Opening up all cliches on Business and IT alignment. Yesterday, I had a discussion on how IT really could solve business problems. One of the statements that came by was that we simply needed to listen to the business in order to understand what IT has to do. This is, in my opinion, a bit too simplistic.

In the past few years we learned that IT and Business aren’t two different parts of an enterprise. Business processes are not just supported by Information Technology, but IT became part of the workflow of most organizations. Therefore the ‘you ask, we deliver’ mentality is not effective anymore. And therefore Business and IT ‘alignment’ is not a goal anymore. We need to entangle, fuse and combine.

Alignment still gives us the thought that Business and IT are two completely different things. This is no longer the case. IT became part of the Business. And only when this principle is understood, IT can become a driving force within (and not behind) any organization. As discussed in previous posts, this is the new vision of the CTO.

New technologies like BPM, SOA and other middleware solutions are based on this principle. But not always implemented. When integration of different ‘silos’ in organizations becomes pure technical, success is a guess. Determining the success factors for the entire organization (both for the Business as well as IT) is critical.

What do you think? And can you give me an example of projects in the IT domain where the success factor is a lottery?

Today Oracle will release it’s next generation in Business Process Management, the BPM Suite 11g. One of the things that stand out, at least in buzz words, is the fact that it supports something called ‘Social BPM’. So what is this and what will it do for the business?

In one of the Oracle BPM WebCasts, Dan Tortorici and Peggy Chen, respectively responsible for BPM and Enterprise 2.0 Product Marketing, tell us where the bridge is to be found between Enterprise Collaboration and Process Modeling. The new approach shows us how to create an Agile framework to facilitate fast changes within the organization while effectively combining formal workflows with informal collaboration.

In traditional application environments, we think in ‘silos’: separated departmental systems that contain specific information. Business Process Management and SOA approaches to architecture helps us to combine those data and effectively create a flow that supports business processes that depend on multiple silos. Using this approach we can steer on the process, instead of information and data. When we take a deeper look inside these processes, we learn that there is one more element missing: ad-hoc changes to the process, human interaction.

In the ‘classic’ approach to BPM human interaction is merely a task, what the people do behind the buttons is merely described as an action, not a process. And this is where collaboration and user interaction comes in. Using the possibilities of the Oracle WebCenter Suite, Social BPM focusses on combining business processes and user interaction.

Working from a user centric design model, Social BPM offers the possibilities for the end-user to create, monitor and participate in business processes, al within the WebLogic Collaboration Suite. This new element in the Enterprise 2.0 philosophy adds an enormous, in my opinion, breakthrough: we stop using information statically but combine the dynamic of user interaction with the structure of Business Process Modeling.

The User Experience is now total: we have insight in our dashboard on the complete process, which participants we have, what information needs to be combined and where our process is headed. This gives us, possibly, the ultimate user interface on business applications. All data needed to effectively proceed in the business can be combined with the process, which can be modeled within the same user interface.

Today at 19.00 CET is the official launch of the Oracle BPM Suite 11g.

In recent times, everything changes. Less money available, more functionality required and competition in most markets gets harder because of pricing competition and tougher selection by customers. This can also be seen as a challenge.

Since the early 1980’s Iterative Software Development is evangelised, but still the most widely used approach is the waterfall model. Technology has taken a quantum leap in the past years, but most technology implementations are still using tech from decades ago. Software design is still done in the IT department. And the list goes on.

In the 2008 and 2009 IBM CEO Study’s Change has been identified as the mayor challenge for IT related organizations. Only to be overtaken in the 2010 CEO Study by complexity of systems. Today’s market space challenges us to create more complex and innovating solutions, in a short timeframe.

When markets get tough, creativity is the one part that can separate businesses, making sure gaining market is achieved, even in stressful times. The time to change IT strategies is right now, especially now.

Last years’ acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation created lot’s of new opportunities for both Oracle and it’s Partners. There was, obviously, a lot to do about the MySQL Database, Java and other Sun technologies like the Solaris operating system. But there also is this great, small virtual machine inside the acquisition, VirtualBox.

As I’ve written yesterday, Oracle released a new version of VirtualBox into the wild yesterday. Offering some new features that makes the tool a lot more professional and mature. These new features, and the complete offering of Oracle technology could create some great new opportunities for the Oracle corporation and Oracle Partners.

One of the tough thing with Oracle technologies is that the fast majority of it can be complex to install, implement and configure. For demoing purposes, this can be demanding on the workforce and overhead involving these kinds of actions in most sales projects demanded today. Oracle’s VirtualBox could simply change that, and more.

The new version of VirtualBox offers support for the OVF standard for virtual machine images and configurations. This means that a single machine, once created, can be installed in multiple virtual machines. Oracle could offer images for it’s mostly used technologies online, and in that way offer a non-install, quick setup, way to deploy, demo and develop on Oracle Software.

Think about it. You want to know more on how a particular piece of software could change your business and all you need to do to check it out is simply download an image and run it. Things could become so much more simpler. At this moment there’s one OVF image available on the OTN network, one for the Hands-on-Labs on Database and Java development. It’s an image running Oracle Enterprise Linux, Database 11gr2, TimesTen In-Memory Database, XMLDB, SQLdeveloper, Application Express, Jdeveloper and lots more. But there could be more specific and leaner machines available.

Besides demoing and developing, what would other great opportunities be from offering VirtualBox and virtual images for the Oracle Corp and it’s Partners?

Somewhere in 2006 I started using VirtualBox for desktop virtualization. There where a few reasons for that choice back then. Although the software wasn’t the perfect companion, it was actually the only freely available virtualization software available for my operating system of choice (at that moment in time Mandriva Linux). But it was also actually just what I needed. Not able to afford high-end hardware and expensive software the small footprint of VirtualBox was great.

Through the years I’ve seen some changes in VirtualBox, all making it more and more a ‘mature’ part of automation and more like the competition out there. In the beginning days of my Mac OS X experience (which is still going on) I started using WMware’s Fusion, but soon switched back to VirtualBox. The user interface has always been clear and simple, the way I like things and I could simply do enough with it.

For businesses, VirtualBox just might be the answer they where looking for. A simple and widely supported virtual machine that now offers a lot of functionality that you might expect from a modern virtualization system. All main host OS’s are supported, and a wide variety of guest systems are added in each version.

The new version of VirtualBox, 3.2 which is the first full Oracle labelled version, is developed with a main focus on three areas: performance, power and platforms. This means that the performance of the system will improve, there’s more added power to serve those heavy machines we want and there are more supported platforms available (including an experiment on hosting OS X machines).

Some of the important new features can be found in the new storage I/O, Remote Video Acceleration, Multiple Virtual Monitors, a Virtual SAS Controller, Online Snapshot Merging (!) and the hosted OS X environment.

I’m really looking forward to some of the business implementations of VirtualBox. Is it still in use mainly in customer environment, running desktop software? Or can you provide me with an example where real servers are being hosted using VirtualBox? And how can the new features help organizations in the VM world?

Update: on june 2nd Oracle released the maintanance version of VirtualBox 3.2: release 3.2.2 adresses some main bugs and adds more stability. Good to see how fast this is going.

Update 2: On june 7th another version was made: 3.2.4. Several minor bugs and regressions where fixed.

In the may 2010 edition of Profit Magazine (an Oracle issued magazine on executive decisions and application implementation) Minda Zetlin (Tech-author, journalist and pro-speaker) writes a very interesting article on the changing insights in IT for corporations, and the CTO role in particular. One of the main focusses is the momentarily change from the servicing IT department, looking into ways of supporting the business, to the innovators, leading business changes using modern technologies.

Technology based corporations use this initiative for quite a while now. Looking at organizations which core business is tech-related, such as software companies or computer vendors, we learn that technology can make a difference and that the innovation in technology is their very reason for survival. But for organizations that simply use IT in order to support their business, this is a more recent change.

The progress of technology is, especially in the last decade, more and more focussed on new possibilities and innovative insight can help organizations deliver faster, more precise and in new ways. ‘You ask, we deliver’ can no longer be the statement for winning corporations.

But these new insights require vision. Simply because the road of technology isn’t paved with clear bricks and especially the creative mind will be needed to combine and create new possibilities for the market and the organization.

In her article, Zetlin states that the main difference between the modern CTO and CIO role is that the CIO has a top-down approach, looking how information technology can help business objectives and the CTO looks the other way around, how can technology push business into new directions, creating new possibilities.

There are some obvious examples of organizations that used this approach to gain more market share and new business. Think about developments like Amazon’s Kindle and various department store’s online shops. Do you know an example on how technology helped non-technology organizations forward? Created new business opportunities with vision and creativity.

When we take a look at designing complex IT systems it’s never easy to draw a line. When is a design functional enough and when do we have enough information to start building. When we take a look at Agile Software development, we have to make sure we don’t over-do it, that we stop when it’s enough.

Let’s use some simple guidelines to make sure we do just the right thing.

Toss away your template. Most large organizations use extensive templates where every design has to make use of. Toss it, you won’t need it. I know, a pretty bald statement, but essentially true. Most templates are build to cover everything and are not designed to be flexible. QA teams check if you have fully filled the information given in the template. But are they the peers needed for your design?

Know your peers. Who are the people that you design for? Are it the developers, or the end users? Is it the architecture or QA department? These insights can tell you what the design has to tell, and what not. For instance, developers who work in conjunction with the end users can work with much less information than we might need to write down in order to make the maintenance department happy. Unfortunately, not all designs are just for one group of people, it might be a mix.

Summarize. For every element in your design write down a small summary. This helps your peers to justify if the information is relevant to them themselves. This helps further understanding of the content and certainly helps making sure your peers know what part of the design is essential for them to read, and what is there for other peers. Add a guidance in reading in the beginning of the document, list what element is meant for what actor.

Using the above we can make sure actors within our project (and sometimes even outside your project) have clear insight in what information is relevant to them.

Do you have other measures we can take in order to achieve this? Let us know.

We have discussed the must of Business and IT working together, enabling instead of passively facilitating. We have talked about Enterprise Architecture and an approach where it goes wrong and just becomes an documentation obstacle and a way to ´hedging´ for the IT department and why we need to set a measurable Agility parameter inside the Architecture process. But in what way can we make sure Enterprise Architecture simply becomes a part of Business Strategy

There are several studies conducted on the matter, where the work of Ross, Weill and Robertson is very noticeable, where the Enterprise Architecture is mainly portrayed as a way to make business strategy possible, or as a part of business strategy. None of the studies I´ve seen show how or even if Business Strategy can be the outcome of Enterprise Architecture, more than a facilitator or a profile in which Business Strategy can evolve. (do you guys know any other studies or examples of this nature?)

In previous posts on the topic I made the wrong assumption that Enterprise Architecture was in fact an activity within the IT department, and therefore I contradicted myself. These things should never be in the sole propriety of IT, but a mutual adventure for the entire Business (including the IT department). But there’s also a change that this happens too much. Is this the reason why EA in the real live becomes an overacted documentation stream?

When we take a look at the title of this post, Enterprise Architecture as Part of Business Strategy, I come to think that in real live it’s the other way around. Business Strategy as Part of Enterprise Architecture. When Agility becomes one of the measurements of Enterprise Architecture it would be possible to create a both-win situation. Where the overall Business Strategy really gets input from the Enterprise Architecture and where Enterprise Architecture actually will help the overall Business Strategy. Your thoughts, please.

Software Development takes time. At least, that is what we hear all the time (or do we tell our end users this?). Software Development frameworks however, are getting more and more time efficient in the last few days. Even ‘old’ development frameworks like Oracle Designer can be extremely fast, if you know what you are doing. An overview of what the suppliers are saying: Microsoft .NET is there to rapidly build great applications, Oracle ADF takes your Java EE productivity to the next level, Oracle Application Express is a rapid web application development tool, Ruby-on-Rails, etc, and we can go on and on.

Development tools are not the issue anymore, any tool can go fast and are developed to deliver rapidly.

So, let’s just deliver as fast as we can. When we take a look at the end-user base of the applications we develop, they’re likely to vote ‘yes’ on whether we should deliver fast and imperfect (with the annotation that we will deliver better software every cycle) or we should deliver in a long time, but better. So where’s the balance?

Developing software is difficult, of course that’s why we are ably to make a living off it, but not impossible. The great challenge is to develop what the end-users wants, or needs. But we can’t guess that. That’s why extensive and expensive courses have to been taken in order to better understand what the end-users actually need. But I say: if we can deliver software as fast as we can do now, why should we document and analyse beforehand, if we can just show them?

(I know, another open door…)

IT and Business have, in the practise, different objectives, which is strange: Business and IT both are there to make an organization work as one whole, one objective and one mindset should be the main criteria. In the real-world a lot of organizations don’t have this luxury, they work separately, and therefore they work as different organizations.

In my previous post, I stated that it’s a sad, sad thing when projects are exclusively in the IT department. And, of course, this was forcing open doors and both on Twitter and Ome-B.nl itself some comments on this post where made. And understandable. This is, for people in our Business pretty scary. But beware: when I talk about facilitating, I don’t mean to say that we can’t have a proactive attitude towards this. When I say projects shouldn’t be in the IT department, I don’t state that they should be in the departments of business itself, it should be a conjoined project.

A common situation is that the IT department has a bad name inside an organization. Delivering working software later than planned (or just late, because they plan very careful), not the right software or are just very expensive. Another thing can be that IT departments just are simply overworked, because they have to keep old systems running, business changes more rapidly than they can manage, and expenses are raising. Therefore a lot of organizations have departments that simply develop their own software, which creates the same problem over and over again.

If we could change or break this cycle, we could make IT and Business alignment (or even IT and Business Fusion) really work. The IT department focused on delivering and facilitating change in a rapid scale, Business working on the projects they need to be focussed on. IT as an active ‘partner in crime’ and as the innovative factor within the organization. Therefore create a more cost-effective and solution-effective organization. Not to mention more happy people and better business. Please be Seated, but participate actively.