(5 votes, average: 9.4 out of 10)
Loading ...Legacy Modernization in Government
A previous era saw the shift to legacy mainframe systems designed, developed, installed and maintained by a then new generation trained or self-educated in these technologies. We are now facing a major skills gap in maintaining these technologies. The Baby Boomers who are retiring in large numbers are leaving with their knowledge. It is essential that the new generation of IT professionals be cross trained… new, younger people in the legacy technologies hand in hand with Web 2.0 (see Mainframe computing jobs vacant as the Baby Boomers who set up systems begin retiring with few educated to fill the spots http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sat-tech-jobs-ibmapr05,0,2110029.story).
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We are seeing the same thing today with the rise of Web 2.0. There is a new generation of people who understand and have been trained in Web 2.0 in all its facets – wikis, Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds, online communities, crowd sourcing and more are going to conceive, install and build the new Web 2.0 environments that will change the way the world works.
It is inevitable that Web 2.0 environments will support or displace the legacy mainframe systems. I’d like to highlight some of the issues that will be important in that transition.
I remember ‘back in the day’ when business started to move from paper-based accounting systems to computerized systems running first on mainframes and later on smaller computer systems. The migration path from one system to another involved keeping both going in parallel until the new environments proved stable and the organization adapted around it. I would suggest that conceptually both environments can be maintained in parallel during the move from legacy systems to Web 2.0 environments, as was done in the past, yet at a far faster rate now. Also it is important to understand that Web 2.0 requires organic growth that can take time in order to build the requisite communities. So the task is to plant seeds, nurture them and allow time to see them grow.
Citizens will increasingly expect more personalization, as well as a more responsive and agile government. Web 2.0 will create healthy competitive tension in government capable of democratizing a sector, meaning giving it back to the citizens, including them in its various processes. As citizens are experiencing major shifts in personalization, data control and accessibility through use of Web 2.0 technologies, businesses will also demand the same from government.
The recent earthquake in China and the use of social networking tools by citizens and their government during the crisis demonstrates the potential for change (see: http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_THE_QUAKE_ONLINE?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-05-18-13-00-37).
Watch for security issues. Web 2.0 sites are vulnerable to attack by ‘enemies of the state’ and other malicious interests
The move from legacy to Web 2.0-based systems will minimize, rationalize and make things more transparent, which will enable everyone to see the inefficient work of the public sector. e-government is capable of democratizing a sector, meaning giving it back to the citizens and including them in various processes
Governments, like every other employer, are desperate to attract and retain quality staff and ensure that employees work in an environment that is socially and technologically similar to their existing experience of the world. Therefore, instant messaging (IM) and wikis are must-haves for these new workers.
Public servants will increasingly expect a work environment that reflects their interests, networks and ways of communicating with their colleagues and peers. Web 2.0 technologies will influence the internal processes and cultures of agencies as much as interactions with citizens.
Engage stakeholders – citizens, internal users, and IT staff – with standardized Web 2.0 environments using well-founded change management tools to guide the transition out of legacy systems.
The ultimate destination of this transition will support the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and help excluded groups to take advantage of this information.
Envision government agencies with a high level of confidence regarding the identity of the online user. They will be able to place people in control of the transaction and protect their privacy. This is the online approximation of a person presenting a passport or other proof of identity document in-person to an agency.
(http://psnetwork.org.nz/blog/2007/04/29/5-principles-govt20/)
Several ideas were advanced from http://blog.executivebiz.com/government-web20-trends-for-2008/:
Due to the application of Web 2.0 in government, there will be increased interactions among users internal to the government and with citizens. Every interaction is an opportunity to learn of an unmet need, which is an opportunity to fuel innovation.
Enterprise mashups based on enterprise data are already an expectation among the workforce, but the deployment of this capability in government has been slow to take effect. As government organizations see how others do it, the deployment of secure enterprise mashup capabilities should accelerate.
Knowledge workers need ad-hoc and situational data, which is dynamically integrated in small amounts. As more government enterprises deliver secure mashup capabilities, the ability of the government workforce to efficiently and effectively accomplish their mission should increase, which should have a positive impact on retention, fueling additional benefits to the government’s mission.
It is well known that John Kennedy’s vision of getting to the moon was accomplished through the mobilization of thousands of engineers in a huge program using large mainframes. This can be done through the massive increases in computing power woven together with Web 2.0 collaborative tools. Imagine what could be achieved? Tackle something big to harness the power of Web 2.0, such as reinventing provincial health care delivery systems.
This article was written with the assistance of Howard Oliver, CEO of What If What Next™, he is an expert in Web 2.0.
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(4 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10) Loading ...Putting the Cart before the Horse
Cisco has come forward with a new vision for the data center. This may really be what I have maintained for the last 15+ years. The future will happen when the “computer is really in the network.”
This is Cisco’s first big shot in a war to control the data center of the future. This strategy, Cisco’s Data Center 3.0, envisions switches at the heart of the architecture with service regulated commodity status for the underlying technology. Essentially, the switches become the epicentre for running and controlling all IT decision-making. Cisco envisions the orchestration of infrastructure services from pools of servers, storage, and network resources over Gigabit Ethernet networks.
Cisco’s comments about the data center can be found in “Transforming Your Data Center One Project at a Time.” The following is a direct quote: “The emergence of the human network is raising individuals’ and organizations’ expectations about how technology, and their IT organizations, can support their objectives and evolving work styles. The data center IP network, as the platform that integrates, protects, and scales other IT resources, is central to the fulfillment of the human network’s promise. A process evolution from transactions to interactions is leading to the emergence of data centers built on network-based service-oriented infrastructures (SOI). SOI softens traditional server, storage, and network operation silos and allows well-integrated IT departments to treat their data centers as single functional units composed of interdependent, virtualized pools of storage, network, server, and application resources to better support applications and meet the challenges introduced by a more distributed interaction model across and between organizations.”
”Why is the network so integral to service-oriented infrastructure? According to IDC (Abner Germanow, “Why Is Networking Growing Faster Than the Rest of IT?” June 4, 2007), “Server virtualization, storage virtualization, and the federation of software applications, to name three examples, are all enabled by the network… As trends in computing evolve from consolidation back to scaling out and scaling up, the potential for the network to participate in the security, reliability, and management of that scale will rise.
”It’s not a bad vision, say industry analysts, and it is shared by server and storage manufacturers. Thanks to virtualization, the server’s role in the data center is increasingly being diminished. Virtual storage, virtual processors, and virtual memory, and maybe even virtual networks, are coming. The major server makers acknowledge that this is the future.
Cisco is saying that because everything converges on the network, network architecture will make the overarching decisions on resource allocation. In other words, the control plane is collapsed onto the network.
Here are some reference points. This announcement can be found at Data Center - Cisco Systems: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns708/networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html
This announcement shows that Cisco is committed to a full virtualization strategy, which I wrote about in my blog post “Does Virtualization Equal ‘Bullet Proof’?”: http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/01/
Essentially, we are moving away from the era of computing just being an amalgamation of devices in the network. This has been a big break from the status quo for the last 50 years. Cisco’s move is a clever attempt to avoid being displaced and relegated to commodity status.
Other major vendors are following suit. For example, today Nortel released the announcement “Nortel Virtualization Solution Simplifies Network for Instant, Secure Launch of Unified Communications”: http://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100239954&locale=en-US Nortel is trying to capture control of the virtual data center. Here is a quote from that release: “Nortel’s network virtualization solution enables enterprises and service providers to simplify their communications infrastructure by allowing resources to be made available in a collective manner and to be allocated as needed,” said Cindy Borovick, Research Vice President, Data Center Networks, IDC. “This maximizes the capabilities of their network, decreasing wasted resources. It also limits the equipment that needs to be deployed, delivering savings over the life of the solution. The integration with a server virtualization solution gives new options for end-to-end virtualization deployments.”
It will be interesting to see how all these initiatives play out. In later posts, I’ll cover how Microsoft, IBM, SUN, HP and others want to play in this space.
I have to apologize for not posting in the last few weeks, as I have been commuting back and forth from India. It is a very exciting place to work. My experiences there will be the focus for some Enterprise Insights in the future. Once I’m back from my next trip and recovered from another round of jet lag.
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(5 votes, average: 9.2 out of 10) Loading ...Software as a Service: My Own Story
I have a great example of using Software as a Service (SAAS) from my own day-to-day experience. One of the complexities that I have faced in doing consulting work has been the coordination between my desktop PC (which is used for most of my industrial-strength analysis and report writing), my laptop (which I travel with), and my Blackberry (which is with me all the time, much to the chagrin of my partner).
For the last few years, I have been using ISPs and getting my mail via POP services. Using an ISP with a POP service has been prone to breakdowns in getting my mail. For several years, I used Plaxo to synchronize between my desktop and laptop with limited success. Plaxo required me to synchronize my contacts, tasks and notes when I was back at the office through cradling my Blackberry. Normally I made changes to my schedule ‘on the fly’ and would not often get back to my office to do the necessary resynchronization between my Blackberry, desktop and laptop. So managing this whole thing was a real pain! Changes have to be done in real time across my desktop and mobile device to ensure reliable control over my activities.
Recently, I spent some time looking at other solutions: Google calendars, IMAP and other services. None of these approaches really meet the bill for me, particularly with the now-basic requirement to have real-time synchronization with my Blackberry, reliability and extreme ease of operation. None of those solutions offered real-time updates between my three work tools.
Well, I’ve finally found a solution that meets the bill in the coordination between my technologies that I use in my far flung and frenetic advisory work – a hosted exchange server.
Microsoft announced recently that it is launching into hosted exchange server services (reference http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-online.mspx). Microsoft Exchange Online is a hosted enterprise messaging solution that provides: “…capabilities to your users with a single sign-on, including e-mail, shared calendaring, and contacts. And it works with Active Directory to ensure that information is synchronized between your local and online directories, allowing your IT department to support a mix of hosted services and on-premise software. Additionally, Exchange Online supports business continuity and disaster recovery with cloud-based antivirus and spam filtering and high data center security standards.”
But the service does not offer a connection to my Blackberry. So after looking at this offering, I did not choose the Microsoft service and elected to go through one of their partners who provide services not only for hosted exchange, but also for BES (Blackberry enterprise server) (http://na.blackberry.com/eng/solutions/types/enterprise/ ).
There are a number of excellent service providers that deliver hosted exchange for a very low price with integration with Blackberry and all the security, backup and support needed. In addition, you can use services from these best-of-breed providers for SharePoint and other software services. Suggested vendors include 123Together, Intermedia and Rogers.
I have been very pleased with this switch from the problematic use of a POP3 and the constant hassle of trying to synchronize, many times unsuccessfully, between my own work and personal technology. One of the really great things is that it is a no-hassle solution at a reasonable price! Basic price is $9.95 per month for 500 MB of storage. For a small additional fee, I get full integration with my Blackberry.
This is a real boom for the SME sector. Individuals or small or medium-sized companies, who are contemplating using an exchange server and setting up a BES server should seriously think about using a hosted Exchange solution. It makes working on the fly economically possible.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Copyright is yet another place where Google and Microsoft are competing.
It was interesting to read two articles from CBC earlier this week that had the same website URL except one was dated the 12′th and the other the 13′th. The first had the headline “Canada a top copyright violator, U.S. group says” and the second “Business coalition opposes harsh copyright reform“.
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(3 votes, average: 8.67 out of 10) Loading ...Does Virtualization Equal ‘Bullet Proof’?
Virtualization has been available to the IT world for more than four decades, yet it has still not really taken off in the multi system environment. Many vendors are pushing this approach to deploying ‘flexible technology’, yet it still has not emerged beyond the ‘glass house’ of the data centers or server closets. IBM invented this technology 40 years ago and Microsoft is pushing this ‘old wine in new bottles’ with their ‘Dynamic IT’ moniker. The Microsoft approach is laid out in “Harnessing the Power of Virtualization for Dynamic IT”, January 21, 2008 by Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corporation at http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2008/01-21virtualization.mspx. Still this technology has not taken off for the enterprise. What are the reasons for this deployment stalemate? Some of the reasons and aspects of deploying these virtual technologies are:
- Complexity: This technology is too complex for IT architects, development or operations professionals to understand. They are used to developing systems that provide tangible functionality in a tangible way in environments that can be measured and managed. There are not many adequate tools to manage virtual and physical environments together.
- Security: Whenever anyone says the environments are very flexible and unconstrained, I know there is going to be a security and control problems. Today, it is so difficult to keep the ‘hatches batten down’ against security, compliance or confidentiality breaches in tightly controlled rigid environments. All the senior IT executives that I work with are under the ‘Sword of Damocles’ to keep their organizations safe and sound. Why would they want to move to this still to be proven technology that can potentially move their computing from the mainframes and servers to across their networks to all the desktops in their organization? Don’t you think there will be some ramifications if a major chunk of confidential client data gets mixed into some ones instant messaging or email stream?
- Unified Communications: A large part of this technology relies on unified communication systems. These are most often managed by telecoms without the full integration, and bandwidth and hardening required for industrial strength IT operations and consolidation of all the virtual resources across the organization. This represents a huge loss of control for IT.
While is true that there is great promise for virtualization, its’ time is still not quite here, except for data centre rationalization, storage farms and server consolidation. The dream of running all resources in a ‘big basket’ is not ready for prime time.
Again there is much promise in this technology that will make IT more cost efficient, responsive and flexible… More work is required to assure the IT buyer that this technology is very robust and secure. The underlying complexity and security management issues require better unified management, security and control technologies systems to make virtualization ‘bullet proof’. Enterprise customers really need something that can be taken for granted to make it feasible to run across their large operations.
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...Getting unified on UC a tall task
During an Avaya press and analyst breifing last week, which the networking vendor used most of to hype its unified communications platform, inquiries arose during the Q and A session about the many internal battles that have to be waged in order to implement such systems successfully. How do you get all department reps on the same page and agreeable to the concept of a newfangeld system that, depite the stated benefits on paper, will represent a considerable amount of time and effort around training and implementation?
The Avaya Canada executive charged with responding did his best by mentioning that a business must know its business before undertaking any large-scale technology implementation, and even managed to get a plug in for Avaya’s services and its resellers.
The discussion moved on to other areas, but the question seemed to hang in the air even after things had wrapped up. The fact is, there really is no answer to the question, other than by saying to those trying to move their firms to UC, put on your best diplomacy hat, be prepared for some potentially long battles with those who resist change, and do your best to get senior management on your side by clearly explaining the benefits, both operational and financial.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...We’re dependent on the “Intermittantnet”
If you’re wondering why there was a decrease in activity on the blogs today, it’s because our network connection was down. And then up. And then down again. E-mail was affected, as was almost all our other business processes. We were told it was a service provider issue. Isn’t it always. I’ll tell you one thing: out of all the disgruntled users that IT managers have to deal with, I’m glad they don’t have to deal with our writers and editors. We get downright grumpy.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Suddenly, Citrix isn’t so boring anymore
They’ve made a few acquisitions, but I wouldn’t have pegged Citrix as the likely contender to buy XenSource, the open source virtualization specialist. In fact, I didn’t see XenSource as being up for sale at all. Now it gets interesting.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Oops — no Cisco.com for you
At least Cisco can now empathize with IT managers and network admins whose facility management problems lead to site outages. Love the initial reader comments.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Cell phones? Not in my back yard
This past weekend my wife and I went up to her family cottage, and it was everything we hoped it would be: warm sunshine, plenty of swimming, good food on the barbeque and lots and lots of quiet. It made me instantly sympathetic to a group of Canadians who want to prevent Telus from putting up a cell phone tower near a rural valley in British Columbia.
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