Jelly Side Up

SOA - It's a Journey not a technology

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:17:57 -0500

I had an interesting conference call with our management team from SHARE and Brenda Michelson, principal consultant for Elemental Links and Richard Soley, CEO of Object Management Group. The topic was about cooperative initiatives between the SOA Consortium and SHARE possibly starting at the February 2008 meeting in Orlando. Both Brenda and Richard are key players in the SOA Consortium which is a new SOA advocacy group comprised of end users, service providers, and technology vendors, committed to helping the Global 1000 successfully adopt SOA by 2010. In particular, Dr. Soley suggested he could help arrange a panel discussion session with key C-level managers who have actually implemented SOA. As a reference he pointed us to a similar panel session that he arranged for the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit this past June in Nashville. The panel discussion session features Nida Davis Roemer (CTO of Red Cross), Yoav Intrator (Chief Architect of Deusche Bank), and Surekha Durvasula (IT architect from Kohl's Department Store). You can listen to or download the
audio capture of that session, which I did. I found it very interesting and enlightening. They answer tough questions about What is SOA really all about? How do you measure success with SOA? SOA is not a reuse strategy - it is a business transformation strategy. SOA is not a technology or product, it is a journey. If you are doing anything with SOA, it is really worth the listen.

So the next question I have to solve is whether this will be well received at SHARE? So, anyone reading this who has an opinion, please chime in with your comments.

Baby Boomers - The Sticky Long Tail

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:39:07 -0500

Social software sites have noticed that there are a lot of baby boomers out there, and that they are not as flighty as the normal targeted younger customer. The article "The Graying of the Internet" - New York Times, 9/12/2007, points out that there are 78 million boomers. That is about three times the number of teenagers. Are they Internet users? Yes, most are. The estimate is that the number of Internet users over 55 is about equal to the number of Internet users between the age of 18 and 34. The boomers have some other interesting traits. They are willing to use social software sites, but not necessarily interested in the same topics as teenagers. They are also more likely to find a service or site that they like and stick with it rather than just flitting from fad to fad.

So what? As we look to deliver services through the web, we often worry about how that service will be received by the younger generation like students who are clearly consumers of our services. How do we look at services we design for employee consumption? How many of our employees fall into the boomer classification in number, life style and behavior? We need to roll out cohesive collaborative and community offerings, and we are working on that. To what extent should we be thinking of the demographics of our target audience, and do we have a feel for what success will look like in their eyes? I don't have the answers to those questions, but I believe we should spend some time thinking about the questions anyhow.

iPhone & iTouch - Threat or Opportunity?

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:38:13 -0500

They are both of course. This little device is stirring up a lot of attention, and I think deservedly so. If we look back at the survey of technology that students own, we find that over 80% own laptops, but only about 13% of them consider bringing a laptop on campus for a variety of good reasons. So now what will happen? I think the iPod Touch (iTouch) will change how students access our IT resources. It also has the potential to enhance how we teach and how students learn. The iTouch is the same price as a low end iPhone, so it's not real cheap, but it doesn't come with the burdensome continuing fee of a cell phone contract. Speaking as a parent - Yippee! As a potential user - that's what I want. While the iTouch does not support everything I want out of the box, it won't be long. There is huge interest in open source hacks to make this happen. The web site iPhoneHacks is a great starting point for this information. I think we need to be prepared to not only make sure this works at Penn State on our wireless networks, but also to advise and help with hacks that make this device really useful. This could be a disruptive technology. Let's be sure to be the disruptors instead of the disruptees.

SHARE in San Diego

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:37:38 -0500

I attended the SHARE conference in San Diego, CA August 11 through August 17. My responsibility at the conference is Director of Operations. At this meeting we held an election for directors at large with two positions being elected from four candidates. I was one of the two elected. My job will be to continue as Director of Operations. So what's that? I lead the team that plans and delivers the content of the conferences. SHARE has the reputation of being a mainframe centric organization. Much of the base technology covered is IBM System z; however, our focus is on trying to address key business issues of enterprise IT. For the past year we focused on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the technologies behind it. The second Business Issues was the shape of IT in 2010 - what will be challenges for IT by 2010. For the next year we will continue the focus on SOA with a new twist - SOA the Journey (rather than just the technology). The second focus area is Virtualization - Panacea, Pandemonium or Something in between. The Virtualization theme addresses more than just server virtualization. It extends to network, storage and even applications virtualization.

I'm building a more extensive SHARE 109 Report on the Confluence Wiki.

Sysadmin Training - Why not build our own?

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:37:05 -0500

Yesterday a group of us were discussing the difficulty of hiring people with technical training in system administration. We have had recent experiences of having no qualified applicants for jobs that we post. Our most recent problem was in finding Linux support people, but this is not specific to any one platform. I think this is the beginning of a trend that we knew was coming. The press has made a big deal of IT jobs being sent offshore. Universities and colleges have suffered declines in enrollment in computer science and other IT related curricula. Some, like ours (Penn State), don't offer curricula that prepare students with the technical skills to be useful in industry without significant additional training. We wish we could change that, but it is not likely to happen soon.

So what should we do? I suggest we build our own training portfolio. Many of us already do presentations on topic on a regular basis. With a little bit of thought we could capture those presentations and make them available online as video podcasts. Furthermore, we should organize our library of presentations in a way that we would cover specific technical topic areas. With a little bit of gap analysis, we could identify missing pieces and create the needed content. This sounds like a big undertaking, and it is; however, given the tools that are now available to us, we could grow this into an interesting resource. Grow is an operative word here. Do you belong to a computer user group? Let's get it involved in building content. At this point, this is just an idea, but with some thought about organization and delivery, and some help from a lot of our friends, we could make this happen!

iTunes No DRM Music

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:36:31 -0500

Yes, I gave in to the urge to upgrade my iTunes selections to No DRM in the places where I could. In all 101 songs were upgraded. Apple offers an upgrade at 30 cents a song. But Wait... You get a better deal if you upgrade an entire album that you might have purchased. So the total cost for upgrading my songs was closer to $20 than the $30 you might have expected. Once you start, iTunes Store remembers and offers to find more songs to upgrade and indicates when you have a choice to purchase music with No DRM. Each No DRM song is 30 cents more, but again, if you buy an entire No DRM album the total is less than 30 cents times the number of songs.

Now that I did this, what did I get for my money? The new songs play at 256 bits per second instead of 128. The sample rate is the same - 44.100 kHz - the standard sample rate for CD quality music. All the new songs are twice as big as the old ones (obviously). The quality should be better, but sometimes I can't tell. Several factors come into play here. First is the quality of the original recording. The Ventures albums that got upgraded are hard to tell, though a couple songs are noticeably better. The original quality was not all that good, and some of the songs were poor quality. The Norah Jones and Paula Abdul albums had outstanding original quality when I bought them, and now they are still outstanding. Probably I'm running into the ceiling of the quality of the speakers on my computer in those cases. When I plug in my Plantronix USB headset, the music sounds much better, but then it always does. The final factor probably is the age of my ears:-) The music may well be better, but I can't hear it.

So, am I happy with my No DRM purchase? Actually, even though I often can't tell the difference in quality in some cases, I am happy. Now I can use those songs the same as I would any other recording for which I purchase physical media. Several months ago I was given a Zune. I think I'll put my Apple No DRM music on my Zune. More about that later.

Grains of Salt

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:35:57 -0500

"Survey results are in - Windows is losing!" At least that is the headline that is being pitched about the results of the recent Evans Data survey about application development in North America. I've seen two versions of this "Developers drift away from Windows" from InfoWorld (and picked up by MacWorld), and "If you are Steve Balmer don't read this" from CNET. These make interesting reading, and that is what writers get paid for. Producing something controversial gets people to read. But does all that tell us anything about developing applications for an enterprise IT environment like Penn State? I contend that it does not, and may actually be irrelevant to what we must do. In our environment we (IT) must deliver services that match the business needs of our employer. Delivering services that match our favorite technology is so out of step with delivering services that match business needs that it can make us irrelevant and expendable. While we read and enjoy these articles, and we are proud of the skills we have developed, we must remember that our ability to understand ways to transform technologies to help Penn State be more successful is a key differentiator between being a Penn State IT employee and being a contracted consultant (aka outsourced service). So have fun with these debates, but keep the salt shaker handy.

Why Jelly Side Up?

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:29:22 -0500

This is my first crack at blogging, and I'm not at all sure how it will turn out. I expect I'll post a variety of things as they come to mind, and look forward to comments and feedback. Why would I choose the name Jelly Side Up? I'm an optimist. I believe that people working together can make a great difference. So, the toast does not have to land jelly side down. We can influence that outcome.