Public and Private Cloud Environments – Pros and Cons

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If you are debating the pros and cons of a public cloud versus a private cloud solution, the following sheds some light on the problem.

Here are the pros of a public cloud environment (and associated cons of a private cloud)

  • There are still Capex costs associated with setting up a private cloud environment. You will also need staff to maintain that environment.
  • If your applications experience numerous peaks during the year, you will still have to plan to ensure availability of enough compute and storage capacity. Besides, as this is your equipment, there are costs associated with the infrastructure even if your applications are not using that infrastructure.
  • Unlike private clouds, public clouds provide unlimited elasticity without you worrying about reaching your limits. Resources are therefore available to your applications in a public environment on an on-demand basis.
  • If you are planning to have diverse cloud services (Big Data, etc.), you will have to have a vast array of skills.
  • You will have to plan for your own Disaster Recovery solutions. That may mean maintaining private cloud environments in different regions (assuming you operate in multiple geographical regions).

Here are the pros of a private cloud environment (and related cons of a public cloud environment)

An enterprise may consider the use of private cloud in the following situations:

  • Although cloud providers have gotten very  good in terms of securing their clients’ environments, it’s possible that due to regulatory and other reasons, the security provided by cloud environments is not sufficient for your needs and thus you want to completely isolate your environment. In those cases, a private cloud environment is the better way forward.
  • You want to have more control over your environment. In many cases, this may not be an issue, as public cloud providers can provide you a lot of control of your environments.

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March 15, 2017 by Cloud Computing

Major dimensions of an enterprise’s cloud migration strategy

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Formulating an enterprise’s cloud strategy involves looking at the problem from a number of dimensions and then asking relevant questions related to each dimension. Doing so requires an extensive understanding of an organization’s current infrastructure, application architecture, business requirements, and an organization’s overall business and IT strategy. This post reviews some of the key dimensions related to formulating an enterprises’s cloud strategy.

Usually an organization that is looking to get a good handle on its cloud strategy already has a number of cloud related initiatives live or in the pipeline. For example, the sales and marketing group may already be using cloud solutions form salesforce.com or certain LOBs (Lines of Businesses) may already be experimenting in a “Shadow IT” setting, and so on. Seeing all the different groups and departments of an organization pursuing their own agendas, the CFO or the CIO usually jump in to define an enterprise wide unified cloud strategy to manage and control spending and to ensure guiding the enterprise through the cloud migration journey.

Crafting a cloud strategy in the light of the dimensions delineated later in this post necessitates that an organization think the type of cloud services that it will be using. This classification usually involves the following four layers of the cloud:

  1. IaaS – This refers to services from a compute, storage, and network perspectives.
  2. PaaS – This refers to platform services such as application development and integration, middleware, analytics, etc.
  3. SaaS – This refers to applications that are hosted and maintained by the cloud services provider. Examples include salesforce.com applications, or Oracle enterprise applications that are hosted on the Oracle cloud.
  4. DaaS – This refers to the data that enterprises can leverage to advance their business outcomes. A number of DaaS offerings have made this a reality. Examples include data profiles of customers belonging to different industry segments and in different markets, data insights related to certain class of customers, etc.

Below are some of the major dimensions that should guide an enterprise’s cloud strategy.

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Choice of Vendors

This dimension requires an analysis of whether an organization has a preferred vendor strategy regarding moving to the cloud. The market has numerous cloud providers with Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforces.com, and Google leading the pack. The answer to this question usually involves analyzing the following facts:

  • An understanding of enterprise’s current use of cloud services and the vendors. For example, if your organization has already invested in a specific vendor who in turn is helping you deliver specific business outcomes, then you may have an inclination to continue along the same path.
  • Desired and expected use of cloud services. For example, if an enterprise knows that it will need to employ certain cloud services (e.g. big data solutions or IoT solutions) that certain vendors are better in delivering based on your organization’s requirements, then that may drive the choice of relevant vendor choice decisions.
  • Some organizations have invested in legacy enterprise applications that are now offering cloud version of those applications. Oracle is an example of this where it is now offering its enterprise applications (e.g. related to HR, HCM) in a cloud environment. In such environments, application and platform layers integrate better and seamlessly driving organizations to opt for those vendors.

Public Cloud vs Private Cloud

Private cloud refers to the network that resides behind an organization’s firewall. This means that an organization is usually responsible for the complete management and maintenance of all aspects of the cloud, hence the term ‘private cloud’. In a public cloud, an organization’s infrastructure, data and / or applications is managed and controlled by the cloud service provider. Although an organization’s data is separate and secure, the hosting still is in a shared environment. The biggest difference, therefore between the two is the extent of control that an organization has on its cloud environment. When formulating a cloud strategy, therefore, an organization must decide on not only which application workloads will be migrated to the cloud but also whether the migration will be on a private or public cloud.

Innovation Initiatives

The many innovation initiatives that an organization has in its pipeline can have a major impact on the organization’s cloud strategy. As mentioned earlier, for example, if an organization is planning to do ventures in the areas of big data and analytics, IoT, and other such innovations, this can accordingly shape an organization’s cloud strategy.

Application Workload Analysis

This requires an analysis of an enterprise’s application architecture and analyzing the various applications and plans related to their migration to the cloud. This therefore necessitates that each application must be analyzed in terms of its migration complexity and feasibility. This analysis will bring to light whether some of the applications may be candidates for a simple rehost or a “lift and shift” approach or whether they need to be completely re-architected before they are migrated to the new cloud environment.

Business Priorities and Roadmaps

A cloud strategy must be able to incorporate various LOBs’ ongoing business plans and priorities for it to get the right buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders. Although an enterprise’s cloud strategy is hatched in IT or the CFO’s office, in the absence of one, businesses start with their own plans. When formulating an enterprise-wide cloud strategy, it’s therefore vital to discuss with LOBs regarding their business requirements, urgency, and roadmaps if any. Normally, as the IT department has its own cloud initiatives in the pipeline, those should be factored in as well.

Shadow IT

As mentioned earlier, in the absence of a cloud strategy, many LOBs and other departments have their own shadow IT initiatives where they test and experiment with their specific product and service initiatives. A cloud strategy must therefore address the requirements of those departments and bring them under a unified enterprise cloud strategy.

Data Center Strategy

Cloud services are forcing user organizations to also rethink their data center strategies. The industry pundits are already predicting the expected dramatic reduction in organizations’ data center footprints over the next few years. This thinking should also be factored in as an organization decides on its cloud strategy.

Designing the new Cloud ecosystem

Whether you know it or not, your application workloads in your current computing environments have an ecosystem of their own. For example, your application workloads have certain levels of security, are being monitored to a certain degree in your data center, interface with other systems and applications, and are surrounded by other related services. Therefore, as you start to devise your cloud strategy, you should be aware (and design) the new ecosystem that will exist in the new cloud environment. Your overall cloud migration strategy, therefore, should be devised based on the new ecosystem of services that your new application workloads will require to run in the new environment.

Bringing it all together

Getting answers relative to each dimension requires interviews and collecting data through other means. Getting these answers requires input from the following:

  1. Interviews with LOB executives and their users
  2. Interviews with the CIO and other IT executives
  3. Interviews with the application architecture group
  4. Review of the IT and enterprise architecture
  5. Review of an enterprise’s strategy

Information obtained through these documents and interview sessions thus can provide a first baseline for a relevant cloud strategy. This strategy must then be validated with the key stakeholders before obtaining the final consensus and publishing the strategy for all.

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PgMP Course Outline Preparation

March 4, 2017 by Cloud Computing Digital Strategy

Reference Strategies for Building Digital Solutions and Platforms

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As enterprises are rushing toward building new digital platforms and solutions, it is important to take a strategic approach to maximize one’s ROI. Below are some of the reference strategies appropriate for those who are involved in building their organization’s strategic digital solutions and platforms.

  1. Be wary of the fast pace of change of digital technologies – As you design your solutions geared for specific mobile devices and gadgets, ensure that you scan the marketplace and analyze the market adoption and penetration of those specific digital technologies. You should also be aware of the trends and be cognizant of the fact that not only these gadgets are changing constantly but customer behavior related to the adoption of these technologies is changing rapidly as well. In fact, the pace of change for these technologies is faster than it has ever been for other technologies.
  2. Monitoring Consumer behavior – Knowing consumer behavior related to your solutions and platforms is very essential  before you further invest in those solutions. Designing digital products and services that are not aligned with contemporary market behaviors can lead to high bounce rates for your digital solutions and assets. Whether you are building a digital app, a hardware of software product, or a simple web page, it is essential to develop a feedback system that channels customer and user sentiments back to the product teams regularly so that appropriate changes and adjustments can be made to the digitalized business solutions and processes.
  3. Monitoring Online Traffic – An essential metric to collect and monitor that is related to the digital products and solutions rolled to online customers and users has to do with online and digital traffic levels. Whether it’s organic traffic through search engines, downloads of an app, or number of high quality user reviews, an organization must monitor those traffic levels to gauge market acceptance of their products and services.
  4. Broader Digital Ecosystem – Although each enterprise has its own business ecosystem that it’s part of, it’s important to be aware of the much larger digital landscape and the new opportunities that emerge within it on a daily basis. A digital content publishing company, for example, can find numerous new digital delivery platforms to distribute its content. An ongoing process to scan the larger ecosystem can help the organization reach larger audiences on more platforms on a continual basis.
  5. Agile Design and Delivery – As your organization rolls out new digital products and services, you have to ensure that you have an adequate backend design and delivery process that is agile and adaptive. Consider a serious defect in a service that you have delivered to the online marketplace but are not able to fix immediately. Such a scenario can seriously erode your brand value and permanently jeopardize your offering in the marketplace. Many organizations, therefore, are changing their internal IT processes and methods to ensure they are agile and flexible to deliver quality products and services quickly to the market.
  6. Look to differentiate on all dimensions of the internal digital ecosystem – Today’s consumers have a wide array of choices for products and services. More than aspiring to get a quality product or service, consumers are looking for personalized customer service and other features and services. Therefore, when designing new digital products and services, ensure that you look to the entire ecosystem of your product and service and differentiate your offering on a wide array of dimensions.
  7. Consider the full customer journey – Mapping customer journeys can help you assess how your customers find your products and services, the steps they go through to make their decisions, and after sale support. Make sure you not only map the entire customer journey for all your products and services but look to provide value at various steps of the journey.
  8. Deliver integrated customer experiences across channels – If you offer your product or service across multiple digital channels then you should assess whether delivering an integrated customer experience across those channels is something that is relevant to your business. For example, if you are reading a Kindle ebook on your laptop and then switch to your mobile device, you will be able to start off from where you left off on your laptop. This form of integrated experience has become the norm in the digital world and therefore you should analyze your customer’s journey and engagement habits to see if delivering customer experiences across channels is relevant to your business.
  9. Design for the savvy and experienced digital user – When designing digital products and services for your users, you should remind yourself that today’s users have a wide array of digital experiences across multiple digital products and services thus elevating their digital experience expectations from other digital products and services. It’s therefore prudent to analyze your potential customers’ expectations and to incorporate relevant best practices from digital products and services that may not necessarily be in your industry.

(This post is periodically being updated)

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February 11, 2017 by Digital Strategy

The New York Times – A Business Case of Digital Transformation

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The New York Times is an example of an organization that seems to have been taking the right steps to transform itself and transition to a digital landscape. Unlike many incumbents who have been swept away by the tides of digital disruption, the New York Times has been gradually transforming itself for the past few years and now seems to be positioned firmly to compete in the digital world. Like other newspaper publishers, the organization had earlier faced losing its competitive positioning in the industry due to the disruption of the print newspaper business. However, by executing the right strategies in a timely fashion, the New York Times seems to not only have weathered the storm of digital disruption but has gained a competitive advantage over its rivals as a result of having built the right capabilities. This article highlights some of the observations and insights from the New York Times digital journey.

1. Staying Focused on Ones Core Competencies

In the wake of digital disruption, it has become quite common these days to hear about organizations reassessing their core competencies. While that is (and has been) a valid concern in a number of cases, it’s not always as bad it may seem. Although an organization’s business model may be subject to change (meaning how it meets customer requirements and deals with its suppliers and so on,) its core competencies don’t have to. In the New York Times’ example we see that the organization has continued to focus on its core competency of journalism and continues to produce quality reporting and analysis on a wide number of topics. This is evidenced by its continued strong subscription base and its repeated mention and high visibility in the news. Furthermore, many of its journalists continue to win Pulitzer Prizes.

Lesson Learned: Despite the pressure that your organization may face to transform itself including the push to reassess your business model, your digital journey doesn’t necessarily need to depart from your core competencies. You can instead leverage the power of digital technologies to boost your competencies to help you reach more customers in the digital landscape. So, instead of being reactive and starting to make major changes, it’s always advisable to take a hard look at how your competition and markets are changing and then taking the right transformation steps by staying focused on your competencies.

2. Identifying New Sources of Revenue

A review of the New York Times’ annual report makes it clear that digital advertising has now become one of the core revenue streams for the organization. With print advertising continuing to decline, the company was able to find an alternative source of revenue in the digital ecosystem. Incumbent organizations in other industries are pursuing similar strategies to expand their revenues onto multiple channels and platforms and finding new ways to generate online revenues.

Lesson Learned: When transforming to a digital world, businesses should look for alternate revenue opportunities in the digital landscape. Many traditional brick and mortar retailers for example are expanding their online presence onto multiple digital platforms rather than simply having a website. A number of them also employ omni channel strategies to provide their customers seamless and blended online and offline shopping experiences. Organizations therefore should take a hard look at their respective industries and look to create more opportunities in the digital realm to ensure that they are immune to any disruption to their core businesses.

3. Looking Inward to Identify Monetization Opportunities

As the organization started its journey toward digital, the New York Times decided to put its old archives from many decades earlier online and opened their access to its paid subscribers. This enabled the organization to increase the value of its overall products and services and gave more reasons to its subscriber base to visit its website.

Lesson Learned: With a little creativity, you can discover many such monetization opportunities in your own digital transformation journey. As was just mentioned, in this case, the New York Times was able to monetize even its old content. Finding new opportunities may not come easy and instead may require reimagining ones business model and imagining new usage scenarios in the digital world. With the advent of creative digital marketing and advertizing tools, many organizations are also pushing their products and services in markets that were not possible earlier hence increasing their revenues.

4. Exploring More Digital Technologies for Business Improvement 

NYTimes.com has introduced visual storytelling by bringing enhanced and high quality digital videos to its user base giving them even more reasons to visit their online sites and also to stay on as loyal paid subscribers.

Lesson Learned: Depending on your business model, you should explore the use of various digital technologies to enhance your customers’ experiences. For example, many health institutions and organizations are using digital gadgets and wearables to track patient health, sophisticated apps are acting as tourist guides, robots are being used to stock inventories and updating an enterprise’s backend systems, etc. Again, a knowledge of the digital technology landscape along with understanding their business usage scenarios and cases can help organizations to offer better solutions to their customers and to blend better in the digital landscape.

5. Opening up Services to More Digital Access Channels  

Subscribers of NYTimes.com continue to enjoy all digital services on a plethora of digital platforms including desktop, mobile handhelds and other mobile devices.

Lesson Learned: Investment in digital solutions that deliver enhanced user experiences on all devices can help toward a satisfied customer base. For example, many airlines such as Singapore Airlines offer their customers access to rich user experiences through Smartphone apps, iOS and Android tablets, Applewatch and other wearables. Some of these airlines also enable their users to enjoy their in-flight entertainment right on their own devices bringing a delightful experience to their customers who are more comfortable consuming media and content on their own devices rather than on the in-flight entertainment screens.

The above are only some of the returns that the New York Times has gained from its early investment in its digital transformation journey. We can see that a little creativity and innovation can help organizations to not only avoid being a victim of the digital disruption but instead get a competitive advantage in the digital marketplace.

To summarize, here are some of the lessons learned as you start or continue your digital transformation journey.

  1. Stay focused on your core competencies
  2. Look aggressively to identify alternate revenue opportunities in the new digital landscape.
  3. Assess whether you can leverage your existing offerings (products and services) to turn them as a success in the digital world.
  4. Explore the use of many digital technologies as a means to improve your customer experiences
  5. Ensure to offer your products and services to your customers through as many digital channels as possible.

References:

NYTimes Annual Report

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February 11, 2017 by Business Case Analysis

The Importance of Enterprise Architecture in Digital Transformation

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If you are like most CIOs, your organization is probably already in the midst of a digital transformation where a number of your organization’s business functions are slowly becoming digitalized. From our experience with digital projects to date, we know now that as these technologies differ from their predecessors, an organization’s transformation to digital must be managed and governed methodically.  A haphazard approach is not sustainable for the long term and can even backfire and lead to wasting your organization’s resources along with eroding your enterprise’s competitive positioning and advantage in the marketplace. On the other hand, a methodical approach such as the process of Enterprise Architecture (EA) can help an enterprise navigate through this change in a more controlled and effective fashion.

The necessity to manage and govern enterprise digital transformation

It’s no secret that digital transformation initiatives embarked upon by enterprises are impacting all facets of the enterprise. Even though digitalization sounds like that it’s ‘technology’ oriented, the fact is that everyone throughout the organization is involved. Various Lines of Businesses (LOBs) such as Product Development, Sales, HCM, Procurement, etc. are all vying to digitalize their business processes and to roll out new digital products and solutions to the marketplace including getting more functions and features for less by migrating to a cloud based platform, rolling our mobility based applications, etc. In fact, pressured by the competition, various LOBs of an enterprise seem to be more anxious than IT to roll out new solutions, thus in turn pressuring IT to become agile and responsive to LOB demands and requirements.

CIOs and other C-execs though have a responsibility to not let get this transformation out of control. Examples abound where initiatives such as Shadow IT, tactical cloud migrations, and ill conceived digital platforms are introducing more risk to the organization including exposing the enterprise to information security, regulatory, and privacy issues. These enterprise wide efforts of transformation therefore must be governed appropriately to ensure minimal business impact and disruption.

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Here are some examples which demonstrate why injecting digital initiatives in the enterprise must be managed and governed carefully to prevent a negative impact on the continued business of the enterprise.

  • Almost all LOBs are looking for ways to migrate to mobility based solutions to attain more flexibility and efficiency gains. An enterprise’s sales force, for example, may want to have access to all functions and features of a sales process through their mobile devices to help them become more effective. However, enabling all of an enterprise’s workforce to mobile based solutions can be a large enough change initiative that may overwhelm the backend systems, introduce security and privacy issues, require special design  of the new user interface, etc. Furthermore, training of the workforce on the new mobile interface may require extensive training and longer transition times. This effort in larger enterprises can therefore be significant enough that may require a methodical transformation approach.
  • Big data solutions are another example of opportunities  offered by digital. Building of Big Data platforms requires enterprise wide involvement of LOBs and the IT department as they can help provide information on the data and information assets that are crucial to the enterprise and that can be used to feed the enterprise’s Big Data platform. This platform can then become the foundation for gleaning future insights. However, building such a platform that can provide cross LOB insights requires working with different segments of the enterprise and thus requires appropriate collaboration, communication and planning. Examples abound which show that Big Data solutions that were built but not aligned to business needs are not accepted by the business resulting in a loss of effort and resources.
  • Enabling an enterprise’s business processes with social media access and technologies can lead to regulatory and privacy concerns that must be manage appropriately. For example, social media specific policies must be formulated and enforced to ensure that enabling of business functions and processes with social media features don’t result in unintended consequences that may hurt the organization’s brand.
  • Migrating business functions and processes to new cloud based systems and platforms requires a strategic approach to ensure that an enterprise’s new cloud based computing platform is robust to handle all business requirements and is scalable for future requirements. This must be coordinated across the enterprise to ensure all LOB requirements are considered in the building of such a platform.

Enterprise Architecture’s role in Enterprise Transformation

Organizations have come to manage and govern transformations of all kinds in various ways. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one such discipline that has been regarded as quite instrumental in spearheading business and related IT change and transformation initiatives. This is because an EA describes the enterprise in terms of its basic building blocks that includes business strategy, business processes, an organization’s business model to deliver value, enabling technologies and an organization’s products and services.

An EA, therefore, helps in establishing a common understanding of the enterprise that is essential before undertaking any major change or transformation initiatives. As an example, EA is regarded as a vital tool when enterprises go through mergers and acquisitions. One of the ways an EA can be helpful is that a detailed representation of the current state of the enterprise in terms of its constituent business processes and enabling systems and technologies brings into sharp focus the inner workings of the enterprise. These inner workings represented as inter-dependencies between various types of applications, data flows within and external to the enterprise, representation of various use cases and organizational roles, etc. provide the right visibility, context and perspectives in helping to create a future target state of the enterprise.

digital enterprise architecture

When represented at the right levels of detail, a documented EA blueprint provides a holistic view of the enterprise, its functions, enabling technologies and the underlying inter-dependencies. This helps all stakeholders to see and accordingly analyze the enterprise in a new light and context. High level executives, for example, may be able to see functional redundancies and opportunities for a better organizational alignment. LOB executives, on the other hand, who usually are focused primarily on running their own businesses can see strategic initiatives that may impact their organization along with ways in which they can better connect with other parts of the enterprise along with creating external partnerships. For example, based on the enterprise’s cloud strategic plans highlighted in the EA, the LOB executives related to sales, supply chain, or HR functions could foresee possibilities for their specific solutions.

Although, EA models, blueprints, inventory of applications and other technology and business artifacts, etc. are considered to hold real value in any transformation initiative, the real value lies in the process that is used to derive those artifacts. This is because such a process involves deep collaboration with various LOBs and other key stakeholders before a current and target architecture of the enterprise is realized and agreed upon. This collaborative process helps in not only aligning enterprise business processes with business strategy but also helps in bringing down the walls that exist between various LOBs.

EA also plays a critical role in the ongoing governance of IT. Once EA models are agreed upon between key stakeholders, the EA current and target blueprints serve as the baseline for an enterprise’s future decision making activities. For example, when considering the introduction of a major business system in the enterprise, the EA blueprints can help in assessing the impact of bringing in the new system into the folds of the enterprise.

Using Enterprise Architecture to Manage Digital Transformation

Based on EA’s earlier mentioned benefits, its role in an enterprise’s digital transformation becomes even more crucial. The growing complexity of the enterprises coupled with the fast pace of market driven change requires a methodical and a disciplined approach. Furthermore, the fact that the digital transformation initiatives are enterprise wide impacting the whole of the enterprise and its LOBs, along with an enterprise’s external stakeholders, makes EA’s role as central to the transformation effort. Also, the fact that many enterprises are currently building their digital foundations, it is incumbent to take a strategic rather than a tactical approach to prevent further muddying of the enterprise’s technology platform.

Digital transformation within the context of each enterprise is about the change that all enterprises are going through in response to the overall disruption caused by digital technologies (the so called ‘third platform’), which essentially constitute Social, Mobile, Analytics, and the Cloud. As these third platform technologies have resulted in a change of customer behaviors, their expectations, and the market changing to adapt to those behaviors and expectations, the enterprises have to transform to compete effectively to position themselves appropriately in the marketplace and the overall environment. For each enterprise, this means reassessing its products, services, and overall value proposition to ensure that it is aligned to its customers’ expectations and overall market demands.

Below are some examples in that show how EA can be instrumental in guiding and managing digital transformation initiatives within an enterprise.

  • Enterprises are looking to migrate a number of their application workloads to the cloud, either by modernizing  their legacy systems or through adoption of new SaaS solutions (e.g. Sales, Human Capital Management (HCM), Supply Chain Management, etc.) As an EA provides a holistic view of all the applications of the enterprise and their underlying platforms and inter-dependencies, the EA process can help in the development of a strategic migration plan from the current state to the target state rather than each department doing it on its own without taking into account the impact to other applications and systems.
  • As digitalization of most business processes is necessitating building of a new cloud based backend that serves a number of LOBs, this must be coordinated with various LOBs and stakeholders. The current state blueprints provided by EA can help understand the broader scope of such a platform and help toward building a future state EA.
  • Current trends clearly show that most enterprises are transitioning to hybrid cloud environments that are based on traditional on-premises infrastructure, private and public clouds, and other public digital platforms. Building this platform that will serve as the foundation for the whole enterprise again requires a strategic approach that takes into account appropriate details of the current environment, something that an EA process process can help in developing.
  • Enterprises are enabling most of their applications and systems to work with mobile. This includes applications for external customer access as well as applications accessed by employees. This enablement requires unified standards in terms of the user interface design and other access requirements that in turn requires strategic planning. An EA also helps in adopting certain standards when injecting new technologies in the enterprise.
  • Mobile devices have become the enablers of an online journey for customers, employees, external partners, as well as other stakeholders of the enterprise’s ecosystem. As EA provides a holistic view of all the business processes, users of those business processes along with the various use cases, it enables analysts and LOBs to see all the relevant business processes involved in specific customer journeys.
  • The increasing reach of the applications and systems along with the need to understand customer and business partner behavior is necessitating intelligent business insights that are only possible through big data applications and analytics. Due to the high computing resources needed to run these applications, more enterprises are opting to run these in secure cloud environments where they have more flexibility and options related to costs and performance. Building of Big Data platforms requires enterprise wide involvement of LOBs and the IT department as they can help provide information on the data and information assets that are crucial to the enterprise and that can be used to feed the enterprise’s Big Data platform. This platform can then become the foundation for running future insights. The current state of the EA provides visibility of the various data stores in the enterprise along with the information feeds from other sources.

It’s quite obvious that injecting new digital solutions within the enterprise can disrupt the existing technology base of the enterprise. The discipline of EA, when instituted and used properly, can make the process much smoother and lead to predictable business outcomes.

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February 9, 2017 by Enterprise Architecture

An Introduction to Project and Portfolio Management (PPM)

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Introduction

In this article we will introduce the discipline of PPM or Project Portfolio Management, its benefits to the enterprise, and major functions and processes that underlie the PPM discipline. PPM is an extension of the Project Management discipline in that it covers the entire enterprise. So, while the Project Management function focuses on making each project successful by focusing on each project’s activities and deliverables, the PPM discipline focuses on managing project portfolios of the enterprise along with all projects that are within each portfolio. A portfolio is a collection of projects and programs. PPM processes cover a much broader lifecycle of all the projects and programs that are part of the portfolio. So, PPM tracks projects from the very beginning, i.e. from idea conception when the project doesn’t even exist as a formal entity, through formal project definition and budget approvals, and then on to project execution and delivery of business outcomes. To contrast with Project Management, PPM is about two things. The first has to do with selecting the “right” projects for the organization. This means selecting only those requested initiatives and projects that are aligned to the objectives and goals of the organization and therefore are expected to provide benefits and positive ROI to the enterprise. The second characteristics of the PPM discipline is that it ensures that the selected projects are done “right” in that the organization gets its ROI from the investment that it has committed for those projects. In doing so, the PPM relies on the PM discipline to ensure that the projects are done “right”.

Two Dimensions of the PPM Discipline

To continue focusing on these two aspects of PPM, let’s first explore what does “selecting the right projects” mean for the organization. Selecting the “right” projects means the following:

  • It means that a proper project intake process exists in the organization that ensures the capture and inclusion of all types of ideas that are a good potential to become projects. This means that the organization has an adequate process in place to encourage ideas in the organization and to facilitate bringing them to a platform where all ideas can be reviewed and evaluated based on their merits and potential benefits to the enterprise.
  • Selecting the right projects also means that the organization has a process in place to ensure that a proper business case is prepared for each of the ideas and initiatives that are recommended by different staff in the organization so they can be evaluated for potential selection. To evaluate them adequately, an organization usually has defined criteria to filter out high potential projects. This ensures that the proposed ideas and initiatives are aligned with an organization’s goals and objectives and not being pushed by the select few individuals in power.
  • Selecting and working on the right projects also means that projects are continuously scrutinized for their viability throughout their lifecycle (and not just in the beginning) to ensure that they continue to stay viable and useful for the organization. This is especially true for projects that although may have seemed beneficial when they were authorized initially but later after they were initiated, they lost their usefulness due to changing organization and market conditions or other factors. This ongoing evaluation can be done during a project’s stage gate reviews or through other similar controlled checkpoints in a project.

PgMP Framework for Program Management

Next, let’s look at what does “doing projects right mean. This has to do with ensuring that once the right projects are selected, that appropriate project management practices are followed to ensure the successful execution and completion of those projects within the constraints. To ensure successful execution and completion of projects, an organization follows best practices and methodologies such as those based on PMI (PMBOK), PRINCE2, or following agile methodologies such as Scrum, XP, and others.

(Click to take online training on Project Management Professional)

Business Benefits of PPM

 

Next, let’s review some of the benefits of following a PPM discipline within an organization.

Business benefits of instituting a PPM discipline in organizations

  • PPC provides a platform for strategy execution – We know that a good strategy without an effective execution framework is of little use. As projects and programs are the vehicles that an organization uses to execute its strategy, a PPM framework and discipline provides that unified platform to execute an organization’s strategy. Through that framework, PPM ensures that not only those projects are selected and executed that are aligned to the organization’s strategy but also measures the delivered value of that strategy.
  • PPC measures the aggregate returns of the portfolio – A PPM framework encourages grouping of projects into specific portfolios (e.g. IT infrastructure projects, new development projects, process improvement projects, maintenance, and so on) so that the collective ROI of the portfolio and other aggregate values can be measured. For example, if an organization finds that its investment in one portfolio is not yielding appropriate returns, it may decide to shift its funding from that portfolio to others to fund the initiatives that fall under the other portfolios. The portfolio approach also allows organizations to monitor and mitigate risks at an overall portfolio level rather than at individual project levels. This is especially useful when certain risks are common across projects.
  • PPM facilitates a demand capture process – Many organizations don’t have a formal demand capture process as a result of which important projects sometimes don’t surface on the radar due to political issues and other organizational bureaucracies. The PPM process ensures that all demand is captured even at lower levels of the organization after which an objective PPM evaluation process pushes the important projects to the top for consideration. This process therefore ensures that innovations and ideas are also captured for potential evaluation.
  • PPM provides a holistic view to control project investments throughout the lifecycle – A PPM approach by design allows the review of all aspects of a project from idea inception to project closeout. This view ensures a continued monitoring of the project’s investments throughout its lifecycle to ensure maximizing benefits realization for the organization. A centralized framework along with a PPM tool allows all organization participants to have access to all aspects of project data and insights that makes it much easier for decision making for people from the C-suite to the PM levels and others.
  • PPM facilitates balancing of organizational demand and capacity – As the PPM discipline provides a holistic governance mechanism for an organization’s portfolios and projects, it also facilitates the balancing of the incoming demand of projects and in-progress projects against available resources. This allows the organizations to make project decisions and to reallocate resources based on an organization’s priorities. This visibility on resources and project priorities also allows the organization to assign critical resources that are in high demand to higher priority projects. The PPM process therefore allows the organization to get a better view of resource allocation, resource availability, and assigning them to the best projects based on need, criticality, and skills.
  • PPM provides a process for project prioritization – One of the common problems in organizations is that political forces sometimes influence project selection and prioritization rather than basing it on the merits and business value. A PPM drive project scoring mechanism ensures that objective measures are considered in such decisions rather than basing it on political and other non-value added factors.

 

Major PPM Functions

 

So, to summarize, a PPM framework or a tool contains the following functions:

  • Capacity and demand management – This provides demand and capacity visibility to an organization to allow them to work on the right projects an assign the best possible resources.
  • Project evaluation – This allows project evaluation by assigning certain weights and constructing an appropriate project profile to allow for organizational consideration.
  • Project prioritization – Based on the assigned weights and other criteria, this PPM function allows prioritization of various projects that are under consideration. This prioritization can be based on the weights assigned during the evaluation phase and also on availability of critical resources required to execute those projects.
  • Resource visibility across the organization – The PPM framework provides charts and visibility across all projects in a given portfolio. This allows the organization to make the right decisions regarding project resourcing.
  • Benefits and ROI measurement – Most PPM framework tools allow for various types of calculations to help assess a project’s returns for the organization.
  • Ability to plug in with popular software development tools and ERP tools – Some PPM tools can connect to development tools related to both waterfall and Agile that allows sharing of information regarding project status, resource visibility, benefits visibility, etc. Others that have billing and invoicing functions in projects allow interfaces with financial ERP systems.
  • Reporting automation – Ability to provide automated dashboards and in-depth reporting capabilities that allows for enhanced project and portfolio status visualization facilitating effective decisions making. It also allows integration with industry standard Business Intelligence tools (e.g. Cognos) that helps organizations get deeper insights from the project information and repository.

 

Tools for PPM

There are many PPM tools in the market. With the advancement of cloud computing these solutions are available as on premise, hosted, or as SaaS options. More recently, the SaaS solutions are increasingly becoming popular due to their affordable pricing plans and also due to ease of deployment and maintenance. Over the past few years, the PPM tools have also matured to effectively bridge the gap between an organization’s strategies and projects that are under execution. As PPM tools can vary in their features and functions and also in their ability to plug-in with other tools, an enterprise should evaluate these tools in the context of their overall planned PPM journey. Some of the more popular tools in this context are as follows:

 

  • Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management (PPM)
  • Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management
  • CA Technologies Project & Portfolio Management
  • LiquidPlanner
  • Innotas
  • PlanView
  • Planisware
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • Software AG
  • ChangePoint
  • Clarizen
  • Workfront
  • Upland Software
  • etc.

 

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January 31, 2017 by PPM (Project & Portfolio Management)

Technologies, Services, and Tools to Build Cloud and Digital Systems and Applications

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This page lists the popular technologies, services, and tools that are used in building digital systems and applications. This list is obviously not exhaustive but covers the popular frameworks and technologies.

 

Web Servers

A web server is used to host public web and other Internet traffic. This is usually the first tier in hosting any digital website or platform.

  • NGINX – A lightweight http server based on open source technologies designed to handle much larger web traffic than the traditional Apache server.
  • Apache Server – One of the original open source web servers that is still widely used in building digital and traditional web traffic.

 

Load Balancers

A load balancer distributes traffic to various internal web services based on its specific configuration. The servers may be located in one subnet or on different networks for fault tolerance or other geographic reasons.

  • AWS Elastic Load Balancers – These distribute traffic across the multiple virtual servers in the cloud environment.

 

Virtual Machines (VMs)

 

Cloud Architectural Concepts

  • Auto Scaling – This refers to scaling an environment’s resources based on resource demands.

Software Development Frameworks

  • Java –
  • PHP –
  • .NET Framework – This is a software framework developed by Microsoft in the early 2000s for developing applications that run in a Windows environment. The .NET framework provides a runtime environment on the Windows platform allowing applications to use services related to security, memory management, exception handling and others. Developers usually develop .NET applications in Visual Studio, which is an integrated development environment.
  • Node.js –
  • Python –
  • Ruby –

 

Application Servers

 

  • Docker containers – Support multiple languages?
  • Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)servers – These are virtual servers located in a typical cloud architecture. Servers come in various flavors (e.g. Windows and Linux) and can be launched in multiple quantities depending on business’s systems requirements. Businesses have the ability to provisions various sizes of servers (CPU, memory, and storage) depending on system and workload performance requirements. These servers are priced according to the usage and other factors. On demand instances lets one to request instances and release them when not needed thus being charged only on use. Businesses can also get reserve instances for longer term use and pay reduced prices. Amazon also offers Spot instances where businesses can bid on pricing and get the best possible rate based on market demands and rates.
  • Amazon ECS – This service provides docker containers on AWS EC2 virtual servers.
  • AWS Lambda –

 

Storage Services

  • Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) – This storage service allows one to get extra storage to be attached to the virutal servers in addition to the storage that comes part of the virtual server (AWS EC2).

 

Application Frameworks

  • Docker Containers – These are software containers that wrap all elements of an application such as run time, code, needed libraries, documentation, etc. in one unit called a container. This allows them to run independently on all platforms. The standardization of Docker containers have popularized their use as they can deployed and executed on multiple platforms. This mechanism and architecture frees developers from the hassles of setting up specific environments and the complications that arise from running different types of applications on different operating systems and environments. More information on Docker can be found here.
  • Tomcat –
  • Spring –
  • Jersey –
  • Node JS Platform –
  • REST (Representational State Transfer) –
  • JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) – JSON is a lightweight technology used for data exchange between two computers written in JaveScript notation. As the data between the host and the server can only be transferred in text,  the browser converts the JavaSript code into JSON before sending it to the server and vice versa. Similarly, the text can be convert back to JavaScript as well. More information on JSON can be found here.

Cloud Infrastructure

  • Apache Mezos – A cluster manager that facilitates resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications and systems. Apache Mezos exposes APIs that applications can use for resource management and scheduling.
  • AWS AZ (Availability Zones) –
  • AWS Regions –

 

Networking

  • VPN (Virtual Private network) – A secure connection between two computers or two networks. A VPN connection can be established over the public Internet. Although the connection is over the Internet, teh VPN establishes a secure tunnel on the Internet to secure the communications between two end points. VPN is used commonly to connect two cloud networks, e.g. connecting a private cloud with a public cloud network.
  • Direct Connect – This refers to a dedicated network connection between two networks. Unlike a VPN, a Direct Connection is on a dedicated line rather on a public network such as the Internet.
  • VPC (Virtual  Private Cloud) – An AWS specific terminology that refers to a logically separate and private network that one can use to host their cloud and systems.

Caching Servers

These servers are used to cache files that are frequently used in the cloud environment thus preventing more trips to the database.

 

Database Services

 

  • AWS RDS – This is an AWS relational database service. A relational database can be used for traditional applications that require a relational database structure and where transactions require complex queries and joins.
  • AWS Redshift – This is Amazon’s peta-byte data warehousing solution.
  • AWS DynamoDB – A NoSQL database that can be used to store structured and unstructured data.
  • AWS ElasticCache – Provides in-memory caching service where non-persistent data can be stored for faster access.

Public Cloud Services

  • Microsft Azure –
  • Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) – As one the pioneers in the cloud market,  AWS offers numerous web services to build a wide range of digital and traditional web based solutions. AWS is used by many industry heavyweights including Zillow, Netflix, etc. AWS provides services related to compute (servers), storage, networking, databases, Big Data, Identify management,  security, IoT, various development toolkits, web load balancing, deployment and configuration tools, and many other services.
  • Rackspace –
  • Oracle Cloud (Name?) –

 

Application Services

Amazon Elastic Transcoder – Transcoding refers to converting one media format from one to another depending on the types of user device and application (e.g. mobile phone, tablets, browser, etc.) Media files can be placed in S3 storage in various buckets and the output can also be output to S3. An API is provided for allowing the use of this service programmatically.

 

 

Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

 

  • Akamai –

 

Source Code Management and Control

  • Git – A Source Code Management and version control system used by a majority of developers worldwide. It’s an open source and free system.
  • Github – A web based source code repository used by millions of users worldwide for their projects. Users can store code privately or share it publicly when working on open source or other open projects. Users who work on public projects can use the repository for free while those working on private projects pay a small monthly fee.

 

AWS Services

  • Elastic Beanstalk – This is an orchestration service that allows easy deployment of applications in the AWS environment. Developers simply have to upload the application to AWS and provides certain application information after which Elastic Beanstalk provisions the required AWS infrastructure transparently. The Elastic Beanstalk works with various application languages and paradigms that include programming languages such as Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Go, etc. and web containers such as Tomcat, Passenger and Puma. It also supports Docker containers. Once deployed Elastic Beanstalk orchestrates between services such as S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancers, etc.
  • AWS Management Console – A management console is used to manage and deploy various AWS services.
  • AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) –

 

applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch)

 

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January 26, 2017 by CIO's Digital Library

Reference Cloud Architectures and Services

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Hybrid Architecture

This configuration allows enterprises to connect their private cloud network with a public cloud network. Enterprises can use their private cloud network to host enterprise applications and databases and can connect to the public cloud for other services. Connections can be direct or over a VPN over the Internet.

 

Content Management Systems Architecture

This architecture is suited for use cases that are heavy on serving content. Due to this architecture being heavy on content, extensive caching is used including static content caching, and database query caching.

 

E-Commerce Architecture

The primary components of this architecture typically include:

  • Web / Application servers
  • Database servers
  • File servers
  • CDN
  • Payment gateways

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IaaS Services Architecture

The following are typical services that organizations contract and manage in their IaaS Cloud Computing portfolio.

  • Servers –
  • Storage –
  • Virtualization –
  • Operating Systems –
  • Network services –

PaaS Services Architecture

  • Database management –
  • Business analytics engine –
  • User management –
  • Identity and Access management –

 

SaaS services architecture and portfolio

  • Financials applications (e.g. Oracle or Workday) –
  • Sales and Marketing (e.g. Salesforce.com) –
  • Product Lifecycle management –
  • Project and Portfolio Management –
  • Procurement –
  • Service management –
  • Supply Chain and Logistics –

 

January 25, 2017 by Cloud Computing Enterprise Architecture

Significance of Master Data Management for the Digital Enterprise

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What is Master Data Management?

Master Data Management refers to the processes, technology, and overall governance methods related to ensuring the quality and overall integrity of key enterprise data. With the streamlining and integration of enterprise business processes, the underlying data and meta data needs to be consistent. This also requires alignment of key master data across various enterprise systems. In a typical large enterprise data related to products, customers, suppliers, orders, employees, etc. is stored in multiple systems that includes ERP systems, legacy applications, data from social media platforms, IoT devices and sensors, new cloud applications, native digital apps, and so on. As number of data sources increase, it is all the more important to ensure consistency of information shared across various business processes.

The quality of data has ramifications on business intelligence, dashboard reporting, decisions made based on those reports and intelligence, etc.

Significance of MDM in the Digital Enterprise

With the emergence of the digital economy where more than unifying the business processes in its value chain, an enterprise also connects to external partners in a broader ecosystem, the flow of data into the core of the enterprise requires that the data in cleansed and in accordance with the policies and technical formats of the enterprise systems. So, as an example, if the thousands of suppliers that provide retail data on products that have to be loaded on enterprise systems, the data must all conform to certain guidelines and have all the required attributes before they can be uploaded in the central enterprise repositories.

  • Complexity of digital business processes

As enterprises connect with partners and other stakeholders in broader and deeper business ecosystems, applications become more complex along with associated data.

  • Complexity of Enterprise Architecture

As the domain of the enterprise architecture expands to include systems and data on the cloud, it further necessitates understanding the lifecycle of data. Such complex systems configurations require more data stewardship and governance processes and rules to ensure integrity, security, storage, archival, and other data management issues.

  • Data Analytics and Big Data

The wider adoption of Big Data and analytics is further necessitating consistency of data across various business domains and processes to ensure analytics software and systems can do the right matching and deliver useful business insights to the enterprise.

  • Compliance Pressures

With increased compliance and regulation requirements in certain industries such as health and life sciences, government, etc. data stewardship and governance issues are becoming increasingly important.

 

— End

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January 20, 2017 by Data Management

Cloud Migration Resources (Case Studies, Methods, and Processes)

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The following lists some of the resources that can be helpful in planning for cloud migrations. This list is continuously updated. You can also read about cloud migration strategy here.

AWS Migration Sources

 

Cloud Migration Best Practices

 

Cloud Migration Case Studies and Examples

 

Cloud Migration – Methods and Processes

 

Cloud Migration – Professional Services

 

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January 17, 2017 by CIO's Digital Library Cloud Migrations