geordee


Enterprise Architecture & Economics

TOGAF describes Enterprise Architecture as a process, something to do. It optimizes the legacy of processes into an integrated environment, to support the delivery of the business strategy. It then recommends how to practice enterprise architecture, using the TOGAF framework.

There are many other definitions exist, each in increasing complexity and vagueness. Almost all of these definitions tell you what to do and how.

In the book Enterprise Architecture As A Strategy, the authors define it as a thought process.

Our use of the term refers to the high-level logic for business processes and IT capabilities. IT unit will...


Evolutionary Architecture

Information and Communications Technology is an engineering discipline. Compared to other engineering disciplines, computer science and software are fairly modern. So, they end up loaning words from the more traditional disciplines. We don’t use the word architecture much in mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering. The most coveted word is design in those fields. But, when it comes to integrated circuits or information technology, we have architectures. The terms are analogous to building structures like buildings or systems like towns.

However, this analogy is a simplification of what happens in reality. While using modern approaches to software development such simplification becomes...


Data Mesh and Data Products

The progression of technology is like the oscillation of a pendulum. We see the trends swaying towards the faster, better, newer aspects of technology. Earlier we had data processing systems in every offices. One of the earlier use cases was to automate spreadsheets. Then the central offices wanted a copy of data from every branches. PCs were and common client-server computing was in vogue. When Internet took over we were back to browser-based thin clients. The branch office servers were eliminated and we have central ERPs now.

Data storage and processing are getting ever cheaper. There was a time, when...


Identification, Discovery and Distribution of Apps

Sometime back I was building an online service to discover food. As we were on it, we also found many such services springing up all around us. We had a catchy URL using the generic top level domain “menu”. The product is Has.Menu, and in Dubai the URL would be dubai.has.menu.

Soon, it became apparent that everyone is moving to mobile apps, and the fight is on the top spots in mobile app stores. Featured app, recommended app, most downloaded app, top developer, and that competition is tough. I can almost say that I watched the whole thing moving from...


Bring Your Own Device, Too

Some years back I was in Australia. As we went around the city, I couldn’t help but notice BYO written in front of most of the restaurants. It’s the shortened version of Bring Your Own Bottle of wine or beer. These days, we hear a lot about BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. In corporate world, it means the employees can bring their own phone, tablet or laptop to work, and get it integrated to the corporate IT infrastructure.

Some years back, I had written that an innovation moves from researchers to corporates and eventually to consumers. The adoption of...


Anything That Can Be Digitized Will Be Digitized

Electronic devices had first made computing easier. Hence the name computers. Increasingly, we are relying on electronic devices for managing information - to capture, store, analyze and retrieve. Not surprisingly, we have the term information technology.

The effect of information technology is ever-increasing in our lives. Computers fueled information technology, and in turn information technology fueled the adoption of computers. Over a period of time, both computers and information technology have become faster, cheaper and reliable. Today the smart phones are taking the place of computers, and we are probably witnessing a massive explosion in information technology. Smart phones makes...


The Perfect Solution

The perfect solution does not exist. A working solution does. Especially in the case of software systems.

We have been perfecting the software for while, and it always takes another week to improve that feature.

The complete solution does not exist. An acceptable solution does. The more it gets complete, the more it gets complex, and the lesser useful it becomes.

We have been trying to find the essential pieces in our software, to make it acceptable enough. Mobile access is essential, but do we need an app for that? User management is essential, but does it have to be...


The Internet Big Bang

Today Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of technical infrastructure at Google wrote a post in Google+ about the corkboard rack/servers Google built in 1999. From the post and the comments we can make some interesting inferences.

  • Google had 112 servers in 1999 and they added 1,680 servers packed in 21 or so racks. Let us round it off to 1,800 servers in 1999.
  • Google today has more than an order of magnitude number of servers. Let us round it off to 18,000 servers.
  • 3 to 4 of the current servers is equivalent to the entire computing power available in...


Information Services

I have been thinking about writing a post with the title Information Services. That is when I got a notification on Code Halos, a new book by Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, and Ben Pring - three Cognizant consultants studying the Future of Work and about Millennial Workforce. I quickly went through the book and the core idea of Code Halo is something related to what I imagined as Information Services.

Quickly put, we have technology and then information technology came about. The service industry, in general, used technology as a differentiator and built their capabilities. It could be transportation, hospitality,...


The Database and The Userbase

In the Internet world there are only two valuable assets - the database and the userbase. And both are hard to acquire. Recently, we have been struggling to create formidable databases in certain domains, and the cost to build and maintain those are pretty high. Even with the sophistication of technology that are practically available and reachable, applied on freely available - “public domain” - data, I am hardly satisfied with the quality of results (I being the perfectionist part of me).

A few recent acquisitions by Google and similar companies underline this even more - two or three “red”...