Bad Mix: Traditional businesses and Social media

I recently did a road map of social media initiatives within the department and agency I work for. I tracked all of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policies from the 1970 (Hello President Carter!) to the present time and them mapped them to specific Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) policies and initiatives. I also captured when various Social media businesses like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Blogger were formed or purchased by Google. It was a fascinating exercise.

The evolution of businesses, which are based on the concepts of social networking, and organic growth, has truly been disruptive in the business world. The tools provided by these companies are making the Jasmine flower proud (my poor attempt in weaving the political revolutions in the middle east into this blog entry). Unfortunately I don't think social media tools are going to successful in the big business world because businesses are based on the principles of organized management. There is a reason why fortune 500 companies hire executives with a Masters of Business ADMINISTRATION and not Masters of Science in Business. Structure and management go together.

If you think about it. Labor unions and other user related groups with a common goal (that are not dependent on a process) will adopt social media successfully within their organization. Meanwhile investment banks and large supply chain companies will have limited success because they are based on processes. IT is critical in a business they automate business process and automation of business processes can be managed. Social media shouldn't be managed but it should be organic. A successful CIO may be able to successful implement social media in niche pockets but he or she cannot make it an enterprise level shared services. Folks in the Department of Defense claim that social media is successful in their organization. When you do intelligence analysis which is based on information sharing from different perspectives then there has be collaboration. Social media in the intelligence domain is successful because it is based on information collaboration. This is uniquely different from a typical fortune 500 company.

Anyway I had this thought this morning and now I need to go to work and the agency's social media initiatives.

New Design Wordpressism

Lately I have been working with web designers and media experts at the FAA to do the following:

• Provide architectural guidance for a proposed Web Content Management System (WCMS) which will be deployed on a government cloud.
• Developing a Communications Architecture Framework
• Collaboratively developing a FAA social media strategy with Ms. Karen Snyder

After doing web design for FDA/CVM from 2000 to 2004, I have realized that web design has morphed from mechanical javascript, splicing gifs and jpegs into rectangular shapes and controlling design flow using tables into CSS, AJAX, CMS. Speaking about CMS, Wordpress themed sites are spreading like wild fire. It seems to be the rage. An open source technology has strongly influenced the web designer's behavior. In fact the Wordpress layout seems to be de-facto layout for all enterprise, mom and pop web sites. The other thing I am seeing is that Facebook design seems to a baseline layout for social media sites. Too bad Sharepoint is not making a dent from the design site. Oh well does Microsoft do anything well?...oh wait they make money well.

Different way of programming

For the last week or so, I have been developing a dashboard for an Enterprise Architecture (EA) at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Due to various organizational constraints and confusion regarding where should the EA repository should exist, associated user access issues and which tool should render the dashboard; I am developing the dashboard using ExtJS AJAX framework. Six months ago, I would have spent a few days trying to understand the Application Programming Interface (API) and then slowly build the application scratch. After working with Groovy on Grails and Ruby on Rails, I decided to take the approach of customizing an example, which is provided in the ExtJs framework. This approach has saved me alot of time and I have a better understanding on how ExtJS works. I admit that I don't have a detailed understanding on how ExtJS is designed and how it should work; but I do know enough to say that I can build the User Interface using ExtJS. So if you are getting ready to code in ExtJS then I say to you, "Ext.onReady(..."

So in closing, I would say that it is faster to customize existing code rather building it from scratch. I have been enjoying working with this JavaScript framework.

Can SOA be achieved in an enterprise

For the last year or so, I have been working for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) Subject Matter Expert (SME). It has been a challenge to see how various folks view SOA the panacea for IT related systems or enterprises. Each stakeholder within an organization has different definition with respect to SOA. So far I have noticed the following at the FAA, we have:

1. Data Services - Services that carry data
2. Business Services - Services that meet a business need
3. ITIL Services - Services which meet Help Desk and Operations centric services
4. Business Process Services - Services which emulate business processes and they use standards like BPEL and BPMN
   
5. Web Services - Information is exchanged over the HTTP protocol in XML or as attachments which are in SOAP container
   
6. Java Services - Java enabled services
7. RESTful Services - Information is exchanged over the HTTP protocol in XML but the information is not in a SOAP container.
8. Orchesterated Services - Services which are made of services
9. etc., etc

As you can see, Services can be confusing. To add to the confusion, we have other tools and methodologies which make SOA a zoo. We also have people who view SOA serving different purposes. In the end, they are all true since they are identifying components which can be or may be true in an enterprise. Here is my take on SOA. SOA should be viewed from a Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA identifies (if it is done right) the "As-Is" state of the IT enterprise and proposes the "To-Be" state of the IT enterprise.

EA should also have a strategy on how to achieve "To-Be" state in a timeframe. This is usually articulated in various EA artifacts like Roadmaps, line of sight documents, strategy documents and an EA repository. Other components that need to implemented to give a true EA picture is to have an enforced System Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Change Control Board (CCB), and Configuration/Change Management (CM). The other thing is that to have a working EA, all of the stakeholders must buy into it. I am a big fan of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF).

Back to SOA now, if EA recommends that SOA is one of the possible approaches to meet "To-Be" state then it needs to bought by all stakeholders in the enterprise. The following steps need to be done when an enterprise wants to use SOA to achieve its goals:

1. Define a Service Data Dictionary - This will reduce the confusions when talking about services.
2. See if the EA strategies identify any systems which need to be consolidated or broken-up.
3. If so then use SOA in system(s) migration
4. If all new systems are built in a SOA fashion then address SOA governance
   
5. Address SOA governance by designing and implementing processes and groups which deal with SOA governance.
6. All new SOA services should be projectized
7. All new SOA services should have a Mission and Vision statement
8. and on, on

In the end, will SOA ever be truly achieved in the FAA. The answer is "No"! However pursuing SOA will help FAA identify gaps in its enterprise with respect to its EA since it forces various stakeholders to communicate together and address how some of the internal processes should be achieved. This is a big key for any successful IT enterprise. Adopting SOA will not provide a successful EA without having a working SDLC and appropriate mechanisms which provide accountability.

"We won't mention their name..."

Three weeks ago, I went to Microsoft Technology Center in Reston Virginia. I was part of the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) team which listened to Microsoft's overall strategy for the next three years, how Microsoft licenses were distributed across the FAA, and listened to their product experts regarding their new products and got a tour of their facility. It was a long session and some parts were interesting. I was amused when their product experts tried to toute the web 2.0 capabilities like creating wikis and blogs on the new Sharepoint product however I asked them if they did any research why they decided to include web 2.0 capabilities in their products. They had good reasons for the wikis since Wikis have proven to be an excellent source of knowledge via Collaborative means. However they didn't give me a good reason why they included blogging software, I realized that big companies like Microsoft provide the "new" capabilities eventhough they don't know if it will ever be used by their customers. I found that very interesting.

The other thing that I thought was hilarious was that their whole staff was taking stabs at Google. Eventhough Google and Microsoft product and services slightly overlap, I didn't think Microsoft and their employee would truly hate Google. For instance, one presentator talked about email services and used Hotmail as an example. Then he stated their products work well Yahoo and other email providers including "the other email provider who is still beta". Then he interjected, "how long are they going to have beta anyway" If you don't know what I am talking about then check out Google Mail or Gmail which is still beta.

Microsoft also stated they are rewriting their whole stack of products to introduce cloud computing since "the other company is planning to expand into this realm." Amazon.com currently provides this service and I know one person who uses their backup service and he is happy with them.

Anyway it looks like Bill Gates new tarket is "the company" that neither he or Microsoft will mention its name. "Hey Bill, 'Google' is not a buzzword but it is simply a company you are jealous of"