The Business, You and Me; Get It Together!

If you've read some of the previous posts you may have realised that I currently work in the IT area of a bank: the chief architect role at Kiwibank in fact (as those who attended the keynote at the recent Microsoft NZ Tech Briefings, or have read our Microsoft case study will know). Prior to Kiwibank I worked for a year at ENZA, then before that a few years at Deloitte Consulting, and prior to that I undertook a physics PhD from Victoria University in association with Industrial Research Ltd, a Crown Research Institute.

Each of these organisations has taught me a little bit more about how people work together and what makes us succeed in delivering. It has also highlighted the precarious and unappreciated position that the shared service line holds, especially the IT shared service line.

ENZA was an organisation that went during the year that I was there, from an external market focussed apple and pear exporter with producer board status and mandated export control, to a grower focussed commercial entity that retreated from the political environment of Wellington to the safety and security of the grower stronghold Hastings. As a company it had two strategic directions ahead of it, either strive to become a global category specialist based perhaps in one of the major trading hubs, or become a grower focussed organisation that showed it's value at the farm gate. Retreating was certainly the less risky option and it was that path that lead to the rationalisation with Turners and Growers in a 2003 merger.

At ENZA the (naive) question faced in 2000 was what part of the company represented the future of the business: the export facing arm or the grower facing arm. IT at this time was treated as a cost centre run under the finance group. And seeing as the organisation ran SAP it was certainly some cost.

In the middle of 2000 while working at ENZA I happened to come across a chap at Turners and Growers who explained that they were running a home grown software suite that was at the end of the tether. Myself and two others actually went and visited them in Auckland and it was apparent that they had problems. The obvious thought to the three of us was imagine combining the two organisations and taking advantage of the SAP implementation at ENZA. It would be a great asset right?

Well, that is indeed what happened. Someone out there saw the synergy: did Tony Gibbs think about this I wonder? Whoever it was they certainly knew a thing or two about SAP and IT in general. I note that there's now a customer success story about SAP and Turners and Growers on the SAP web site.

Prior to that experience I was at Deloitte Consulting which presented me with opportunities to work in companies and organisations across government, the health sector, and telecommunications. Now for all the minor gripes that many of us had there at the time - long hours etc etc - one thing definitely stands out: the value of good people. I did work with some very good people and while often thrown in at the deep end we did ok. A small group went on to do especially well, witness Trademe and AMR. Being a consulting group we didn't have much of an IT function. Information Technology was a core attribute of our service line and overlaid across the group was a matrix model representing sector and service advocacy. I think it worked well.

In comparison many of the companies we worked for had well defined structures with strong vertical focus on product delivery. You'd walk into these organisations and there were barriers everywhere. Internal development was hardly ever undertaken. Individual business units would occasionally issue RFIs, RFPs or succumb to the salesmanship of a clever vendor. Work would always proceed on the basis of a long chain approach that ensured the people that understood what was possible never had a chance to really influence the development of new ideas in the organisation. Certainly not outside of the immediate business unit.

In these environments you'd always here the catch phrase: "it's up to the business to decide", or often from the PMs/BAs, "we have to listen to the business", or the classic "the business wants...".

The depressing thing is that this is more often voiced by the staff of the IT department than the business units themselves. If people in an IT department don't think they're value contributing then they deserve to be treated as a cost centre and outsourced to the likes of EDS or IBM.

It's a personal mission of mine that my application delivery group does not come out with the same nonsense. It's the innovation that comes from those that know what's possible combined with the people that can advocate for a customer, and those that know the financial constraints and tools, and those that can market the products that creates value contribution in a company. Any organisation that forgets the value of the combined talent of all its resources deserves to lose market value.

Oh, and Industrial Research? A depressing environment of disillusioned scientists with ideas but no knowledge of how to commercialise them...

Wellington Microsoft Tech Briefing

It was another great event yesterday and it's just fantastic to be seeing so many people. Wellington is my home town so there were plenty (plenty) of faces I recognised in the audience. A big thank you for opportunity goes out to Mark Carroll, Rebecca, Sean, Dean, Carol and all the others. Being the second time through the short speech I make in the keynote gave me a chance to think twice about the message I was trying to present.

And it's confirmed in my mind that the main message I want to get across to people is actively think about opportunities in their organisations, experiment with technologies and tools, and work on marketing any ideas they may come up with. It's how to make things happen and you know, life is too short to being dumb stuff when you could be doing cool stuff.

As a great way to finish off the day I got to attend the Microsoft Architects Council meeting at the hotel. I like to attend these events as it's a good chance to catch up with people I don't see every day. We have an active group of people up and down the country that attend these events and the chance to explore ideas is never something to pass up.

Next week is the final Tech Briefing in Christchurch. I can't wait for this as I know by then I'll be wanting to tune the message once more!

Prioritisation: Apples and Oranges

Every company seems to share the ritual of the prioritisation session. It has a common format and a common process.

Each business head gets to voice their opinion on what's most important to them. These are dutifully collated into a master list and then a discussion takes place to rank one above the other based upon some number of criteria; typically financial, customer experience, and compliance. Finally the agreed list is circulated for action.

It's value is normally limited because importance is not a good measure for prioritisation.

Importance is a measure of emotional conviction. It is a broad term that can mean many things depending upon the subject. The importance of a programme of work is not the same thing as the importance of an immediate fix, or the importance of a process review, or the importance of addressing a particular risk. In each case the definition of the term, importance, differs and therefore it can not be used for comparison. It is accurately a measure of emotional response, but I doubt little else.

What is the alternative? Perhaps it's better to ask what's the point.

The purpose of the prioritisation session is to allocate scarce resources. Scarcity can only be resolved through a process of trade-off (this is text book economics). What complicates the task in an organisation are the differing time requirements, resource specialisations, and dependency effects.

We have a limited ability to weigh up the combination of time, resource, specialisation and dependency factors to determine how limited resources can be applied to a range of competing tasks. Our minds have to make best guess estimates and the wider the scope the greater the problem (I bet someone out there can prove this is a power law expansion).

Which drives us to smaller delivery teams to reduce the scope of the problem.

So what should the prioritisation session be?

Perhaps to set areas of focus and define the criteria for prioritisation. I doubt little more.

Innovation in the Corporate Environment

This is a hot topic for me. I work in one of these environments and I'm involved in a fairly traditional (these days) role of enterprise architect: nominally responsible for the overall design of systems to ensure they meet business needs, and typically driven more from the perspective of policy and process than the introduction of new ideas. I'm afraid I'm not a very good enterprise architect.

Being on the back foot and not contributing to the ideas that form the basis of many of the commercial opportunities seems quite daft to me.

My aim in life is instead to communicate the opportunities of technology, or in fact, any thing that comes to mind actually. You know I went through university in a rather clueless manner and it's only now I see the possibilities of the methods taught to me at the time. There is just so much out there that can help give you an edge. (Wish I'd paid a bit more attention in the lecture rooms....)

Ensuring technology meets business needs is never going to see innovative solutions deployed, it's never going to see solutions applied when problems aren't yet realised to exist. How often have we looked around and seen only in retrospect that we missed the ball completely (trust me in my 4o years it's happened a helluva lot!).

So, yes, innovation is a hot topic for me.

Today I read an article syndicated from some offshute of The Economist called, innovatively enough, The Economist Newspaper, referring to the demise of traditional R&D and the rise of a new form of directed innovation concentrating on the D aspect. I'm not against this, a lot of the great ideas out there (that I've missed the boat on) have typically only been a couple of years ahead of everyone else's thinking. But the fact they were ahead proved a significant advantage.

The article began by looking at the output of Vannevar Bush, a gifted thinker in his own right, and an advisor to the Roosevelt and later administrations. It was Vannevar that spearheaded America's implementation of government and military funded R&D from the 1940s to the 1970s. "Industry is generally inhibited by preconceived goals, by its own clearly defined standards, and by the constant pressure of commercial necessity," he wrote in 1945. It still rings true today.

But, the days of the big labs are gone. Bell Labs has fallen apart, IBM's research labs are far more highly directed now, Microsoft Research nominally allow free reign but then look at the narrow range of papers on their site. Where's all the Research and what can a smaller company do?

It seems to me that in the mid-size corporate environment (with a few hundred staff) there is one classic failing: the creation of the product delivery chain. You know the one. It starts with the customer on the street, then there's marketing, then BAs, then project teams, and at the end of the line, the implementors.

Nothing driven down such a long chain will be innovative. The people at the end of the line act out a Dilbertesque cartoon living in perpetual frustration. The customers only get what they ask for; and no more. The nimble, smart companies out there create their own new niches and the slow ones are left to play catch up.

I think the secret to this is to keep team sizes down and allow small teams to experiment with ideas ensuring that at an overview level there is a process of nurturing and selection. Allowing failure to occur has to be an integral part. "Please fail very quickly - so that you can try again" says Eric Schmidt from Google.

Ground breaking products and processes are always due to the conceptual insights of individuals. So it should be the task of every innovative organisation to provide a mechanism to foster the intellectual output of their staff.

Response Time Distributions, IIS Log Files, and the question of the Missing Events

Over the last year I've been involved in a number of investigations attempting to find bottlenecks in systems consisting of clients, web service hosts, and databases (usually containing application logic in addition to data). The details of each system's implementation is not especially important to this discussion because what I want to do here is just relate one of my recent experiences regarding measurement of response times. You might like to check if you get similar behaviour.

Firstly, let's just describe the typical situation I find myself looking it. It's very generic, I'm sure the same thing will apply to you. I usually have some client systems accessing a service layer hosted in IIS6 talking to a database server (usually with significant embedded application logic).





The Problem
The problem (or my lesson in this case) is how to interpret the numbers you get from the IIS log files on the web service hosts. These files give you HTTP request duration and the arrival time of the request. Now what happens when you naively plot a distribution of the the duration (ie request execution time)? You might expect a nice symmetrical peak centered on some value, or you might get something such as the following.


I found that I was consistently getting this sort of shape across different types of requests. This isn't really all that unexpected. Each URI in the log file corresponds to a web service against which a number of web methods may be called. The web methods may have significantly different response times so the graph of the service call is really just a summation of all the individual web method calls. And in fact we've now implemented duration timing on each individual web method call, and in fact we get a much simplified distribution centred round one peak.

Anyhow, while I was looking into the double peak I decided to look at the arrival rate and compare that to the duration of the call. Theoretically you should get a Poisson distribution for random, uncorrelated events and on those occasions when there were many simultaneous arrivals you'd also expect the response time to slow down (although whether this was linear/non-linear is another question).

So, I looked for a period of time during which we have fairly constant activity and chose 2 hours in the middle of the day.



You can see that there's a nice distribution with the expected shape centred on 4 arrivals/second. Of course the IIS log files only record data when a request actually arrives. Looking at the bar graph you'd therefore naively expect about 300 one second intervals over the two hour period during which no requests arrived.

And this is where I got a surprising result.

So, it appears that the IIS HTTP arrival time is not accurate. I think that what I'm seeing here is that IIS is already queuing the requests up for processing - presumably because processing downstream is taking too long.

If you get anything like this, have seen it before, or have a bit more knowledge of what is going on I'd love to hear about it.

Powershell versus Perl

I've just been preparing some data for a post which I've been meaning to put up for a few months now. The data comes from an IIS log file and I need to pull out of it the time of the HTTP request, the HTTP service (uri-stem), and the duration of the request (time-taken). In the past I've always used Perl for this sort of task taking advantage of the regular expression syntax to extract my chosen data elements. For a 50MB sample log file (all logging options turned on) this takes approximately 12 seconds.

The Perl I've just used to test this follows:

use File::DosGlob 'glob';
use File::DosGlob 'GLOBAL_glob';

@logfiles = glob "ex*.log";

for my $logfile (@logfiles) {

  open(INFILE, "$logfile");
  $logfile =~ s/ex//g;

  open(OUTFILE, ">$logfile");

  while() {
      if (m"^(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\s\d\d:\d\d:\d\d).*/(.*\.asmx).*\s(\d+)$") {
          $file = lc($2);
          print OUTFILE "$1\t$file\t$3\n";
      }
  }
  close(INFILE);
  close(OUTFILE);
}

Now, since I've started using Powershell recently to extract and manipulate data for analysis I thought I'd also try the same thing with that. Note I'm just a beginner at this so I could be doing this the wrong way but here's what I tried:

Get-Content ex070223.log | 

foreach-object { if ($_ -match "(?^\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\s\d\d:\d\d:\d\d).*/(?.*\.asmx).*\s(?\d+$)")

 { & { $matches["occured"] + "," + $matches["service"] + ", " + $matches["duration"] } } }

The regular expression syntax is very powerful, I like the named matches - I guess this is a straight .net runtime feature, but I'm easily impressed. However, the time it takes to complete is abominable! It took 20 minutes to complete where the Perl program took 12 seconds.

Still, the power available from the command line is impressive...

Gadgets

I'm having a relaxing evening now after an exciting day mostly spent in Auckland at a Microsoft Tech Briefing. A great experience for me as I had the opportunity to be part of the key note speech. I happen to work for an up and coming NZ bank and I was able to present some of the experiences I've gained from my time in the bank - from being a member of a 20 something project team in 2001 - before the bank establishment - to the present day: an organisation of 700 with a 6 month profit of $11m.

The experience of being part of the key note was enlighting in itself. The nervous energy beforehand, the videos, sound, lighting, the 900+ people in the room, being part of a team that consisted of some much brighter people than I, it was great. And I still have Wellington and Christchurch to come over the next 2 weeks! What a buzz! I've never spoken to so many people before. For better or worse, the nearest thing to it in my memory is being 14 and being asked to recite a poem at my uncle's funeral. He was a very popular person and the church was packed. As sad as the event was I still remember the energy of the occasion clearly.

Of the event itself, and the reason for this posting, was the cementing in my mind of the importance of Vista's new gadgets. Jeremy Boyd of Mindscape demonstrated a remarkable gadget for the approval of Vista Dreamscene videos on a community site (can't find it - maybe they haven't put it live on the net?). This particular gadget used the capabilities of WCF to securely connect to a service and perform an operation. Working as enterprise architect at a bank you can imagine my interest. I've been harping on about this at work for a while now and recently noticed a blog post from someone I've met that used to work as a banking consultant at the Microsoft Sydney office, (James Gardner). It's just a matter of time... will we get there first?

The question of who get's there first was actually one of the main themes of my presentation. Looking at the way in which innovation can occur. Looking back on my historical work experiences I can now see how large corporates fail so often at delivering innovation. They start off so nimble and quick and then slow down to a near grinding halt. Achieving change becomes increasingly difficult because of the burden of process and competition of people. Does it have to be this way?

I'm sure I'm going to post more on this but it seems to me that there's a lot to be learnt from the field of R&D in traditional high risk, high reward industries and the application of R&D to service based industries. I know the potential margins haven't traditionally been seen as high enough to counter the cost but I think the time is right. I believe the risk reward matrix is increasingly favouring small experimental developments to highlight problem domains and visualise potential solutions. If we just manage to do those two things we'll be making downstream project delivery so much better (let alone considering the commercial benefits).

I strongly feel that the opportunities for applying technology are stronger today than ever before. It's the technologists who are currently creating the business models of tomorrow, not the business school graduates.

In the meantime, I recommend following JB, JD, and Andrew at Mindscape - they are a clever bunch of guys. I'm sure they'll go far.

SAF 2006 - A Retrospective View

It's a few days since the event now, the small details are beginning to fade away, and I can look back now and think about the overriding themes. Of these, one strikes me more than any other: a statement from Garry Flake which went roughly like "the Internet is an increasingly complete reflection of reality".

Garry's presentation ("How I learned to stop worrying and love the imminent Internet singularity") took a look ahead at the future. He picked up on an idea published in 1993 by Vernor Vinge: the idea that the exponential speed of technological improvements will produce super-human capabilities, making the future unknowable, an idea that I think harks back to Arther C Clarke and the concept that any sufficiently advanced technology constitutes magic. Vernor coined this occurence a singularity because we have no knowledge of the future beyond that point. This is an interesting thought, especially with respect to the Internet. Garry highlighted (as had Charles Fitzgerald in his earlier presentation, "Software and Services") that information technology is most strongly advancing in two areas: memory and networking. Both of these are improving well ahead of the rate of improvement of processing power. (But as for other areas of technology, I personally doubt we're making such significant progress. Don't you think that living from 1900 to 1970 would have been just as remarkable as living from 1940 to the present?)

With a near future characterised by a massive increase in easily accessible storage and network bandwidth it shouldn't be surprising that more and more information about our daily lives and the world around us will be stored and catalogued for later use. The stored information will increasingly reflect the detail of the real world and the Internet will increasingly become a reflection of reality.

To me this is a wonderful concept because it means that we have a representation of reality that's accessible, can be queried, and is an enabler to learn about our world and improve it. To business it should also be wonderful because it opens up opportunities in many more ways than are possible now: mining, characterising, segmenting, predicting, combining, and in general just responding better to customer needs.

The reflected electronic world of information and the services that operate on that information will also provide value from the integration across organisation boundaries. If you can spot the opportunity that links a group of disparate services together you could be clipping the ticket to your first billion. This is the basis of the mashup and we're sure to see making unexpected outcomes from the smart combination of diverse services and information.

The feflected reality was not the only nugget to come out from the SAF, there were also several other ideas that came through the presentations and roundtable workshops I attended.

Bill Gates highlighted the limitations and short life ahead of the existing web browser model; Ray Lane emphasized the uneconomic application development environment present in the US and the likely impact of globalisation; Norm Judah gave a great overview of how Microsoft manage their own internal services; Garry Flake presented on the Innovators Dilemma, and there was a lot of discussion across all presentations on the long tail effect.

Bill Gates' brief discussion of the future of the browser came up during the Q&A session at the end of the SAF. He made the point that the web browser was designed in the 1990s to fulfill a need to deliver an interface to a system over a limited bandwidth link. That environment is not true now and we know it will be increasingly invalid going forward. Network bandwidth is increasing rapidily so you can envisage a future where you connect to a system on the Internet and a much more functional application interface is downloaded and run on your device using some sort of application hosting environment (perhaps based on a virtual machine created for the session, or a sandboxed machine such as you get with .NET and Java). The standards for this form of interactivity have a long way to go but the direction is clear. I wonder how long before this will impact the next generation of Internet sites?

Ray Lane's presentation of the economic problems of the application development market highlighted the large number of existing small development companies, the available venture funding, the commoditization occuring in the development process and as a result the market contraction we can expect (up to 70% of existing companies going). However, Ray also highlighted the new opportunities created by the long tail and networking effects hence the name of the presentation, "The Personal Enterprise".

Norm Judah's presentation of "The Last Architectural Mile" showed us how Microsoft run their own services. This eye opener showed them using their own toolsets to manage their data centres with millions of servers. The use of the Business Scorecard Manager to present their current status was great as was the simple idea that success of failure occurs in the last mile. Delivering into production is so important and yet, while complex IT systems are designed with great thought and effort, the human processes that operate those systems are often not.

Garry Flake's singularity presentation also introduced the innovator's dilemma (first coined by Clayton M. Christensen and described in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma), that innovation comes from the bottom not the top. As companies become established new start ups innovate and then take over the entranched company's market. Companies that survive show an ability to sustain innovation by being prepared to make significant change (or destroy themselves as Garry put it). I wonder to what extent you can say that we've seen this with the likes of IBM and Microsoft? Certainly IBM have moved a long way from the days when the mainframe was their core deliverable. One thing that does mark both companies is their massive investment in R&D, billions of dollars per year. Garry is an example of the impact of Microsoft Labs, his team form Live Labs, a collaboration with MS Research that is developing the functionality you can now get now through www.live.com.

The concept of an increasingly accurate reality represented on the Internet was an overriding theme throughout the event. The impacts are diverse; the wealth of information, the potential outcomes from better analysis, providing richer choice, responding better to people, clustering, trending, making decisions at the edge, networked opportunities, the long tail. I've tried to put some order to these ideas in the bullet pointed list below and in the posts under this you'll see the notes I recorded at the time of the presentations. Some of these notes I posted on the Internet as soon as I'd finished writing them in the lecture rooms, and others I posted over the last couple of days from the notes I'd taken on my laptop. Hope it's helpful.

Change Drivers: Opportunity Creation from Changing Technology

• Storage and networking improving much faster than local cpu
• Parallel processing increasingly applied to overcome limitations in cpu speed increases
• This is opening up new opportunities due to network effects
  • The long tail
    • The affect of the many in the tail can be greater than the few in the head
  • The internet is increasingly mirroring the physical world

The Internet as a Mirror of Reality

• Responding to people
• Understanding people
• How?
  • You can't manage what you can't measure
• Analytics
  • Application to numerous areas
    • Process improvement
    • Understanding and responding to human behaviours
    • Processing of different data types
      • Text
      • Numeric
      • Image data
      • Sound
    • The internet increasingly mirrors real life - the data on the net is becoming an increasingly complete representation of real life
      • Brute force statistical analysis
        • Trending
        • Clustering
• Personal choice
  • Make options available
  • Natural selection and evolution
• Beware human faults
  • The Innovators Dilemma
    • Look down as well as up
• Take advantage of the masses - the long tail
  • Opportunities exist due to the accessibility of the many
• Decision making at the edge
  • Responding to your customers at the edge of your organisation versus centralised product development
  • Responding at the edge is equivalent to greater customer focus
  • Create networked opportunities
    • Connect individual to individual
  • Great local example - Seattle traffic reporting via the internet

SAF06 - The Personal Enterprise

Ray Lane

 

Commoditisation

• Cost of software reducing
• Costs for software 10% of current
• 70% of companies will go
• $4.7 billion going in as venture capital in US market
• Nicolas Carr – IT doesn’t matter...

Globalisation

• US market leadership lost
• Existing model uneconomic
  • Too many competitors within a limited region

Market Demand

• SMB market growth strong
• Enterprise market limited

Future

• Leverage community power
  • Mash ups etc
• Enabling user generated content
• Apps from services
• Personal history
  • Activity
  • Alive
• Context
• Relationship status and value and history

Seven Laws for Success in the Personal Enterprise

• Serves individual need
• Viral adoption
• Contextual and personal
• No train
• Delivers instantaneous value
• Utilises social networks
• No IT

Examples

• WebEx
• Skype
• IM
• SuiteTwo
• Google desktop
• SFDC
• Monster

SAF06 - High Performance Computing

Ryan Waite, Group Program Manager for High Performance Computing

Background

• 30 people in the group developing HPC
• 10GFlops $30m 1991
• 10GFlops $4000 2006
• Departmental cluster growth higher than top end growth
• Product development fundamental to Microsoft
• Continued Office product development needs to demonstrate new functions and value
• HPC seen as a possible avenue to do this in the future
• Financial Services seen as a key sector

Usage

• Weather Research and Forecast model
• Community project
• 3000 users
• 360k lines only 750 changes to port to windows
• Excel Services
• Store spreadsheets on sharepoint
• Run on the server
• Run excel services on Compute Cluster
• Monte Carlo
• Risk
• Speedo fabric design
• Weave and affect on fluid dynamics
• Procter and Gamble
• Plastic bottle design
• Packaging analysis
• MRI scan of heart and blood flow
• Fluid dynamics model
• What if analysis of surgical changes

Compute Cluster Cost

• Cheaper than standard windows 2003 (~30% less)
• Can’t run office servers on it

Grid Computing

• Definition not clear
• Microsoft refer to
• Compute grid
• Data grid

Dataset Sizes are going to be MASSIVE

• New Sky Telescope 2015
• 80TB data in a scan on one night
• Rescan next night
• Identify what changes
• Repeat!

SAF06 - Software and Services

Charles Fitzgerald, GM Platform Strategy

Change Drivers

• Broadband
• Services
• Commoditisation
• Complexity
• Consumer focus

Challenge

• To find the value
• It’s never going to be easy because of competition

Services Infrastructure

• 20 million on a slow IM day
• Infrastructure construction dramatic
• $200 million on data centre capacity
• Next to hydroelectric generation facilities
• Millions of servers
• Concrete, copper, steel, electricity

The Tyranny of Or, the Power of And

• In the past we've had to make a lot of choices
• This technology or that
• This way of delivering or that
• This company's services or that company's
• Today we have the ability to combine services more easily
• Mashups
• Partnerships
• Give the customer choice, offer both options

Broadband Inflexion Point

• Web browser designed for limited bandwidth
• Broadband beyond current web 1.0

SAF06 - Dynamics

Satya Nadella

The Last Mile of Productivity

• Connecting people to process

Microsoft have 30 CRM instances deployed across different areas

Dynamics Investments

• Role based experiences - Office
• Collaboration - Sharepoint
• Contextual intelligence - SQL Server
• Services - Visual Studio
• Live enabled - Windows Live

Dynamics architectural tenants

• Composable role based experience
• Model driven
• SOA deployment

Demonstrations

• Dynamics CRM v3c
• Lead management gadget for Vista sidebar - hooks into CRM web services
• Relationship mapping with images on each member of the relationship
• 3D home design and layout
• Exception management demonstration
• Exception notifications go into sidebar via a gadget
• Click on the notification and a sharepoint site comes up with exception problem identified (in this case an order problem)
• Drills down onto order details
• Combines it with mapping from virtual earth
• Order origination and delivery points identified
• Where the order is now
• Collaboration with the truck driver via a wireless device
• Messenger used - hopefully not while driving
• Sharepoint search used to identify missing customs document required for shipping
• Business Intelligence
• Sharepoint dashboard
• Mapping
• Tabular business score card from Performance Point Manager with traffic lights
• Opening detail data with Excel Analysis Services
• Another dashboard with more detail
• More detailed mapping
• Pie charts and graphs
• Drill down with ProClarity
• Performance map
• Size of box shows size of sales
• Colour shows margin a la heat map
• Drill down into geographic areas
• Dynamics Live CRM
• Hosted on the Live site a la SalesForce.com
• Dashboard
• Charts
• Scorecards
• Drilldown
• Outlook style interface for activities, calendar, queued items
• Customer data
• Collaboration tools
• Workspace creation for working with partners
• Collaborator uploads documents rather than emailing
• Marketing campaign creation and management
• Internet ads
• MSN ad centre
• Choose regions and target pages
• Performance tracking
• Email

Model Driven Development

• Research derived customer model
• Workflow driven
• Role specific tools

SAF06 - How I learned to stop worrying and love the imminent internet singularity...

Garry Flake

Microsoft Live labs

Live Labs is a partnership between MSR and Windows/Windows Live.

Singularity - introduced by Vernor Vinge in 1993 - the idea that the exponential speed of technological improvements will produce super-human capabilities, making the future completely unknowable.

Hmmm.

Is it the end of humanity??

Making a case for the internet singularity

• Democratization
• Greater and greater power in devices
• Lower and lower entry barriers
• Content
• documents
• office, html
• images
• movies
• audio
• publishing
• blogs
• software
• opensource
• research
• wikipedia, search
• metadata
• tags, play lists
• Power law distributions and long tails
• The weight of the tail is greater than the head
• Coined by Chris Anderson an a Wired article
• Implications
• Consumers start to become producers
• Playlists
• Remixes and mashups
• Aggregations...
• The small producers may outweigh the large producers
• But is it all worth reading/listening/watching? I'm doubtful...but the important thing is that the good stuff bubbles to the top.
• Internet ecosystems and network effects
• The value of a network increases as a function of the number of participants
• The Innovators Dilemma
• Cray killed by SGI
• SGI killed by Sun
• Sun killed by PC
• PC killed by cellphone?
• The first companies must destroy themselves to survive - innovations come in from the bottom
• Companies often fail to look downward - they only look upward
• Online world causes the innovators dilemma to run much faster - months versus years

The internet as a mirror

• We are putting more and more information on the internet
• The internet becomes more and more a reflection of the physical world
• Because it is on the internet it is accessible
• Analysis occurs across the internet
• For example, data mining of natural language based upon internet hosted information (text)
• For example, genome data
• For example genome research papers on the internet so that data miners could access both the research and the data - programmatic data miners can access both the papers and the data and result in new discoveries.
• This is a circular process
• The body of knowledge increases

Live Labs

• A little under a year old, reports to Ray Ozzie
• A virtual organisation that aspires to hit a suite spot between
• Users and businesses
• Short versus long term
• Problems and solutions
• Science and engineering
• (This sounds dubious to me...)
• Garry then gave a demonstration of Microsoft Live Labs- Photosynth which is worth viewing if you haven't yet tried it.

My thoughts - lots of opportunity if you know how to mine it. Analytical techniques and tools become so important in this.

SAF06 - The Architectural Last Mile

These are my notes from Norm Judah's keynote this Thursday morning at SAF06. Norm is CTO of Microsoft Worldwide Services and IT. These notes are taken during the talk and published straight away - wifi is great.

Norm firstly asks what is architecture?... the art of simplicity.

Norm highlights a number of recent architectural changes:

• The power at the edge of the network
• Traditionally big in the middle, dumb on the outside
• Boundary changes
• Boundaries between companies
• Management impacts

Success of failure occurs in the last mile

• People
• Human processes are not often re-engineered

Build systems not for the people of today - but the people of tomorrow. Look at how your teenage kids behave: instant messenging, youtube - living online behaviours in a manner that does not make sense to those of us that are in midlife or older. So don't automatically assume that because you can't imagine using this system, that your views will apply for the future.

Processes and human behaviour is important. IT spend does not automatically increase productivity. MIT study by Erik Brynjolfsson (http://web.mit.edu/sloan-msa/Papers/2.3.pdf)shows that process is more important, but also that process + IT investment achieves much greater productivity.

Demonstrated Community Campus - Microsoft only site. Remarked that it's easy to create the site but hard to get people to use it which highlights the importance of managing human behaviour, of process.

A lesson from this is that you need to measure in detail. People will register but not use a system. So a count of registrations has no value. Look instead for how parts of the site are being used.

They prepared an adoption maturity model based on CMMi. Don't build an immaturity model

• Negligent
• Obstructive
• Contemptuous
• Underming

Refer to Capt. Tom Schorsch, http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/1996/11/xt96d11h.asp, and the original notes on CMM from Finkelstein, "A Software Process Immaturity Model," ACM SIGSOFT, Software Engineering Notes, Vol. 17, No. 4, October 1992, pp. 22-23.

Make heros! Publish and market the subject matter experts. Give awards for most posts, most effort. Create individual importance.

Another lesson: operational architecture crucial to project success. Since most things go wrong due to operational errors you need to explicitly design for the operation. You can not manage it if you don't measure it.

Norm gave a great example of using the Business Scorecard Manager to report on Exchange availability in Microsoft. This forms the mail SLA reporting. The report showed 33,000 connection attempts blocked for the day - hacking attempts!

The scorecard contained a section called Major Problem Reviews (MPR). These were categorisations of the types of problems.

Desired Configuration Management

• Reduce configuration changes
• Proactively manage upcoming change

SAF06 - ESB Microsoft Implementation

This presentation at SAF described an ESB implementation based upon Biztalk, Sharepoint and the .net environment.

I've picked up a few things from this.

1. The use of XMS rather than JMS over MQ
   
2. The use of Amberpoint and MOM for service management
   
3. Very high performance message transformation by not using message boxing.
   
4. Implementation of a customer ESB management portal in Sharepoint with an exception handler created to provide an easy to see view of current activity and errors.
   
5. Use of BAM to track information as it's being written into Sharepoint with the graphs output into Sharepoint.
   
6. Use of SOAP headers to contain message context that is later written into the MQ message headers.
7. Monitoring at different levels
1. Infrastructure
2. Operation
3. Biztalk Server
8. Good description of how they marketed the solution through Kaiser-Permanente
1. Developers Guide
2. VM with ESB core engine installed
3. Sample applications create
4. Sample unit tests (nUnit and BizUnit)
5. Sample automated build process

Apparently there will be a Microsoft ESB guidance package. A prelim version will be available - perhaps via Brian Loesgen's blog at www.geekswithblogs.com/bloesgen