshima. During the Cold War, the U.S. "MAD" strategy of "mutually assured destruction" was premised on countless civilian casualties.

The biggest lesson the military was supposed to have learned from Vietnam was never again to go to war unless we intended to win at any cost. That would mean the American people were fully supportive, willing to make any sacrifice. That would mean rooting out and destroying an enemy even if it meant killing civilians. In other words, never again get into a frivolous military venture.

The United States spends more money on its defense budget than all other nations combined. This has resulted in an impressive array of shock and awe weaponry. What good is all that power if we can't intimidate our enemies with it?

Iran and North Korea, America's biggest current foes, would be behaving very differently today if our troops had come home after Saddam's government was originally toppled. Had that happened, what would Iraq look like today? Who knows? But, I doubt the circumstances could be much worse than what's happening there now. With private Saudi citizens reportedly giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq, Iranians training and arming Shi'ite militias, and who knows what is being done by Syria, the only thing for certain is American soldiers in Iraq are targets to be killed by suicide bombers, improvised explosive device (IED) roadside bombs, and even shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

Imagine that the U.S. withdraws all its troops. What's the worst that could happen? If need be we can always invade Iraq again, can't we?

Meanwhile, what would happen if American shock and awe air and sea power were used to take out Iran's fledgling nuclear weapon-making facilities? I imagine the price of oil might skyrocket to well over $100 per barrel. Tom Friedman of the New York Times thinks that could be good news since it would finally break our addiction to foreign oil. As he says, "the sooner oil reaches $100 per barrel, the sooner it will get back to $20 per barrel."

If American victory means imposing a democratic government onto the people in Iraq, then we need to send the 500,000 soldiers that would be required to oversee a conquered people. On the other hand, if U.S. troops aren't an easy target for Iran, then there's a military option to take out Iranian nuclear weaponry plants if indeed they are a legitimate threat to America.

President Bush should heed the advice of his fellow Republican presidential predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, who said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." With America's current military relatively small in number and bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush has been guilty of the opposite. His many loud threats are virtually ignored by enemies who perceive America as soft and weak and unwilling to fight.

Technology Laws: Abundance vs Scarcity

Renowned author and high technology futurist George Gilder has developed what he describes as Ten Rules for Tech Investors. Two of these, the Law of Abundance and the Law of Scarcity, are irrefutably correct. Basically, wise entrepreneurs waste what is abundant in order to save what is scarce.

Gilder is sometimes positively brilliant such as when he explains how dumb networks will always prevail over smart networks. With dumb networks, intelligence shifts to the edges of the network.

Other times Gilder's right-wing extremist views sound like the musings of a fanatic, such as his resolute support for "intelligent design" over Darwin's theory of natural selection, his quirky belief that government-run education is to blame for declining American literacy, or that broadcast TV is a failing model because it wastes the consumer's time. In 1974, the National Organization for Women even named Gilder its Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year for his book "Men and Marriage."

Politics aside, even though George Gilder has never managed a business and he's never written a line of computer code, he's obviously done an incredible amount of technical research. He's definitely neck deep in his understanding of science.

Back in 1981, George Gilder wrote a book about supply-side economics called "Wealth & Poverty" which made it to #4 on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Considered "the bible of the Reagan revolution," his book explained how cutting taxes would stimulate entrepreneurship, increasing the taxable base of the economy, thereby raising revenues by cutting taxes.

The classical definition of economics is the study of choice under scarcity. But in Gilder's world, scarcity is only a temporary problem. Through engineering ingenuity things considered to be scarce, such as transitors or bandwidth, unfailingly get "supplied" and become plentiful.

Wired Magazine recently published a fascinating article written by George Gilder called The Information Factories which suggests that the desktop is dead. Long live the Internet cloud! In the brave new world of 21st century computing, we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth.

Last century the PC was king. The mainframe was deposed and deceased. The desktop was the data center. Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes which gets swelled every 24 hours by additional terabytes of new data. As Gilder writes:

In the PC era, the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center –- those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location. They will leverage the Net to provide not only search, but also the panoply of applications formerly housed on the desktop.

As George Gilder explains, "In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant -– as signalled by precipitously declining prices -– in order to save what is scarce. Google has been profligate with the surfeits of data storage and backbone bandwidth. Conversely, it has been parsimonious with that most precious of resources, users' patience." Wasting what is abundant to conserve what is scarce, Google has become the supreme entrepreneur of the new millennium.

Support a 21st-Century Draft

Apart from many other arguments, the biggest problem I have with Bush's war in Iraq is that most Americans have never been asked to sacrifice anything. The burden of national defense should be been borne by everyone -- not just a very small few.

New York Democrat Charles Rangel, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has called for reinstatement of the draft. Virtually all politicians -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- will quickly reject any such proposal for bringing back conscription, a practice officially ended in 1973.

Unlike during World War II, the U.S. today does not require a huge military comprised of every able-bodied man and woman of draft age. But there is a serious malaise in American society that can best be solved by finding a way for young people to make a deep and significant commitment to their country. Congress should support a 21st-century draft for national service (not just military service). Almost certainly, it won't.

America Needs Bold New Political Ideas

With the election now over and the Democrats getting ready to take control of both the House and Senate in the next Congress, let's hope they don't overreach. That would be the natural tendency for a party that's long been out of power. Congress shouldn't try to control America's foreign policy no matter how much they may want to. That's the job of the President. Congress must not engage in impeachment hearings or assigning partisan blame for past mistakes. That would be a total waste of time and energy.

Over the past two years, the Democrats have demonstrated remarkable discipline. Soon-to-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi, soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean all deserve tremendous credit for the job they've done. Let's hope John Kerry quickly announces that he is not running for President again in 2008. He's such a loser he almost lost an election he wasn't even running in.

Looking ahead to 2008, I personally hope that neither Hillary Clinton nor Oback Barama win their party's nomination. Given the South's solid red Republican block, it's going to be hard enough for the Democrats to win the presidency without trying to elect the first woman president or first minority president. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton is such a political lightning rod, she'd probably lose a national election if she ran unopposed, and Oback Barama is simply too inexperienced and unproven to seriously consider running in 2008.

So, what can Democrats do?
America faces incredible challenges both at home and abroad: budget deficits; healthcare funding; energy independence; nuclear weapons proliferation; government ethics; Islamic terrorists; racial inequality; illegal immigration, Baby Boomer social security obligations -- to name just a few.

America desperately needs bold new thinking and leadership. Perhaps the Dems could sponsor some of the following ideas:

• Let's make mass transportation free! To cover the cost, we should add lots more toll booths along Interstate highways, especially around our cities where traffic jams have become unbearable. Our nation's goal has to be to encourage reductions in overall energy consumption.


• Let's pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting political advertising on the public air waves. In other words, no more television or radio ads by politicians, political parties, lobbyists or special interest groups. This would drastically reduce the need for political campaign contributions.


• Let's institute a mandatory two-year national service obligation. Young people who elect to serve in the armed forces can receive greater compensation than those who choose to perform other jobs. Qualified college graduates can contribute in jobs related to their field of expertise by working in education or healthcare.


• Let's recognize that America's war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. Instead, we ought to decriminalize illegal drugs and levy substantial taxes on them like we do with alcohol and cigarettes.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with these particular ideas, the main point is that this past election was a rejection of the status quo. America needs to recapture her imagination and inspiration.

Why Are We at War in Iraq?

We didn't go to war in Iraq because of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). There weren't any.

We didn't go to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was culpable for the 9/11 al-Qaeda terror attacks against America. He wasn't. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were never friends or allies.

We didn't go to war in Iraq to spread democracy. That's a rationalization invented after we failed to find WMDs. Elections are not the same as democracy. Democracy cannot be forced onto a people. America has always spread democracy by example, not by force. Ironically, nothing has harmed America's own democracy more than Bush's war or terrorism.

Why, then, are we fighting a war in Iraq?

Because Bush and Cheney believed that Arabs had to be punished for 9/11. Fighting a war in Afghanistan was not sufficient. Afghans weren't the people aboard the planes on 9/11. Arabs were. America had to prove to Arabs they couldn't get away with terror.

So, if America had to attack Arabs, who could they go after? Saudi Arabia? Never! Eygpt? No way! Syria? Too small! Iraq was the only logical choice, especially with all its oil.

Once the decision was made to attack Iraq, the Bush White House focused on justifying an invasion. Donald Rumsfeld believed that Iraq's army would lay down its arms and immediately surrender in response to "shock and awe." Unfortunately, he was dead wrong. Instead, Iraqi fighters morphed into an insurgency against Americans.

President Bush in a recent stump speech in Indiana said, "We will defeat the enemy in Iraq. We have a plan for victory." The obvious question is, "Mr. President, what is victory in Iraq and how will we know when we've achieved it?"

Starting an EA Program According to Dr. Kenneth Russell

"The biggest issue for any company starting an EA program is Governance and Communication . . . and you guys [Flashmap Systems] offer a great solution for getting that off of the ground."

-- Dr. Kenneth Russell
Kinetic Strategy Partners

Business Benefits of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture provides a holistic view that enables business managers to see how and where their own individual needs fit into larger overall organizational objectives.

Without Enterprise Architecture, business managers are forced to work within a very limited context that often leads to stovepiped, or siloed, technology solutions.

Reducing redundancy by leveraging existing capabilities allows business managers to make better informed decisions. This inevitably leads to improved performance through cost-cutting and accelerated delivery of new solutions.

How Flashmap Systems Helps Architects

Most enterprises possess lots of non-integrated information, located in different silos, and collected in various formats such as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and multiple different databases. My company, Flashmap Systems, sells products that help IT organizations establish, communicate, and enforce IT standards, architectures and strategies.

Architecture That's Not Communicated Does Not Add Value

Flashmap's flagship product, ITatlas, provides a focus for transforming and integrating existing content so that architects can explain what they are trying to do and how are they going to do it. Success, in terms of architecture, begins with communicating the right information to the right people at the right time. This requires simple and easy access to architectural information.

Enterprise architecture's chief purpose is to create a unified, standardized environment of hardware and software systems with tight links to business strategies and goals. IT assets encompass logical resources, such as applications and databases, as well as physical resources, such as processors, storage, and networks. A firm optimizes these assets by developing a map of its IT assets and business processes, and a set of governing principles that support the business strategy and how it can be expressed through IT.

The enterprise architecture blueprint specifies hardware, software, protocol, and interface standards. It also includes a development/deployment plan that describes the projects needed to achieve the architecture's desired target state.

There are many models for developing an enterprise architecture, including the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the Zachman Architecture Framework, and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF). Most frameworks contain four basic domains:

1. Business and/or Process Architecture
2. Information and/or Data Architecture
3. Application and/or System Architecture
4. Infrastructure and/or Technology Architecture

Enterprise Architecture standards and conformance criteria must be clearly communicated. Make sure architecture artifacts aren't so esoteric that no one understands them. The key to successful EA is to keep it simple.

Is This Armageddon?

Any commentary regarding the Middle East is radioactive. Nonetheless, the fundamental question seems to me to boil down to a single question:

Does Israel have the right to exist?

Doesn't the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute stem from the desire throughout the Muslim world to eliminate Israel?  Are Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists or are they liberators?

There will never be peace so long as the Middle East crisis is perceived as a "long war" in which victory will be the culmination of a series of unavoidable catastrophes, such as the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 wars, plus two intifadahs.

Conventional armies, such as those led by Egypt's Nassar, failed to get rid of Israel. Guerrilla movements, such as Arafat's PLO who invented skyjackings and suicide bombers, failed to get rid of Israel. It's unlikely that terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas -- inspired by the rhetorical threats of Iran's incendiary president Ahmadinejad -- will get rid of Israel by raining rockets down onto Israeli civilians.

As Thomas Friedman says, "There will never be peace until Palestinians start loving their own children more than they hate the Israelis."

So far, Israeli withdrawals and concessions have brought about the opposite of Palestinian moderation. As soon as Israel withdrew from Gaza, making it the first independent Palestinian territory ever, militants began firing rockets from Gaza into Israeli towns.

Why didn't Palestinians make any effort to turn Gaza into a thriving state? Why didn't they create villages out of the settlements the Israeli government forced its settlers to abandon? Why did they fail to begin building schools, roads, and hospitals? Instead, Palestinians elected a radical Islamic Hamas government who chose to interpret Israel's voluntary evacuation not as a gesture of peace but as a victory for their armed struggle. Since then terrorism in Gaza has flourished, weapons imported, militants trained, rockets fired.

It's clear Israel will never negotiate the right of return for some 4 million Palestinian refugees, the descendants of the 700,000 Arabs who fled during the 1948 war. To do so would make Jews a minority in Israel -- the very situation that the United Nations ruled out in deciding the original partition of Palestine.

The Palestinian people must decide if they are willing to settle for an independent state living along side Israel. If they elect, instead, to continue to repudiate negotiated peace, then the question becomes Are we rushing toward Armageddon -- the decisive catastrophic conflict described in the Bible as the scene of a final battle between the forces of good and evil, prophesied to occur at the end of the world?

Orange You Glad It's Election Time Again?

Don't you miss those Orange Alerts?  They only happen just before elections. You know it's election season when the Republicans start hauling out their proposal for an Anti-Gay Marriage constitutional amendment, or when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (whose name rhymes with "loyal uber alles") starts arresting Islamic terrorists who are plotting a jihad to "kill all the devils," including blowing up Chicago's Sears Tower. There's nothing quite like conspirators pledging an oath to Al Qaeda to get the fear juices flowing.

The leaders in the Bush Administration are masters of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). That's how they got America into an unjust, unwinnable, and hugely costly war in Iraq -- high in human costs; high in political costs; high in diplomatic costs; and high in financial costs.

After watching the FRONTLINE program entitled "The Dark Side," is it any wonder that the Republicans want to cut PBS's budget?  Once upon a time the major broadcasting networks (i.e., NBC, CBS, ABC) would do investigative reporting. Unfortunately, that's no longer true. Perhaps it's because nowadays they are all no longer independently owned.

The PBS FRONTLINE program portrays a vivid exposé explaining how all roads on the War on Terror ran straight through the Office of the Vice President. It had a political arm and a policy side. But, most frighteningly, it had a powerful legal team too.

Cheney believed in expanding the President's executive power. He was convinced that presidential power had been whittled away by Congress and the courts ever since Watergate. Richard Cheney viewed the searing moments of the Nixon Administration, in which he had a front row seat, as a dimunition of what the President ought to be. Within days of 9/11, Cheney's legal insiders saw a chance to rebuild the President's power, almost as if 9/11 was a moment of preparation meeting opportunity.

Vice President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, headed a group of lawyers who said the President could authorize whatever means were necessary to fight the War on Terror. They said that, as Commander-in-Chief, George Bush could disregard any other law during time of war. When 9/11 came, it was a state of emergency that gave the people at the top of the Administration a chance to try some things they'd been thinking about for a long time.

Within six months of 9/11, it was clear that the Vice President was going to get the U.S. to go to war against Iraq -- even though CIA Director George Tenet believed he had proved that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not connected. Cheney's strategy was to raise fears about the imminent danger of weapons of mass destruction, saying on NBC's Meet the Press, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." His partisan chum Condoleezza Rice chimed in, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The intelligence community was merely used as a public relations operation to validate the war against Saddam Hussein.

How much longer will the war in Iraq continue?  That depends on what happens in the next couple of elections. Considering, though, that the incumbency rate in Congress is 98%, members pretty much have to be indicted before they lose their seat. I guess in the end America always gets the government it deserves and the government it elects because: a) the masses are asses; b) the partisanship is poisonous; and c) the country is run by extremists because the moderates have turned their back on our political systems.

Frontline's "The Dark Side"

Only historians will be able to judge whether or not George W. Bush (aka Bush 43) is the worst American President ever. Only time will tell if the legacy of his Administration is as awful as it appears -- what with the Iraq War, the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and wipe out Al Qaida, Abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay, astronomical budget deficits, unjust tax policies, Hurricane Katrina, skyrocketing gasoline prices, global warming, rising interest rates, rising inflation, stem cell research, illegal immigrants, social security reform, Medicare prescription drugs, yadda, yadda, yadda...

No one needs to wait, however, to judge Dick Cheney as the WORST Vice President in the history of the United States. Ditto for Donald Rumsfeld as this nation's WORST Secretary of Defense ever.

I urge people to take the time to watch the PBS FRONTLINE program entitled "The Dark Side." You can watch the full program online.

In "The Dark Side," FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror, and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side."

This country has never had a Vice President as powerful as Dick Cheney and never had a Secretary of Defense who probably is feared as much as Donald Rumsfeld.

Cheney and Rumsfeld have worked side-by-side together for over three decades. Starting back in the Nixon Administration, many years ago, Dick Cheney, then a young intern on the Hill, began his political career working as a staff aide for Rumsfeld. Politically, their views of the world and their view of government are very similar.

Later, as Gerald Ford took office, Don Rumsfeld was chosen as White House Chief of Staff. He selected Dick Cheney as his deputy. Together they took over running the White House. Both were formidable bureaucratic infighters. One day they proved it, literally remaking the Ford Administration in a legendary maneuver performed entirely behind-the-scenes in what was referred to as the "Halloween Massacre." They managed to cut Henry Kissinger's job in half; Vice President Rockefeller was swiftly marginalized; William Colby, then running the CIA, was replaced by George H. W. Bush; Rumsfeld moved to be Secretary of Defense; and Cheney moved up to Rumsfeld's old job as Chief of Staff. It was an extraordinary tactical flourish.

After the Ford Administration, Rumsfeld made his fortune in private industry. Cheney spent a decade as the Congressman from Wyoming where he was immersed in intelligence matters.

Then, Richard Cheney became Secretary of Defense for the first President Bush. In the shadow of Colin Powell, he had quietly managed the military in the first Gulf War.

After 9/11, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted the military to come up with a plan for attacking Al Qaida in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon was caught flat-footed. The military was totally unprepared in the wake of 9/11 for anything needed to be done in Afghanistan. They had no plans on the shelf. They had no idea what was required.

Rumsfeld was angry. He wanted quick action from a small force. The Generals from Central Command, led by four star Tommy Franks, had operational plans for different parts of the world, but nothing for Afghanistan. Meanwhile, George Tenet and his anti-terror CIA teams were ready to go. It was a bitter pill for the Pentagon.

In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. Tensions between Cheney and Rumsfeld on the one side and Tenet on the other were really high. But when Tenet insisted that there was no connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet.

Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies throughout the government who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies, and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. Questionable intelligence was "stovepiped" to the Vice President and presented to the public.

Dick Cheney deeply distrusted the CIA. He remembered how wrong the CIA had been in failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and more. In the end, many believe the battle between the Vice President and the CIA has destroyed the Agency.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are the main protagonists that got us into a pre-emptive war in Iraq -- a war America is now going to lose because there's no way for America to win. That's how the Iraq War and the Vietnam War are alike. What constitutes "winning" anyway? Slogans such as "Americans will stand down as Iraqis stand up" are just empty rhetoric. Congressman Murtha is correct. American soldiers are an occupying force. The troops should come home sooner rather than later.

In the final analysis, the ultimate evaluation of George W. Bush's presidency will be judged based on the failure of the Iraq War and how he followed the advice of the worst Vice President and the worst Secretary of Defense in the history of the United States. That will be his eternal epitaph.

Unholy Trinities

At the beginning of America's journey, there was an unholy trinity -- Molasses to Rum to Slaves -- immortalized by the Sherman Edwards song written for the 1969 Broadway musical "1776".




Today, in 2006, yet another unholy trinity has emerged -- Chinese Loans to Persian Gulf Oil to Global Warming.





It doesn't matter whether examining slavery or global warming -- in both cases the reality is Business Power always trumps People Power -- until there's a DISASTER.

Global Warming is real. It's the result of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, especially greenhouse gas emissions produced by fossil fuels (i.e., coal and oil).

Al Gore is speaking out everywhere on "Global Warming and the Environment" -- on television, in the movie "An Inconvenient Truth," in lectures, in newspager editorials, etc. He presents a pretty compelling argument on how CO2 is killing our planet. The process is starting with the oceans because massive quantities of CO2 are being absorbed which is causing acidity to increase, thereby destroying calcium carbonate (which is what shells and coral reefs are made of). Warming ocean waters are causing storm intensities to increase (e.g., Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last fall). Do we have to wait for global warming to cause sea levels to dramatically rise before we start to take this threat seriously?

The Bush Administration has actually appointed the principal lobbyists and lawyers for the biggest polluters to be in charge of administering the laws that their clients are charged with violating. Vice President Cheney’s infamous "Energy Task Force" sought out lobbyists for polluters, asking them for help in designing a totally meaningless “voluntary” program.

As the late, charismatic astronomer and writer Carl Sagan said, referring to the picture of the Earth presented to the right:

"Look at that dot. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know. everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever WAS lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds, our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light…

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand…

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

-- Carl Sagan

Needed: Real Campaign Finance Reform

Stephen Colbert, on The Colbert Report, recently interviewed David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover, the story about "How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government."

We used to live in a country where government was supposed to protect people from the excesses of the free market. Today, however, both our government and our elected officials are For Sale!



More and more decisions are made based on who is contributing campaign money to lawmakers. Money that goes into the political process has expectations. That's how energy bills get written by energy companies and Medicare bills get written by pharmaceutical companies.

Real reform needs to start with publicly-financed elections. The problem, today, is that the people who are directly paying for our elections are getting a government that they own. Think about all of the money that goes into the political process that gets returned to contributors in the form of tens of billions of dollars of no-bid government contracts.

If we had publicly-financed elections, we'd actually save money. Of course, another option might be an outright ban on all TV political advertising. That would eliminate the need for huge campaign contributions. It would also get rid of those awful 30-second attack ads on television.

The bottom line is that the masses are asses electorate prefers a government for sale over publicly-financed elections.

Wilshire Enterprise Architecture Conference Presentation Proposals

Wilshire Conferences has scheduled an Enterprise Architecture event for Chicago, November 7-9, 2006. I submitted three presentation proposals included below.

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How To Build and Communicate an EA Taxonomy
By Jeff Tash, ITscout

Workshop (2 hours)
Audience: Introductory

The best way of communicating EA taxonomy information is to think in terms of a 3-dimensional cube:

1. Along one dimension you have models.  EA models describe Business Architecture (i.e., processes), Data Architecture, Application Architecture, and Technology Architecture.  When describing the last component, you’ll want 4 models that can visually depict a technology portfolio as 3 layers:
   
   
   
   • The bottom layer (Layer 1) specifies Infrastructure (Model 1)
   
   
   • The middle layer (Layer 2), on top of Infrastructure, corresponds to Applications which can either be built (Model 2) or bought (Model 3)
   
   
   • The top layer (Layer 3), above Applications, refers to the application-generated data that yearns to be mined for its Business Intelligence (Model 4)


2. The second dimension for communicating taxonomy information refers to views.  Different views target different audiences.  Some views can be targeted to architects, others to developers, and still others aimed at business-oriented end-users.


3. The third dimension involves time.  Think of it in terms of current state and future state(s).

This workshop will engage participants by challenging them to look at what kinds of information Enterprise Architects ought to capture and communicate using a taxonomy.  Attendees will receive complimentary Roadmap wall posters that describe ITscout’s 3-layer/4-model graphical taxonomy which visually depicts the typical universe of IT products that comprise an enterprise’s technology portfolio.

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Consolidation & Standardization
By Jeff Tash, ITscout

Conference Session (1 hour)
Audience: Intermediate

The biggest lesson for effective consolidation is to "standardize wherever possible."  Consolidation should yield decreases in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).  Analyzing the global spend and identifying consolidation opportunities not only leads to economies of scale and reduced headcount, but also improves security and increases systems management capability.

When building a business case for consolidation you want to show how facility costs, headcount, annual maintenance fees, etc., will be reduced.  You should also explain intangible benefits such as simplifying the organization's overall Enterprise Architecture, or providing the opportunity to establish strategic relationships with key vendors.  Before embarking on a consolidation project, it's vital to understand the financial implications related to matters such as scale-based license pricing or asset depreciation policies.

The bottom line is that consolidation is one of the most critical aspects of any IT organization's Enterprise Architecture blueprint.  For each IT asset, the question periodically should be asked, "If we didn't already own this, would we now go ahead and purchase it or develop it?"  And, if the answer is "no," the next question should be: "How do we get rid of it and how fast?"

This session will explore the rules for consolidation:

• Why Consolidate?
• Business Justification
• Technology Architecture Issues and Drivers
• Architecting, Planning, Documenting, and Implementing

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What’s the Value of IT Architecture?
By Jeff Tash, ITscout

Roundtable Session (45-minutes)
Audience: Advanced

Architects are responsible for bridging the chasm between the cultures of business and technology.  Their job is to communicate complexity by simplifying and synthesizing.

The best way to conceptualize the architectural bridge is to envision a twisted rope made up of three intertwined strands.  One strand corresponds to models.  The second relates to populating those models.  The third involves communicating the documented information organized around the models.  What’s the value of EA if its contents are not communicated effectively?  How much can EA be worth if the only ones who ever read what the architects have written are the authors themselves?

The overriding goal of architecture is to allow an organization to think about and manage technology in precisely the same way that it currently knows how to think about and manage money, people and property.  IT Architecture generates ROI by aiding managers in making better, more informed technology decisions.

In this roundtable session, participants will discuss how IT Architecture creates value through:

• Consolidation and standardization
  
  
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • Technology Architecture


• Governance and compliance
  
  
  • ITIL
  • IT Service Management


• Innovation and effectiveness
  
  
  • Software Architecture
  • Architectural Styles

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Biography

Jeff Tash is CEO of Flashmap Systems, Inc. (www.FlashmapSystems.com).  He also maintains two free web sites: ITscout (www.ITscout.org) which organizes information about IT products and vendors; plus the "Architecture ‘Resources’ Repository" (www.ITscout.org/Architecture).  Previously, for over twelve years, he was President of Hewitt Technologies, a Division of Hewitt Associates. Prior to that, he was employed by Digital Equipment Corp, IBM Corp., Control Data Corp., and Arthur Young & Company.  Mr. Tash has lectured internationally to tens of thousands of IT professionals. Also, more than a million copies of his ITscout Roadmap wall posters have been distributed worldwide. He is currently a Microsoft MVP Architect and an IASA Fellow.

More on Consolidation

Sun Microsystems is promoting Expansion by Consolidation as a way of "simplifying IT environments to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)."

The biggest lesson for effective consolidation is to "standardize wherever possible."

If a company is supporting 5 different Web servers with 10 different plug-ins and 15 different configurations, it limits flexibility, increases costs, and heightens security risks.

Sun has developed a series of 10 Rules for Consolidation. Below is an edited excerpt:

1. Get executive-level support

A consolidation project may involve multiple applications with many owners who come from various divisions in an organization. Early executive-level support can help head off turf wars among business units.

2. Agree on the business goals

Consolidation may involve asking people to give up control of a server or application for which they bear responsibility. Unless they understand that there is a clear business goal, such as reducing overhead for their department, they are unlikely to willingly go along with the consolidation plan.

3. Proactively address company politics

Individual business units have different priorities. For example, an investment bank might have a few applications that calculate derivatives, and each application might have a single user. It might seem like a slam dunk to recommend consolidating those applications, until the investment bank balks that each application is handling billions of dollars in business and that it would rather not fix something that isn't broken.

4. Establish service level agreements

A company needs to have a clear understanding of the service levels that can be expected in a consolidated environment before any consolidation takes place. As with the previous three rules, people will be wary -- or worse, blame the consolidated environment for their problems -- unless they know up front the resources and service levels that will be at their disposal post-consolidation.

5. Standardize wherever possible

The most important aspect for consolidation is to develop a standardized set of applications. Standardized configuration not only leads to economies of scale, but also goes a long way toward improving security.

6. Perform extensive planning and documentation

Consolidation comes with risk. Planning and documenting can help make sure everything is put together correctly to mitigate risks, and it can help an organization put everything back together if something does go seriously wrong.

7. Allocate appropriate time, skills and resources to the effort

Many consolidation efforts can get compromised or sub-optimized if customers do not allocate enough time or the correct people to the effort for proper planning, analysis, architecting, testing, implementation, or socialization with business units, stakeholders, and constituents. Failure to do so can lead to implementation problems, operational challenges, production issues, and/or architectures that still demonstrate some level of under-utilization of assets.

8. Train the IT staff on managing the consolidated environment

Consolidation may introduce new technologies, such as virtualization.

9. Develop new applications for the consolidated environment

If standardization is the number one lesson for consolidation, then forward consolidation is number two. Forward consolidation dictates that it is far easier and less expensive to design new applications for the consolidated environment than it is to roll out standalone applications into the environment after they have been built.

10. Get help from an experienced vendor

Look for an experienced vendor who has tools to assist with consolidation efforts and who has been involved with other successful consolidation projects.

Sun uses four basic steps for all of the consolidations that it performs:

Whereas Sun wants to sell its customers new hardware servers and professional consulting services, my company, Flashmap Systems, offers architecture products that assist IT organizations who want to standardize through consolidation. It's been our experience that the key to a successful consolidation implementation depends, first and foremost, on effective communication -- getting everyone on the same page -- demystifying the complexity of technology architecture.

Why Consolidate?

Existing IT investments ought to be rationalized. As quoted in the previous posting, Peter Drucker on Managerial Courage, "Every product, every operation, and every activity of a business should be put on trial for its life every two or three years."

Consolidation of existing systems and technologies should be expected to yield some decrease in headcount or operating costs. Reduction in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is often cited as the primary driver for consolidation. By analyzing the global spend and identifying vendor consolidation opportunities, substantial savings should be possible. Of course, other benefits, too, should accrue, such as increasing systems management capability or improving service level management.

IT asset inventories in most large enterprises are, most likely, highly incomplete. An inventory, ideally, will show both asset age as well as information about interdependencies, such as what hardware a particular piece of software runs on, or what other software components it requires in order to execute properly. Hardware assets need to include current and historical utilization statistics. For example, you can't consolidate additional services onto hardware that is already running close to its maximum capacity.

Before embarking on a consolidation project, it's vital to understand the financial implications related to matters such as scale-based license pricing or asset depreciation policies. For instance, consolidating assets that have not yet been fully depreciated could incur a cost instead of a savings.

When building a business case for consolidation you will typically want to show how facility costs, headcount, annual maintenance fees, etc., will be reduced. You should also explain such intangible benefits as simplifying the organization's overall enterprise architecture, or providing the opportunity to establish strategic relationships with key vendors.

The bottom line is that consolidation is one of the most critical aspects of any IT organization's enterprise architecture blueprint. For each IT asset, the question periodically should be asked, "If we didn't already own this, would we now go ahead and purchase it or develop it?" And, if the answer is "no," the next question should be: "How do we get rid of it and how fast?"

Peter Drucker on Managerial Courage

Back in 1963, renowned management guru Peter F. Drucker wrote a Harvard Business Review classic on How To Manage for Effectiveness. His comments are as pertinent today as they were then.

Druker asks, "What is the manager's job?"

His answer: "To direct the resources and efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results."

But, as Druker points out, "The bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to 'problems' rather than to 'opportunities,' and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimum impact on results."

The fundamental problem is how frequently managers confuse the difference between "effectiveness" and "efficiency." They struggle to distinguish between "doing the right things and doing things right." Quoting Peter Drucker, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." Yet, how often do real world managers pursue "efficiency" with little, if any, regard for "effectiveness?"

In business enterprises "a very small number of events -- 10 percent to 20 percent at most -- account for 90 percent of all results, whereas the great majority of events account for 10 percent or less of the results." A handful of customers produce the bulk of all orders. A handful of products produce the bulk of all sales. A few top sales people generate most new business. A handful of production runs account for most of a plant's output. A few researchers in the laboratory produce nearly all the important innovations. And so on and so forth.

The most crucial requirement for effectiveness is "managerial courage." The manager's toughest job is to accept one basic truth: Every product and every activity of business begins to obsolesce as soon as it is started. Every product, every operation, and every activity of a business should, therefore, be put on trial for its life every two or three years. Each should be considered the way we consider a proposal to go into a new product, a new operation or a new activity. One question should be asked of each: "If we were not in this already, would we now go into it?" And if the answer is "no," the next question should be: "How do we get out and how fast?"

Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005) was perhaps the most influential management thinker ever. It's beneficial to reflect back on his profound wisdom.

Innovation & Architecture

BusinessWeek suggests that "making innovation work is the single most important business challenge in our era." What does that mean in terms of IT? In my opinion, business executives had better figure out how they're going to tap into innovative architectural creative thinking. That means using resources to pull together IT architectures which will have an impact that is broad and deep.

Businesses and industries will be affected by the fact that already today more transistors are being produced annually than grains of rice -- and at a lower cost. There already exists in the world over 2 billion mobile phones and almost 1 billion PCs. Designing robust, adaptive IT architectures is the core competence needed by organizations that intend on using information and communication technology to connect to the global grid. If your organization doesn't yet grasp the importance of architecture as a way to open people's mind to the wide world that lies ahead, then you're toast.

Designing innovative IT architecture requires visionary talent. Architects are the people responsible for bridging the chasm between the cultures of business and technology. Companies must transform themselves from IT cultures driven by cost and quality control to enterprises that profit from creative IT thinking.

Innovation was the original cornerstone underlying information technology. But ever since Y2K and then the dot com boom and bust, followed by 9/11, enterprise IT innovation has pretty much stagnated. Nevertheless, technology has continued its inexorable march forward with ever more transistors on a single chip and ever more bandwidth -- both wired and wireless -- and ever more storewidth.

It's time for businesses to once again begin using information and communication technology to innovate. Success will depend on turning architecture into a core methodology of innovation. Forward-thinking leaders must educate, inspire, cajole, hire, bribe, punish, build -- all to transform their companies' cultures. Their job is to tear down silos, mix people up, bring in outside change agents, stimulate people's minds, and generate a diversified portfolio of promising ideas.

One critical core concept to understand is that good ideas about IT architecture can come from everywhere and anywhere. What's essential is that every important idea -- every project, every deadline -- all be accessible on the intranet to everyone who has a need to know -- all easily accessible in a way that requires minimal, if any, formal training.

Innovative architecture does not mean instant perfection. Architecture naturally evolves over time. What's most important, however, is understanding that people naturally need a vision along with a plan on how to get to that vision, as well as real and reasonable deadlines. As Google's vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, says: "Worry about usage and users, not money. Provide something simple to use and easy to love. The money will follow." Mayer has been a Champion of Innovation longer than most. She's a big reason why Google functions as a single, open network where Googlers can look for those working on similar technologies, find relevant expertise, or join projects.

Republicants

Below are just some of what transpired during a typical 24-hour news cycle in the life of a federal government totally controlled by the Republican Party.

The Senate voted 57-41, three votes short of advancing the bill, to reject a Republican effort to slash taxes on inherited estates. This vote preserves the estate tax, for now. The estate tax is currently paid only by those who inherit more than $2 million. According to the most recent statistics available from the Internal Revenue Service, 1.17 percent of people who died in 2002 left a taxable estate. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn, says the "death tax is unfair."


House Republicans slashed $115 million from the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which distributes money to PBS and NPR. That's a 23 percent reduction next year for TV shows like "Sesame Street" and radio shows like "All Things Considered."

Republican pundit Ann Coutler, author of the book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," described a group of 9/11 widows who backed the Democratic Party as "millionaire 'witches' reveling in their status as celebrities enjoying their husbands' deaths" referring to four women who headed a campaign that resulted in the creation of the September 11 Commission which investigated the hijacked plane attacks.

GOP leaders vow to keep pressing for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage after being soundly defeated in the Senate after proponents failed to persuade even a majority of senators to support the measure.

Click Here To View Jon Stewart vs. Bill Bennett

Are You Ready for Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise Architecture is often sold as a remedy for better aligning IT goals with business goals.  Promises are made that EA can serve as a strategic vehicle for:

• reducing IT costs
• enabling business change
• simplifying technology portfolios
• supporting greater flexibility
• improving process effectiveness
• delivering IT projects quicker and cheaper
• implementing IT governance, especially regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley
• rationalizing application portfolios
• plus a thousand more pie-in-the-sky IT objectives

Can your IT organization really do Enterprise Architecture?  It depends.  Is your IT group, itself, ready to embrace EA?  Can it establish the discipline that's needed for a successful EA implementation?  And, perhaps most importantly, does your IT organization start off with sufficient credibility with your own enterprise's business executives?

When it comes to enterprise IT, there's a continuum that ranges between strategic and support. The telltale indicator is to look at where the CIO reports. Does he or she report directly to the CEO, or does the CIO report to the CFO?

If it's the latter, then IT's role is perceived as one of providing support. In this case, when business leaders think IT, they invariably think cost center. With a support IT organization, the most important objective is reducing IT operational and maintenance costs. Beware that EA groups are themselves frequently considered cost-overhead and as such are subject to cost-cutting purges. Generally, the best strategy for cutting costs is to focus initial EA initiatives on consolidation.

Even if your CIO reports to the CEO, or COO, and is therefore considered strategic, there's still the question of how important your executives deem the value of information technology in terms of your business. Much may depend on what others in your industry are doing. Also, does your overall IT organization command credibility across the other parts of the business?  What about the rest of IT?  Have they bought into EA?  Finally, what happens if your architecture efforts are successful?  Are you ready for an explosion of demand?

EA can help an organization improve its ability to deliver IT services. EA can help provide more effective IT governance. EA can even help better align IT capabilities with the needs of the business.  Start slowly. Establish success one step at a time. Be prepared to respond. Build credibility. And, most importantly -- communicate -- continually, effectively, and to all levels of people both inside and outside of IT and across all business areas.

In the final analysis, EA is a critical ingredient for operating a successful 21st-century IT organization, especially when combined with its related disciplines: IT portfolio management, IT governance, IT service management, and IT project management.

Titling at Windmills: A 50-50-50 Energy Proposal

America is addicted to oil and that addiction is killing us -- fiscally, environmentally, and spiritually.

We are not fighting the war in Iraq because of WMDs or to spread democracy. That's all poppycock. We're there because Iraq has lots of oil.

At $70+ per barrel, gasoline is averaging 3 bucks a gallon. Even worse, more and more wealth is amassing in oil producing countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. We're literally funding both sides of the Iraqi war.

America desperately needs an energy policy. Hell, we've needed one ever since the original Arab oil embargo happened way back during Nixon's second administration. We needed one during Carter's and Reagan's administrations. Bill Clinton was just lucky that when he was president, the price of oil was ridiculously low -- sometimes selling for under $1.00 per gallon. How did America react? We bought Hummers and Explorers and various other gas-guzzling SUVs.

But now, with a Texas oil man in the White House, we need an energy policy worse than ever. It could be Bush's equivalent of Nixon's trip to China. Unfortunately, I doubt George Bush is half the statesman Nixon was. Nixon may have been a crook. Nixon may have been a scoundrel. But, historically, he at least tried to do great things (besides opening up relations with Red China, Nixon created EPA -- the Environmental Protection Agency).

Blogging is a lot like self-publishing your own letters to the editor. It takes a lot of chutzpah to believe that putting forth an energy proposal in a blog can have any impact on anyone. Then again, that's okay. I write my blog mainly for myself -- as a personal journal -- a web log. I don't assume anyone else reads what I write.

So, what's my 50-50-50 energy proposal for America?

The first 50 refers to a 50% tariff on all non-North American oil. At $70 per barrel, that would be an added tax of $35 for each and every barrel of oil imported from anywhere except Canada or Mexico. To minimize the impact on the economy, the tax should be staged over a five year period -- 10% the first year; 20% the second year; 30% the third year; 40% the fourth year; and finally 50% in years five and beyond.

What should we do with the windfall from this tax revenue? That's where the second and third "50s" in 50-50-50 apply. I recommend that 50% of the monies collected be used to fund academic research into new, alternative energy resources. The other 50% should be used to help families who earn under $100K per year to heat their homes, and to assist small farmers earning under $100K per year who need fuel for their tractors and assistance paying for higher costing petroleum-based fertilizers.

With oil imported from outside North America costing over $100 per barrel, other forms of energy will hopefully become competitive in the marketplace. Perhaps it will be oil shale from Montana or tar pits in Alberta or corn grown in Nebraska for ethanol. Maybe it will be new roofing materials that include built-in solar panels or almost invisible wind farms off our coastline. What's important is that we need to break our addiction to oil -- especially Middle East oil -- and we need to do it now.

Goggles for Google

Are you, like me, getting a little long in the tooth?  Now that I'm fat and bald, my wife says she misses me; she still loves me; but she misses me!

Do you remember back in 1967 when the Beatles' hit song "When I'm sixty-four" seemed so far off in the future?  No longer.

When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

I'm a baby-boomer who's balding, bulging, and bespectacled. I need help nowadays viewing what's displayed on my browser's screen.

Well, here comes Microsoft to the rescue with a PowerToy called the ClearType Tuner.

ClearType delivers improved font display quality, resolution, and readability over traditional forms of font smoothing or anti-aliasing, especially on color LCD displays.

ClearType is a form of sub-pixel font rendering that draws text using a pixel's red-green-blue (RGB) components separately instead of using the entire pixel. When the pixel is used in this way, horizontal resolution theoretically increases 300 percent.

Picture elements on an LCD screen are actually comprised of individual horizontally-oriented red, green and blue sub-pixels. For instance, an LCD screen that has a display resolution of 800x600 pixels actually has 2400x600 individual sub-pixels. The human eye is not capable of differentiating colors on such a small scale, so a combination of these three primary colors can emulate any intermediate color. Sub-pixel font rendering takes advantage of this by antialiasing at the sub-pixel level instead of at the pixel level.

ClearType magnified [click here for more info]

You can turn on ClearType using either:

• ClearType Web interface, or
• downloadable PowerToy ClearType Tuner

As a once-upon-a-time cognitive psychologist, I loved reading an article that Microsoft published entitled "The Science of Word Recognition". It delves into an explanation about how people use the letters within a word to recognize a word. This article, written by a cognitive psychologist working for Microsoft, explores neural network modeling which has has been particularly successful in advancing our understanding of reading processes. As one who in graduate school studied psycholingustics, specifically speech perception, I was fascinated to learn how the benefits of ClearType were based on a psychological, scientific understanding of on-screen reading experiences.

The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast, Blogged or Wikied

Columnist Joshua Greenbaum has been commenting on IT for as far back as I can remember. His most recent article, "The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast," helps to deflate some of the hype around Web 2.0.

Josh doesn't believe that so-called tech revolutions over the past 20 years -- such as "the PC revolution, the Mac revolution, the Windows revolution, the Unix revolution, the business process re-engineering revolution, the client-server revolution, the ERP revolution, the open-source revolution, and, more recently and most tellingly, the dot-com revolution" -- were indeed all that revolutionary. He writes:

Each one promised to sweep aside the old and wholly replace it with the new. Each proposed ways to disintermediate the sinners of the past from their manifold sins and show the world how the one true way could change everything we say and think and do. And each, by the time it had run its course, proved that "the more it changes, the more it remains the same" trumps "vive la revolution" in the slogan wars every time.

Personally, I disagree with Josh's assessment that revolutions mean "sweeping aside the old and wholly replacing it with the new." Rather, I prefer to think in terms of paradigm shifts, especially in terms of revolutionary changes to the user interface. Paradigm shifts create new possibilities.

Do you remember old-fashioned batch systems which depended on punch cards or magnetic tapes? They were revolutionarily different than the online transactions processing systems that succeeded them. Mind you, online transaction processing systems, such as those built using IBM's CICS with 3270 terminals, didn't really replace or even supercede older batch systems. Rather, they enabled the introduction of entirely new types of applications that had previously been impossible to develop.

The next major wave of software user interface evolution depended on character-based asynchronous terminals, such as DEC's VT100s. Where 3270s displayed entire pages with each communication interaction, VT100s interacted with the host computer one character at-a-time. This allowed portions of a display screen to incrementally change based on a user's input.

The original PCs were quite similar to VT100s except in the revolutionary way that they supported direct memory mapping to the display. This powerful capability eventually led to a Mac-like GUI interface known as WIMP -- windows, icons, menus, and pointing devices (or windows, icons, mouse, and pull-down menus).

Next came Web browsers which, like 3270s, displayed entire pages with each communication interaction.

Now, with the emergence of AJAX (which is reminiscent of VT100s where portions of a screen can be dynamically modified), we're beginning to see new kinds of applications such as what's demonstrated by Google Maps.

Each major paradigm shift brings with it a whole new class of application capabilities. That doesn't necessarily mean that it eliminates all that preceded it. Of course, problems are often defined in terms of available solutions. So it's not surprising that once a new tool is invented, practitioners often tend to look at every problem in terms of how to solve it using the new technology.

Eleven Score and Ten Years Ago

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address began with the famous line: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He ended that speech with the equally famous and well-remembered line: "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

I wonder if Lincoln were alive today, in addition to changing to: "Eleven score and ten years ago", he'd also modify his speech to "government of the money, by the money, and for the money". After all, Honest Abe would never lie.

Yahoo! Does AJAX Too!

The Yahoo! Developer Network features both the Yahoo! User Interface Library and the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library.

---



• The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a free, open source set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications.
  
  The UI Library is a set of JavaScript components, including:
  
  
  
  • dynamic UI elements, like:
    • drag and drop
    • tree views
    • animation
  
  
  • underlying functionality, like:
    • custom events
    • cross-browser XMLHttpRequest connections for building AJAX applications
  
  



---



• The Yahoo! Design Patterns Library are a collection of solutions for common web design problems.



---

Selling the Computer Revolution

When it comes to computing, I'm practically a fossil. My earliest experiences began back in 1965 when I was enrolled in an honors high school math class. My teacher, Miss Johnson, Ed.D., had arranged for her students to create and run BASIC programs. We accessed a GE mainframe running at MIT via a 110-baud teletype with an attached papertape reader and punch. The TTY communicated at 10 characters per second. Each character was transmitted asynchronously as 11 bits: 1 start bit; 7 ASCII bits; 1 parity bit; and 2 stop bits (2 stop bits were required to give the printhead sufficient time to return to its initial starting position).

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California has created a collection of old Marketing Brochures that are priceless.

I remember purchasing an Apple II computer back in 1978. It literally connected to my TV set which it used for for its visual display, and like the TTY, the Apple II keyboard only supported uppercase characters.



Check out the original Apple logo that appeared on a 1976 operation manual from an Apple I. It's quite different than the Apple logo from my Apple II which consisted of multi-colored horizontal bands shaped like an Apple with a bite taken out.



In 1969, I began working with DEC's 12-bit PDP-8 minicomputers. I can vividly remember when its successor, the 16-bit PDP-11 minicomputer, was originally introduced. Check out the mini-skirt on the brochure cover below.




My first real job after graduate school was at Control Data Corp. where I had the privilege of working on the world's first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, designed by the legendary Seymour Cray. This 60-bit ones-complement machine (it supported both positive and negative zeroes) was surrounded by twenty peripheral processors, one of which drove its awesome operator console, shown below:




Thank you Computer History Museum for a wonderful walk down memory lane.

** Dick ** Rove ** Bush ** Lay **

The names of the people in recent scandal-driven headlines are enough to make one blush: ** Dick ** Rove ** Bush ** Lay ** !!! Toss into the confusion the one-word difference between William Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton, and it's not surprising that all the sexual innuendo has people once again pondering what "is" is.

Seriously, what I find most difficult to comprehend is how it is possible for Lay, who was found guilty by a jury on every count with which he was charged, to continue to remain free on bond until his sentencing hearing in September. Lay was also found guilty in a separate case of one count of bank fraud and three counts of making false statements to banks. The charges against Lay carry a maximum penalty in prison of 45 years for the corporate trial and 120 years in the banking trial.

I know that Lay had to relinquish his passport. He also posted a $5 million bond secured with family-owned properties, but I tend to believe that's pocket change for someone who, along with his sidekick Skilling, invested close to $70 million into their legal defense. I wonder what the Vegas odds are that this guy is going the route of illegal emigrant. Why isn't this guy locked up NOW? What a country! Everyone is equal -- unless you're rich.

Only in George Bush's America could 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion (see United for a Fair Economy report). The Senate is expected to attempt to repeal the federal estate tax in the first several months of 2006. The House of Representatives passed a repeal measure in April 2005.

Repealing the estate tax will cost the U.S. Treasury $1 trillion over the first ten years of full repeal. Passing the repeal will make it so that 99.73% of all estates will be able to pass on 100% of their assets to heirs tax-free (see United for a Fair Economy report). What a country -- especially if you're rich!!!

American ITIL

Just like American Idol, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) got its start across the pond over in the U.K.

I recently attended an IBM Briefing on IT Service Management where I learned what IBM Tivoli and IBM Global Services are doing in the area of ITIL.

IBM's 3-layer approach approach to IT Service Management focuses on utilizing ITIL's standard process models layered on top of an open, federated Change and Configuration Management Database that serves as an IT Service Management Platform. At the base of the stack are IBM's suite of traditional IT operational management products that Tivoli has been providing for years.

The IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) details how IT Service Management can be achieved by making ITIL actionable. ITIL is a collection of best practices that are intended to help an IT organization measure its contributions in terms of business value by integrating internal IT processes across an integrated management database. In other words, managing IT using the same process and database techniques that are used for managing the business at large.

Traditionally, IT has often behaved much like the cobbler whose children wore no shoes. IT preached to business leaders the gospel about needing to integrate information, processes, technology, and people. But internally, IT was typically run as a collection of poorly automated technology silos. The challenge for IT Service Management is to turn this around by automating the delivery of automation.

Just as Technology Architecture organizes and classifies products into product categories, IT Service Management organizes and classifies IT processes into process categories. Where products in a Technology Architecture are tracked in terms of life cycle (e.g., emerging, mature outside your company, mature inside your company, end of life, etc.), the processes associated with IT Service Management must be broken down by roles that show who performs what activities, and when. Collectively, many different people and many different tools collaborate during process workflows.

Data and Process have been marching forward in lock step ever since DATA DIVISIONS and PROCEDURE DIVISIONS first appeared together in COBOL programs. These two -- Data and Process -- became forever intertwined at the start of the object-oriented programming revolution. Soon thereafter objects evolved into components, which today have emerged into services. ITIL and IT Service Management, together with SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), are the driving forces propelling enterprise computing forward into the 21st-century.

Fine Employers of Illegal Immigrants

Americans want immigration laws enforced. That means getting serious about controlling the border. But employers, too, must be prohibited from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.

In Bush's presidential address to the nation on the topic of immigration reform and border security, he requested a legalization initiative which calls for "the ability to apply for citizenship for those who can show a history and 'roots' in the United States, payment of a penalty for violation of immigration laws, payment of taxes and show a record of employment and an ability to speak English."

Most likely, applicants would be expected "to have to provide a two to five year history of presence in the United States, a clean criminal record, proof of tax payments, and payment of penalties in line with current penalties paid for visa overstays in the amount of $1,000."

Processing naturalization applications will take time and force applicants to wait their turn with respect to persons who "played by the rules and followed the law." Waiting periods for legal immigrants vary dramatically based on whether they are sponsored by a spouse (three year wait), family member (five year wait), or even longer for normal consular processing and/or labor certification.

No Amnesty
Illegal immigrants who broke the law should not get away scot free.


Employer Accountability
Let's pay -- as a reward -- a percentage of fines collected from employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. To receive a reward, illegal immigrants would be required to submit accurate and detailed records of their employment history. The reward money could be used to help people return home.

To Rove, Or Not To Rove, That Is the Indictment

The politically left-leaning truthout.org blog has reported "that attorneys for Karl Rove were handed an indictment either late in the night of May 12 or early in the morning of May 13" but that "the office of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald will not confirm, will not deny, will not comment on its investigation or on truthout.org's report."

The current speculation is that "Rove may be turning state's evidence," and that "that the scope of Fitzgerald's investigation may have broadened."

Is Vice President Cheney now in the cross hairs of the special prosecutor's investigation? Will the mystery behind the individuals and events directly related to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame ever be solved? Will the public ever learn about what really happened? All these questions reminds me of the old TV cartoon show The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Tune in next week to find out if Boris and Natasha had a threesome with Dick.

Baseball Has It Bass Ackwards

Today marks the start of this season's interleague play in Major League Baseball. That's where teams from the American League play against teams from the National League. I suppose these games are most enjoyable for people who you live in places like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco/Oakland, where there are bragging rights on the line between regional rivalries.

Interleague games began back in 1997 (other than the World Series and exhibition games). But, in my opinion, there's a problem with interleague games. The issue revolves around the fact that American League teams and National League teams each play by different rules -- namely, the American League supports the Designated Hitter Rule while the National League does not.

According to section 6.10 of Baseball's Official Rules, "In the event of inter league competition between clubs of Leagues using the Designated Hitter Rule and clubs of Leagues not using the Designated Hitter Rule, the rule will be used or not used as is the practice of the home team."

This is bass ackwards. A much better solution would allow fans in American League cities to watch games played according to National Leagues rules, and for fans in National League cities to watch games according to American League rules. That way fans could get a chance to experience something quite different when a team from the other league visits their city.

Personally, I love the Designated Hitter Rule. I just love watching runs being scored. I've been an avid baseball fan my entire life, dating back to an era when there were only eight teams in each league and the farthest west where major league baseball was ever played was Missouri (both St. Louis and Kansas City). When I was growing up my biggest heroes were Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams.

I've seen my fair share of pitchers hit. Most couldn't hit their IQ (and baseball players generally aren't the brightest bulbs in the pack to start with). I'd prefer watching David Ortiz play as designated hitter any day of the week.

I have always loved watching games played at Fenway Park because of how its quirkiness plays a role in how runs get scored. I love its nooks, crannies, asymmetries, and the Green Monster. I wish baseball would install two heavily-padded wooden telephone poles out in both left- and right-center fields, at 375 feet. That would add a Pachinko-like quality to well-hit fly balls.

Google Gifts

Google continues to spew out wonderful software innovations beyond just search -- all at no charge. Google Earth provides a 3D interface to the planet. Google's SketchUp is a simple tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects, etc. Google Calendar is a terrific tool for organizing schedules. Google Blogger is the software I use for creating and publishing the ITscout Blog. Google Gmail and Groups provide cool email and group discussion capabilities, respectively. For a complete list of Google's set of awesome free tools, see More Google products.

The latest Google software marvel is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications easy. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Google Web Toolkit ships with a Java-to-JavaScript compiler and a special web browser that helps you debug your GWT applications.

Here's the GWT development cycle:

1. Use your favorite Java IDE (like Eclipse) to write and debug an application in the Java language, using as many (or as few) GWT libraries as you find useful. You can use GWT's set of UI components (called Widgets) to construct the UI elements that make up your AJAX application. Like traditional UI frameworks, Widgets are combined in Panels that determine the layout of the widgets contained within them. GWT supports a variety of built-in Widgets that are useful for AJAX applications, including hierachical trees, tab bars, menu bars, and modal dialog boxes. GWT also has built-in support for remote procedure calls and other more sophisticated web application features.


2. Use GWT's Java-to-JavaScript compiler to distill your application into a set of JavaScript and HTML files that you can serve with any web server. Your applications run as pure JavaScript and HTML, compiled from your original Java source code with the GWT Java-to-JavaScript compiler. When you deploy your GWT applications to production, you deploy this JavaScript and HTML to your web servers.


3. Confirm that your application works in each browser that you want to support, which usually takes no additional work.

AJAX is what makes Google Maps so cool. AJAX is what enables Google Maps to be dynamic, interactive, and draggable with no clicking and waiting for graphics to reload each time you want to view the adjacent parts of a map.

In my humble opinion (IMHO), Google Web Toolkit is a gift from the Gods. Thank you Google.

Simple Solutions To Complex Problems

I've said it before; I'll say it again. The masses are asses. Our leaders are stupid.

There's a crisis with Social Security. Why not remove the salary cap from the payroll tax? Why should people stop contributing to Social Security on wages they earn above $90,000? Also, why not have means tests for Social Security benefits? Why should the former head of ExxonMobil collect a Social Security monthly benefit check upon retirement?

There's a crisis with Medicare. Why doesn't the government negotiate prescription drug prices like the Veteran Administration does?

There's an energy crisis. Why isn't mass transit free? Why doesn't the government offer tax incentives for people who install solar hot water heaters and solar paneled roofs?

There's an illegal immigration crisis. First, why not hold accountable the companies who hire illegal, undocumented workers? Eliminate the opportunity for illegal immigrants to find work and you'll eliminate the illegal immigration problem. Also, instead of building triple-layered fencing along the Mexican border, why not install a series of blimps with infrared detection gear? Then law enforcement officers, or National Guard soldiers, can be quickly dispatched to arrest intruders.

There's an education crisis. Why not re-introduce a service-style draft where all young Americans are required to volunteer to serve their country for two years after completing their education? People who volunteer to serve in the armed forces ought to receive higher pay than others. Perhaps people who volunteer to teach in disadvantaged neighborhoods ought to have their student loans forgiven. Everyone should serve in some capacity. We as a nation need to return to the spirit of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Unfortunately the future looks pretty bleak. Whoever succeeds Bush is going to inherit a war in Iraq that can't be won militarily, tax cuts set to expire in 2010, and a national debt rapidly approaching $10 trillion that's growing an average of $1.78 billion per day.

Bush and IT

Regardless of whether or not the controversial National Security Agency data mining program directly threatens the Fourth Amendment's "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," it most certainly represents an astounding technological marvel from an IT perspective.

Think about the underlying information-trolling technology that enables a database program to profile virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. Even if one trusts the president's promise not to connect all the dots to the degree the technology permits, the act of collecting all those dots in a form that permits their complete connection is a realization of the Big Brother society that George Orwell described in his novel "1984."

Although the Bush administration may have successfully helped propel forward IT's technological innovativeness, the same cannot be said about the IT industry in general. Unfortunately, the health and well-being of IT departments have pretty much followed the same trajectory as Bush's approval ratings.

Prior to Bush's presidency, IT was almost impervious to market swings in the economy. The staggering nonstop growth of IT stocks like Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel, even after severe market crashes like in October 1987, was cited as tangible proof of America's never-ending ingenuity. But none of these stocks, nor those for hundreds of other IT companies, have ever come close to fully rebounding from the triple whammy of the Y2K debacle, the Internet bubble, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Other parallels between IT and the Bush administration include loss of faith in the future and gross managerial incompetence.

According to Gartner, IT is now a "non-growth industry" with spending lagging behind general economic growth. Today's conventional wisdom is that there are no compelling reasons for vigorous investment in IT. In other words, businesses have lost faith in their ability to generate returns from technology investments. They have concluded that IT, nowadays, is just a commodity. So, when it comes to IT, there's no longer any tangible value to be achieved by striving for excellence or being innovative. How myopic!

The mistake many business leaders are making is believing that computer networks are pretty much plug-and-play and that industry standards have eliminated the need for them to have to do much systems integration any longer. The reality is that the opportunity to innovate through IT has never been greater. Doing so, however, requires significant paradigm shifts on the part of business management. The loss of faith must be restored. Incompetence must be pushed aside. Business leaders must be willing to nurture and foster innovation.

For an example of software innovation, look at how Boston's new TD Banknorth Garden was sold out for the final 14 Boston Celtics basketball games despite the team's woeful performance on the court (see "Sold out at the Garden"). A tiny Cambridge, Mass. software firm called StratBridge developed a system which enabled the Celtics' executives to see which tickets were not sold, act on the information by designing promotions to sell them, and watch the results live to make sure their promotions were working. This single IT-based innovation is probably going to revolutionize ticket-selling at sporting events as much as frequent flier programs affected the airlines business a generation back. All that's needed is a combination of out-of-the-box thinking and the courage to invest.

Mea Culpa

With the ITscout Blog, I have been guilty of a major faux pas by repeatedly crossing back and forth between it being: 1) a professional blog that focuses on issues related to IT architecture; and 2) a personal blog that indulges in political commentary.

I've rationalized that it's okay for me to do this because ITscout is, and always has been, my personal web site. ITscout is most definitely NOT my company's web site. (ITscout's content is simply made available at no charge for my company's customers.)

Also, the size of the ITscout Blog readership is quite small. I feel that provides me tremendous freedom. Rather than worrying about why more people aren't caring about what I have to say, I simply write my web log as a personal journal.

Perhaps someday I'll seperate my commentary between two different blogs. But for right now, I plan to continue writing on topics that may, or may not, be business related.

Vietnam vs. Iraq

Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney successfully avoided Vietnam -- the President by serving in the Air National Guard and the Vice President through draft deferments. But I wonder if, in their heart of hearts, either of these politicians ever truly supported America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Based on their rhetoric, I seriously doubt it.

I think most Americans agree that the Vietnam War was a very costly mistake -- a blemish on our nation's proud history. We never should have gotten into that war in the first place and we sure as hell should have ended our involvement much sooner than 1973. There was no domino effect. Indeed, in 1978 Vietnam even briefly went to war against its communist ally China. Who knows what to say to the families of over 58,000 Americans who gave their lives for their country in Vietnam?

So, what about Iraq? Most Americans today believe we should never have started this war either. I don't know what to say to the families of over 2,400 Americans who have already given their lives in Iraq. All I can say is that the parallels with Vietnam seem frighteningly similar.

Many dissenting generals have said we needed more soldiers in Iraq -- not to win the war, but to win the peace. Now, it's too late because America is perceived by most Iraqis as occupiers, not liberators. Why did we not have enough troops? The simple answer is because we ended the military draft in 1973. If there were still a draft, you can be sure there would once again be demonstrations in the streets and student strikes on campus, just like there were in the late '60s and early '70s. On the other hand, if America really and truly is at war, why is there no draft? That's unconscionable.

President Eisenhower warned Americans about the military industrial complex -- that combination of U.S. armed forces, arms industry corporations, and associated political and commercial interests. Right there, square in the middle of the bulls eye, you'll find President Bush and Vice President Cheney, orchestrating the unprecedented, obscene profits being generated off this war in Iraq. Follow the money. Then, you'll understand the true purpose of the Iraq War.

Enforcing Illegal Immigration Laws -- Not!

Currently in America there are somewhere between 11 million and 20 million illegal aliens. Citing an official GAO document, dated August 31, 2005, CNN's Lou Dobbs reports that in 2004, only 3 employers were fined for hiring illegal aliens. In fact, during the first four years of Bush's presidency, 2001 through 2004, only 318 employers (out of 5.5 million employers) have been fined for hiring illegal aliens.

As Lou Dobbs suggests, "The problem in our lack of border security and illegal immigration is becoming increasingly obvious: two political parties that are beholden to corporate America, the largest employers of illegal aliens, and the leadership of both parties that are selling out American citizens in search of cheap labor and political advantage."

Lookin' for a Leader

Neil Young's new album, "Living With War," includes the song 'Lookin' for a Leader.'

Lookin' for a leader
To bring our country home
Re-unite the red white and blue
Before it turns to stone

Lookin' for somebody
Young enough to take it on
Clean up the corruption
And make the country strong

Walkin' among our people
There's someone who's straight and strong
To lead us from desolation
And a broken world gone wrong

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all

America has a leader
But he's not in the house
He's walking here among us
And we've got to seek him out

Yeah we've got our election
But corruption has a chance
We got to have a clean win
To regain confidence

America is beautiful
But she has an ugly side
We're lookin' for a leader
In this country far and wide
We're lookin' for a leader
With the great spirit on his side

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all

Frankly, I don't personally care if America's next leader is a black man or a woman. All I want is someone who believes, like the late, great economist John Kennenth Galbraith, that markets and governments must work together to produce:

1. great schools and universites


2. first-rate healthcare for all


3. an environment protected -- not destroyed


4. personal freedom that's not dependent on what people own or or who they know

It's Time To Change America's Motto

In 1956, Congress officially designated 'In God We Trust' as the current national motto superseding 'E Pluribus Unum'. The most common place where the motto is observed is on U.S. currency -- both paper money and coins.

Inflation has shrunk the value of the dollar so much that coins nowadays have become virtually worthless. When was the last time you bought something costing less than a buck? The days of 15-cent hamburgers and 10-cent Cokes are long gone! There isn't even a character on modern day keyboards corresponding to the cent character ( ¢ ).

While it would be extremely difficult because of physical constraints to stamp a longer motto onto coins, there would be no problem printing a lengthier motto onto paper currency. I recommend an Act of Congress that would replace 'In God We Trust' with the 'Serenity Prayer':

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

This new motto would be a much better reflection of the true essence of 21st-century America.

How Does Bush Get Away with Disobeying Laws?

America is fundamentally broken. I'm pretty confident the cause lies somewhere between money and apathy. It's impossible to say which of these two powerful forces contributes more to the stifling of America's liberties.

Wanna get angry? Read Charlie Savage's Boston Globe column entitled "Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws."

The article is an expose disclosing how "President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution."

Sadly, no one seems to care -- not the public, nor the Congress, not even the courts.

The scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty 'to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.' Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to 'execute' a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.

Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts. Bush and his legal team have been quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation's sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files 'signing statements' -- official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

The statements serve as public notice about how the administration is interpreting the law. But, the documents are being read closely by one key group of people: the bureaucrats who are charged with implementing new laws. Lower-level officials will follow the president's instructions even when his understanding of a law conflicts with the clear intent of Congress. Years down the road, people will not understand why policy doesn't look like the legislation.

Congress can check a president who goes too far. But oversight gets much reduced in a situation where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party. Bush has essentially said that "We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it." Although the president is daring Congress to act against his positions, they're not taking action because they don't want to appear to be too critical, given that their own fortunes are tied to the president's because they are all Republicans.

A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, can make the Constitution simply 'disappear.' The American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch 'to exercise some self-restraint.' But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, and then ruled for himself every time. This attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy, is moving us toward an unlimited executive power.

The U.S. Government vs. SPAM

Do you remember the CAN-SPAM Act? Awhile back, I wrote a blog posting entitled the CAN'T-SPAM Law.

Supposedly the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was going to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email. The volume of spam daily cluttering my email suggests pretty strongly that the FTC isn't exactly enforcing this law.

How do you handle spam? Personally, I use three Message Rules inside Microsoft's Outlook Express.

[Note: To create a rule for Outlook Express e-mail messages, on the Tools menu, point to Message Rules, and then click Mail.]

1. The first rule I've named Spam White List Addresses. It's purpose is to identify email messages I know are not spam. I don't want these emails tested against my other two spam rules. In specifying the message rule, where it says "Select the Conditions for your rule" I have the first entry checked, "Where the From list contains people." I then populate the rule using either complete email addresses or string portions extracted from email addresses. Where the rule says "Select the Actions for your rule" I have checked "Stop processing more rules."


2. My second spam rule deals with Spam Black List Addresses. Where it says "Select the Conditions for your rule" I again have checked the first entry, "Where the From list contains people." Then I populate the list with portions of text extracted from spam email addresses. For instance: 'service@amazon.com', 'netscape.net', '.au', 'email.com', '@mail', etc. Note that complete addresses are not required, just strings of text. This list is constantly growing. Where the rule says "Select the Actions for your rule" I have checked the entry "Move it to the specified folder." I also have checked "Highlight it with a color."


3. Finally, I have a third spam rule called Spam Black List Subjects that's very similar to the second rule except where it says "Select the Conditions for your rule" I have checked the second entry, "Where the Subject line contains specific words." The words in my list include many variations of spellings, for instance: 'Viagra', 'V1agra', 'Vi-agra', and so on. My list of spam black list words is quite large and constantly growing. Again, where the rule says "Select the Actions for your rule" I have checked the entry "Move it to the specified folder." I also have checked "Highlight it with a color." I use the same folder as the second rule's list, but these entries are highlighted in a different color.

I periodically go through my SPAM folder, adjusting my three spam rule definitions as necessary. I then forward each spam email to spam@uce.gov. I wish I could also forward each spam email to every congressmen and senator, except most of those folks nowadays only accept emails via web forms.

I've watched enough CSI and Law & Order television shows to know that if the government really wanted to it could easily track down where spam messages originate. Frankly, I don't think anyone in the Bush administration cares about individual people, only corporations. Spam will probably be one of the excuses that will be used to allow the free Internet to be usurped by the huge goliaths like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and AOL. Money corrupts everything and big money has totally corrupted America's government.

The Ever Widening Spread Between Haves and Have-nots

America is fundamentally broken.

In 1960 the gap in wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30-fold. Today it's 75-fold.

Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 CEOs was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Now, it's 1,000 times.

As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has failed to keep up. The top 10% of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades. The top 1% have gained the most -- more than all the bottom 50% combined. Meanwhile, working men and women and their families are strained to cope with the rising cost of health care, housing, and higher education -- all of which have risen in price much faster than typical family incomes.

What are Enterprise Architects Trying to Accomplish?

If you have an existing or a planned Enterprise Architecture effort, how many people understand its full scope? Is it important to communicate aspects of the EA effort to people outside the core group? Do you have multiple different audiences that should be aware of what's happening? If so, how is that communication going to take place?

These types of questions are important because they help shape the enterprise architecture solution.

Often what you'll find is that communication gaps exist because context is what's missing. Context is what gives information a natural setting so that it intuitively makes sense. Architects need to provide the right context for their vision. Context makes it so that information has meaning and value because its logic is easily understood. If you're an application developer, the architecture information you need is different than if you're a project manager. Similarly, data and database administrators need different information, as do the business people who ultimately are responsible for all enterprise endeavors.

My company, Flashmap Systems, supports frameworks that provide context. Our tools are used to catalog and present strategy and knowledge. Our goal is to help architects make their information as easy to understand and use as possible. Not only that, but also make it accessible and useful for as many different audiences as possible. In other words, capturing information is only part of the end result of architecture. The payoff comes from the value of its usage.

Why Have an Architecture Repository?

If you're an enterprise architect, I think the first two questions you need to ask yourself are: what information would you like to communicate; and who's the audience you'd like to present that information to?

I can't imagine that the primary purpose of an architecture repository is for the people who build it. It's got to be about those who are going to use it. What's critical is getting the right information to the right people in the right way.

From the architect's perspective, the benefit of creating a repository ought to be reaping the rewards for having captured, collected, collated, and categorized data. That starts by helping architects communicate out to the different audiences they're trying to reach so that those people can better communicate back in how well, how accurate, and how useful the information in the repository is.

War on Terrorism

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, shortly after Lincoln ascended to the presidency (prior to F.D.R.'s second election, presidential inaugurations were held in March instead of January). That war lasted four years, ending on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

During World War I, with President Woodrow Wilson in the White House, Congress declared war on April 6, 1917. That war ended a year and a half later on Armistice Day, "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month", November 11, 1918.

America, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's leadership, entered World War II immedately after the raid on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a "day that shall live in infamy." The U.S. emerged victorious from World War II in three years and nine months, ending on V.J. Day, August 15, 1945.

President Bush's War on Terrorism officially began on September 11, 2001. Here we are today, nearly four and a half years later, and Osama bin Laden is still roaming free and there's no end to this war anywhere in sight.

I can't help but continue to wonder who is profiting from the War on Terrorism. Billions upon billions upon billions are being spent each and every month. Who is getting rich?

I do not understand why Osama bin Laden is not dead yet. Meanwhile we continue fighting in Iraq. Originally told that war was because of WMDs, we're now told WMD stands for "We Meant Democracy" (not that anything even remotely resembling real democracy is showing up anywhere in the Islamic Middle East). Yet, more than ever, Americans and Westerners everywhere are terrorized, living in fear of retaliation from bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. Today's Islamic jihadists are emboldened by appeasement and submissiveness. With each new rampage you feel as if the ideals that generations of Americans have died to defend are now being betrayed.

Can it get any worse? Today, President Bush said he will veto any congressional effort to stop a deal allowing an Arab company to take over six major U.S. seaports (this from a president who has yet to veto a single bill since he's been in office). Who wants to bet this never happens (neither the deal nor the veto)?

My Beef with Google

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, were once young, idealistic entrepreneurs. Whereas most major companies have longwinded, detailed descriptions explaining their corporate codes of conduct, Brin and Page described Google's with a mere three words: "Don't be evil."

But, I wonder, has Google grown up and become just like everyone else?

Reported in the news last month was an AP wire story that talked about how Google agreed to censor search results in China. That decision required some lightning fast changes to Google's own Help Center web site:

Google Help Center

Does Google censor search results?

The answer to the above question used to say "Google does not censor results for any search item."

Now it says "It is Google's policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so."

While certainly nothing evil by comparison with Google's capitulation to China's demand for censorship, I recently had my own little brush with the company's "highest possible standard of ethical business."

As readers of the ITscout Blog well know, I created a free web site called the Architecture 'Resources' Repository. Silly me. I actually thought it might be beneficial if the web pages there included non-obtrusive, context-sensitive Google ads. I believed it might possibly "add value."

So I investigated Google's AdSense capability. I read page after page of information on Google's web site. I viewed their AdSense demos. Finally, I asked my company's software developer team to modify the ITguide code base that I had used for implementing the Architecture 'Resources' Repository so that context-sensitive ads would appear along the left-hand margin of the page under the Flashmap navigator graphic.

Lo and behold, Google ads started appearing. Unfortunately, however, the actual ads that started showing up were nothing more than the equivalent of email spam. They had absolutely nothing to do with the architectural content on the pages. So I contacted Google's AdSense technical support. They responded that "Google's crawlers work to gather content from the page [and that] less relevant ads may be displayed for 48 hours or longer."

What the technical support response failed to tell me, and which appeared nowhere in their marketing description of AdSense, was a small piece of obscure information we finally found buried deep within the Adsense support site. It said, "At this time, pages that require a login can not be easily visited by our crawlers."

After mentioning this in an email to the AdSense technical support person, I got back the following reply:

Our content crawler is not able to access login-protected pages, so placing your ad code on pages behind a login may result in public service ads or ads that are not relevant to the page.

In order to receive relevant ads, we recommend that you place the ad code only on pages that are not protected by a login.

Had this information been properly stated up front, I could have saved a lot of time, effort, and aggravation. I can't believe Google wasn't open and honest in their description of the AdSense offering. Somehow I've got to believe Micro$oft is smiling. Gooooooogle isn't as goooooood as they claimed to be. :-)

A Boast Full of Pride

I am prideful. I am proud of the work that's been done on the Architecture 'Resources' Repository. I am especially pleased with the definition of architecture as a bridge that connects between business and technology.



Further, I particularly like the extension of the analogy into a metaphorical description of architecture as 3 rope-like bridges where each rope is comprised of three intertwined strands corresponding to 1) modeling, 2) documenting, and 3) communicating; and the reason for three bridges, to differentiate among 1) enterprise architecture, 2) software architecture, and 3) cross-domain architectures (e.g., security architecture, network architecture).

I am proud of the quality, quantity, and objectivity of content contained in the Architecture 'Resources' Repository. I feel that serving as gatekeeper for the clearinghouse eliminates the kind of problems that have recently occurred in several Wikipedia scandals.

I am extremely proud of ITscout and its four models for describing technology portfolios. Trying to maintain the content inside ITscout is a Herculean task -- albeit one I've not been all that good at doing well. Nevertheless, the immense volume of information contained there is chock full of links to some fantastic content. Moreover, a visitor is never more than a single click away from a context-sensitive Google search.

Finally, I can't even begin to express the amount of pride I have in the team of people I work with everyday at Flashmap Systems. The buttons on my shirt start popping as soon as I think about how my colleagues have helped our FlashAtlas customers communicate their enterprise architectures. Our list of customers read like a Who's Who of Fortune or Forbes companies.

Bush's "Mosts"

George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States of America. Over the past 200+ years, we have had a couple of great presidents, a few good ones, some not so good, and a few really awful ones. Yet, after five years in office, the Bush administration has distinguished itself as perhaps the most secretive, most divisive, most deceptive, most distrusted, most arrogant, most mean-spririted, and above all, most incompetent presidency in our nation's history.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Gonzales, as well as others in this administration, have managed through doublespeak, non-transparency, and most of all, lots of terrible policies, to move our country from Ronald Reagan's "shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere" to a place where many Americans, including myself, can't even figure out what our democratic values stand for anymore.

Immediately after 9/11 the world stood united in its support for America. Today, our country is hopelessly broken. The White House leadership along with legislation from the Republican-controlled Congress (House and Senate) has brought us (in no particular order): Iraqi Mess-o-potamia, Guantonamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretap surveillance, Katrina, Social Security, Medicare Prescription Drugs, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bill Frist, Scooter Libby, tax cuts for the wealthy, budget cuts slashing assistance to students, children and seniors, astronomical budgets, astronomical deficits, astronomical oil company profits, astronomical gasoline prices, astronomical trade deficits, Halliburton, global warming, stem-cell research, leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson... and on and on and on. Has there been any good news over the past five years? No wonder America today is so disliked and so disrespected by so many people in so many places.

How do Republicans keep winning? Spin-meister Karl Rove is an absolute political genius. Oh, yeah, and the masses are asses.

Geoffrey Moore on 'Innovation'

Author Geoffrey Moore, in his book Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, talks about how getting a return on innovation requires discipline in moving ideas from core to context, and then reinvesting the profits -- and the people -- back into the next innovation.



CIO Insight interviewed Geoffrey Moore in an article entitled "Innovation Takes More than Inspiration; It Takes Investment, and Persistence." In that interview, Moore discusses how innovation isn't just about inventing the next new thing, but rather it requires a conscious investment strategy, and the will to carry it out.

In Geoffrey Moore's opinion, there's a sense of entitlement in the U.S. economy: that Americans feel entitled to high margins; entitled to use more of the world's resources than any other nation. The challenge for the U.S., according to Moore, is to figure out how to survive the sea change as economic power crosses the Pacific.

Below is an edited excerpt from that interview:

As globalization sets in and competition heats up, companies are looking to innovation to stay on top. But, according to Moore, that will mean little if wonderful new products and services never see the light of day. Consider the notorious fate of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center: Its many great ideas (e.g., ethernet, GUIs & mouse, WYSIWYG editing, object-oriented programming) would never have been commercialized had not others recognized their true value. There are only three kinds of innovation: You can differentiate through innovation, creating a new value proposition that customers prefer and that competitors don't have. That will win new revenues at attractive margins. You can innovate to neutralize a competitor's innovation. You don't necessarily gain an advantage, but you can begin to overcome a deficit, to catch up. As a result, you gain more sales, albeit not with a really competitive margin. But at least you're in the deal. You can also innovate in ways that don't change your outward competitiveness, though they can change your return on innovation internally. That means doing things more efficiently, getting the same amount of bang for less bucks. Unfortunately, if you look at the kinds of innovation that go on in established enterprises, more and more innovation is not generating a net new differentiating return. So you see stock prices of established enterprises being flat for years -- like at Microsoft or Cisco Systems. That's because they're not getting a net, new amount of competitive advantage. They're just kind of recycling the existing competitive advantage in their existing categories. Look at the tech sector where innovation was always thought of as that disruptive stuff that magically creates new categories. You start with mainframes, then minicomputers, then the PC, then the LAN, then the Internet. Nowadays it's mobility. Each change has had a stronger back-flush, until finally, when we got to the real correction, the bursting of the tech bubble, it was really about the legacy inertia of technology refusing to die. What we're seeing now is the maturation of the tech sector. Yet the idea lingers that if you're not doing disruptive innovation, nothing of interest is happening. And that's complete and total bunk. The big problem is that too many companies dabble in innovation. It's called smorgasbording. They say, "Well, we've got a little of this, and we've got a little of that." But, since they don't take any one project very far, they never escape the gravitational field of their traditional sector. Their new innovations never resonate. Meanwhile, 95 percent of their revenue is coming from a commodity product or service. Here's the critical distinction: core versus context. Core is defined as that which creates a return on innovation. Innovation for differentiation is core. Everything else is context. It may be mission-critical context, but it's still context. The problem is that you can't improve your economic outlook on the context side. You can get more productive, but you can't change your competitive position without changing your competitive-advantage equation. If you don't have any new competitive advantage coming along, every year the environment gets a little bit better at competing against you, and every year you get a little more marginalized. So you've got to cut a little more cost. And you get a little more marginalized. You cut a little bit more cost. And we watch these very powerful institutions quietly sunset themselves with about a one-degree decline every year, for decades. How can companies reignite their growth engines? They have to self-fund. They have to extract resources from context to repurpose for core. They have to continue to meet revenue commitments, but do it with fewer resources. How do you do this? Standardize, modularize, optimize, and then outsource. In the 21st century, companies can no longer afford to be vertically integrated with all of their time, talent, and management attention allocated across all of the various functions equally. If you allocate your resources based on your revenue makers, or margin makers, you're driving forward but looking through the rearview mirror. You're optimizing for what has been successful. If you're like most companies, you base this year's budget on last year's budget. Thus, you've already institutionalized the resource allocation which means that you're funding context before core. So core gets the scraps after context has been at the trough first. But you really have to fund core before you fund context. The context people will say, "We have to hit our revenue target, and if you cut that budget, we can't do it." Unfortunately, the company needs to find someone who can hit the target. With today's economy there's no other choice. The good news about mission-critical context is that it has inertia on its side. If you're big, and you're in an established category, established categories have inertia. So you ought to be able to take some productivity risks with your business without diminishing your top-line or bottom-line goals. What happens to the workforce when you start using context to fund core? Most people cling to the task they've been successful at. Eventually, that task becomes mission-critical context, but they're the experts, so they stay with it. And then it starts to get sunsetted, and they stay with it. And then eventually it gets outsourced. And then they're in a bad spot, because they really have nothing else they know how to do. So they either have to go with the work to the outsourcer, or they just lose their jobs. How can companies do it differently? There's a process model that overlays the evolution of any work. Every process has: a gestation or invention period a prolonged deployment period an optimization period All these tasks have to happen. But at too many companies, all the resources are getting stuck in mission-critical context. They think they've lost their inventors. They have not. They've lost their deployers. Or rather, they haven't lost them -- they're stuck on mission-critical context. But they need to shift to the next generation of core. Meanwhile, optimizers are key to getting the work out of the hands of the deployers stuck in the deployment process, down to where it can eventually be outsourced. That frees the deployers to come back to core and begin deploying the next round of invention. Who are the optimization people? They are all the Six Sigma monks. Six Sigma people shift roles all the time, going from group to group to group, bringing their quality-control capability with them. Deployers are program managers; when they finish one program they go do another program. Human beings tend to gravitate toward one of these three zones. Companies need to identify their employees' relative interests and passions and skills at doing invention, deployment and optimization. Then they need to detach investment from the task. If leaders are moved, you can trust them to move the rest of the resources with them to make it happen. Getting a return on innovation requires discipline in moving ideas from core to context, and then reinvesting the profits -- and the people -- back into the next core. Today companies tend to milk an employee's expertise and then throw away the employee. It's not fair to the employee. But if firms can continually invent, deploy and optimize, and think about their employees as part of that process, they can create better capitalist outcomes in a way that aligns with their workforce rather than betrays it. That way, they're preparing to survive in this increasingly Darwinian business world.

Blogging Is Not Enough For Me

The tremendous popularity of blogs nowadays is a testament that there's no shortage of people wanting to communicate. But, by their very nature, the information contained in blogs is generally temporal and fleeting.

Bloggers naturally write like they're posting to a journal or authoring a newspaper column. Readers of blogs typically subscribe just like they do in order to receive magazines delivered by their postal carrier, or newsletters that arrive in their e-mail inbox.

While the content contained in blogs can obviously be indexed and accessed via search engines, like Google, Yahoo, or MSN Search, my guess is that most blogs are overwhelmingly viewed by people who are regular recurring readers, and not by folks who reach a blog page after clicking on the results of some online search.

A few weblog publishing tools, such as TypePad (i.e., Movable Type), support the creation of categories as an alternate means to the traditional chronological form of organizing blog entries. But, in my estimation, these category features are not that frequently used by the vast majority of blog readers. I'm not even sure how popular the categorizing features are with blog authors. I tend to believe it's the kind of functionality that authors mostly think they want early on when they're first getting going with their blogging. After awhile, though, all that most bloggers really want to do is simply post their thoughts as quickly as possible, more or less like a diary, or a stream of consciousness. Speed (i.e., elapsed time to respond after some event), frequency (i.e., the number of distinct postings), and brevity (i.e., the length of each posting in terms of number of words written) are the key criteria that a blogger commonly uses for measuring his/her personal productivity.



If writing a blog is like publishing a magazine or newspaper column, then creating an in-depth description of a specific topic/subject is more akin to authoring a book. With the latter, the process commences with the formulation of a table of contents, which can also be referred to as a taxonomy or category tree, where information is arranged according to an hierarchical organization.

Every "branch" of a category tree includes its own category description. Normally, each description is painstakingly crafted as new content gets continuously integrated with previously-written existing content. Over time, after a number of separate editing sessions, the descriptive information often needs to be rewritten. Sometimes whole sections must be reorganized. Indeed, the category tree itself frequently undergoes constant, continual refinement and occasionally requires major refactoring.

This whole process is somewhat analogous to the art of whittling -- shaving a little here, shaping a little there. In the end the ultimate goal is to craft a hierarchy that correctly, and most effectively, is understood by the reader. The objective is to decompose the larger, overall topic/subject into small, manageable, bite-size morsels that can be easily comprehended.

Extending the category tree analogy further, each branch can also spawn its own "leaves." The characteristics of each "leaf" depends on the topic/subject being modeled. The detailed information that's captured for each instance of a leaf is quite different than the information necessary for describing the individual categories themselves.

The Architecture 'Resources' Repository is an example of a complex topic/subject. It has a category tree that explodes out into an expansive set of branches needed to describe and explain something as formidable as IT Architecture.

The graphic shown on the right includes a bookshelf metaphor that's superimposed on top of the underlying category tree. You might imagine that you're a bird soaring high above the IT Architecture category tree and the bookshelf image that you're seeing is your bird's-eye view. Using the graphic as a navigational aid you can immediately dive into any portion of the IT Architecture category tree.

Another example of a category tree is ITscout's model for Infrastructure, shown below (click on the image to view a Flash version that can be zoomed by right-clicking):



The graphical navigator provides for instantaneous single-click access to any portion of the very large, complicated, underlying category tree.

In the world of Internet communication, blogging plays an important role. But it has many weaknesses if you're trying to publish and communicate more permanent and polished information about a complex topic/subject. Every blogger should be as lucky as I am to have supplemental web sites like the Architecture 'Resources' Repository and ITscout.

Nobody Does It Better

My definition of "architecture" always begins with "bridging" the communication gap between technical and non-technical people. Frankly, I can't understand why more companies aren't beating a path to my company's door. Flashmap Systems' products enable architects to communicate with people -- both inside and outside of the IT organization.

Flashmap's products are not modeling tools. You can't use our offerings to sit down with a blank screen and just start generating pretty pictures. Likewise, Flashmap's products don't include crawlers that automatically discover what IT assets an organization already has deployed. But what Flashmap's products can do, better than anyone else's tools that I've seen, is enable IT organizations to communicate information about their architecture. Nobody does it better.

It's no surprise that my company's products embody some of my own longstanding beliefs. One, in particular, is the high value I place on communicating information visually. That's why in the ITscout Blog, for instance, I strive to be pithy, pertinent, and pictorial. There's almost always at least one picture in every posting.

I began my career as a cognitive psychologist. I wanted to understand how the human brain processes information. I was enrolled in a doctoral program at Indiana University with a minor in artificial intelligence. One of the lessons I remember from back then is that over 70 percent of the neurons in the human brain are dedicated to our visual processing. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is probably a gross underestimate. I personally place great stock in a visual graphic's ability to simplify and synthesize -- two essential elements for effectively communicating complex subject matter.

Early in my professional career, I migrated out of cognitive psychology and into computer science. If I had to point to a single factor that nudged me from one discipline to the other, it was Donald Knuth's seminal work The Art of Computer Programming, especially his coverage of data structures -- stacks, queues, lists, arrays, and trees -- along with techniques for manipulating those structures. Knuth's clear writing, dry humor, and historical discussions made those books among the great classics of computer programming literature. Modeling data structures is what led me into the field of database management which got me interested in data architecture and that ultimately brought me to the study of IT architecture in general.

If you want to know what I understand about architecture today, all you have to do is check out the Architecture 'Resources' Repository web site. The graphic I used for simplifying and synthesizing the complex field of IT Architecture is the bookshelf metaphor shown to the right. If you click on the image of the bookshelf itself a new browser window will open up. If you then scroll down the displayed page you will see the category tree I've created for organizing and classifying architectural information.

On the displayed page, just below the bookcase graphic but above the category tree, there's a pair of radio buttons that look like the following:

Select one of the following options to see a treeview display of the model: Categories only Categories and Products

Click the Categories and Products radio button on the displayed page and then press the Display Model button. The resulting output will show all of the "leaves" along with all of the category tree "branches." (Note that all the "leaves" as well as all the "branches" are themselves hyperlinks that you can click.)

The Architecture 'Resources' Repository demonstrates how a large compendium of descriptive information about an enormously complex subject can be quickly and easily accessed by a diverse, yet totally untrained audience of casual, occasional visitors.

The ITscout web site, which earlier I also created, provides easy, simple access to an even broader, more complex topic -- the entire marketplace for all IT products.

While Flashmap Systems has sold products that communicate architecture information to a few dozen Fortune 1000 customers, I tend to believe we're still one of the best kept secrets in the entire IT industry. Most CIOs and IT professionals have never heard of us.

The message needs to get out. The Architecture 'Resources' Repository and the ITscout web site both project the look and feel for how our tools operate. However, neither of those sites actually demonstrate how Flashmap's products communicate architectural information across an enterprise. Neither the Architecture 'Resources' Repository, nor ITscout, show how different information can be targeted to different audiences. Neither demonstrates how visual cues such as icons and legends can be used to convey status information such as current state versus future state.

If you have a need to communicate your enterprise's architecture information (and who doesn't?), and the Architecture 'Resources' Repository, and ITscout have piqued your interest, then why aren't you "doing it?" Come, beat a path to our door. Nobody does it better. Like Rick (Humphrey Bogart) said to Captain Renault (Claude Rains) at the end of the movie Casablanca, "[That could be] the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Why Communicate?

Architects love to create visual models. It taps their creative juices. UML (Unified Modeling Language) and Visio were godsends in that they make it easy for architects to draw images that illustrate the underlying complexity associated with artifacts related to IT.

Architects hate to document models. Why? Because that involves tedious, hard work. Who wants to spend time poring over data, capturing and collecting pertinent information that describes those complex artifacts related to IT? Invariably architects search for some magic silver bullet that can somehow crawl their networks and scour their disks automatically extracting jewels of useful information about their computing environment. Ah, if only it were as simple as performing a Google-like search. Most who experiment with discovery tools that inventory, collate, and coordinate, however, come away pretty disappointed and disillusioned with what those products can actually accomplish. It turns out, in the end, that there's really no substitute for good old-fashioned hard work performed by an intelligent, adaptive, biological information processor (i.e., a living, breathing human being).

Finally, we get to the final prong of any architectural endeavor -- actually communicating the information organized around the models. A really big question that needs to be answered is, "Do architects want to convey to others what they've learned by modeling and documenting," and if so, "Who do they want to communicate that information to?"

More often than not, unfortunately, architecture teams operate like black holes. They suck up resources by scheduling lots of meetings, asking lots of questions, and then in the end, after all that fact-finding, deliver little more than a PowerPoint presentation with, perhaps, an accompanying Word document that no one but the author ever reads.

It's not uncommon in today's economic climate for architecture teams to get reorganized and reorganized, over and over again. In such cases, generally, little more gets produced beyond some UML-like diagrams that don't mean much except to the person who originally thought up the models and created the graphics.

In the real-world where architects design buildings for a living, inordinate amounts of time are devoted to communicating -- both with the consumers (i.e., customers/clients) and with the producers (i.e., developers, contractors, sub-contractors). Initially architects produce drawings, or renderings, so that their clients can visualize what they're buying, and actually see what's going to be built using their money. Then the architects produce numerous, much more detailed drawings called blueprints that are shared with contractors and sub-contractors who will do the actual construction work. Once again, communication is paramount. Note, by the way, that the client isn't expected to extrapolate what the eventual structure will look like based on the blueprints. It should also be noted that it's the architect's responsibility to perform extensive work documenting the details that involve issues pertaining to engineering, zoning, permits, etc.

IT architects can't just produce UML drawings, not if they want to convey to business people the concepts those UML graphics embody. IT architects also have to provide the extensive documentation above and beyond the sketches that they draw. When one looks at the long list of architecture tools on the market (see Products listed in the Architecture 'Resources' Repository), they'll find numerous offerings related to modeling. They'll also discover many tools that focus on documenting architecture information. But, it seems, my company, Flashmap Systems, is one of the very few who concentrate their focus on communicating architecture to untrained users. I figure we're either leading the market, or we're off course. Only our customers can say for sure!

Iran and the President's Conundrum

President Bush defends his warrantless domestic spying program based on his powers as a wartime Commander-in-Chief. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that George Washington spied on British supporters, Abraham Lincoln wiretapped telegraph lines, and during World Wars I and II, both Woodrow Wilson and F.D.R. intercepted communications. On the other hand, is America really at war? (see The Un-War President)

Why did George Bush lead America into a preemptive war against Iraq? Perhaps more importantly, why aren't we going to war against Iran? What differentiates Iran and Iraq besides the last letter of their country's names?

Is there any question that Iran is a major terrorist sponsor? They send their petrodollars to Hezbollah and Hamas. They're playing a huge clandestine role in Iraq doing who knows what supporting Shi'ite retaliation against Sunni insurgents. What about Iran's intent on developing WMDs? They are threatening to launch attacks using long-range missiles and commando terrorist units in retaliation for any strike on its nuclear facilities. Iran began its Islamic revolution back in 1979 with the storming of the American embassy and the subsequent holding of kidnap victims for over a year. No Iranian has ever paid a price for that outrageous criminal act.

How does President Bush justify the loss of American lives in Iraq and simultaneously justify NOT EXPANDING the war on terror into Iran? What, exactly, is his definition of victory? How is Iraq different than Viet Nam? Who is going to be the last American soldier to die in Iraq, and when will that be? Are there going to be American military helicopters rescuing people from Baghdad's Green Zone reminiscent of images from Saigon a generation ago?

President Bush keeps asking that we trust him -- that we forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers. Frankly, as much as I've learned to distrust presidents during my lifetime (LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton), Georgen W. Bush is the undisputed champion of distrust. To my fellow Americans who elected him, all I can say is the masses are asses.

EA Network NOT

The following note which I had posted to a Discussion Thread on the EA Network was removed by Mike Morneau, Program Manager and Administrator, Enterprise Architectures Network:

Topic: Architecture Products The list of products included in the Architecture 'Resources' Repository (www.ITscout.org/Architecture) is growing: Adaptive Business Process Manager Adaptive Enterprise Architecture Adaptive IT Portfolio Manager Agilense EA WebModeler alfabet planningIT Axon Idea Processor Borland Tempo CA Enterprise IT Management (EITM) Compuware OptimalJ Enterprizer Factiva Factiva Synaptica Knowledge Management System Flashmap Systems FlashAtlas Flashmap Systems ITguide Framework Software Structure Grandite SILVERRUN ModelSphere IBM Rational Software Architect IBM Rational Software Modeler IBM Rational Systems Developer Interfacing Technologies Enterprise Process Center (EPC) KBSI ProCap KBSI PROSIM MEGA Suite MEGA Suite: MEGA Architecture Mercury IT Governance Center Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2003 Mindjet MindManager Netspective Enterprise Frameworks Suite (NEFS) Proforma ProVision Enterprise QualiWare Lifecycle Manager SiloFx Synap-c Enterprise Architecture Suite Sparx Enterprise Architect Telelogic Focal Point Telelogic System Architect Troux Compliance Management Troux Enterprise Architecture and Planning Troux IT Governance Platform Troux Portfolio Management Visible Advantage Please send the names of any additional products you think ought to be included in the list. Also, if you can think of any articles or books that you particularly like, please pass those along as well and I will list them in the repository. Thanks in advance for your assistance. --------------------------------------------- Jeff Tash CEO, Flashmap Systems, Inc. http://www.FlashmapSystems.com tash@flashmapsystems.com 617.332.3101 ITscout http://www.ITscout.org http://www.ITscout.org/Architecture http://ITscout.blogspot.com ITscout@ITscout.org 800.381.7515

I received an email informing me that the "content was interpreted as being in violation of the EA Network's position and rules regarding posts that are commercial in nature." I was requested to exercise vigilance in future posts.

I'm not really sure what was objectionable about this content, but in the future I simply will not post to the EA Network.

Why is this lunacy tolerated?

First came suicide-bombers. Then, improvised explosive devices. Now, attacks against Westerners because cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed were published in a Danish newspaper. This climate of radical Islamic intimidation and intolerance is beyond frightening.

The current uproar is because of an editorial cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. A second one showed him in Heaven, pleading with newly arrived suicide terrorists: "Stop, stop! We have run out of virgins!" (Be honest now. That's funny!)

Militant Islam has no problem with beheadings, riots, death threats, kidnappings, flag-burnings. The jihadis who demand censorship of the Western press have no issue showing pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of video cameras.

The Muslim world seems to hold one standard of behavior for itself and quite another for the rest of the world. It asks nothing of its own people and everything of everyone else, while always expecting no serious repercussions.

Iran just published cartoons defaming the Holocaust in response to the Danish cartoons because, as Iran’s "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed, this controversy was a "conspiracy planned by the Zionists." Iranian "President" Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust combined with his incessant pursuit of nuclear weapons is beyond scary (Bush was only off by a single letter in his war to prevent WMDs).

The Islamic world's media, with full government sponsorship, slings "apes and pigs" slurs aimed at Jews and Christians. Those responsible for 9/11 are given safe harbor hiding in Pakistan along the Afghan border. Yet, when a recent American missile strike killed a few of them, the U.S. was roundly castigated for violating borders in pursuit of our deadly enemies who, while on Pakistani soil, boast of planning yet another mass murder of Americans.

The list of hypocrisies are endless. Millions of Muslims have emigrated to the United States and Europe. Yet Israel, the biblical home of the Jews, is deemed as "occupied by infidels."

Why is this lunacy tolerated?

Oil.

The billions of petrodollars the world sends to medieval regimes like Iran or Saudi Arabia has yielded tribal, patriarchal societies from which has emerged Wahhabis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Qeada. Puritanical zealotry, autocratic corruption, dictatorship, theocracy -- this is not a world where democratization can take hold without a plan for establishing the rule of law and constitutional government. Unfortunately, President Bush seems to have no plans beyond the kind of naive elections that have already brought to power political parties like Hamas in Palestine or a Shi'ite theocracy in Iraq. Hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars are being spent prosecuting a war against the likes of Zarqawi. Thousands of American soldiers have already died with no end in sight and no clue where the next wave of recruits will be coming from. The debt being left to the next generation of Americans is beyond shameful. Why are we doing this? Oil.

Come next November, maybe the voters will realize that G.O.P. stands for the Gas and Oil Party.

Communicating Taxonomy Information

I like to think of communicating taxonomy information in terms of a 3-dimensional cube.

• Along one dimension you have models. In terms of IT assets, I prefer to classify information according to four models:
  
  
  • IT Infrastructure
  • Application Development
  • Applications (either COTS or custom-developed)
  • Business Intelligence

• The second dimension is what I like to refer to as views that target different audiences. Some views can be targeted to architects, others to developers, and still more aimed at business-oriented end-users.



• The third dimension involves time. Think of it in terms of current state and future state. Obviously, you need a roadmap or strategy to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

A really important issue you need to think about is what kinds of information you want to capture and communicate using your taxonomy. For someone just starting off, I recommend you begin by identifying IT standards. Communicating your standards will enable consolidation and that will result in an almost immediate return on investment.

For IT groups that want a quick and inexpensive way to get started, I'd suggest you consider ITguide. For less than $100/month you can use the ITscout taxonomies to communicate your IT standards. To get a sense of ITguide's overall look-and-feel, check out the Architecture 'Resources' Repository at www.ITscout.org/Architecture. I used ITguide as the code base for capturing and communicating everything I know about "architecture."

Enterprise Architecture Musings

While perusing the Enterprise Architecture Network, I ran across a couple of discussion threads that grabbed my attention.



The first was a posting by Scott Goodin who wrote an entry entitled "Lost, Wandering or Both?" It talked about the following:

Current State = where you are

If you don't know where you are, you are lost.

Future State = where you're going

If you don'’t know your where you're going, you are wandering.

If you don'’t know where you are or where you're going, it's insane to just continue on lost and/or wandering. You've obviously got work to do. On the other hand, even if you do know where you are and where you're going, you still need a roadmap or strategy to help you get from your current state to your future state.

The second discussion thread that attracted my attention was posted by Tod Goulds. He asked the community for help in presenting a business case for Enterprise Architecture that could show real, measurable ROI (Return On Investment).

Tod received lots of responses to his posting. Many referred to the savings organizationion can achieve through standards and consolidation (a topic I, too, have written extensively about -- see IT Standards Manifesto). Others suggested less quantifiable benefits, such as the value of replacing out-dated applications thereby reducing the forward cost of maintenance, or the impact of aligning strategic IT plans with business needs.

David Rico, in responding to Tod's thread, referenced an article he had written entitled "A Framework for Measuring the ROI of Enterprise Architecture" which methodically looked at measuring:

• Costs (total amount of money spent on enterprise architecture)
• Benefits (total amount of money gained from enterprise architecture)
• Benefit to Cost Ratio (ratio of enterprise architecture benefits to costs)
• ROI% (ratio of adjusted enterprise architecture benefits to costs)
• NPV -- Net Present Value (discounted cash flows of enterprise architecture)
• BEP -- Break Even Point (point when benefits exceed costs of enterprise architecture)

Unfortunately, as the article indicates, few organizations consistently collect cost and benefit data, and certainly not according to a standard. Much of the data reported in this paper by David Rico comes from U.S. government assessments of the maturity, state, status, and progress of federal enterprise architecture initiatives (personally, I don't place much stock in the trustworthiness of the government's estimates of costs or benefits).

Ron Baillie responded that "there were different views as to what the 'returns' for EA are". He provided three examples of different views:

• standardization provides re-use of components, data entities, building blocks, etc. -- leading to cost reduction
• greater integration provides better information flow -- leading to cost reduction, efficiency, additional revenue opportunities, etc.
• architecture addresses tactical 'project' needs while building 'capabilities' in IT, such as agility, ability to innovate, etc. -- leading to strategic competitive value

My own perspective on this topic is that whenever management asks IT for measurable ROI they're usually just erecting a roadblock. I wonder if anyone has ever successfully demonstrated ROI for e-mail or PowerPoint or web servers! Enterprise Architecture is similar to IT Infrastructure in that I'm not quite sure how you measure its ROI, but if it's not there it's going to cost you big time.

I'd be dumbfounded to imagine any CIO without a strategic vision. The question is, how is that strategic vision communicated to others -- both inside and outside of IT? That's where Enterprise Architecture demonstrates its most important Return On Investment -- by enabling the CIO to share his/her vision.

BS Bingo! -- The Stay Awake Office Game!!!

Do you keep falling asleep in meetings and seminars?

What about those long and boring conference calls?

Well, apparently, there's a new game making the rounds that's perfect for all those boring meetings and tedious sessions at conferences and seminars. It's called BS Bingo!

Here's how it's played. Before (or during) your next meeting, seminar, or conference call, prepare for yourself a 5" x 5" square divided into five columns across and five rows down. Then, in some random order, enter the following words/phrases into each of the 25 one-inch blocks.

synergy	fast track	leverage	best practice	at the end of the day
revisit	expeditious	game plan	out of the loop	core competencies
benchmark	value-added	proactive	client-focused	think outside the box
24/7	bottom line	mind-set	result-driven	empower (or empowerment)
paradigm	touch base	win-win	strategic fit	to tell you the truth

When you hear one of the above words/phrases, check off the appropriate block.

When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout "BULLSHIT!"

Trust me, this game is guaranteed to dramatically improve your attention span in meetings.

Architecture is Communicating Complexity

Architecture is, if anything, first and foremost all about "communicating complexity." Furthermore, in my opinion, I'm convinced the absolute best way to communicate complexity is by "simplifying and synthesizing."

For instance, take a look at the field of architecture itself. I contend that this discipline is hugely complex. Ask five reasonably intelligent, experienced IT people to define "architecture" and you'll probably get back at least a half dozen different definitions.

I set out to simplify and synthesize a description of architecture when I built the Architecture 'Resources' Repository (www.ITscout.org/Architecture), My goal was to create a web site that virtually anyone with no training whatsoever could use to discover and explore all kinds of information about architecture.

Previously, I tried to accomplish pretty much the same kind of thing with ITscout. Of course, its focus was different. ITscout is chiefly product-centric. It attempts to single-handedly encompass and describe the entirety of the enormously big IT industry marketplace.

Getting back to architecture, I've frequently written in this blog how the task of architecting is comprised of three component parts:

1. modeling
2. documenting
3. communicating

Nearly everyone agrees that architects have to perform the first task -- modeling. Oftentimes I find architects hoping to be able to use off-the-shelf models to jump-start their architectural efforts. I tend to believe that's a big part of the reason why so many people have found the Zachman 5-row by 6-column table attractive. I know I've had lots of folks express an interest in wanting to use the graphical ITscout models for describing their technology architecture portfolios.

The second task architects must perform -- documenting -- is mostly seen as arduous and burdensome. Most people I talk to are looking for some magic silver bullet. For some reason they elect to ignore the old adage, "Garbage in, garbage out." The fact of the matter is architecture is hard work, and someone has to do that work. Indeed, the benefits are often in the doing. Capturing, classifying, categorizing, refactoring -- those are the activities that make an architecture shine.

The final step in architecting -- communicating -- is my personal bailiwick. Unfortunately, not a lot of architects seem to even recognize the importance of this task. The problem reminds me of my experiences as a software developer working with end users. If I asked people what they wanted their application to do, they usually didn't have a clue how to express their real requirements. On the other hand, if I showed them what they could have they would immediately respond back with what was wrong with what I had shown them. I often described this behavior with the simple saying that "problems get defined in terms of available solutions."

In my humble opinion, communication is what architecture is truly about. After all, I can't begin to tell you how many times I've witnessed examples of architectural "shelfware" where the only ones who read what the architects had written were the authors themselves. If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Similarly, if an architect creates and populates models that nobody sees, does it have any impact? I think not.

There's No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

The Big Picture: The Challenge of Visual Modeling By Jonas Lamis, Vice President, Product Marketing, Troux Technologies

My company, Flashmap Systems, was contacted by Troux Technologies, asking our permission for their Vice President of Product Marketing, Jonas Lamis, to include our graphic, illustrated below, in an article he was writing for Architecture & Governance Magazine.

Click on image for Flash version of graphic that can be zoomed by right-clicking

Our response was "Go right ahead. But please be sure to include our copyright notice."

Although the article, entitled The Big Picture: The Challenge of Visual Modeling, included our graphic, our copyright was omitted. I assume that this was an oversight. The article itself made some excellent points, especially Edward Tufte's notion that Graphical Excellence:

• is the well-designed presentation of interesting data;
• communicates complex ideas with clarity, precision and efficiency; and
• provides the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time, with the least ink, and in the smallest space.

Unfortunately, the article mischaracterizes my company's EA products. It implies that Flashmap's tools compete directly against Troux's Metis Enterprise software. Personally, I don't believe they do. Rather, they complement one another.

Enterprise Architecture, in my view, involves three distinctly separate components:

• the creation of models
• the population of content
• the communication of content

Troux's suite of tools focus mainly on the first two bullets above, while Flashmap's products excel at accomplishing the third -- communicating architecture information to a community of untrained users. Take a look below at an example of the kind of UML-like graphic that Troux's products produce:


Obviously, the collection of Metis boxes and lines are quite different than Flashmap's "big picture" value chain-like graphic, shown near the beginning of this posting, which visually depicts goods and services flowing left-to-right while money moves in the opposite direction from right-to-left.

Social Insecurity

Last night, in his State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush said: "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security, yet the rising cost of entitlements is a problem that is not going away -- and with every year we fail to act, the situation gets worse."

I admit I'm politically naive, but it sure seems as if two quite simple changes could be made to Social Security that would go a long way toward solving the problems of baby boom retirements. I'm certain it would do more than the president's cockemany proposal for personal retirement accounts.

First, remove the $90,000 Social Security salary cap. Second, introduce a means test to determine who is eligible to receive Social Security benefits upon retirement.

We live in an America where currently more than one in four families with children earn less than $30,000 a year, and where 46 million Americans live without health insurance. Meanwhile, if you look at the recently-passed tax cuts which will cost more than $150 billion over the next ten years, you'll find that 97% of the money from those cuts will go to households making more than $200,000 a year. Households with incomes under $100,000 will get 0.1% of these cuts.

Rich people can afford to contribute more to Social Security while they're working and rich people don't need to collect Social Security checks after they retire.

Architectural Resources

The Architecture 'Resources' Repository can be accessed using the following login information:

URL:	http://www.ITscout.org/ITguide
Username:	architecture
Password:	itguide

Alternatively, a much simpler and easier way of accessing the Architecture 'Resources' Repository is to specify the following URL address (which will automatically log you in as if you had entered the above login sequence):

www.ITscout.org/Architecture

Visually, the "Flashmap" graphic used to organize information about Architecture 'Resources' is the "bookcase" that appears to the right. It consists of two shelves filled with different sets of colored books.

The three yellow books horizontally placed on the left side of the top shelf represent Architecture Types. The five red books located to their right correspond to Architectural Concepts. The third grouping of topics, represented by the four blue books on the left-hand side of the bottom shelf, refer to the Application and/or Practice of Architectural Principles.

Finally, the last set of books, the green ones vertically arranged along the right-hand side of the bottom shelf, reflect an assorted collection of Architectural Resources. These include:

• Blogs
• Web Sites
• Articles
• Books
• Magazines
• Events
• Other Resources

Other Resources include such topics as: Certification, Glossaries/Lexicons, Professional Groups, References, and Video Presentations.

The Architecture 'Resources' Repository is continuously being updated and refreshed with new information. Its purpose is to serve as a clearinghouse chock full of links to valuable information about architecture. Please use the FEEDBACK icon to submit suggestions, corrections, additions, etc. It appears on every page in the task bar which is located near the upper right corner just below the Flashmap Systems logo. The FEEDBACK icon is represented by the following graphic:

Incidently, also included in the task bar is a GOOGLE SEARCH button. Clicking it will automatically open up a new browser window with a context-sensitive search that matches whatever topic you're currently viewing. Its icon is represented by the following graphic:

The Un-War President

Tonight, in his State of the Union speech, I anticipate President George W. Bush, like he has on many occasions, will refer to himself as a war president. It's just not true. America is not in a state of war.

Abraham Lincoln was a war president. So, too, were Woodrow Wilson and FDR. But in 2006, America isn't actually in a state of war.

Section 8 in Article I of the U.S. Constitution states that "Congress shall have the power to declare War." No such declaration has occurred regarding Iraq or the war on terror.

My father fought in World War II. My grandfather fought in World War I. Those were real wars. I, personally, was successful in evading the draft that would have sent me to Viet Nam. As far as I'm concerned, though, Viet Nam, like Korea before it, weren't real wars. They were police actions. Real wars are fought to be won -- at any cost.

Today's war on terror is a sad joke. That's not to imply that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida are not real enemies. But the war on terrorism is not a real war since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of actually engaging Al Qaida or capturing Osama bin Laden.

Real wars are not fought by all volunteer armies. If this were a real war the government would be selling War Bonds, not cutting taxes while running the deficit up over $8 trillion. If this were a real war we would have had enough troops on the ground in Iraq to have prevented the looting that started the insurgency. If this were a real war we'd have shut down Al Jazeera in a heartbeat and found out where all those videotapes are coming from.

This is a war where, as Thomas Friedman of the N.Y. Times has frequently pointed out, American citizens are essentially paying for both sides of the conflict. With oil hovering close to $70 per barrel, Exxon just reported obscene annual profits of $36.13 billion. At those prices, can you imagine just how much Arab and Persian oil money is being funneled to those fighters killing American soldiers?

President Bush now asserts that Congress cannot impede his inherent powers as Commander in Chief granted in Section 2 of Article II of the Constitution. Bush campaigns that he has an unrestricted right to conduct warrantless domestic spying, even though the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) forbids it. The claim that Congress authorized spying on Americans after 9/11 is preposterous. In FISA, Congress carefully balanced the liberties protected in the Bill of Rights against the need for surveillance of foreign enemies. Likewise, the administration brazenly asserts that the president possesses the authority to mistreat detainees, even after signing a law barring torture. To argue that Congress cannot place any limits on the president's ability to conduct a war on terror is absurd. I am very afraid for the state of our union when the president can ignore a statute that deals with the core liberties of American citizens.

Personally, even though I have two children of draftable age, I say if we're going to fight a real war then let's fight a real war. Let's go kick some ass, catch or kill Osama bin Laden, and destroy Al Qaida. If 9/11 was an act of war, then let's fight it like a real war. Otherwise, let's treat 9/11 as a horrific crime to be met with criminal justice. But, no more half-assed Viet Nam-like wars where U.S. soldiers die so that America's military industrial complex can get rich.

Application and/or Practice of Architectural Principles

The third grouping of topics included within the Architecture 'Resources' Repository concentrates its focus on the application and/or practice of architectural principles. Represented by the four blue books located on the left-hand side of the bottom shelf, these sub-categories include:

• Industry Standards


• Implementations


• Products


• Consulting Firms

Perhaps the most important Industry Standard related to IT Architecture is IEEE 1471, a specification that addresses the activities related to the creation, analysis, and sustainment of architectures, and the recording of such architectures in terms of architectural descriptions.

Under the category labeled Implementations, my hope and dream is that real-world IT architects will open up their treasure chests of knowledge and experience and share with others their documented description of real solutions, referencing the tools and methodologies they used to be successful. Obviously, accomplishing this goal depends on the voluntary involvement and contribution by practitioners such as members of IASA (International Association of Software Architects).

The third and fourth sub-categories listed under Application and/or Practice specify Products and Consulting Firms. I will try to provide objective descriptions void of hype and marketing fluff. It's imperative, however, that people submit the names of tools and consultancies. If visitors to the Architecture 'Resources' Repository express an interest, I could possibly include an evaluation grading feature similar to the functionality offered in ITscout.

Architectural Concepts

One of the primary goals of the Architecture 'Resources' Repository is to locate, qualify, sort, coordinate, and explain available information regarding general concepts relevant to IT architects. These are represented by the five red books located on the right-hand side of the top shelf.

General concepts of IT Architecture include:

• Frameworks


• Patterns


• Methodologies


• Governance

Frameworks are tools which can be used for developing a broad range of different architectures. Frameworks describe a method for designing an information system in terms of a set of building blocks, and for showing how the building blocks fit together. It contains a set of tools and provides a common vocabulary. It also includes a list of recommended standards and compliant products that can be used to implement the building blocks. Patterns are solutions to common problems. The goal of architectural patterns is to create a body of literature to help architects resolve recurring problems. An architecture methodology refers to the set of processes a company uses to generate and deliver architectures. Architecture governance is the process used to manage architecture variance over time. Effective IT governance provides a structure for ensuring that IT supports business goals, maximizes IT investments, and appropriately manages IT related risks and opportunities.

Other concepts include such additional topics as:

• Architectural Styles


• Architectural Viewpoints


• Personas/Roles

The Lying Society

From presidents lying to lobbyists bribing to everyday people cheating on taxes, dishonesty has become the norm in today's society. Within our culture, dishonesty is promoted everywhere -- in interpersonal relations, in our work, in our everyday affairs, in our politics. Consider the new Medicare prescription drug benefit that's pitched as "keeping our promise to seniors," or the doublespeak of allowing greater industrial pollution through the "Clear Skies" initiative.

It seems that the only time anyone, especially public officials, will admit to a mistake is when it's expedient to do so because there's no other recourse. This tendency to espouse honesty but practice dishonesty permeates life in America. Becoming inured to dishonesty, accepting it as normal, we increasingly accept the notion that the only reason not to do something is the possibility of getting caught.

As we become more and more set against each other, our trust and mutual reliance increasingly erodes. We feel we cannot count on anyone else but ourselves, and this creates profound feelings of alienation and insecurity. How can we stop lying? By somehow replacing our society's compulsive obsession with acquiring money and possessions -- the pursuit of material success -- with a newfound commitment to community and connectedness.

Architecture Types

IT Architecture is comprised of three different types of architecture:

1. Enterprise Architecture: global


2. Cross-Domain Architectures: cross-functional or cross-organizational


3. Software Architecture: project-centric

These are represented by the three yellow books horizontally placed on the left side of the top shelf.

• Enterprise Architecture (global) -- consists of:
  • Business Architecture
    • processes
    • workflows
  • Data Architecture
    • entities or "things"
    • relationships
    • metadata
  • Application Architecture
    • partitioning
    • integration
  • Technology Architecture
    • infrastructure -- foundation
    • applications -- layered on top of infrastructure
      • built -- developed
      • bought -- purchased
    • business intelligence -- layered on top of applications


• Cross-Domain Architectures
  • cross-functional or cross-organizational
  • domain specific -- e.g.,
    • security architecture
    • network architecture
    • "customer" architecture


• Software Architecture
  • project-centric
  • application specific -- e.g.,
    • accounts payable
    • order entry
    • sales management

Angels and Demons -- Science versus Religion

Dan Brown, author of the unputdownable novel The Da Vinci Code, is an exhilaratingly brilliant writer. That book's prequel, Angels and Demons, included a riveting monologue that I found absolutely fascinating. I'd like to share an edited excerpt with you.

In this fictional story, the Vatican's carmerlengo, the head of the Sacred College of Cardinals, supposedly presented the following to a worldwide television audience:

Medicine, electronic communications, space travel, genetic manipulation...these are the miracles about which we now tell our children. These are the miracles we herald as proof that science will bring us the answers. The ancient stories of immaculate conceptions, burning bushes, and parting seas are no longer relevant. God has become obsolete. Science how won the battle.

Science may have alleviated the miseries of disease and drudgery and provided an array of gadgetry for our entertainment and convenience, but it has left us in a world without wonder. Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed. Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident. Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. We are bombarded with violence, division, fracture, and betrayal. Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history? Does science hold anything sacred? Science looks for answers by probing our unborn fetuses. Science even presumes to rearrange our own DNA. It shatters God's world into smaller and smaller pieces in quest of meaning...and all it finds is more questions.

The ancient war between science and religion is over. Science has won. But it didn't win fairly. It has not won by providing answers. It has won by so radically reorienting our society that the truths we once saw as signposts now seem inapplicable. Religion cannot keep up. Scientific growth is exponential. It feeds on itself like a virus. Every new breakthrough opens doors for new breakthroughs. Mankind took thousands of years to progress from the wheel to the car. Yet only decades from the car into space. Now we measure scientific progress in weeks. We are spinning out of control. The rift between us grows deeper and deeper, and as religion is left behind, people find themselves in a spiritual void. We cry out for meaning. And believe me, we do cry out. We see UFO's, engage in channeling, spirit contact, out-of-body experiences, mindquests -- all these eccentric ideas have a scientific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational. They are the desperate cry of the modern soul, lonely and tormented, crippled by its own enlightenment and its inability to accept meaning in anything removed from technology.

Science, you say, will save us. Science, I say, has destroyed us. Since the days of Galileo, the church has tried to slow the relentless march of science, sometimes with misguided means, but always with benevolent intention. Even so, the temptations are too great for man to resist. I warn you, look around yourselves. The promises of science have not been kept. Promises of efficiency and simplicity have bred nothing but pollution and chaos. We are a fractured and frantic species...moving down a path of destruction.

Who is this God science? Who is the God who offers his people power but no moral framework to tell you how to use that power? What kind of God gives a child fire but does not warn the child of its dangers? The language of science comes with no signposts about good and bad. Science textbooks tell us how to create a nuclear reaction, and yet they contain no chapter asking us if it is a good or bad idea.

To science, I say this. The church is tired. We are exhausted from trying to be your signposts. Our resources are drying up from our campaign to be the voice of balance as you plow blindly on in your quest for smaller chips and larger profits. We ask not why you will not govern yourselves, but how can you? Your world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur. So you move on. You proliferate weapons of mass destruction, but it is the Pope who travels the world beseeching leaders to use restraint. You clone living creatures, but it is the church reminding us to consider the moral implications of our actions. You encourage people to interact on phones, video screens, and computers, but it is the church who opens its doors and reminds us to commune in person as we were meant to do. You even murder unborn babies in the name of research that saves lives. Again, it is the church who points out the fallacy of this reasoning.

And all the while, you proclaim the church is ignorant. But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power? This church is reaching out to you. Reaching out to everyone. And yet the more we reach, the more you push us away. Show me proof there is a God, you say. I say use your telescopes to look to the heavens, and tell me how there could not be a God! You ask what does God look like. I say, where did that question come from? The answers are one and the same. Do you not see God in your science? How can you miss Him! You proclaim that even the slightest change in the force of gravity or the weight of an atom would have rendered our universe a lifeless mist rather that our magnificent sea of heavenly bodies, and yet you fail to see God's hand in this? Is it really so much easier to believe that we simply chose the right card from a deck of billions? Have we become so spiritually bankrupt that we would rather believe in mathematical impossibility than in a power greater than us?

Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this. When we as a species abandon our trust in the power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faith...all faiths...are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable... With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. If the outside world could see this church as I do...looking beyond the ritual of these walls...they would see a modern miracle...a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.

Are we obsolete? Are these men dinosaurs? Am I? Does the world really need a voice for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the unborn child? Do we really need souls like these who, though imperfect, spend their lives imploring each of us to read the signposts of morality and not lose our way?

We are perched on a precipice. None of us can afford to be apathetic. Whether you see this evil as Satan, corruption, or immorality...the dark force is alive and growing every day. Do not ignore it. The force, though mighty, is not invincible. Goodness can prevail. Listen to your hearts. Listen to God. Together we can step back from this abyss.

Thank you, Dan Brown, for your thought-provoking writings.

Refactoring the Architecture 'Resources' Repository

Back in April 2005, IASA, the International Association of Software Architects, formed a working group focused on software architectural "Foundations and Taxonomy" with the specific goal of charting the "largely uncharted" profession of IT architecture.

The IASA F&T Workgroup began its work by identifying valuable architectural resources that already exist from other organizations. Then, after locating, qualifying, sorting, coordinating, and explaining available information relevant to IT architects, the Workgroup's mission was to fill-in missing "holes" in the existing resources with new complementary contributions. The ultimate deliverable will provide the necessary foundation to achieve IASA's vision and meet the needs of the IASA membership.

As an IASA Fellow and member of the IASA F&T Workgroup team, I volunteered to build the Architecture 'Resources' Repository. In tackling this project, I adopted a strategy similar to the approach I took when I developed ITscout, a free web site that organizes and describes IT products. While products certainly play an important role in the field of architecture, there are many other vital and essential topics besides tools that need to be understood such as frameworks and patterns.

Please note that this implementation of the Architecture 'Resources' Repository IS NOT THE IASA TAXONOMY. The IASA Taxonomy being created by the F&T Workgroup is still a work-in-progress, a beta version of which will be introduced in London this coming April, 2006.

The Architecture 'Resources' Repository that I created can be accessed using the following login information:

URL:	http://www.ITscout.org/ITguide
Username:	architecture
Password:	itguide

The visual "Flashmap" model used for organizing architecture information is a simple 2-shelf "bookcase" containing several sets of different colored books. After several months of experience with the original prototype, I decided to make some minor changes to the Flashmap graphic by refactoring the classification hierarchy. The new category tree is presented below. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Enterprise Architecture
Cross-Domain Architectures
Software Architecture

Frameworks
Patterns
Methodologies
Governance
Other Concepts

Industry Standards
Implementations
Products
Consulting Firms

Blogs
Web Sites
Articles
Books
Magazines
Events
Other Resources

The Victory of Hamas

Hamas has won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, the legislative branch of the Palestinian Authority. The mere fact that a truly fair election took place within the Arab World is itself a victory for democracy. On the other hand, the Nazis too came to power in Germany in 1932 via the ballot box. The real question now is how is the world going to respond to an Islamic extremist and terrorist body that seeks Israel's destruction and the establishment of a radical Islamist state for the Palestinians.

"We do not recognize the Israeli enemy, nor his right to be our neighbor, nor to stay (on the land), nor his ownership of any inch of land. . . . We are interested in restoring our full rights to return all the people of Palestine to the land of Palestine. Our principles are clear: Palestine is a land of Waqf (Islamic trust), which can not be given up."

Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas leader
January 17, 2006, Newsday

The world should make clear to the Palestinian people that a fanatic regime waging jihad and extending theocracy is unacceptable. Frankly, however, I seriously doubt we'll see such a response from the European, Russian, or U.N. members of the Middle East Road Map peace process.

Lord Acton's Famous Quote

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) issued epic warnings that political power is the most serious threat to liberty. His most famous observation describes how morality lessens as power increases.

Republicans today control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. They have absolute power, and it has corrupted their Party and led to a culture of corruption (think Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, David Safavian, Scooter Libby) and contempt for the law (think Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). Not only has President George W. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor international telephone calls and Internet communications of Americans without obtaining warrants, but now Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales claims the president doesn't even need Congress to extend the USA Patriot Act in order to keep using the law's investigative powers against terror suspects.

No one is arguing in favor of terrorists. But President Bush is not King George. The Executive Branch must obey the laws that Congress writes.

SOA and ANSI/SPARC 3-SchemaApplying Lessons from the Past

Some 30 years ago, back in 1975, the Database Management community experienced a great epiphany. It was called the ANSI/SPARC three-schema architecture referring to the Standards Planning and Requirements Committee (SPARC) of the American National Standards Institute Information Processing Systems (ANSI/X3) Committee.

The ANSI/SPARC architecture defined three separate schemas, or views, for describing data in a database:

• External Schema or Application View
• Conceptual Schema or Logical View
• Internal Schema or Physical View

The Conceptual Schema describes data definitions unambiguously, independent of any particular data structure or data representation. Its intent is to represent an enterprise model of data and to support mappings from external to internal layers.

The External Schema describes the data corresponding to part of the conceptual schema as seen by one or more users or programs, as cast in a particular data model and as represented in a given programming language. Relational Views are a classic example of external schemas.

The Internal Schema describes how data is physically represented and structured on the storage media. In terms of data independence, the physical view completely separates a logical model from its underlying implementation.

Obviously, the ANSI/SPARC 3-Schema Data Model is now old hat. On the other hand, perhaps its fundamental principles ought to be applied to today's world of SOA services. One of the chief problems with services is imposing order around their definition and classification. After all, virtually anything with an API (Application Programming Interface) can be described as a service. That's pretty broad.

Imagine an enterprise or conceptual model of services. These would represent the core set of capabilities being offered and supported. The external view would then correspond to the usage of a service by an application or another service. The internal view would map to an underlying implementation of the service. While it's true that data and services are most definitely not the same, I believe both share the same basic need for a coherent way of organizing, classifying, and categorizing. The three schema approach has worked phenomenally well for data. I personally think it's worth considering for services too. As stand-up comedian Dennis Miller used to always say on his Saturday Night Live "Weekend Update" rants, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."

I'm Baaaaaaack!!!!!

After a two month hiatus, I'm back once again publishing the ITscout Blog. Please forgive my absence. I just needed a break. Writing the blog was becoming an obsession. Everyday I compulsively checked the statistics reported by Site Meter, a counter that keeps track of the number of visitors to the ITscout Blog. I was driving myself crazy whenever the number wasn't growing. Most surprisingly, at least to me, was that readership increased during my absence. All I can imagine is that the work I was doing for IASA, creating the Architecture Resources Repository, stimulated new interest in the ITscout Blog.

Didn't everyone appreciate that I was spewing forth pearls of wisdom? Why weren't people beating a path to the ITscout Blog door? After all, who could possibly disagree with my metaphorical description of architecture as three rope-like bridges where each rope was actually three intertwined strands corresponding to 1) modeling, 2) documenting, and 3) communicating?

The bridge analogy is used to explain how architecture literally connects between business and technology by helping business people better understand technology while helping technology people better understand business. The reason why there are three bridges is to differentiate among 1) enterprise architecture, 2) software architecture, and 3) cross-domain subsets like security architecture.

Modeling is an essential element of architecture. There are many products that help architects create graphical models, such as Microsoft's Visio (Microsoft acquired Visio), Telelogic's System Architect (Telelogic acquired Popkin Software), and Troux's Metis (Troux acquired Computas). Most modeling tools support UML, the Unified Modeling Language.

Documenting refers to the process of populating models with content. Whereas models provide the schema or framework for describing architecture, the devil is in the details. That's where the process of documentation comes in. It involves collecting facts and properties and then organizing that information according to underlying models. For example, component-based architecture products like LogicLibrary's Logidex and Flashline's Registry can help map and discover software development assets. Similarly, various software and hardware asset management tools available from many different vendors can be used for performing software and hardware inventories, respectively. This information is invaluable for managing software licenses as well as financial accounting depreciation schedules.

Communicating is the final member of the architectural triplet. Designing models and capturing documentation is virtually worthless unless the information can be easily and readily accessed. My company, Flashmap Systems, specializes in organizing, visualizing, and communicating information targeted to both IT and business people. Flashmap's products are designed to deliver a simplicity and elegance that contribute to a good user experience. As Apple's iPod has clearly demonstrated, success in technology has less to do with features, and more to do with ease of use. Simplicity is the key to effective communication. The last thing any communication tool should do is confuse people. More features aren't better. Indeed, feature overload is the quickest path to confusion. Simplicity means getting something done in a minimal number of simple steps. If a communication product is complex, intimidating, or confusing, its chances for success are scant. Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users because, frankly, nobody has time to learn new features. The best communication tool is one that people don't even notice. Style and elegance are ultimately what determines the user experience.

3 x 3 Architecture Tools

3 sets of architectural tasks:

• Modeling
• Documentation
• Communication

3 classes of architectural products:

• Enterprise Architecture
• Domain-specific Architecture
• Software Architecture

	Enterprise Architecture (global)	Domain-specific Architecture (cross-functional)	Software Architecture (project-centric)
Modeling
Documentation
Communication

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Hardware Going Full Circle

IBM System 360

to

Microsoft Xbox 360

Q: Why does a circle have 360 degrees? A: Ancient peoples who lived in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) invented writing, and invented a 360-degree circle. Their calendar divided the year into 12 months of 30 days each, that is, 360 days.

My career in computing began in 1965, writing and executing tiny little BASIC programs, using a 110-baud Teletype with an UPPERCASE only keyboard, paper roll output, a side attachment for reading and punching papertapes, connected via a very clunky telephone modem to a GE mainframe computer running at MIT.

That mid Sixties timeframe also coincided with the introduction of Big Blue's big bang System 360's, named for their ability to serve all 360 degrees of computing requirements using a single hardware architecture.

Code written to run on one System 360 could automatically execute on any System 360. No re-compiling. No re-linking. Executable images were completely portable across a very scalable hardware line.

Hardware architecture circa mid-1960's was a VERY BIG DEAL. Fifteen years later, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), in its heyday, even included the 'A' from 'Architecture' as the second letter in its 'VAX' hardware name.

Nowadays we take hardware architecture more or less for granted. But you have to admit, it was a pretty huge breakthrough back when Gene Amdahl designed a set of machine instructions that separated the interface to the hardware from the underlying technology used to create the hardware. This allowed semiconductor technologies to advance along several fronts simultaneously while preserving customers' existing investments in software.

Every Blogger Needs a Knowledgebase (or two)

A blog is an ongoing, continuously running monologue occasionally interrupted by brief comments from readers.

Writing a blog is like knitting a yarn, telling a story, spinning a tale, re-telling somebody else's story, responding to some event, reacting to someone else's opinion, promoting a particular point of view, and so on and so forth. It meanders like a flowing stream, circuitously winding every which way. Topics can and do range all over the map. Continuity from one posting to the next is never all too important.

A knowledgebase, on the other hand, is like a dynamic, structured, virtual book containing organized collections of information that are constantly undergoing refinements, revisions, and extensions as new information is synthesized and old information occasionally refactored.

A mountain top is a more apt metaphor for a knowledgebase. The creator is a "subject matter expert" who has scaled to the summit in search of understanding and comprehension of the knowledgebase's underlying model.

The ability to effectively present information to others is, itself, a craft, much like authoring a book is a craft.

A knowledgebase starts with a model or a set of models.

• Models are defined in terms of structure and context.
• Information is organized and described in terms of abstractions.
• Information is structured and presented based on hierarchically navigable category trees.
• Relationships can be linked between models.

A knowledgebase is like a list of "best of links" to resources, including category descriptions, and lists of related objects.

A knowledgebase has as its #1 job the transfer of knowledge. There are producers and consumers. Producers write. Consumers read.

Category descriptions are often like PowerPoint presentations. Category trees can be organized in all kinds of ways, with hierarchical representations imposing context.

Categories can include lists that can track all kinds of objects (i.e., abstractions) including: products & vendors, services, people, projects, ...

Items on lists can be visually highlighted using legend icons as context cues.

My Blog and Knowledgebases

I write the ITscout Blog. In addition, I am responsible for two knowledgebases:

1. IASA 'Resources' Repository


2. ITscout

Knowledgebases are fundamentally quite different than blogs. Structure, organization, and order are all of paramount importance. Models and context are king -- they rule.

The IASA 'Resources' Repository is accessed using the following login information:

URL	http://www.ITscout.org/ITguide/
Username	architecture
Password	itguide

This knowledgebase includes a diverse collection of resources related to Architecture.

ITscout is a knowledgebase that describes and organizes the universe of IT products based on a 3-layer, 4-model Technology Architecture framework.



The bottom layer, IT Infrastructure, provides the base platform for computing and communication -- two sides of the same coin.

See IT Infrastructure

The middle layer is Applications which can be built or bought.

See Application Development
See COTS Applications

Applications are layered on top of IT Infrastructure.

The top layer, Data, enables business intelligence.

See Business Intelligence

Data is layered on top of Applications.

Improvements to knowledgebases is a function of quality and quantity of feedback. Knowledgebases are not wikis which work fine in situations where information can be organized alphabetically, like the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Knowledgebases do not place control of structure, organization, and presentation into the hands of the public. That's not to say that knowledgebases can't include editable content like a wiki.

Knowledgebase models are like forests of category trees with graphical representations that can transfer knowledge almost through visual osmosis. The structure and organization of knowledgebase models are much more complex than simple alphabetical orderings. Classification hierarchies are structured using multi-level category trees. In the end, a good knowledgebase is like a good reference book, and even better, it's constantly kept current and up-to-date, forever growing and evolving.

Up, up and away!

It's not easy to understand UP,
a two-letter word, that has
many meanings.

UP means toward the sky or
at the top of the list.

When we awaken in the
morning, we wake UP.

At a meeting, a topic
comes UP?

Why do we speak UP?

Why are officers UP
for election?

Why is it UP to the
secretary to write UP
a report?

We call UP our friends.

We brighten UP a room.

We polish UP the silver.

We warm UP the leftovers and
clean UP the kitchen.

We lock UP the house.

Some guys fix UP old cars.

At other times the little word has real
special meaning.

People stir UP trouble,
line UP for tickets,
work UP an appetite, and
think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but
to be dressed UP is special.

UP is confusing:

A drain must be opened UP
because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning
but we close it UP at night.

Mixed UP about UP?

If you are UP to it,
you might try building UP a list
of the many ways UP is used.
It will take UP a lot of your time,
but if you don't give UP,
you may wind UP with a lot more
definitions of UP.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.
When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes
things UP.

When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but let's wrap it UP.
My time is UP, so..........Time to shut UP!

Blogs vs. Knowledgebases

Blogs

Blogs are like a stream of consciousness. The choice of topic for any given day's posting can be affected by any number of different factors. Sometimes a topic reflects reactions to some external world or business event. Other times topics deal with specific issues or particular themes.

When I'm actually going through the process of writing a blog, I repeatedly switch back and forth between a text-based HTML editor window and a Preview window. After multiple iterations, I publish. After a post has been published, I check how well it's been physically rendered by the blogging software. Occasionally I'll go through another round or two of iterations before the final last publishing.

Sometimes, only on rare occasions, when I'm re-reading some old posting, I'll spot some spelling error, or poorly expressed language. I then go back and modify the content and republish the posting. Otherwise, I almost never go back and re-edit or re-write past postings. BTW, that's exactly the opposite of my knowledgebase behavior where I'm constantly revising content by adding, editing, removing, and refactoring.

Some bloggers include on their blog site categories. I don't know how popular this navigational feature is with people who read blogs. I'd guess bloggers spend considerably more time assigning "categories" and/or "keywords" than readers ever spend navigating via "categories" and/or "keywords".

Another group of bloggers like to assign "tags" for navigating the web using social bookmarks. I have no firsthand knowledge on the effectiveness of expanded web navigational aids like these.

Knowledgebases

Knowledgebases are built on models that hierarchically organize content in terms of context. While blogs reflect ongoing diary-like writings to a journal, knowledgebases are more like an always on PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint presentations evolve over time, continually improving, synthesizing new ideas, adapting based on past experiences.

The underlying recursive structure of knowledgebase models is a category tree. Categories can contain sub-categories that can contain sub-categories that can contain sub-categories, and so on, and so forth.

Category trees expand and contract over time. Sometimes major pruning is required, especially when complexity can be transformed into simplicity. Category descriptions are regularly revised and reviewed, and vice versa.

Knowledgebases are designed to guide, teach, and facilitate knowledge transfer. Knowledgebases help leverage intangible assets by sharing know-how. Knowledgebases can help show how all the pieces fit together. Knowledgebases can help show how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Knowledgebases provide simple ways of organizing and sharing information. Occasional untrained visitors can view and explore navigable content hased on multi-dimensional context.

Conclusion

Blogs are like rivers flowing endlessly forward. Knowledgebases are like mountains with ever rising peaks required to attain and sustain mastery through comprehension and understanding. Sometimes new mountains arise while old ones fall. Meanwhile technology marches forever onward.

Communication, collaboration, context, content

In the world of architecture, there are "producers of information" and "consumers of information."

• "Producers" capture and organize knowledge
• "Consumers" discover and use knowledge

Communication of knowledge is inherently difficult, mediated by always-contextual codes, norms, culture, and perceptions. Translating knowledge from one context to another, like translating any language involves not just basic grammar and syntax rules, but also issues of meaning and intent that are contextual and subjective.

I find I need two (2) separate communication channels for conveying content and context:

1. blog
2. knowledgebase

Blogs are temporally-driven. Frequent postings are necessary because, literally, you're writing a journal. Blogs are read starting with the most recent entry first and then reading backwards in reverse chronological order. Blogs need to be short and pithy with a sense of candor, urgency, controversy, and timeliness.

Knowledgebases require intelligently-structured ways of organizing information based on models. Knowledgebase models ought to be simple, intuitive, highly-visual, and easily-navigable.

Context determines how content is interpreted. Common hierarchical classifications facilitate communication and collaboration.

Most effective are visual models that combine context, hierarchical category trees, and simple navigation. Let's look at an example.

I'm a member of an IASA (International Association of software Architects) working group that's attempting to define a taxonomy for describing architecture.

To view the IASA Architecture 'Resources' Repository, use the following access information:

URL: http://www.ITscout.org/ITguide/
Username: architecture
Password: itguide

Start by moving your mouse pointer over the outer rim of the bookcase graphic and then clicking when 'Architecture' is highlighted.

Next, click on the yellow book at the bottom left of the top shelf, the one labeled "Frameworks". Also, click and explore the books labeled "Archetypes" and "Patterns".

Blogs are journals. Knowledgebases are structured. Both are valuable in transferring knowledge.

One similarity between blogs and knowledgebases is how, in both cases, information is published onto a web page. The main difference is that knowledgebase web pages get continually rewritten and refined in an evolutionary fashion as new knowledge is amassed and organized.

Architecture is ...

Architecture is ... like a bridge that connects between business and technology.



Its purpose is twofold:

1. Helps business people better understand technology


2. Helps technology people better understand business

Architecture is ... really more like three different bridges since there are actually three different types of architecture:

1. enterprise architecture (global)
   
   
2. domain-specific architecture (cross-functional, cross-organizational)
   
   
3. software architecture (project-centric)
   

Architecture is ... like a braided rope bridge consisting of three intertwined strands that correspond to:

1. modeling


2. documentation


3. communication

Architecture is like a Bridge

Architecture is like a bridge that connects between business and technology.

Business connects to one side of the bridge The other side of the bridge connects to IT

Its purpose is twofold:

• Helps business people better understand technology


• Helps technology people better understand business

Architecture is a lot like teaching technologists the same lessons Peter Drucker, the "father" of modern management, taught to business executives. His message was very simple: "Look at people, not at machines or buildings."

Technologists need to learn that there's more to organizing information besides "command and control" methods.

A technologist's principle task ought to be:

• making people capable of joint performance
• making an organization's strengths more effective
• making an organization's weaknesses irrelevant

Business people literally need to learn how to think about and manage technology in precisely the same way that they currently know how to think about and manage:

• money
• people
• property

The business side of architecture is based on the logic of rational organization and production. Rationalization works by applying scientific management to the creation of defined, quantifiable, repeatable production and organizational processes. Almost every facet of modern industry takes some quantifiable process, maximizes it for efficiency based on a distinct division of labor, with defined inputs and outputs, and then manages it based on a rules-bound bureaucratic structure.

The technology side of architecture is not quite the same. That's not to say that inside IT there haven't been efforts to rationalize, such as: IT resource planning (sometimes referred to as ERP for IT); or IT service management. The result of rationalization is a process supposedly capable of being engineered.

Multiple craft industries over the past two centuries -- all of which were once considered impossible to manufacture or mass-produce -- have yielded to the resulting benefits of efficiency and quality that rationalization achieves. Yet, the creation of software has still somehow managed to elude an engineered approach to its production, even after 30 years of tremendous effort. In attempting to engineer the process, software developers cannot agree on the details of a defined, quantifiable, repeatable process. Instead, highly skilled professionals still craft most of the world's software.

Why haven't basic industrial patterns -- software industrialization, software manufacturing, software engineering, and software assembly lines -- become dominant? By the time the automotive industry had reached its 30th anniversary, around 1930, the fundamental issues of production, as exemplified by Ford's assembly line; product, as exemplified by standardized design; and industry, as exemplified by the few dominant national players like Ford and GM, had all been clearly established.

Is software an act of engineering or communication?

If, indeed, software is a rational endeavor, then it should be possible to improve quality by providing better and more resources. "Better and more resources" means better management, better tools, more disciplined production, and more programmers.

If, on the other hand, software is a craft, then improving quality involves the exact opposite: focusing on less hierarchy, better knowledge, more-skilled programmers, and greater development flexibility.

The essential limit of software development is communication. Communication is inherently difficult, mediated by always-contextual codes, norms, culture, and perceptions. Translating knowledge from one context to another, like translating any language involves not just basic grammar and syntax rules, but also issues of meaning and intent that are contextual and subjective.

Software is the execution of knowledge. Much of knowledge is tacit, undefined, uncodified, and developed over time, often without being explicit even to the individuals participating in the process. More importantly, such knowledge and practices are dynamic, constantly evolving and transforming.

Modeling the execution of knowledge has proven to be exceedingly difficult -- often incomplete, impractical, or unsatisfactory. The less broadly accepted and understood the knowledge within a domain, the more difficult the task becomes of translating that knowledge. The issues are inevitably about context and communication.

Architecture is really more like 3 bridges

Architecture is really more like 3 bridges:



There are 3 different types of architecture:

1. enterprise architecture (global) -- consists of:
   • business architecture
     • processes
     • workflows
   • data architecture
     • entities or "things"
     • relationships
     • metadata
   • application architecture
     • partitioning
     • integration
   • technology architecture
     • infrastructure -- foundation
     • applications -- layered on top of infrastructure
       • built -- developed
       • bought -- purchased
     • business intelligence -- layered on top of applications


2. Domain-specific Architecture
   • cross-functional or cross-organizational
   • domain specific -- e.g.,
     • security architecture
     • network architecture
     • "customer" architecture


3. Software Architecture
   • project-centric
   • application specific -- e.g.,
     • accounts payable
     • order entry
     • sales management

Architecture bridges are like braided ropes

Architecture bridges  are like braided ropes consisting of three (3) intertwined strands that correspond to:

1. modeling


2. documentation


3. communication

Modeling

Modeling reflects the essence of architecture. Models are abstractions used to leverage, aid, and facilitate the transfer of knowledge and experience among different groups of people.

Many books have been written and courses presented that describe ways of designing models.

UML, the Unified Modeling Language, represents the most common set of models for specifying application structure, behavior, architecture, business process, and data structure. Many modeling tools support UML, including: IBM's Rational, Microsoft's Visio, Telelogic's System Architect, as well as numerous other products.

The goal is to extend UML into OMG's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) that unifies every step of development and integration from business modeling, through architectural and application modeling, to development, deployment, maintenance, and evolution. In addition, service oriented is driving demand for its own new breed of modeling products.

Patterns represent ways of modeling best practices so that they can be effectively imitated by others. Modeling is also required to achieve re-use and establish standards.

Documentation

Documentation is about capturing facts and properties -- and then organizing that information based on models.

Models are like a skeleton Everything except the bones are Documentation

The world famous Harvard Business School professors Richard Nolan and Warren MacFarlane suggest that intangible assets are worth approximately ten times (10 x ) the value of physical assets.

Various Asset Management products can track physical assets. Many include spiders that can automatically crawl across a network's resources in order to discover and inventory what already exists.

Capturing, collecting, and organizing the intangibles -- worth more than ten times (10 x ) the tangibles -- involves tracking:

• product know-how and technical knowledge
• employee training and experience
• best practices
• re-use

Communication

Communication is the oft neglected third thread of the architectural rope. Frequently, the only people who access or read architecture information are the authors themselves.

Communication means helping occasional visitors intuitively navigate, explore, and find information. Capturing, collecting, and organizing -- the Documentation step -- is where information gets fed in. This step, Communication, is where information gets accessed by casual untrained users reading and learning about tangible as well as intangible assets.

UML requires training. UML is complex. UML can be highly detailed. A simpler level of abstraction is needed that's easier to understand by someone without any formal training.

Communication and collaboration are converging with computing. Context is critical for converying content. My company, Flashmap Systems, competes in this market niche -- providing products like ITatlas and ITguide that help architects communicate with their users. Information about architecture needs to be shared and understood by widely diverse audiences.

In addition, Flashmap Systems has contributed to effective communication through ITscout's highly visual, 3-layer/4-model technololgy portfolio framework:

Technology Architecture

• infrastructure -- foundation
  • clientware
  • middleware
  • serverware
  • manageware
  • platforms
• applications -- layered on top of infrastructure
  • built -- developed
    • platforms
    • languages
    • reusables
    • lifecycle
  • bought -- purchased
    • value chains
    • back-office to front-office
    • industry-specific verticals
• business intelligence -- layered on top of applications
  • data
  • tools
  • analytics

Rail Roads versus Car Roads

Rail roads and car roads both represent infrastructure. But while the former are mostly privately owned, the latter are mainly public. Anyone with a car or bicycle can freely drive on public roads, the vast majority of which are paved.

Trains shaped America's 19th century economy. Cars did the same for the 20th century. As we embark on the 21st century, a challenging question is, should broadband information highways be private or public?

Currently, broadband access to the Internet is delivered for a monthly fee either by cable television providers or by public telephone carriers with DSL networks. But, wireless networks might potentially change the present market dynamics entirely.

On November 11, 2005, the Mercury News reported that Google wants to use the city of Mountain View, CA, home of its corporate headquarters, as a test ground to show that giving people wireless Internet connections on a large scale is a good idea socially and financially. They believe that "free (or very cheap) Internet access is a key to bridging the digital divide."

Imagine how much different our world would be if the road network we drive our cars on were privately owned and operated instead of being paid for by our taxes.

Telephones have never been public, except in the form of pay phones. But, historically, there was always a huge difference between roadways and telephone networks based on scarcity versus abundance.

Up until fairly recently, network bandwidth has been scarce. That resource had to be carefully managed. On the other hand, most roads most of the time have little if any traffic. (Note: Traffic jams, where road bandwidth is scarce, is the exception.)

By installing a network of WiFi transmitters atop a city's street-light poles, there'd be an abundance of bandwidth for wireless broadband connections to the Internet. As technology marches forward, the cost for such networks in the future is expected to continue to plummet while the abundance of bandwidth should continue to climb.

Free public roadways totally transformed our society. Imagine how free public Internet highways might someday completely reshape our children's world. This is an important debate. I'm grateful to Google for helping to get it started.

"Simple and Open" Always Wins

Google (GOOG) currently has a Price to Earnings ratio (P/E) of 86.30. Micrsoft's (MSFT) P/E is 23.00. Why does Wall Street value Google almost four times more than Microsoft? I think the answer is because Google is seen as innovative and disruptive.  Google isn't building a Yahoo!-like portal. Google isn't building a Microsoft Office-like suite. Google doesn't imitate.

Personally, I think it's terrific how Microsoft embraced XML and Web Services. I'm impressed by the initial reviews of Windows Live and Office Live. But, if Microsoft really wants to narrow the P/E gap between themselves and Google, then they need to get disruptive. My advice: wholeheartedly embrace a strategy based on simple and open. Avoid complex and proprietary.

Obviously, such a shift is risky. It will require substantial changes to Microsoft's business model. But, they're still strong and rich. Now is when they should be willing to gamble intelligently.

We've seen once great companies like Digital Equipment crash and burn. It looks like GM may be soon be facing bankruptcy. That's already happened at United and Delta. I have little doubt but that IBM teetered on the brink of disaster and only was saved by Gerstener's miraculous ability to teach that elephant to dance.

Microsoft's P/E ought to be above 80. The information revolution is still in its infancy. Microsft took a huge risk when it gambled on Windows. It did so again with Internet Explorer. Now is the time for Microsoft to bet the ranch on simple and open. Get disruptive. Don't imitate. Look at what you tried to do with Passport, and then do the exact opposite.

Intangible Assets = 10 times Physical Assets

The Enterprise Metadata blog includes the following quote from a Harvard Business Review article entitled Information Technology and the Board of Directors, written by Richard Nolan (an emeritus professor of business at Harvard Business School and a professor of management and organization at the University of Washington Business School in Seattle) and Warren McFarlan (a Baker Foundation Professor and the Albert H. Gordon Professor of Business Administration emeritus at Harvard Business School):

The board needs to understand the overall architecture of its company’s IT applications, systems, components, and asset management strategy. The first step is to find out what kinds of hardware, software, and information the company owns so as to determine whether it’s getting adequate return on its IT investments. Physical assets are fairly easy to inventory while intangible assets are not.

The authors estimate that intangible assets (like product know-how, reuse, employee training & experience, etc.) are worth ten times the value of physical assets, Although the latter are far easier to measure using Asset Management products to track physical assets, the real value resides in Technology Architecture which is where the intangible assets get captured and communicated.

wikiCalc

Dan Bricklin -- the original spreadsheet inventor who along with his then partner Bob Frankston created VisiCalc for Apple II's way back in the late 1970s -- has unveiled wikiCalc, a web page authoring tool that works like a cross between a wiki and a spreadsheet.

wikiCalc is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data that has more than just unformatted text, such as schedules, lists, or tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit capability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.

AJAX: A White Tornado Stronger Than Dirt

Don Dodge believes that Microsoft reinvents itself every 5 years in an effort to adapt to an ever changing software world -- and that with Windows Live and Office Live, Microsoft has come aLIVE again, coinciding perfectly with "The Coming Web Services Tsunami". Perhaps, but Web Services is proving to be significantly more challenging than Web Browser technology was a decade ago -- the last time Bill Gates fired off a fatwa-like edict. (Don, how did Microsoft reinvent itself in the intervening period 5 years ago?)

Web Services has already been around for awhile. Thus far, Web Services have primarily been developed using SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. For the most part, these XML-based technologies have provided a text-based alternative to binary-based object request brokers such as CORBA and DCOM. The main advantage, of course, has been XML's ability to flow freely through port 80 -- the same port used by HTTP to transmit HTML.

Web Services have mostly been designed around traditional request-reply, synchronous, client/server-like interprocess communication. Once a client makes a request, it waits until the server responds. Because all data transferred between clients and servers must be converted back and forth between binary and text on both sides of the connection, there are inherently longer delays between interactions than older CORBA or DCOM implementations. However, the performance hit is well worth the cost because of the benefit of being able to ride on top of the ubiquitous Web-based HTTP Internet network.

In addition to being slow, request-reply interactions also tend to be tightly-coupled. The huge breakthrough needed before Web Services will truly take off depends on a significant shift toward more loosely-coupled processing. That's where AJAX becomes important.

AJAX officially stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Of course for me, a baby boomer who grew up watching TV commercials back in the Sixties, AJAX will always be a "white tornado" for cleaning my kitchen floor, or a "white knight on a horse" who would point his lance at people in the park and their clothes would turn magically clean because AJAX was "stronger than dirt."

The real magic underlying 21st-century AJAX is that it forces de-coupling, and de-coupling is what will enable the flexibility and scalability that Web Services pundits have promised but thus far failed to deliver.

A decade ago, Bill Gates' Internet Tidal Wave memo succeeded in turning Microsoft around on a dime. The company instantly changed its strategic client/server approach away from proprietary Windows-based fat-clients and replaced it with a browser-based technological solution.

Roll forward to 2005. Longhorn, aka Vista, was supposed to have already been finished. The huge opportunity Microsoft had hoped to leverage hinged on the industry rapidly shifting to rich client user interfaces. But schedule delay after schedule delay has resulted in a rapid closing of the window of opportunity. Just as "fat clients" lost out to standards-based open Web browser user interfaces, it appears that "rich clients" may lose out to standards-based open AJAX-enabled Web browser user interfaces.

Let's give Microsoft credit for recognizing the changing marketplace. It's great that they're going to rally behind de-coupled AJAX development so that Web Services can finally begin to deliver on it's true promise. By itself, however, AJAX, is still not sufficient. The essential breakthrough also requires support for development by exception. Object-oriented's composites and inheritance provide a key portion of the necessary solution. Still needed is an equivalent capability on the process/workflow side of software development.

Politics and Standards

In the past, there have been occasions when I've expressed great pride in my New England heritage (e.g., see The Spirit of New England or A Culture of Standards). But, I'm embarrassed by an amendment to a piece of important Massachusetts legislation passed out of the Senate Ways & Means committee that seems intended purely to entangle with politics a decision by the state's CIO to standardize on OASIS' Open Document Format (ODF) for all Commonwealth of Massachusetts public documents stored after January 1, 2007.

ZDNet's David Berlind reported in Politics and the perversion of standards a word for word transcription of a political hearing that presents a practically made-for-TV story that is perhaps better than any industry drama.

David Berlind does a superlative job of differentiating the nuanced boundaries between standards, software, and licenses, as depicted by the following edited excerpt:

The HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP, the protocol of the Web) is the open standard that's supported by both Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and the Apache Software Foundation's Apache Web Server. One -- Apache -- is available under an open source license, the other -- Microsoft's IIS -- is not. Where Massachusetts needs Web servers, the state is free to pick either (or from a bunch of others) and know that, because of how both support the same open Web standard (HTTP) -- either can be used to publish a Web site that anyone in the world can access.

That's exactly how the ODF ecosystem can work to the benefit of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. ODF is like HTTP. Since it's open -- the state would be free to pick from solutions that support it and those solutions can come from Microsoft (just like IIS supports HTTP) or from open source providers like OpenOffice.org (just like the Apache supports HTTP). Much the same way the licenses to Apache and IIS are irrelevant to their support of HTTP, the licenses to OpenOffice.org and the licenses to the solutions that can come from Microsoft, Corel, or whoever else decides to support ODF in their products are irrelevant as well.

Personally, I can't understand, nor accept, why Microsoft won't support ODF. Microsoft should compete by building superior products for editing documents. If Microsoft believes its formats are superior, than customers can elect to store their documents in those formats. But, there's no reason why documents edited using Microsoft products cannot be stored based on standardized ODF. Microsoft already supports PDF formats for print-image output. They also support a Microsoft-developed alternative to PDF called the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer. Why can't they do the same with ODF, providing the option of storing documents in either ODF or Microsoft's Office XML Reference Schema?

Performance Matters

Chris Loosley, an expert in Service Level Management (SLM) at Keynote Systems, recently began blogging (using the same template I chose for the ITscout Blog). His blog, entitled Performance Matters, deals with all aspects of Web site performance management. I unconditionally recommend Chris's blog to anyone interested in software performance.

The systematic application of performance management or service level management practices is an essential way to improve the availability and responsiveness of Web sites and e-business applications. SLM is an essential way to maintain and improve a business's overall quality and effectiveness.

On Being Eclectic

Recently I wrote the following in an earlier blog posting:

With the ITscout Blog, my emphasis has primarily revolved around addressing two key questions:

1. What is IT Architecture?
2. Why is IT Architecture important?

In truth, although IT Architecture is the primary theme around which my professional career currently revolves, the ITscout Blog is indeed a personal web site and not a corporate web site. The views I express are clearly my own, mine alone, and not necessarily those of the company I work for, nor the people I work with. While IT Architecture is extremely important to me, I prefer to use my blog to report on a wide range of eclectic topics -- things I find personally interesting. I suppose I could maintain separate blogs -- one for work-related topics and another for everything else -- but I prefer not to (at least not yet).

Given this long-winded preface, it'll come as no surprise that this current posting has nothing to do with IT Architecture. But, I'd like to share some connected dots I had never seen connected before.

Everyone by now has heard of Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose wife Valerie Plame had her identity as a CIA agent leaked to the press (i.e., Bob Novack) by someone inside the White House (most probably by Carl Rove). What I hadn't realized, until today, is that back in January 1991, that same Joe Wilson was George H. W. Bush's (i.e., #41's) acting ambassador to Iraq, living in Baghdah during the runup to the first Gulf War. I learned of this from Boston Globe editorial columnist H.D.S. Greenway, whose op-ed piece, entitled "The Atypical Ambassador", is excerpted below:

We now know how men like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought into a utopian grand design and took a deeply inexperienced young president along with them.

And we know now what a deep and damaging failure this botched dip into idealistic colonialism has been, and how it has hurt our cause of trying to combat Islamic extremism.

I left here with Joe Wilson nearly 15 years ago, but because the son lacked the wisdom of the father, I am back in this demeaned and bitter city witnessing the greatest foreign debacle of a lifetime.

A day earlier, The Boston Globe ran a scathing editorial written by James Carroll entitled "Deconstructing Cheney" which described "just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States" and how intertwined the Vice President's career has been with his close pal and constant sidekick Donald Rumsfeld. Most frightening is an accusation in this article stating how, on September 11th, "in Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call."

Don't NASCAR Our National Parks

I have nothing against NASCAR. If people want to watch corporate logos running around in circles, that's okay by me.

Frankly, I long for earlier times when baseball stadiums had names like Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium instead of U.S. Cellular Field or Minute Maid Park. Similarly, I prefer postseason college football's Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Sugar Bowl over the Outback Bowl, Capitol One Bowl, and GMAC Bowl. But, sports are big business and I can understand how everyone's out to make a buck.

However, enough is enough already, especially if as reported in The American Daily Prospect, Republicans get their way in plastering corporate logos all over our National Parks. Any plans to throw open the doors of commercialization in places like Yellowstone, Yosemite, or
Cape Cod National Seashore need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

Corporate jingles, slogans, and logos have crept into almost every corner of our lives. We don't need the private-sector to spoil the superb expression of civic consciousness which is America's "national parks."

Why Don't People Vote?

According to a Census Bureau Report, 64 percent of U.S. citizens age 18 and over voted in the 2004 presidential election, up from 60 percent in 2000. That's actually a higher percentage than I had thought. But, my question about voting in the title of this blog posting isn't about elections. Rather, I was wondering why more people don't take advantage of the grading feature included inside ITscout.

For example, if you look at the list of Relational DBMS Server products, only one person assigned a grade to Microsoft's SQL Server, two people graded Oracle 10g, and one person gave a grade to IBM's DB2. ITscout provides a chance for people to share their opinion about products in a completely fair and unbiased manner. Why not take advantage of this opportunity?

In addition to products, people can also share their opinion about such B2C (Business-to-Consumer) categories as Maps, Dictionaries, Dead People Finders, or Multimedia Search.

Finally, I ask for your help. Please use the Feedback option on the Menu Bar to pass along corrections, additions, deletions, and suggestions.

No Need for Blogger Greed

Ramit Sethi, a recent Stanford grad, publishes a personal finance blog called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. One of his recent postings, entitled "On greed and speed," delved into a discussion about bloggers who place Google AdSense ads on their blogs in order to make money when people click through. Supposedly, it's an innovative, seemingly win-win solution for everyone.

Like Ramit on his blog site, I too have decided not to include AdSense or other ad solutions on the ITscout Blog, and for pretty much the same set of reasons. First, I don't want to ruin the visitor experience. Second, I don't want to focus on trying to make money by optimizing ads rather than just trying to create valuable content. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I tend to believe most bloggers who are running ads are making very, very little actual money.

My approach to blogging is pretty much the same one I used while developing the ITscout web site, still one of, if not the industry's best master list of IT products and vendors. With ITscout, my primary goal was to develop a framework for modeling technology portfolios. That led to a visually-oriented three-layer, four-model representation with IT Infastructure at the bottom, Applications layered above which could either be purchased or developed, and finally, at the top, a layer corresponding to Business Intelligence. With the ITscout Blog, my emphasis has primarily revolved around addressing two key questions:

1. What is IT Architecture?
2. Why is IT Architecture important?

In both cases, ITscout and the ITscout Blog, I started out thinking less about money and more about value. I agree totally with Ramit who says, if you are (1) passionate about what you do and (2) are really good at it, then eventually the money will come.

I've concluded this posting with the following edited excerpt from Ramit's On greed and speed:

It's really hard to make something useful and lasting. If you've got a community around whatever you're doing, or people who comment on your blog, or emails from people who have written to you thanking you or asking you questions, or whatever you consider value, that's a huge step in the right direction. It takes time and patience and foresight to build value, and you'll be handsomely rewarded beyond small chump change.

Build something great. Do this first. Be patient and slowly get people to come to your site/store/business/talk/whatever. Don't start trying to sell something immediately. If people don't come, figure out why. Adapt and listen.

It's not about the money -- although you'll get plenty of it when you create something lasting.

CAN'T-SPAM Law

Many people complain that government just isn't working very well. There have been indictments in the White House. The House Majority Leader has been indicted. The Senate Majority Leader is under criminal investigation. Budget deficits are soaring through the roof. The war in Iraq has already cost the lives of more than 2000 U.S. soldiers. FEMA's response to Katrina, Rita, and Wilma has been pitiful. And, Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM Act) has been a huge legislative farce.

Do you receive lots of junk email messages from people you don't know?

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is responsible for enforcement actions against deceptive commercial emailers and spammers. They suggest that if you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.

I think it's finally time for all of us to start forwarding all this crap to

spam@uce.gov

Microsoft's Big Squeeze

Bill Gates and his new CTO sidekick, Ray Ozzie, have demonstrated software suggesting Microsoft can be competitive with the Internet upstarts who survive off Web ad revenue generated by hundreds of millions of eyeballs.

I'm sure some people now wonder if Windows Live will somehow be reminiscent of Microsoft's incredible Internet Explorer response to Netscape ten years ago. Is it possible that Microsoft's monopolistic domination of markets might once again crush an up and coming technology superstar, this time around Google playing the role of Netscape?

The dilemma for Microsoft is that their monopoly is not only under attack by the Googles and Yahoos of the world who view the Internet as a platform, but also simultaneously from the IBMs, Suns, Oracles, and Intels who are full of hope that advances in all aspects of the Internet, Linux, Open Source, Grid Computing, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Autonomic Computing, will collectively give rise to a new virtual platform computing infrastructure that will greatly diminish the importance of Windows and Office.

Microsoft makes big profits by selling high-volume, high-margin, shrink-wrapped or pre-installed software. But, the PC market is now mature. There's very little likelihood that a huge new growth spurt will be coming along anytime soon. It's going to take a whole lot more than a new version of the Windows operating system (i.e., Vista) to stimulate massive new PC purchases. Similarly, few professional workers are looking for more, or even better, office automation software. I can't imagine what kinds of improvements could be made to word processing, spreadsheets, or presentation graphics that would generate a huge new demand for these classes of products.

Don Dodge, a member of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team, likes to differentiate among three different problem spaces where IT entrepreneurs like to focus their innovative energies:

1. Consumer problems
2. Enterprise problems
3. Developer problems

He also likes to repeatedly warn that the #1 trap entrepreneurs fall into is creating a solution looking for a problem. Don's latest blog posting, Microsoft - the biggest start-up in the world, smacks of someone who perhaps has been drinking way too much corporate Kool Aid.

Microsoft is under attack in the Consumer space. Generating revenue from advertising is a completely different business model than making money selling packaged software. I'd guess Microsoft has a lot to learn before it will be able to compete effectively in this space. Even worse, there's a distinct possibility that good enough and free office automation functionality delivered over the Internet might pose a very serious challenge to the MS Office cash cow.

Microsoft is also under attack in the Enterprise space. IBM's business initiative built on an open, integrated, heterogeneous IT infrastructure with self-managing, autonomic capabilities, available globally On Demand, sounds very appealing to businesses looking to embrace methodologies based on the onset of a technology-enabled business process revolution.

Microsoft still retains a very strong and loyal following among software developers, but C# has still failed to attract the universal appeal of Java, Open Source development tools like Eclipse are beginning to seriously challenge Microsoft's dominant Visual Studio development environment technology, and the huge cost discrepancy between outsourcing versus in-house development projects could significantly diminish the importance of winning the hearts and minds of software programmers.

As great as Vista and Office 12 may eventually be, Microsoft's Cathedral-like approach to new product development has resulted in very long delays in product availability. I also believe that many of the new capabilities will require significant paradigm shifts before gaining solid traction.

No one is going to start worrying about a company with over $40 billion of cash in the bank. But, Microsoft's unprecedented success with Windows and Office may well have been as much about their being lucky as it was about being good. Microsoft owes an incredible debt to IBM. First, for choosing Microsoft's DOS. Second, for royally screwing up OS/2. Third, for helping persuade Lotus and WordPerfect to make incredibly stupid marketing mistakes. Toss into the equation Netscape's inability to compete against Microsoft's free browser technology bundled into Windows, and you wind up with the 800 pound gorilla that has come to dominate the IT industry like no firm has dominated a market since the days of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company.

Microsoft needs to articulate and execute a leadership position. After spending more than $20 billion in R&D over the past three years, they ought to be able to do this. This time around, they shouldn't depend on the imitation of other's innovations or on the ineptness of stupid competitors.

Is "Windows Live" DOA?

Microsoft just unveiled a new strategy called "Windows Live" designed to fend off a growing threat from Google, Yahoo!, and others of their ilk. By offering services, Microsoft hopes it can figure out how to compete against these nimble Internet upstarts without cannibalizing sales of its own two monopolies: Windows and Office.

Google'’s reputation of just giving away as much as possible and sharing revenue with everybody on everything is a dead simple message that everyone just naturally gets. Microsoft's reputation, on the other hand, has been one of selling high volume, high margin, feature-rich, shrink-wrapped software. Microsoft's past historic efforts to bully potential rivals doesn't exactly make the word "trust" one that readily rolls off the lips of someone describing the world's largest software company.

Microsoft with its MSN Search and Virtual Earth is obviously trying to replicate the tremendous success of Google Search and Google Earth. Competition through imitation is a tried-and-true Microsoft strategy.

Microsoft will likely move towards a web service based model for a select few traditional client software products in order to compete against companies like Salesforce.com. But, don't expect "Office Live" to start offering a free alternative to Word and Excel anytime soon. Conversely, Sun and Google have already announced an agreement to promote and freely distribute Sun's Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar, and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite.

Microsoft's online push represents its most ambitious attempt to adapt to the challenges and opportunities posed by the Internet. Yet, Microsoft has little choice but to shift more of its business online because the Internet is steadily becoming the preferred computing platform. Still, it needs to protect its core franchise of licensing software for installation on a single computer. But Microsoft's long-running dominance is being threatened by rapidly growing companies like Google and Yahoo! which are offering Internet-based applications and services for free. The line separating what's being hosted on the Web and what's stored on a computer hard drive is rapidly blurring.

Can Microsoft copy Google's advertising-based model? Will potential partners be attracted to Microsoft in the same way they've bought into Google's simple approach that says Let'’s make money together? Let the competition begin!

Modeling and Documenting and Communicating! Oh My!

Dorothy: Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!

IT Architecture reminds me of that timeless quote presented above, taken from the movie The Wizard of Oz, except the IT jungle is filled with models and documentation and communication  (Oh My!)

Let's start with models. I'm not referring to the gorgeous women models who prance down runways peddling famous fashion designer clothing. Nor am I talking about the latest car models from auto manufacturers like Ford, GM, or Toyota. I'm also not using the term in the same way that weather forecasters or economists define models, or molecular models in chemistry, graphical models in computing, or even role models in parenting. Rather, I'd like you to think about plastic models like those sold as kits by Revell.