Weekend musings of a Global Digirati: PINs That Needle Families

I was reading a fascinating article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal titled “PINs That Needle Families.” The article touches a nerve and also makes one reflect on our digital life and afterlife:
What happens if, god forbade, one were suddenly incapacitated or worse, drop dead?

After the logistics of sorting through the last rights etc, my better half would have to begin picking up the pieces. This includes sorting through my complex web of finances, bank and brokerage accounts, some of which I have left open in the countries I have lived and worked in during the past decade and half. Couples generally manage finances independently and Suja and I are no exception. Though my wife has a general idea of my finances, she doesn’t know all the intricacies of the various accounts that I manage.

As a global digirati, my financial management is as complex, eclectic and globally distributed as the Enterprise Architecture engagements I undertake. Some were opened because of account-opening incentives I received and keep open ‘just in case.’ Given my frequent relocations in the past years, I prefer being green: receiving online only statements. I admit there is a need to ‘rationalize’ my portfolio of accounts but that digresses from the problem at hand: how will my better half get access to my accounts?

I had a conversation with my mother on this very topic when I was in India last year; tough we decided that giving her the details of my financial accounts wasn’t the most practical solution. We discussed the possibility of my exchanging the details with my brother who lives in London, half-way around the world.

As the article alludes, the process of managing accounts and corresponding passwords does not have a cookie-cutter solution (yet). Writing it down in a sheet of paper or diary wouldn’t be ‘secure.’ And storing them in a digital file? Also, any solution would need constant maintenance to ensure synch-up with the changes to account password I have to make periodically. I am yet to evaluate a password management service: I guess am not ready to add yet another digital service/tool to my life.

Enterprise Architects Enabling Strategic Global Sourcing

As the lead Architect for my firm at the client we are engaged with, I anchor a weekly pow-wow between our teams and client’s Enterprise Architects. The agenda for the sessions is open, addressing key architectural, technical and process related issues, ideation on best practices and discussions from our respective eco-systems.

During a recent session, Dave, one of the clients EA’s brought up the topic of sourcing and a viewpoint he was building for his CIO. I pointed out to Dave how the sourcing challenge EA’s at this firm are coming to grips with are not unique. I pointed him to my Cutter Journal paper on the topic (Enterprise Architects Enabling Strategic Global Sourcing) and we began brainstorming some of the ideas as it was applicable in the current context.

After the brainstorm I began musing how I hadn’t revisited my views after I had written the paper, over a year and half ago. A few of the background issues continue to plague Enterprise Architecture groups: sluggish economy and lack of hiring means Enterprise Architecture groups are not getting fresh talent. Lack of hiring at the bottom is also impacting nurturing of homegrown talent in client organizations while continued visa restrictions also means Offshoring firms are discerning when it comes to bringing talent more than needed onsite.

I had addressed some of the key issues I had seen at client organizations in the paper:

• Loss of technical expertise due to sourcing


• The need to coordinate multivendor scenarios


• Vendors lacking knowledge of organizational dynamics


• Vendors lacking specific business context


• Vendors not up to date on organizational processes, acronyms, and jargon

Since I wrote the paper, I have continued to be engaged with other clients and Enterprise Architects, who continually voice views on similar challenges I had highlighted in the paper. As I continue to brainstorm on the topic, I might revisit the views in the paper. Do send in your comments too.

Do Consulting Enterprise Architects provide value and meet the expectations of organisations?

There is a fascinating conversation thread in the Enterprise Architecture forum on Linkedin. It started with Michael asking "Do the consultancies (including Gartner, KPMG, DeLoitte, ...) actually meet the expectations of organisations or is there a gap between the value they claim to add and what they deliver?"

The answers are varied: those on the sell side (respondents from sourcing firms) are weighing in to say they do provide value while those on the buy side are musing on the real value. The question is all the more important given the current state of stagnant growth and sluggish growth in economy. One can perhaps look for answers in two section of the market

• The heating up of tech hiring in Silicon Valley. The recent dot.com IPO’s are certainly adding to the buzz in the e-commerce world.




• Hiring by technology outsourcing firms. With a slow but steady growth in outsourcing, technology consulting and sourcing firms continue to add to local jobs (though evidence on this count is purely empirical)

The role and job description of Enterprise Architect at these two ends of the technology spectrum are as distinct as their areas of focus. Silicon Valley technology firms, fueled by venture capital funding and IPO dreams focus on cutting edge solutions and adoption of emerging technologies and tools. EA’s here are really hands-on Über techies, tech leads and solution managers rolled into one. On the other hand Outsourcing firms focus on providing technology services and solutions – not always cutting edge solutions – to businesses and enterprises focused on automation of processes and deriving ROI from their existing investments. Here, the role of EA may be a bit more text-bookish: integrating business, data, information and technology architectures to meet strategic goals.

Back to Michael’s linkedIn question: the role of a consultant, or in this case a consulting enterprise architect would depend on the nature of problem s/he is hired to consult on. In the silicon-valley-firm example, the EA-hired-gun would probably be staff-augmenting the already sharp technologists. “Meeting the expectations” here would mean helping develop and take solutions to market at the speed in which the dot.com client needs it to be done.

On the other hand, EA-consultants in Corporate-America, typical clients of consulting firms, focus on bringing their breadth of consulting and problem solving experience to weigh in on the challenge being faced by the client. Lots of times such consulting is about the ability to quickly identify the problem and applying a solution pattern. The solution patterns could be custom-solutions or the ones the consultant or his firm has seen successfully applied to solve similar problems for other clients. "Meeting (or exceeding) the expectations" in this instance is dependent on quickly identifying the root cause of the problem and being able to generate consensus on the problem statement with distinct groups of client stakeholders: including the hiring manger and his other internal stakeholders. If the problem statement is wrong or wrongly identified, the solution will obviously fail.

In my years in consulting, I have worked with some sharp and business savvy Enterprise Architects and IT executives who are open to out-of-box thinking and solutions. I have also encountered a fair share of executives who engage external conlustants to validate their own thinking while strongly holding on to their NIH views. You don’t need a consultant to tell you who benefitted from my engagements. :-)

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A few interesting links

• "Q1 2011 registered $7.5B of venture capital funding invested in 738 deals" - Q1 2011 – Quarterly Venture Capital Report



• As National Employment Stalls, Job Market Booms In Silicon Valley - Huffington Post



• Silicon Valley: Where The Job Market Is Booming - NEWS.GeekNerdNetwork.com



• TCS to Boost US Outsourcing Staff - Wall Street Journal

Microsoft 365 on the cloud: The Future is Past

With rollout of Microsoft 365, Redmond has finally got an answer to Cloud Computing, at least in the commodity applications space.

So what’s new? Not much if you, like me, have also been using Microsoft’ hotmail account – email over cloud - for over a decade. Every large Software vendor aspires to a share of the next big thing and for now it is the cloud. Same goes for every IT professional, self included, who wishes to keep on top of the latest: one just can’t stay away from the hype over cloud computing.

Much of the research surveys point to how commodity applications from Apple, Google and Microsoft are going to change our lives. Surveys also highlight the fact that few IT executives expect their organizations to select a public cloud over a private cloud.

As regards commodity applications, they are not as new as they are being touted to be. I guess the change is already here:
• email on the cloud – since mid 1990s : over 15 years old
• WebEx, instant messenger services on the cloud – since late 1990s – over a decade
• SalesForce case studies on cloud computing – since early 2000 – nearly a decade
• Online learning tools – since mid 1990s – over 15 years
• Social media tools – evolving for the past decade
• Music and video on the cloud – services evolving for the past decade. Remember the hype when google bought out youtube?
• Documents on the web? Openoffice, OpenDocs etc since late 1990s.

A few blogs on the topic
• Cloud Computing: The Future is Past
• For Microsoft, Is The Cloud A Threat – Or Their Secret Weapon?
• My Musing on Cloud Computing, Sourcing and Offshoring
• Memo to Microsoft: It’s Time for Windows 365

Case Study: Learning to KISS eCommerce design?

More than a decade after the dot.com bust, we seem to be witnessing another version of an eCommerce boom, a 2.0 if you will. While rest of the economy continues to lag, the success of Linkedin, Pandora and other internet IPO's this summer is getting business and IT leaders excited about eCommerce strategies and implementations.

One can argue that the success of dot.com 2.0 startups is more due to innovative business models than a radical innovation in technology. The tools and technologies for web development have matured, and so has eCommerce development life cycle. The proliferation of web technologies and tools, along with maturing industry also means one is likely to see the usual clutter of incompatible tools and technologies, version incompatibility, challenges with back-end integration.

For a consulting Enterprise Architect like me, the challenges translate to opportunities (there is demand for good eCommerce Systems Integrators and Architects!) In my day job, I have been consulting with a client on eCommerce program governance, roadmap definition, alignment with the corporate Enterprise Architecture blueprints. It is not all strategy work there is the roll-your-sleeves solution delivery: helping teams’ firefight rollout of functional and technical enhancements. My observations on eCommerce Enterprise Architecture - not in a particular order - follows.

The Program: eCommerce implementation for a large (Fortune 500) firm headquartered in Ohio. The company is focused on Supply Chain management for a specific business vertical. The current phases of eCommerce platform are focused on enabling Business-to-Business (B2B) integration though the architecture roadmap includes evolving towards B2C too.

Organizational IT: Federated, shared services model. The eCommerce strategy and applications are owned by a senior executive (technology solutions owner). Integration - including SOA, J2EE services - is a shared service. Configuration Management is owned by another organization as are Database and systems administration and Quality Control/Assurance. Needless to say backend systems (SAP et al) are owned by other LOBs. The company's Enterprise Architects are similarly verticalized, with a couple of them aligned to eCommerce programs and one focused on integration. The eCommerce Architecture is a "next generation" solution intended to upgrade the "legacy" web application and expected to evolve into the front end for most of the lines of business.

Architecture: The eCommerce Architecture is based on an IBM centric web-commerce stack : IBM's Portal, Commerce and Web Content Manager products integrated by Java. DB2 is the Commerce data repository while solution from Endeca is leveraged for product feeds and search. Java is also leveraged to develop web services and real-time integration with back-end order processing, fulfilment and pricing systems of which there are more than a few including SAP based and homegrown solutions; typical of fortune 500 organizations.
Most of the design and development of the eCommerce platform is sourced to vendors. Sometime ago, the client wanted to move away from Vendor A; in stepped my employer. I got engaged during the vendor transition phase: a fascinating opportunity for a consulting Architect. After a successful vendor transition, I lead the team through a critical project that helped them find their way around intricacies of the client’s IT shop. Observations from the trenches include:

• Division of labor being taken to an extreme: There is a specialization of skills, even within a single vendor’s stack. Most of the younger generation developers - read those with about 3-6 years experience - are content to hone their skills in a specific toolkit, be it Websphere Commerce, Websphere Portal or WCM. Few developers seem to have the aptitude or inclination to span the technology stack, even within a vendor’s platform, which is a problem and an opportunity: It is a problem most large eCommerce programs are plagued with, and an opportunity for astute developers to scale up and become uber application integrators.


• Remote development. Offshore service providers, including my employer, are taking on larger Systems Integration programs. And although offshoring IT services has got commoditized, almost every large program seems to go through similar learnings. Onboarding and enabling right skills is part of the challenge, exacerbated by the division of labor. Having a Business Analyst and Technical lead sitting in Anytown, USA guiding a portal developer sitting in Bangalore, and commerce guy in Mysore can be challenging at best; made worse when the portal developer does not understanding squak of the underlying commerce services or database.


• We are yet to realize the promise of plug and play. There is a proliferation of tools and technologies and most don’t plug-and-play without a lot of plumbing. Many products within the same vendor’s architecture also require additional time and effort in “integration”


• Services? For most part, the promise of SoA is yet to be realized. Period.


• Complexities of build and deployment


• And then there is the backend….. Most eCommerce systems are intended to enable a web front-end to enable customer self-service. Internet is ‘yet another’ channel for back-end systems that can range from legacy mainframes to contemporary but equally complex backend systems.

Back to my day job. I continue to bridge the gap between our techies and the client's Enterprise Architects and technologists. And my team is trying to help fix some of core issues - including the ones highlighted above - in the current landscape that prevent the system from scaling up. I wouldn’t be leading the gig if the ‘Architects’ had kept things simple to begin with.

Bottomline: When it comes to Architecting eCommerce systems, we don’t KISS! Most of us come out of Engineering and IT dreaming of developing simple, elegant and functional solutions to business problems. The new generation of developers architecting eCommerce applications seem to have skipped class when that lesson was being taught.

Indo-Pakistani - bhai bhai – Brother in Arms? At least when it comes to Tennis

Last week, Americans and most nations with a sizable muslim population were reverted by the threat of Quran burning, and heaved a big sigh of relief when Pastor Jones, in NY decided not to continue with the "planned" Quran burning on 9/11.

While this was happening, another interesting development was being watched by South Asians: coming together of Indian Rohan Bopanna and his Pakistani doubles partner Aisam-Ul-Haq Quresh who tried to make history in the U.S. Open Men’s Doubles Finals.

Those who know the history of India and Pakistan will also probably know the bitter rivalry between the two nations that carries into sports arenas. Given this context, Rohan partnering with Aisam-Ul-Haq comes as a breath of fresh air.

Many feel that even coming second in the finals is great boost to India-Pakistani relations. Bloggers on the topic:

• Indian-Pakistani pair defeated in U.S. Open final
• In Men’s Doubles Final, World Peace Takes Center Court
• U.S. Open Men’s Doubles Finals (open thread) Sepia Mutiny
• Koran Burning Cancelled, 2 Dead in Afghanistan from Quran Burning Protests
• Did the media 'elevate' the Florida Quran-burning story?

Indian Passport woes and bunglings: Holding bureaucrats accountable?!

The talk of bureaucratic bungling, cronyism and red-tape is among the few that can get people of South Asian Diaspora really animated. Most of us would have a story to tell, here is another to add to the list.

In the past, part of the woes, when it comes to issuance of passport in India used to be blamed on the lack of Information technology. Then Tata Consultancy Service (TCS), the largest India based offshoring firm bagged a multi million dollar project a while ago, raising expectations among the tech community. (Ref Article)
The Passport Seva Project is an e-governance project of the Indian government which is supposed to streamline and bring efficiency in the process of distribution of passports. The contract for implementing the project, worth Rs 1,000 crore (Rs10 billion or $21.4 million) was given to information technology major Tata Consultancy Services in October 2008, with an implementation timeline from June.

The automation still seems to be undergoing teething troubles. A popular Bangalore based blogger, Mohan Nellore, posted his views on the blog “Passport Renewal through Seva Kendra” that generated hundreds of comments.

My wife decided to renew her Indian passport during a trip to India, which should have been a straightforward affair. Especially since she already had a couple of renewals in the past years, and there was enough paper trial and passport booklets from the past.

After submitting the application for passport renewal, while reviewing the status of application online, Sujatha discovered that the “Gender” column had been wrongly entered as Male. (ref screen print below). My joke (sic!) regarding the passport officials unilaterally deciding that she had a sex change fell flat.

On discovering the error, she sent several emails out to the mail-id’s listed on Bangalore passport office website. All of them bounced back with a ‘server error’ (Not sure if Passport Office has sourced the maintenance of those servers to our friends at TCS?). Since the hi-tech route failed, my wife had switch to the traditional way of dealing with Indian bureaucracy : She rushed to the Passport office in Koramangala, stood in the queue and submitted a letter requesting that the error be fixed before the passport was issued. She was assured by the counter clerk that it would be done.

A few weeks ago, she received her passport, and we weren’t too shocked to note that the mistake had not been corrected. Again a rushed trip to the Passport office and meeting with the Assistant Passport officer, who put in an endorsement on a “correction form” saying a new passport would be issued with correct details.

Yesterday, my wife again receives the same passport, with incorrect details, with a typed note stapled saying Passport office couldn’t take on the responsibility of error due to online data entry, and that she would have to pay the fee again and re-apply. I think this is one of the most preposterous excuses a bureaucrat can use. Passport office’s own website says:

• 4. Index Check CompletedDetails of previous passport history etc… of the applicant are verified using our database.

This step was obviously missed. The clerk at the passport office who typed and stapled the note to my wife’s passport with incorrect details was trying to cover his/her back since they probably report on the number of ‘errors’ and passing the buck is easier than owning up and helping Citizen.

Needless to say, Indian passport officers and officials like most of the Bureaucracy think they are not accountable to anybody; and not the least citizen, in this case Non Resident Indian citizen who provide much needed Forex remittances to the economy.

I am sure my friends at TCS are burning midnight oil to streamline the business process and trying to define a robust Enterprise architecture for the passport services for a billion people. They probably could explain away my wife’s ordeal as an inadvertent “human error.”

Not sure if you have suggestions on cutting through this bureaucratic mess?

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Update: There are a few "techniques" adopted commonly in India when it comes to dealing with bureaucracy and red tape. This includes bribery (when possible), pulling strings (again when possible) or finding a friend/cousin/associate who knows somebody in the department concerned.

Posting my two cents on this blog is not the only thing I did. I continued to explore all the three options. Thankfully, the third Indian-Option-of-dealing-with-bureaucracy worked out for us. A friend of a cousin knew someone in the Passport office in Bengaluru, who was willing to pull a few strings to ensure a corrected passport was dispatched in a day!