Tag Archives: ICC
Four Canonical Techniques That Really Work (Or Not)
Several years ago I had the fortunate opportunity to participate in a post-mortem study of a $100 million dollar project failure. No one likes to be associated with a project failure, but in this case it was fortunate since the size of the write-off was large enough that it forced the team to take a very hard look at root causes and not just do a cursory analysis. As a result we finally got to the heart of a challenge that has been plaguing data architects and designers for 20 years – how to effectively use canonical data models. (more…)
Who’s Fault Is It If Your Integration Factory Is Not Performing?
The CIO of GT Inc. (the fictitious name of a real company) met with his middleware vendor rep to deliver some depressing news.
“We established an outsourced factory delivery model two years ago using the productivity tools that you sold us and we made it our enterprise standard. The factory results however, are discouraging use of your integration platform. Projects are not getting approved by the business because of high costs, or else project teams are working around the standard and building hand-coded solutions. Did I make a mistake in buying your software?” (more…)
Are Function Points Useful For Data Integration?
Why does one software project cost twice as much as another? Is it because it is developing twice as much functionality as the other? If you contract with two system integrators, how can you tell which one is more productive? In a multi-year outsourcing arrangement, is your supplier getting more or less efficient year over year?
An enduring challenge in the software industry is establishing a standard unit of measurement that expresses the amount of business functionality in a given information system so that questions like these can be addressed. Most organizations have not adopted a formal measure, but of those that have, the most widely accepted measure is function points which were defined by Allan Albrecht in 1979[1]. But are function points an effective metric for integration projects? (more…)
Is IT Ready for Self-Service?
In response to a recent post where I suggested that Integration is a good place to start your self-service journey, readers responded with questions about whether IT is ready. Here is one of the comments: “For self-service to be successful requires the company to have the correct level of maturity both on the business and IT side, the correct structure and governance in place and an entity dedicated to guiding and promoting the organizations integration efforts.” (more…)
What Is The Cloud Really?
At a recent CIO Magazine executive dinner on Cloud and Innovation, the discussion topic for the evening centered on How IT Is Driving Business Innovation with Private Clouds. The discussion started (as they often do) with a round-table poll of everyone’s definition of “the cloud”. The responses from attendees included everything from the cloud business model (pay as you go), to who does it (outsource vs. insource), to service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), to ubiquitous and device-independent global access and finally to resource pooling and multi-tenancy environments. IMHO, none of these are the real defining characteristic of the cloud. (more…)
Why Is Integration A Good Place To Begin Your IT Self Service Journey?
There is no question that self-service information technology is a growing trend. John Haddad made a compelling case for the inescapable trend in his article No More Waiting Thanks To Self Service Data Integration. So if IT self-service is a fait-accompli, what can you do to get started? I suggest that integration capabilities are the best place to start for three reasons. I’ll save the most compelling reason to the end. (more…)
Demand Management Is An Oxymoron
I was delivering a presentation recently to a group of IT executives and one of the CIOs asked “The Integration Factory sounds great, but how do you manage backlog?” My response was, “There is no backlog so there is nothing to manage.” In lean terminology, a backlog of projects or change requests are work-in-process inventory and are considered waste; essentially an inventory of unmet needs. A lean factory strives to minimize WIP by using just-in-time techniques. (more…)
Your Biggest IT Security Nightmare – Non-Production Data
Everyone is worried about data security and privacy as they should be; for data to be trusted, users and management need confidence in not just knowing that data is correct, but also in knowing that it is secure and that access is permitted only in controlled situations. There is no shortage of security disaster stories, but I’m not worried about production data since it is at the heart of application management disciplines which, while still not perfect, have had 50 years to mature. This perspective is stated succinctly by Ronald Reagan when he spoke about the economy and said “I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.” (more…)
The Secret To Retiring Applications – Flawless Data Validation
Applications are retired (sunset or decommissioned) when they become dormant or read-only. This occurs as a result of mergers and acquisitions or through modernization efforts and is a natural part of Application Information Lifecycle Management. While the applications may be no longer needed, the data they contain cannot be discarded. As a result, many organizations have hundreds, even thousands, of defunct applications that are consuming budget dollars, taking up data center space, complicating IT management, and generally just getting in the way. The challenge is getting rid of applications without getting rid of the data which is tightly coupled to them. (more…)
Customer Centricity Comes Of Age With MDM
To build on my last blog article, the secret to customer relationships in a mass-market high-tech world is in the data. The data that banks have about their customers contains a wealth of knowledge that can be leveraged to deliver greater value and thereby capture a greater share of the customer’s wallet.
As described in this recent blog article: How Banks Can Use MDM To Increase Customer Share of Wallet, the enabling technology that is helping financial institutions execute a customer centric strategy is a multidomain master data management (MDM) system to create reliable and related business-critical data about customers, products, services, locations, employees and so on. (more…)