Element8 Software is a technology startup that offers a software platform called xpoint which helps customers deliver business change projects and programmes.

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Over the past couple of years we’ve all heard more and more talk about the potential for IT to transform business and drive innovation and profitability – and hand-in-hand with this, the potential for CIOs to be seen as in charge of IT groups that are true ‘strategic business enablers’ rather than simple cost centres. This is very sensible and a natural consequence of the changing role that IT has come to play in business over the past 20 years, as it’s moved out from the back office as ‘Data Processing’ to become a ubiquitous enabler for people to share information, buy products, and interact with each other.

So the idea that the effective application of IT can drive real business transformation is not what I have a problem with – I’m actually a massive proponent of this kind of vision, and indeed exploring the ins and outs of this is what MWD is essentially about.

No, the problem I have is when I see ‘experts’ positioning these things as exclusive alternatives:

• As a CIO you have to be either running an IT function that is a strategic business enabler *or* a cost centre
• You have to drive collaborative, consultative dialogues with business leaders *or* you have to be a transactional ‘order taker’
• You have to be focused on driving ‘innovation’ *or* minimising costs.

I’ve come across a number of commentators – including the normally pretty sensible Nick Carr, as well as a Research Director from one of the very largest IT industry analyst firms – argue this very black-and-white view.

The problem is, it’s a massive over-simplification of the real world. The truth is that (as many people tire of me saying over and over again) in this case as in so many others, we live in a world of ‘and’, not a world of ‘or’. The truth is most obvious in larger companies, but it’s everywhere: IT needs to play multiple roles in multiple contexts if it’s really going to serve the needs of a business in the most effective way.

If you take a capability-based view of business and explore how IT resources should support different business capabilities in different ways, it quickly becomes apparent that in some areas, even the most forward-thinking CIO with strong peer relationships at the highest level should be looking to structure some parts of his operation to act as transactional order takers, delivering ‘good enough’ service at minimal cost (email service might be a good example for many). On the other hand IT services and capabilities (examples might include services supporting sales and marketing optimisation, customer interfaces, product development) should be optimised for flexibility and creative exploration; here, IT governance policies might be best focused largely on the ‘edges’ of these areas to make sure that creative use of IT is expressed within clear boundaries. Where services and capabilities should be optimised for cost – this is where governance should focus on centralisation and standardisation as far as possible.

As the above suggests, a more nuanced view of the role that IT should play has significant impacts on the terms of reference and charters for IT governance and architecture functions. I find it alarming how many architecture teams, for example, see their role largely as one of standards-enforcement: things are starting to change, but change is slower than it needs to be IMO.

I suspect that a great many of my “Calling BS on…” series of posts are going to boil down to two possible arguments: one against simplistic either-or thinking, and the other against ‘XYZ is dead’ posturing. Let’s see, though…

As always, I’d love to get your views in comments. Come on, rant with me!

Yesterday at IBM’s IMPACT conference in Vegas, the company announced the release of Business Process Manager 7.5. At first glance, Business Process Manager might look like a simple updating and blending of two overlapping toolsets (the former WebSphere Process Server/Integration Developer combo, and the former WebSphere Lombardi Edition platform). Indeed other commentators have pointed to this release as “a new paint job”.

However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.

We’ll be publishing a new in-depth report in the next couple of days: in that report we’ll be laying out how the whole thing fits together. In brief, though, what’s happened is that IBM has pulled the two technology offerings together around a unified repository and governance toolset – Process Center. This is former Lombardi technology; however now it delivers its capabilities across Process Designer (the former Lombardi design environment) and Integration Designer (the former Integration Developer). IBM has also created a single unified deployment runtime foundation that hosts integration flows, ESB microflows, business rules and business processes, together with a unified administration environment. The two design environments remain separate, aimed at different audiences – but integrated through the Process Center repository.

Whereas until recently IBM pitched Lombardi technology and WebSphere Process Server / Integration Developer as offering the same capabilities but for different scenarios, Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.

For the last few years, although it’s too much to say IBM has been swimming against the tide of BPM technology development, the company has certainly struggled to break away from its historical roots in delivering a BPM technology offering – the offering overall was primarily skewed towards the needs of software developers and architects.

With the release of Business Process Manager, IBM has absorbed the Lombardi DNA. Business Process Manager demonstrates a vital clarity of purpose in IBM for its customers and prospects, and should give those companies improved confidence that IBM has its story straight. What’s more, the promotion of former Lombardi technologies and design approaches to be front-and-centre in shaping the new Business Process Manager offering makes Business Process Manager stand out in terms of ease-of use.

In the past couple of days I’ve read a couple of articles (“IT can’t be a service provider and a partner too” and “Run IT as a business – why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen“) that riff on the same theme: that the exhortation to “run IT as a business” leads you down a road to organisational exile.

Put briefly, the thinking seems to be: if you set an IT organisation up to run as a business, you create a supplier-customer relationship with other parts of your wider organisation – and this relegates you to being a simple order taker. You’ll have to implement the requirements you’re given, and often these will be out of whack with what the organisation will really need and will raise IT costs over the long term, making an internal IT operation even less attractive and making you more likely to be outsourced.

In my experience this analysis is plain wrong, and comes from simplistic thinking about what the phrase “run X as a business” might mean. Being more business-focused has multiple facets to it, and blindly interpreting the idea leads you to daft, simplistic conclusions. Applying similar thinking to cooking would lead to the advice “don’t use sharp knives; if you do that it’ll only be a matter of time before you chop a hand off”.

To be clear: my experience and advice diverges with these other opinions not because I disagree about the risks of IT becoming a “simple order-taker”; but rather because I disagree that running IT as a business means you have to become a simple order-taker and everything else is excluded. There’s much more to it than that. The key is to see the relationship between IT and other areas of a business as having three key layers.

When I look at IT leaders who have really become strategic players at board level (and I’ve been talking to them ever since my work on The Technology Garden), it’s not the case that their organisations have stopped becoming service-focused and focus wholly on hanging out with senior business managers. If anything their organisations are more service-focused than the norm.

In the best-performing organisations, the “run IT as a business” idea is primarily about an inward-looking perspective. It’s about putting repeatable processes in place, creating a service culture, figuring out the actual costs of delivering IT services through IT processes, and looking for ways to increase IT process efficiency and effectiveness.

In high-performing IT organisations, when it comes to the outward-looking perspective (the relationship between the IT organisation and other parts of a business) the relationship has at least three layers:

1. As a foundation, IT teams have to deliver reliable operational services in line with clear promises and in the context of defined cost expectations and budgets.
2. When it comes to using IT to enable business in new ways the relationship works at a higher level, using different teams, reporting structures, skills and incentives within multidisciplinary joint IT-business teams.
3. The top layer acts to mitigate the risks of individual business units driving change that is counterproductive to the organisation as a whole, typically through some kind of IT governance structure that helps to ensure that significant IT investments are considered in their proper strategic context and that the costs and risks are properly understood by all.

That’s three layers: IT operation/service delivery; IT-business engagement; and governance/strategy. You can be focused on service provision and also on partnering. As long as you understand the bigger picture.

The other day I got a business update from Sonoa Systems, sparked by the arrival at the company by Sam Ramji – former Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft. Sam is now the VP of Strategy at Sonoa.

As you can see in our report on Sonoa, the company is making significant inroads in a critical area of service management, focused on assuring the quality-of-service delivered by APIs. The company started out selling its core technology, ServiceNet, as a service management platform for SOA implementations – but recently it’s expanded its focus to delivering enabling technology that helps media companies, SaaS providers, telcos and other service providers – as well as traditional “bricks and mortar” companies like Guardian Life which want to offer some of their internal capabilities as wholesale services – ensure that the API consumer experience is reliable and that quality can be guaranteed. MySpace, Warner Music and MTV Networks are all customers.

Now, Sonoa sees its ultimate value as enabling enterprises that want to jump “into the Cloud” – but that also need to continue to comply with policies and governance requirements – to make the leap; principally by driving up the level of API-quality trust and visibility that can exist between service providers and consumers.

In the context of this goal, the recent launch by Sonoa of a freemium-model, self-service, hosted implementation of the core ServiceNet technology under the brand “Apigee” (see www.apigee.com) is a smart development. The idea is to enable API providers, and developers consuming APIs, to quickly set up and use value-added API management services. There are already 250 customers live – evenly split between API providers, API consumers, and those who both consume and provide APIs.

We know from our research that although there’s very significant interest from organisations in the potential flexibility, time-to-market and cost profile that Cloud Computing and SaaS models can bring, security and trust remain the top concerns for those many companies that haven’t yet dipped their toes in the water. It’ll be fascinating to see if and how companies like Sonoa can drive broad, mainstream adoption of the “remixable services and data” Web 2.0 promise that has so much potential value.

The “G” word is one of those words that’s bandied about with increasing abandon these days – but for many, “governance” is just a more sexy way of saying “management” (in the same way that “architecture” is quite often used as a sexy way of saying “design”).

So how much are organisations really walking the walk with IT governance initiatives? This is something we’re expending significant effort on finding out through 2009, and one of the ways we’re doing it is through surveys like this one, which we’re carrying out in conjunction with CIO UK magazine.

We’d love to know your thoughts. We’ll make sure we point to the results back here (they’ll be published at cio.co.uk) and we’re sure they’ll throw up a load of interesting insights.

A few days ago the results of our second CIO UK poll were published in this piece – CIO Debate: Collaboration is building momentum in 2009. The poll corroborated earlier research that we carried out for our Collaboration advisory service in the summer of last year, in conjunction with the guys at Freeform Dynamics.

The headline findings: despite all the hype, collaboration adoption is still just getting underway. A big part of the reason for this is the difficulty of justifying big up-front infrastructure investments. Where collaboration is growing fastest, though, it’s business activities “at the edge” – those involved in interactions with external parties – which seem to be driving things along. There is a significant amount of appetite for collaboration technology, though, and our research indicates that 2009 will be quite a strong year for collaboration technology adoption.

Our third CIO UK poll is now live at cio.mwdadvisors.com, and this time we’re asking a handful of questions about approaches to IT Governance. How many organisations are pursuing formal IT Governance programmes, and if so what are the reasons? Are they basing their efforts on established frameworks like COBIT and ISO 38500? And what are their plans going forward? Those are some of the questions we’re looking to explore.

If you’re a CIO or IT Director – or you know someone who is – please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the link)! We’ll be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic in the next few weeks.

A couple of weeks ago I was the happy recipient of a review copy of the excellent Todd Biske’s SOA Governance book. Todd’s “Outside the Box” blog is one of those rarities where every post is worth reading twice – so I was very interested to see whether his writing ability might stretch to something the length of a book! Todd’s clearly established himself as someone who has a lot of insight on the topic of SOA Governance, so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be disappointed.

A number of other bloggers have posted detailed reviews of Todd’s book, so I’m not going to do exactly the same here. Take a look at the Amazon comments if you’d like to see what they said.

For me, I’ll be brief: SOA Governance is a very good book indeed, in that it does something that so many technology and business management books fail to do: it breaks a complex and hype-laden subject down into very manageable chunks, and walks through the topic clearly and at a steady pace – but it still manages to move quickly enough to prevent the reader getting bored. It’s not a perfect(*) book, but then nothing is – and if it had been, I would have been too jealous to write this. We need more technology/business management books like this, and we needed just such a book on SOA Governance. Well done Todd!

I knew this was a good book because it made me revisit some conclusions I’d already had washing around in my own head for a couple of years.

One of the things that I still find as I travel around is that when I get into discussions about SOA, there’s way too much focus on the “S” and not enough focus on the “A”. It’s almost as if we’ve been blinded by technologies and standards which have “service” somewhere in their names, and aren’t able to look at the bigger picture.

What Todd’s book reminded me is that if you want to get real value out of service orientation, then it’s the “A”rchitecture that really makes things happen. Todd’s narrative keeps coming back to his definition of Governance, which revolves around People, Policies and Processes. And it also talks a lot about the concept of “contracts” in the context of analysing how service providers and consumers should work together in order to interact. Without People, Policies and Processes in place to guide your organisation down the right path, and without the concept of “Contract” to focus on the responsibilities that need to be described and assigned when service consumers and providers interact, such an architecture effort will likely lead nowhere. You’ll end up with “just a bunch of services”.

So – and this was the thought that occurred to me after reading Todd’s book – perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about “service” oriented “architecture” at all. It seems to me that what architects might find more productive to focus on is policies and contracts, not “services”. Maybe “service” is better thought of as a concept that describes the outcome of this kind of architecture approach. And so maybe it’s the case that there are two things in play here, and we’re getting them mixed up: contract- and policy-oriented architecture (CPOA ;-) and service-oriented IT delivery?

What do you think?

(*) one thing I found rather strange was that despite a word at the front to reassure readers that they didn’t need to know any technology detail in order to read the book, at a number of points you’re suddenly confronted, out of nowhere, by XML fragments which (as far as I could tell) didn’t really add any value. That’s a tiny niggle though.

As part of yesterday’s release of the latest iteration of its webMethods Insight product Software AG announced an OEM partnership with Progress Software. This announcement adds the Actional runtime SOA management and monitoring technology (which Progress acquired back in January 2006) to Software AG’s existing Centrasite design-time governance capabilities (which were bolstered by the acquisition of Infravio in September 2006) and the runtime policy enforcement provided by its webMethods X-Broker and partner Layer 7′s XML Firewall.

The incorporation of runtime SOA management and monitoring functionality into Insight is a necessary evolution of Software AG-webMethods integration strategy that we commented on just over a year ago. It’s long been our position that SOA is more than a standards-based approach to software development and integration. The business value of a service-oriented initiative depends on a recognition that software services are experienced, just like their real-world analogues. The quality of that experience depends on a governance approach that extends throughout the service lifecycle, where the contracts defined when services are designed are subsequently enforced through policies once they are deployed and running – and where runtime metrics are captured to provide insight into the service level quality that is actually exeprienced. Furthermore, those metrics can be used to inform and support change management processes, so closing the SOA lifecycle loop.

Whilst the announcement doesn’t come as any great surprise, the source of the runtime management and monitoring functionality does. When Oracle confirmed it’s intention to acquire BEA, I said:

It [the acquisition] leaves some of the other bigger specialist players – TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering.

Software AG has gone to a potential competitor for the mantle of best-of-breed, specialist alternative to the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. If you had told me on Friday that Software AG was going to strike an OEM deal for SOA management and monitoring I’d have put my money on AmberPoint, which has historically been the OEM of choice for the likes of BEA and TIBCO.

I am not quite sure what to make of this decision. AmberPoint doesn’t compete with Software AG directly and has established a healthy and growing customer base, as well as partnerships with some of the leading systems integrators – and a technology partnership with Software AG! Software AG’s decision comes not long after Oracle’s decision to drop AmberPoint. As we pointed out in our analysis of Oracle’s roadmap for the BEA integration, we don’t have any hard evidence for Oracle’s claims that it had received negative feedback from BEA customers but it’s something we will continue to explore. In light of the decision to go with Actional, it will be intriguing to see how the partnership evolves and how things pan out when Software AG and Progress are in a competitive situation.

This acquisition should be welcome news to Software AG customers that have invested in the company’s SOA offerings as it will save them the time and effort of plugging the runtime governance gap that existed prior to the partnership. Those embarking on a significant SOA intiative should also give Software AG careful consideration, particularly if they are not wedded to one of the mega-platform providers.