Maintaining user interfaces is waste of money and out-dated

Does your company still want to build its own user interfaces of the customer web-sites? Do you have headaches about all these new devices popping up? Android? iPad? New versions of HTML, Flash, Silverlight and so on, to be supported? All those browsers to be supported? Different screen formats? CSS-complexities? steep tooling learning curves? Cumbersome software version control? Does full support of all those (versions of) user interfaces cost you more than the content to be exposed?

Well, the answer is: Don't build user interfaces anymore. From now on they are free, they arise from nothing at the cost of not a single dime - in fact at no cost at all - within days or even hours after you unlock your data. At a diversity you never could have dreamed of. This is no fairytale, but reality at this very moment.

Months before we - at Dutch Railways - published our mobile app to supply travel information, a full high quality equivalent was made available to the public domain by someone we didn't know and we didn't pay.

The world is changing rapidly. Witness this great momentum and be part of it. After watching the video below your conception of user interfaces will never be the same anymore. This is only the beginning...

Client Server versus Publish Subscribe

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is an asynchronous pattern which can be implemented with a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) mechanism. Pub/sub is basically a decoupling mechanism in a landscape of communicating systems. Not only the technology of the communicating systems is decoupled, but also presence in time of the communicating systems is decoupled and even locations are decoupled as there is no endpoint resolution applicable.

There are lots of products implementing the pub/sub mechanism. The video below is about OpenSplice DDS (Distributed Data Systems), but that is of no importance. The reason I republish this video in this posting is the fact that the guys of OpenSplice did a splendid job in explaining pub/sub and the advantages compared to the client/server pattern.

Enjoy and get unlighted!

Proudly presented...

A respected colleague of mine explains how Dutch Railways (Nederlandse Spoorwegen) has been "greening" the IT by eliminating lots of physical servers by virtualizing them.

There is not only an environmental and financial benefit to this move to virtualization, it also creates the possibility to offer self-service hosting facilities on demand to our consumers, reducing platform delivery from weeks or months to hours or even minutes, at no effort.

[Click the little arrow]

Start with "Why"

How great leaders inspire action.

Great talk by Simon Sinek:

All organizations and careers function on 3 levels. What you do, How you do it and Why you do it. The Why is your driving motivation for action. The Hows are the specific actions that are taken to realize your Why. The Whats are the tangible ways in which you bring your Why to life.


The problem is, most don’t even know that Why exists.

Another great document on Cloud Computing

I recognize a lot of cynicism about Cloud Computing. People see it as a buzz word, which it is, and for this reason play down this technology trend. I think CIO's should not be happy when this happens in their office.

I am not going to explain or evangelize Cloud Computing in this blog posting. What I will do is refer to a downloadable powerpoint presentation by Pat Helland.

Pat Helland remade a paper of Berkeley's called Above the Clouds. Pat has made this document to an easy approachable yet comprehensive powerpoint presentation.

Every CIO dealing with applications in datacenters should be aware of what Berkeley try to tell us. I am really impressed by Berkeley's paper and Pat Helland's powerpoint sheets.

The 8 questions Berkeley answers in the paper are:

• What is Cloud Computing, and how is it different from previous paradigm shifts such as Software as a Service (SaaS)?
  

• Why is Cloud Computing poised to take off now, whereas previous attempts have foundered?
  

• What does it take to become a Cloud Computing provider, and why would a company consider becoming one?
  

• What new opportunities are either enabled by or potential drivers of Cloud Computing?
  

• How might we classify current Cloud Computing offerings across a spectrum, and how do the technical and business challenges differ depending on where in the spectrum a particular offering lies?
  

• What, if any, are the new economic models enabled by Cloud Computing, and how can a service operator decide whether to move to the cloud or stay in a private datacenter?
  

• What are the top 10 obstacles to the success of Cloud Computing—and the corresponding top 10 opportunities available for overcoming the obstacles?
  

• What changes should be made to the design of future applications software, infrastructure software, and hardware to match the needs and opportunities of Cloud Computing?

The importance of semantics mediation

See here how to mediate semantics.

Cloud Computing: 16 corrections

What is Cloud Computing?

James Governor posted a list of 15 statements that explain when it's not Cloud Computing.

But is he right?

Monitoring services

In my previous posting I suggested to use proxies to pull services into a controlled environment.

One of the Progress guys who are doing a job for us was adverted by a foreign colleague to this posting. He recognized that my idea matched exactly with one of their products. I am not involved in Progress in any way, but the Flash demo he made is interesting enough to be shown on my weblog. Watch this demo here, it's very worthwhile.

You can download a free trial version of the product and a Forrester white paper here.

Again, I am not involved in Progress, but I am just charmed by the products. If any other SOA-tools supplier has some nice Flash demo's or animations on Youtube, I'll be more than happy to also present them illustratively here on my blog.

"Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects"

In this video presentation (Silverlight) Pat Helland demystifies the near future of Information Technology. Whether it concerns the evolvement of processor chips, software or data centers, Pat aptly and pleasantly explains what we can expect in the next couple of years.

The video was recorded at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona last November (2007). I personally enjoyed the honor to attend the same presentation by Pat Helland at the Microsoft campus in Redmond last January (2008) as final part of the Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP), which Microsoft offers to Enterprise Architects in the Netherlands.

Believe me, Pat is cool! Pat is very very cool!

[Click the picture]


Powerpoint, video and MP3 are available for download (I watched the video on my iPod in the train traveling to work).

Which ESB do you choose?

Which product would you choose as your ESB? This is what I found on YouTube. Watch, compare and make up your mind... (I know, I know, it is only presentation)

[Sonic: "Why the Enterprise Service Bus"]



[IBM: "IBM WebSphere Enterprise Services Bus Introduction"]

What is a Mashup?

As I expect to start blogging more frequently about mashups as a web 2.0 extension to SOA, the least thing I could do is explain what a mashup actual is. Well, I am not going to explain it myself because David Berlind, executive editor at ZDNET, can do the job much better...

My three cents

To reach your customers via the cloud (it is where millions of your prospects are), start focusing on delivering your content and offerings via your own API's in stead (beside) of building websites. And allow your marketing employees and customers to build their own mashups. Just like the little Google mashup on my blog page ("My Three Cents"). This mashup got API's to complex algorithms - running in Googles secured data centers somewhere in the cloud - that calculate my incentives and manage the payments that should make me rich.

Or what about the video above that mashes up with this blog entry and has an API to a giant video server infrastructure "somewhere".

Mashups are so much more powerful and pervasive than just a website; potentially it can spread your business like a "virus" among your prospects as I illustrated with my train ticket mashup. Think of what fantastic mashups creative anonymous web-hobbyists and students could (will) build with our API's to our ticket selling-, delay state- and reroute applications. Just imagine what the potential could be for your business.

About another view on SOA and selling train tickets

On this blog I occasionally mention two perspectives on SOA; one is the composite application construction perspective and the other is the business organization perspective. Both perspectives have an internal viewpoint; they look inside the organization. It's the inside-out approach to SOA. I neglected another approach to SOA which I now think is at least as important, if not more: the outside-in approach to SOA. (Mind: I am not talking about the outside-in design of services, which is something different)

With the growth of Internet, or the "cloud", organizations are surrounded by high quality pervasive connectivity which lies global wide in the hands of individuals (employees, customers) at no cost. Until now I did not blog much about this giant technology leap of the last decade. But I no longer can ignore this evolvement as a highly valid justification to introduce SOA, outside-in.

Let me confess, I was triggered by this book...

The book is set up around the case of a manufacturer of popcorn makers. One of its employees found out - via his personal weblog - that there existed a huge market for popcorn makers that got the logo of the buyers favorite sports team printed on it. The authors of the book talk about "shadow IT" as a kind of home-brew IT at the edge of the organization managed by employees in contrast to "hub IT" in the center of the organization managed by the IT department. The authors stress not to ignore this shadow IT, as I did, but to promote and support it. They supply rules, tell the reader how to put these rules to work, and they provide some real life examples. They show the very, very recognizable resistance, scepticism and pitfalls and how to overcome these challenges. In essence it's about supplying Web services based API's on the core systems to support light weight mashup code distributed widely on the Internet. Every site applying the mashup code automatically changes into a selling channel.

This video shows a playlet of a part of the fictive case in the book.



Of course opening up your applications with a SOAP-based API doesn't make an SOA. But what is interesting is the approach the authors chose to evolve to a mature SOA: it doesn't start with rethinking structure and governance, but with allowing and even promoting some sort of chaos! For the sake of new business revenue and business innovation...

A (not too) fictive example

I tried to jump from the case in the book to my real life working environment. What has selling popcorn makers in common with people transportation by train? More than you would think.

Buying a ticket

We (Dutch Railways) want more people on our trains. We attract people on the train by offering clean and comfortable trains and pleasant stations. But everybody knows that selling something works best by making buying as easy as possible. So getting people on the train can best be achieved by making buying a ticket as easy and convenient as a few mouse clicks at home (or on a mobile PDA or laptop). The tag cloud on our website even shows clearly that many visitors are searching the site for buying tickets ("kaartjes kopen"). Unfortunately however, there is no possibility to buy tickets online; the site directs to vending machines on the station as the most convenient way to buy a ticket (...!).

Opportunity!

Create Javascript (or Flash or whatever) code (to be embedded as a mashup on any website) with a SOAP call to a ticket ordering application including payment facilities (e.g. credit card payment).

Not printing but world wide delivery at home

Printing tickets on a home printer is susceptible to fraud (illegal copies), so why not send genuine tickets to the home address with an ordinary one day delivery service? In Holland this costs 44 cents per sending, with discounts for printed matter and discounts for bulk mail. If you decide to travel at hoc by train today, then just buy your ticket in the conventional way.

Japanese (or any other foreign) holiday travelers can buy their train tickets during preparing their visit to beautiful Holland. They receive their tickets at home and need not find their way to and on any "difficult" vending machines nor do they need to line up the queues at the selling counters.

Copy and paste selling points

The mashup code can be offered to relevant site owners to be embedded on their site (sports events, meeting room providers, hotels, airlines, theaters, travel agencies, discotheques, pop festivals, our own homepage, etc). The mashup code is freely to be distributed to virtually everyone, so every employee (or whoever) may promote the selling of tickets from his own private weblog or home page without the buyers leaving the webpage.

To promote the deployment of the ticket selling mashup, mechanisms could be created to pay incentives to owners of sites from which tickets are sold.

Ticket becomes collectors item

The ticket handling can be ad-supported. Just print advertisements on the tickets. Or the tickets can hold the logo of the football team from whose site the tickets are ordered. You may even have the possibility to upload you own image to be printed on the ticket in case you offer tickets as a "present" to your grandchildren in order to stimulate them to come over to you for a visit. Relevant travel information like platform numbers, time tables and change locations may be printed on the backside of the ticket or on an accompanying leaflet. To foreign travelers some extra guidance could be sent on traveling with the Dutch public transports in general. The train ticket may in the end turn into a collectors item like a stamp.

Win-win

To accomplish this, the tickets need to be printed on demand. That requires to contract a printing house to do this job. And we need to bulk mail the tickets every day. Another specialized service provider could be contracted to fulfill that job for us. This kind of service oriented organization is a win-win situation for all parties involved. The traveler gets his tickets delivered at home, the printing house and mailing service provider gain business revenue, and Dutch Railways is pervasive visible in the "cloud" with numerous selling points all over the world.

Commercial features

Some other easy to be implemented commercial features are:

• Offering targeted and ad-hoc discounts is a piece of cake which would hardly be possible using the conventional vending machines or selling counters
• Combined ticket selling for traveling and entrance to an event are easily possible

And last bus not least, possibly the number of vending machines can be reduced by offering discounts on online ordered tickets.

Why I Believe in the Unbelievable

At this moment in time we are the witnesses of the most overwhelming cultural shift in the world ever. Watch how our world has started an incredible change...

For more see http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/

SaaS explained

Are you not yet familiar with the idea of SaaS? Then watch this clip...

BPM already offered as SaaS

A few days ago I posted about the Marriage of BPM and SaaS. A fellow-blogger - Roeland Loggen, whom I happened to meet last Friday in Amsterdam and who happened to be a BPM expert - commented on my posting telling me that BPM is already offered as SaaS.

The links Roeland added are very interesting. See how e.g. Lombardi offers a process design tool as SaaS:

• Features

• Flash demo (with sound)

The resulting process models can be exported to be run by leading BPM execution suites.

I don't intend to push forward Lombardi. I just use this company as an easy showcase of my previous posting. I hope they don't care (...)

SOA Governance in a nutshell

SOA governance is about policies with regard to building as well as running SOA-based applications. This animation nicely explains SOA governance in a nutshell.

About the Truth

SOA sounds like music

I don't say SOA is easy. Neither is it easy to compose music, being the architecture of notes, tunes and instruments... nor is it easy to play the tones in a way that makes good sounding music.

Where SOA is the product of the composer, BPM is the product of the conductor having the music sound in harmony by orchestrating the individual musicians.

Canonical Data Model visualized

This animation perfectly shows the principles and benefits of a Canonical Data Model.

Guerilla SOA

Watch this amusing as well as instructive video-presentation of Jim Webber on "Guerilla SOA" where he presents some interesting conclusions about the future of messaging.

In a very entertaining presentation, Jim Webber debunks myths about the ESB concept and explains how a lightweight approach can yield real benefits without giving in to vendor pressure.

I doubt if he is right on all aspects, but there is some of his guerilla vision I tend to sort of agree with, as this previous post of mine testifies (pushing ESB to the infrastructure and make extensive use of WS-*).

He has published a bunch of other presentations.