Enterprise Architecture: Social CRM (Part Two)

I previously blogged on Social CRM and its effect on the enterprise ecosystem. Today, I will share human perspectives and things your IT executives need to noodle regarding social CRM...



OK, so on the chance that your enterprise is a leader and not a follower, you are probably thinking a lot about social media and how to integrate it into your enterprise architecture. One of the troubling aspects of social media is that the enterprise is no longer in control of the conversation for either its customers or even its employees. Does your enterprise have a strategy to empower coworkers by providing them with inspiration to exercise their calling or is it to stifle conversation?

We have all heard about the challenges of IT aligning with the business and how enterprise architecture requires listening to the business. The funny thing about this mantra is that enterprise architects now have a greater ability to directly listen to the conversations of customers and bypass the business and the overdistillation and misdirection that occurs. Sadly, the vast majority of enterprise architects are focusing on anything that matters to the customer.

So, its time for enterprise architecture to show leadership when it comes to social media but the best example of leadership isn't in hiding behind the corporate veneer but to figure out how to remove barriers from allowing outsiders to talk with insiders. Leaders in the social media space have realized that real leadership requires you to acknowledge that you are a human being first and a leader second.

Much of the mantra of leadership within large enterprises occurs through the one-way flow of information to their target audience. This requires not just changes in culture related to awareness of capitalism, but the elimination of senses of class and rank within the enterprise. Does the customer care if you are a manager, director or VP or do they care to simply find someone who can solve their challenge?

On too many occasions, whenever a new concept emerges in the marketplace, enterprises immediately run out and hire the boutique consultancy of the day to have them create a strategy. In the new world, this is probably the biggest mistake you can make. Don't outsource thinking around social media, but instead figure out ways to embrace it. What prevents each and every member of the enterprise architecture team from making social media personal to them? Wouldn't your strategy be much better if you understand social media from the perspective of the user...

Enterprise Architecture: Alternatives to Outsourcing

Many IT executives have given up on their employees well-being and believe that the only way to save money is to pursue the path of outsourcing without considering other alternatives. Let's look at how their thinking may be flawed...



As an employee of a large enterprise, I run across lots of employees who have a variety of backgrounds within IT. Some have achieved their bachelor's degree while working and others stayed the more traditional path of going to college right after high school. Some have pursued Master's degrees while others have pursued technical certifications. Some were graduates of computer science programs while others have majors in more esoteric topics such as biology and english literature. Collectively speaking, I asked several individuals in various human resource capacities to tell me whether the performance of a particular demographic as measured by the annual review process favors one group over another and the answer was not mathematically provable.

The challenge faced in large enterprises is less about technical aptitude and more about the ability to understand the business and its particular challenges. Each corporation has its own challenges when it comes to methods for communication, cultural attitude, willingness to be leaders or followers within their vertical and even what it truly values above and beyond the stated requirements of a job description. None of this can be learned in a university setting.

When I worked for my employer in the late 80's, my salary was only $16,000 a year. I was fresh out of the United States Coast Guard with a high-school education. To be fair, I did have IT experience when in high-school. In those days, the work day was less than 40 hours. In high-school, I worked at Cigna in a department named Application Field Services which had two responsibilities. The first was to be technical support for when IT programmers got stuck and needed guidance, in essence they were the elite of the company. The second responsibility was to oversight into mainframe infrastructure. In this department, I had the opportunity to learn both hardware and software. In fact, I changed out many terminal controllers and even did minor electrical repairs on them. The interesting thing was I would start my work at 2pm and go all the way to 9pm, which essentially was a full-time job in IT while being in high school.

Anyway, someone recognized at an early age that I had the aptitude to be a good IT employee and gave me the chance. Imagine what would happen if America started harvesting all the IT talent that exists within the nations high-schools and start to create the same experience I had for them. The economic perspective says that the average outsourced developer in India from a major vendor such as Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys, etc is billed to the client in the range of $30 to $50 an hour. One needs to ask can you pay a local high school student $15 an hour to accomplish the same task.

The interesting thing is that on one hand, modern enterprises are looking for advanced degrees but on another hand, there are many high-school students that we all know of that are proficient languages such as Visual Basic and Java that could do a better job than many professionals. So, why are CIOs ignoring the basic economic principles. One perspective may say that it is too difficult to find these types of students. I say that the real challenge is in the fact that the majority of IT executives nowadays don't know true talent when they see it and prefer to remain blissfully ignorant. Maybe, they know that if their CEO even thought for a second along the lines of this blog that they would be immediately fired. After all, what does it say about a CIO who doesn't have the innate ability to recognize talent. Can't we all agree that this is job number one of leadership...

Enterprise Architecture: Missing Conversations about Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the latest hype where every software vendor, industry pundit and IT executive who practices management by magazine praises this new innovation, yet no one talks about what is missing. So, I will take the opportunity to share three things that I have been noodling about cloud computing that are not discussed elsewhere...



Elasticity: Cloud is sold as being able to grow and shrink capacity on demand. The challenge with this model is that much of the activities of shrinking and growing are somewhat manual in nature and involve putting a human in the middle. If my application is under severe load where it could benefit from having a few additional instances being spun up, what standards-based APIs would it use to communicate to the cloud to make the request? More importantly, since most applications are load-balanced, how would the cloud communicate to my load-balancing infrastructure that it should add new servers to the pool dynamically? Most of the conversation regarding cloud is about how to use APIs to reach into the cloud, but not about how the cloud can communicate back to critical infrastructure such as firewalls who could dynamically open access based on new IP addresses or even load balancers for that matter.

Compliance and Discovery: So, what happens if you have a running instance that just happens to be co-located on the same set of servers as an Al-queda application when the FBI decides to seize all the equipment? What happens if your backup is done in the cloud and it is on the same set of tapes as Bin-Laden's information when it is also seized by the FBI? What happens if you needed this backup because you live in Rhode Island where floods were occuring and you needed to recover but couldn't? Multi-tenancy isn't just a strict access-security concern, but could also pose discovery related challenges.

RefactoringOK, if you are in a large enterprise and are sick and tired of the software vendor community coming up with the latest approach to technology that requires you to rewrite enterprise applications from scratch for each new paradigm shift then raise your hand. We have already rewritten applications when we moved from mainframe to mini-computer to client-server to web-based to SOA and so on. The business is sick and tired of having to invest in this type of activity. While technologies such as Amazon Cloud, Azure and so on are cool for new applications, when will the conversation shift to refactoring? Who is noodling how I can incrementally take my mainframe COBOL application and move say just storage to the cloud without having to rewrite in a Java or .NET language? Are there any book authors noodling a manuscript entitled refactoring enterprise applications to the cloud? Can we have a healthy conversation on how to leverage many of the assets we already have invested millions in and figure out ways to harvest it? The cloud can be wildly successful if we put on our economic hats. The cloud needs to become less about technology and more about business value...