SOA filling the Gaps

An Example of a card from Ash experiment Image Source: Wikipedia In a post in my other blog (written in Hebrew ), I wrote that sometimes my opinion differed from the majority opinion. Sometimes it also differed, from leading experts opinions in the field or the topic. In those cases, I acted according to my opinion and not according to the Majority view. Wisdom of the Crowd is a method used more frequently than before. The essence of Wisdom of the Crowd, is assembling many non-expert opinions as  information supporting Decision making .   The classic usage of Wisdom of the Crowd is for estimation of quantified problem, e.g. a  Taurus   weight. However, usage of  Wisdom of the Crowd could be misleading.  In this post I discuss two factors, which oppose usage of Wisdom of the Crowd, including few examples.  Factor 1: Conformity and Social Behaviour The illustration in the heading of this post, depicts an easy task of distin...

For decades we are talking about closing the gap between business and IT , but the gap is still as wide as it was. In the beginning of the ERP era, we focused on aligning Business Processes and Core Systems, but in most enterprises we failed. SOA was the next alignment promise: defining the SOA Services in Business boundaries instead of Technical boundaries, should narrow the gap. However, despite of SOA Business Value ( Agility and Reuse )  in most enterprises,  the large Business-IT Gap remained as large as it was.  The IT Community aimed at the next alignment attempt: SOA is technical and BPM is its Business related complement.  Will the current BPM based alignment attempt succeed? I do not know, but Nick Heath's article  titled: Stop doing what the vendors tell you, CIOs told , published in  Tech Republic , suggests that the root of the problem is not Technological .   Stop Doing What the vendors Tell You Nick Heath's article is based ...

On July, 2011 I wrote a post titled:  Vendors Survival: Will Apple Survive until 2021? .  Many people thought that the question I asked is irrelevant: Apple was never more successful.  Not everyone of them is so sure today.  Apple 's position was changed. The graph above derived from Yahoo! Finance page depicts the change: Apple's stock is going down in the last 6 months.  I could use a three months graph instead of a 6 months graph, which could show more dramatic change, but I thought that it is not correct to use so short term graph.  The red line compares Google 's stock to Apple's stock. No similar trend is depicted in Google's stock.   What was changed since 2011? Apple is less successful than before. It looks like the company lost Mind Share: it is not so cool and is no longer perceived as the innovative company. " Sic transit gloria mundi " is a Latin proverb saying that glory will not last for ever. One of the ...

When HP intended to acquire EDS  in 2008, I wrote a post titled: Vendors Survival: Will HP Survive Until 2018? - HP's EDS First Take .  The prefix implies that the post was not the only post about Vendors Survival. Other posts discuss future survival of other vendors such as Microsoft , Apple , Google , SUN and EMC .  The optimistic view was that HP will become a co-leader of the Outsourcing market together with IBM (The market leader). The idea was to get more revenues from the profitable Service market, because Hardware commoditization reduced Hardware profitability.    However, my opinion was, that the optimistic view was less realistic than other scenarios.  It looks like my prediction was not far from reality. HP Layoffs in 2012 On May, 23 2012, HP announced that it is cutting 27,000 jobs after posting a profit decline of 31%in the second quarter of 2012.  Many of the jobs cut where former EDS employees .  The Case of General M...

In a  previous post I discussed Business Process Management (BPM) evolution as reflected by an Ovum report.  Recently I read new Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant . The Magic Quadrant is titled IBPMS Magic Quadrant. If you compare it to previous Gartner BPMS Magic Quadrants (you should not compare them), you will find a totally different picture.  Only three Leaders in the IBPMS Magic Quadrant, namely: IBM , PegaSystems and Appian . No Challengers and a lot of Visionaries I know ( Oracle , Software AG , Tibco , Vitria ) and two Visionaries I never heard of ( Bosch Software Innovations , Whitestein ).  Previous BPMS Magic Quadrant includes many Leaders, many Challengers as well as many Visionaries. The pattern of few Leaders, No Challengers and many Visionaries is typical to immature markets. Gartner explains it as a new generation of BPMS tools. What differentiate IBPMS from BPMS? IBPMS tools try to address a new Use Case : Intelligent  Business Operati...

Why SOA is implemented by more enterprises than BPM ?  SOA is an Architecture, so an enterprise may use an Architecture or not.  Many Enterprises without any architecture, begin their SOA initiative, when SOA was only Hype and buzzword. Other Enterprises followed when it matured. Some realized measurable SOA benefits.  Unfortunately, many of them executed it wrongly, and therefore their SOA benefits were limited or even non-existent.  Managing Business Processes is not an option it is a must . Therefore Enterprises managed their Processes manually or by usage of  code  embedded in Systems' Business Logic Layer. It is difficult to convince them to change their Process Management practices by implementing BPM. The company's management team may use the slogan: If it is not broken do not fix it.   The significant value of BPM is not Business Process Automation. It is Business Process Change or Improvement or Flexibility. In order to change a Bus...

Recently, I was interviewed by  Pcon   (unfortunately the link points to an Hebrew only site) as part of debriefing on Legacy Systems.  Pcon is an Israeli company investigating IT topics by quoting professional articles and interviewing experts. They publish the results of the investigations including practical recommendations. This post is mainly about topics raised by me during the interview, but not included in the debriefing, which will be published.    What are Legacy Systems? The term Legacy Systems refers to old application systems and/or veteran technologies still in use.  Usually, the term Legacy Systems is associated with: 1. Mainframe Hardware e.g. IBM System z and its Operating Systems or Proprietary Servers and Operating Systems such as HP Alpha and OpenVMS Operating System, IBM AS/400 and OS/400   Operating System. 2. Development and Production Environments, e.g. COBOL , Natural and DBMS systems such as Adabas  ...