Tag: application modernization

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Lessons Learned (or Not): Development and the Cloud

Lessons Learned (or Not): Development and the Cloud

Talk about agile technology and how great things are because we can experience rapid software solution development and deployment via the cloud is shining a brighter light on certain IT management issues which have existed for quite some time, but perhaps went largely unrecognized.  One of these issues is product development direction and influence, and where it really comes from.  If you think most IT companies determine their product lines and offerings from the top down, with detailed specifications supported by a strong business case, you may want to think again.  Based on my experience and that of a lot of other folks, there are many companies out there offering products and services  that were crafted in more of an ad hoc manner than through a focused “product development” effort with long term sustainability in mind.  In some cases, this demonstrates ingenuity and a desire to look at things in new ways.  Sometimes it’s just uncontrolled and unstructured chaos with dollar signs attached.

“there’s a school of thought, put forward by the small but influential analyst firm RedMonk, that developers now occupy the role of IT kingmakers. This theory holds that the traditional model of IT adoption, which assumes that major decisions emanate from the top, is wrong. Instead, the decisions that appear to come from a CIO are, in fact, dictated by the choices made by people way down in the IT organization-the traditionally denigrated developers. CIOs merely ratify the decisions made by “lowly” developers.”

It goes like this:  a high level concept comes from upper management… some “great idea”.  This high level idea is communicated (at a high level) to the production teams who will make it real.  The production teams decide what it really is, how it will really work, what it will look like, and how it will be offered – and all of this generally based on the preferences, skill sets, moral guidelines, belief systems, and work ethic of those involved in the development process.  The product details are run back up the food chain, where they then become the defining elements of the new solution.  In many cases, refinements and changes are argued against by the developers, citing various reasons or roadblocks to making changes to their prized construction.  But hey – they got it ready to go out the door, didn’t they?  So what if it’s not quite what you envisioned, and doesn’t necessarily represent a sustainable strategy?

Experience in business does count, particularly if you learn from it.  There is a saying I heard once, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it other than it proves to be so very true each and every day.  The saying is that “there is no morality without context”.  In business, context is often experience, understanding the cause and effect of an action or activity.  Without this learning, without the experience earned within the organization or by others, there is no context guiding the development.

“It’s irresistible to poke fun at some of the most egregious aspects of today’s IT practices-change control committees that only meet once every two weeks;ITIL implementations that place more emphasis on paper trails than actually, you know, getting things done; operations groups that resist application updates in the name of stability, and so on and so forth.

However, the fact is that these functions, if not their manifestation, exist for important reasons. Overlooking them-or outright ignoring them-is not the right solution. Ensuring that updates to production systems are made, and being able to track who makes changes to infrastructure, are enterprise functions are that won’t go away just because cloud computing is in the picture.”

Lessons previously learned will need to be learned again, and addressing problems after-the-fact is generally far more costly than being proactive and trying to avoid them in the first place.  It can be a very painful process, watching the company go through puberty all over again (particularly if it had once reached some level of maturity), yet this is what can occur when the bright and shiny new idea causes management to forget fundamental lessons previously learned.

In a recent article on Computerworld.com, author Bernard Golden makes a number of really good and interesting points about the opposing viewpoints of this “agile” development enabled by the cloud (the article focuses on AWS – Amazon Web Services, but it is completely relevant in the broader context).  Link here to access the entire post, it’s worth the read.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230040/How_the_Cloud_Brings_Developers_into_Business_Process

Make Sense?

J

Read more about legacy application modernization, and why IT and back-office outsourcing makes sense for a lot of reasons 

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Is Cloud Ringing the Death Toll for ERP?

Is Cloud Ringing the Death Toll for ERP?  Nope.

Software developers are being forced to recognize the business benefits of cloud computing models, and must shift their thinking along with the demand.  ERP isn’t dead or dying.  It’s changing, and delivering new agility and capability to businesses of all sizes.  Developers are going to have to find ways to modernize and adapt old, large frameworks to address these new demands, or lose out to newer players.

“Cloud on its own doesn’t affect the validity of ERP. Businesses still require management software to help them run their organization effectively. What Cloud does do however, is level the playing field and make ERP solutions more accessible to the consumer. That means publishers and resellers need to pay attention.” 

an old ERP The Right Way! guest blog by Jason Carroll with contributions from Brett Beaubouef

Make Sense?

J

Read more about legacy application modernization, and why IT and back-office outsourcing makes sense for a lot of reasons 

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The race to find the “secret sauce” for hosted application services for small business

The race to find the “secret sauce” for hosted application services for small business

Cloud computing is here to stay.  What was once viewed as bleeding-edge technology fraught with peril and risk is now recognized as an emerging standard for application deployment and delivery.  The race to the clouds represents a significant challenge, however, when issues of application interoperability and integration are introduced – particularly when it comes to small business solutions which traditionally reside on the local PC and network.

Today’s available technologies and platforms quite nicely facilitate single application deliveries, yet frequently fail to address the dynamic provisioning and deployment requirements of a rich integrated application environment.  Users who desire to select from a variety of applications in a hosted environment are most often met with barriers which won’t allow them to have the particular mixture of solutions they need.

While virtualization approaches for platforms and applications are gaining popularity and increasing in capability, the reality of the problem still rests with the fact that, in order for the applications to integrate, they must be installed on the same machine.  There is a race amongst the virtualization platform providers to find the “secret sauce” of application hosting; to enabling a flexible, dynamic, rich application delivery method which overcomes the need to have integrated applications installed together on servers in pre-selected ‘packages’.  With the secret sauce, the provider would be able to offer the customer any possible combination of available applications, and offer them as fully integrated solutions, regardless of whether or not those applications were actually installed on a machine together somewhere.

Currently, the solution is addressed (sort of) in how the provider deals with three main elements in the service model, which are packaging, provisioning, and business rules.  With these three ingredients appropriately approached in a flexible infrastructure and partner network, the potential for broad hosted application delivery and distribution exists.   Service providers are still stuck with the requirement to pre-select their various partner or integrated application inclusions, but it is possible to offer the perception of maximum flexibility without actually having it.  The challenge is not presented with the business rules, but in the packaging and provisioning processes.

Packaging is the step where the item to be provisioned is combined with other elements, resulting in a service or installation “package”.  Much like a manufacturing assembly process, packaging takes into consideration the total resource utilization or requirement, accounting for all resources combined into or used to create the package.  Packaging cannot be performed without first understanding, at a detailed level, what can be provisioned and how.  With the variety of applications, data services, implementation methodologies and models which exist, a single method approach has proven to not address a majority of software products currently available on the SMB market, and is unlikely to in the near future.

An example of this challenge is partially revealed when we look at the diversity of applications involved in the Microsoft Office ecosystem.  Many businesses rely upon the functionality present on the Office suite desktop products, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  For some application users, this functionality is not present in their primary use software, but is presented via desktop level integration methods.  In order to deliver the full functionality and capability of the primary use application, the installation and integration support for the Office applications must also be provisioned and packaged into the service.   Offering even limited integrations and options like Office for inclusion in the package can introduce challenges in data access and management, permissions and file level security, and ISV licensing of applications.  For these and other reasons, attempting to provide a rich, user-selected mixture of deliverables poses the ultimate challenge to the application service provider.

When a cloud or application hosting provider can offer their customers the ability to sign up for, purchase, and utilize without complication or delay their selections of desktop or web-based applications, services and integrations, and pay for them as a subscription service accessible at any time and from anywhere – that’s the secret sauce of application hosting and cloud IT that everyone’s looking for.

Make sense?

J

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Use the Cloud to extend “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries

Use the Cloud to connect beyond traditional boundaries

With the number of definitions being applied to the term “cloud” these days, it’s no wonder business owners and IT managers are having a hard time keeping up. Depending on who you talk to, cloud can mean anything from “all things related to the internet” to a description of a more complex, distributed method of provisioning and utilizing the various elements (or layers) involved in a network computing model. There are purists in the industry who don’t agree with the broad use of the term “cloud”, as it creates confusion in the market as to what is and is not true cloud computing. Over time, however, this situation should be resolved through the understanding that, no matter what software or system you elect to implement, there will likely be an aspect of “cloud” in it. The popular term will become less important, and the market will simply recognize that this is how business computing is done.  It becomes “normal” IT, and not something special.

The stealthy inclusion of web services and connected applications has been happening for a few years now.  Even the tried-and-true QuickBooks desktop editions have become the center points for a large number of Internet delivered product features. Where payroll was once simply part of the program, it’s now an outsourced service delivered seamlessly from within the application. It’s the same with credit card processing, bill payments, attaching documents, and more. The cloud is involved in a lot more than most people really understand, because so much of the “magic” happens behind the scenes. This makes it easier for the user to adopt, but doesn’t go a long way towards helping them understand the model or the intrinsic benefits derived from it. Cloud is here, and it’s probably in the solution you are currently using. It’s already “normal” IT, you just didn’t know it.

While the market works through this realization, there is much to do in terms of educating folks on how they can use this new paradigm to their greater benefit. Business process automation, outsourcing non-core processes, and using integrated systems to improve information sharing and exchange within an organization aren’t entirely new concepts. What’s new, and what is enabled through this distributed yet interconnected technology model, is the ability for organizations to extend their “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries. The walled garden of the enterprise can be safely and affordably opened to allow interaction at deeper levels with entities outside of the firewall, allowing metrics relating to those interactions to be captured, collected and analyzed in real time.

Make Sense?

J