NabaTech

Enterprise Architecture—Part #9: EA Integration

After you have considered an “enterprise” as a specific “business undertaking”—a set of related business activities aimed at some common goal, viewed the overall enterprise architecture (EA) of an organization as a collection of EAs, and developed the individual EAs, you can focus on EA integration. This step is aimed at ensuring that the separate EAs do not result in duplicate data or duplicate IT systems supporting different enterprises within the organization. As an example, consider the following diagram illustrating the EAs for several "enterprises" such as financial management, customer relationship management, human resource management, and the core enterprise (this is what the organization really knows how to do well):

The diagram shows the component architectures—business, data, application, and technology—for each enterprise. The two areas where the potential for EA integration should be most evident are the data and technology areas. Even though you might use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) IT solutions to implement some of these EAs such as customer relationship management and human resource management, you would want to ensure that any data such as customer information or employee information is not duplicated. That would be an example of EA integration at the data level. Similarly, you would want to consolidate the hardware and software platforms and the network so that all EA implementations can share the infrastructure. The exact details of how you achieve EA integration depend on the details of the EAs and the strategy you want to employ. For example, you could have common data in a single database that multiple applications access or you might decide to define Web Services that manage the data and any application that needs the common data access it through specific services. No matter how you accomplish it, the key point is that after developing of the component EAs for an organization, you need to go through the EA integration step to ensure that you don't end up with what we call "stovepiped" systems and business practices.

Tags: enterprise architecture EA integration COTS stovepiped SOA service

My Tech Ebook Wish—An Example

I mentioned how ebooks would be ideal for technical information, but I haven't explained what sort of information I have been in mind. I am specifically thinking of just-in-time information, packaged in small ebooks that cover a narrow topic. Here's a concrete example. Let's assume that I want to set up a website for a small IT consulting business. I do my research, pick a webhosting company, and sign up for a hosting plan along with a domain name. Next comes the task of designing and putting up the website. I'll leave the designing part to my artistic side and focus on the technical "putting up the website" part here. I decide that I'd go for database-driven content, specifically a site based on PHP and MySQL. Since there are many PHP–MySQL open-source content management systems (CMS) around, I do some research again and even try out some of these CMS at opensourceCMS.com and then pick Drupal as my CMS of choice. I read Drupal's online handbook and, following those instructions, download the Drupal tarball, install it at my hosting site, and soon I have an empty Drupal website that looks something like this:

Now comes the fun part, I need to add content, but I don't know all the details of Drupal to get moving quickly. I add the administrator account and do some configuring and then start reading the online help, but it's slow going because I don't I fully understand terms such as block, node, taxonomy, vocabulary, and so on. I know I'll eventually figure it out and then I can drop the website content into the Drupal CMS and have the website ready to roll, but if I could get my hands on a small ebook, perhaps no more than 100 pages, that explained the basic principles of Drupal and walked me through the steps involved in creating a few typical websites in Drupal, then I'd certainly be willing to pay $7-10 for the ebook. It'd be even more appealing to me, if, instead of just text and some static screenshots, the ebook included animations to show exactly which field to change for a task and the result of that change on the website's appearance. To see if the ebook is appropriate, I'd like to browse the table of content and perhaps 5 to 10 pages of material. I'll be looking for some real knowledge, not just a rehash of installation steps. That's the kind of just-in-time technical information I want to see in ebooks that I'd be willing to pay for :-)

Tags: books ebooks epublishing drupal php mysql cms justintime opensource

Ebooks Ideal for Just-In-Time Tech Information

Computer books get outdated quickly and often you need technical information on a narrow topic, just in time for some upcoming project. I think ebooks (or e-docs as Amazon calls the technical documents) are the best way to deliver this type of information. When you need technical information in a hurry, you probably don't have the time to run to the bookstore or the library (and who says the bookstore even has a book with the information you need) or wait for a print book shipment from an online store. When you need it fast, electronic delivery is the best way. Even if you have the time to wait, what you need might be just 50 pages of detailed information on a specific technology (or the detailed steps to perform a specific task) and it's doubtful that any publisher would want to print and distribute a 50-page or even a 100-page book. For this type of tech information, ebooks are ideal.

As for the rapid aging problem of print computer books, ebooks would make it possible to keep the content up to date, correct any errors easily, and, best of all, not expend resources printing lots of copies. That should lower the upfront costs of publishing and enable authors/publishers to sell content at lower prices in many different formats such as a whole book, one or more chapters, or selected sections from multiple books. Of course ebooks can and should be more than just an electronic version of print books; ebooks can include multimedia content (for example, simple animation that illustrates concepts and steps with annotated text or even audio narration), better navigation within the book, and links to online resources related to the topics covered in the book.

There is the question of the ebook format. I hope the ongoing work by the OpenReader Consortium will give us a universal distribution format for digital publications. In the meanwhile, unencrypted PDF files would have to do. In fact most of the Amazon e-docs—the ones that cover technical topics— are offered as downloadable PDF files (take a look at the E-Books & E-Docs category in Amazon).

Tags: books ebooks epublishing edocs amazon openreader PDF

Diet—Leha's Chicken Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Walnuts

Over the past year or so we have often had a salad at dinner. The salad recipe is something my wife, Leha, whipped up. With the ingredients ready in the fridge, the salad takes only a few minutes to prepare, so it's ideal for the busy individual or family. I want to share the recipe so you can try it and also write it down for myself and our daughters so they easily can get it off this blog :-) Here's the recipe:

Ingredients (serves 2):

• A third of a head of lettuce
• Some roast chicken or turkey
• 5 or 6 slices of red beet (from a can)
• About a quarter cup of sun-dried tomatoes preserved in olive oil and herbs—along with some of the oil (we buy it in a jar from a warehouse store)
• One teaspoon of ground parmesan cheese
• One teaspoon of balsamic vinegar
• Some raisins
• Handful of walnuts

Steps:

1. Wash a third of the lettuce head, shake off the water, and then tear up the leaves in a plate.
2. Sprinkle the raisins on the lettuce. For variety, you can replace the raisins with other fruit such as grapes or chopped apples.
3. Cut the beet slices and spread them on the salad.
4. Tear some roast chicken and spread them on the salad (add as much as you like). By the way, we roast the chicken during the weekend and use it from the fridge as and when we need. You can also use leftover roast turkey.
5. Assuming that the sun-dried tomatoes were in a jar in the refrigerator, warm them up for 20 seconds in a microwave oven. Then chop the sun-dried tomatoes and spread them on the salad (keep the oil).
6. Put a teaspoon of parmesan cheese on the olive oil left over from the sun-dried tomatoes and then add the teapoon of balsamic vinegar into the olive oil and mix them up with a spoon. This is going to be your salad dressing—drizzle it on the salad.
7. Crumble the walnuts and sprinkle them on the salad.

That's it! Pour a glass of wine and dig into the salad :-)

Tags: diet chicken salad sundried tomatoes walnuts beet raisins healthy

Fiction Ebooks

Since I have no experience writing fiction, I refrain from commenting on prospects of fiction ebooks, but I do like to read what others have to say about that market. Unlike computer ebooks that could be read on a laptop or a desktop PC (while you use whatever information the computer book offers), I thought that you'd need a handy ebook reader to read fiction ebooks. To me, computer ebooks just seemed to have more potential than fiction ebooks. Then I read a recent post—In Our Continuing Series of Electronic Publishing Rants, Episode IV—where Booksquare mentions that ebook fiction seems to be thriving. Although the conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence of ebook authors reporting increasing sales, I found it reassuring that fiction ebooks are doing well.

Booksquare acknowledges that ebooks will not replace paper books, but many people do like to download and read ebooks, so ebooks are attracting an ever-growing audience. Booksquare suggests that authors with book rights can consider making their titles available as ebooks and publishers with out-of-print titles, for which they have the copyrights, can offer them as ebooks or in POD format. These seem to be sensible suggestions for both authors and publishers. By the way, on the subject of piracy, Booksquare suggests that we look at the Project Gutenberg model and stop fearing piracy so much.

Tags: books ebooks epublishing fiction booksquare gutenberg POD

Enterprise Architecture—Part #8: Technology Architecture

By now you have worked on the business, data, and application architectures. Next comes the technology architecture that describes the computing infrastructure—the computer hardware, software, and networking platforms—that would support the applications, that, in turn, enable the business activities. Undoubtedly, the technology architecture would be influenced by the latest IT trends, but the goal is not to focus solely on the technology, but to select technical solutions that can support secure and robust applications in a timely and cost-effective manner. In today's internetworked world, the enterprise network is at the heart of the technical infrastructure. Other elements of the technology architecture include hardware (mainframe, servers, storage systems, desktop PCs) and associated system software such as operating systems and databases. The technology architecture serves as the blueprint for the infrastructure and it puts forth the standards and specifications for its components.

At the highest level, you can document the technology architecture with diagrams and narrative descriptions. The diagrams invariably look like network diagrams. For example, here is a typical example:

This sample diagram shows a generic mainframe reservation system and some internal servers on a LAN that connects to the Internet and a WAN through a firewall. Users access the reservation system over the Internet. The internal systems access other partners' systems over a wide area network (WAN). When you draw the technology architecture diagrams for your organization, you should annotate the diagram with specific geographical locations of various systems as well as indicate the hardware and software details of different platforms.

Tags: enterprise architecture EA technology network LAN WAN IT

NPR Interview with Carl Tanner, the (Bounty Hunter, Truck Driver) Tenor

One of my cousins in England, Biraj Barkakaty, happens to be a counter-tenor; currently an alto lay clerk at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, so my ears perked up at the recent NPR broadcast about tenor Carl Tanner who hails from nearby Arlington, Virginia. The interesting part of the NPR interview was the story of how Carl Tanner got into singing. He used to play football and sing high school choir, but he wasn't thinking about singing even after he graduated from the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Winchester, Virginia. He said that he thought he wasn't good at it and he lacked the confidence and the drive, so he took a job driving truck, but found that it paid very little. Then, because of his physique, a bounty hunter hired him as a backup and he hunted down suspects for a while. He was quite good at too, having successfully captured 169 out of 178 suspects, but after getting shot at, he decided it was enough and, finally got into singing. And now he's a famous tenor, highly in demand at various opera houses around the world. Amazing story, isn't it!

Currently Carl Tanner is singing the role of Samson in the Washington National Opera's production of Samson et Dalila—they have seven performances during May 14 through June 4, 2005. I mentioned the Carl Tanner story and the Samson et Dalila opera to my violinist daughter Emily. She asked me if we could go see the opera and, guess what, I was able to get tickets to this Sunday's performance. The opera is sung in French with English supertitles; that'll be a chance to brush up on my non-existent French :-)

Tags: classical opera tenor countertenor Carl Tanner Samson et Dalila alto NPR

Lamenting the Size of Computer Books

I still have my copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language that I bought around 1980 when I first learned C (transitioning from FORTRAN), on a VAX-11/780 running Berkeley Unix that we installed following instructions outlined by Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems wasn't incorporated yet). Kernighan and Ritchie's paperback book, published by Prentice-Hall, was all of 225 pages or so, yet it was packed with everything I needed to learn C. Kernighan and Ritchie subsequently had a second edition of the book in 1988, updated to ANSI C, and it's still only about 275 pages long. I continued from C to C++ and when Addison-Wesley published Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language in 1985, it too was only about 325 pages. Then something happened and computer book sizes jumped. In fact I was part of that trend—I wrote the 800-page The Waite Group's Microsoft C Bible in 1988. Of course, today the majority of computer books (at least the ones dealing with programming languages or operating systems) are typically close to a thousand pages in size!

I think I know the reasons why computer books end up so large. First, the subject matter has grown in complexity, so we need more book pages. For example, C relies on libraries to do all the hard work and once you start describing the libraries, it's hard to keep the book's size down. C++ also has standard libraries and when you describe them, guess what, the book gets larger. Even Stroustrup's third edition of The C++ Programming Language grew to 920 pages. The second reason is that it's not economical to sell smaller books at lower prices—I am not an expert on this, but it seems the numbers just don't work out. A third reason is the book buyer's expectation of getting a certain number of pages at a certain price. This is related to the reason that smaller print books are not economical. If there are a whole bunch of books on the same subject and all priced at $49.99, the feeling—right or wrong—is that the book with most pages would be perceived to be a better value. Even with all these reasons for selling the huge tomes, I still wish we could move to 300-page computer books that focus on narrow topics and offer good value to the book buyer. Perhaps computer ebooks will help us reduce the size and offer better value than print books.

Tags: books ebooks epublishing trends size C C++ Kernighan Ritchie Stroustrup Joy billjoy

Thomas L. Friedman on "The World Is Flat"

This past weekend my wife and I attended the iit05 conference where Thomas L. Friedman was one of the keynote speakers and he gave a captivating talk summarizing his recent book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. As you might have heard or read by now, in his new book Tom Friedman is talking about how the world has shrunk and technology has leveled the playing field for everyone around the world to compete in the global marketplace. You might say "I knew that already," but Tom Friedman has a casual and engaging way of explaining what he means and how it affects us, which made us sit up and listen to his talk.

Friedman began his talk recounting how, for a long while, he has been going back and forth between the Lexus and the Olive Tree issues (based on his previous book The Lexus and the Olive Tree). Then last year, when outsourcing became a topic in the U.S. presidential election campaign, he decided to go to the land of outsourcing (India, China) and interview people who were doing the outsourced jobs. That's when it hit him that while we were busy with other things, the world had quietly changed—in his words, it had become flat (I assume he meant the playing field is leveled). He decided to take a few months off to put down his thoughts on paper and the result was the new book. For the benefit of the audience, he went through the key historical and technological events—the fall of the Berlin Wall, release of Microsoft Windows 3.0 (a universal GUI for everyone), the 1995 Netscape IPO and the release of the Netscape Web browser, the fiber optic networks installed in the heyday of Internet boom that now provides us low-cost communications, interoperability of software applications, and ubiquitous wireless communication—that, in his opinion, collectively brought about the current state of affairs where any capable individual can participate in the global economy regardless of geographic location. He calls this "Globalization 3.0" and he outlined six new ways that people can now collaborate in the flat world: outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and informing (by which he means unlimited access to information). He gave interesting examples of each of these new ways of working, including how terrorists are also exploiting the flat world tools (you can find all the examples in his book).

So what does this all mean? Friedman says the horizontal collaboration among individuals and companies in the flat world is shaping global economics and politics now. He acknowledges that not everyone can participate in the flat world, but even if a small percentage of the world's population can collaborate and compete, the impact is still going to be huge. Friedman suggests that we better hone our science and engineering skills so we can be ready to compete in the flat world. He said this is what he tells his daughters nowadays: "Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.'' All in all, it was a great keynote speech that got us thinking about the new world order and also concerned about what the future holds for our daughters.

Tags: friedman flat outsourcing offshoring insourcing supplychaining informing iit IIT iit05

Diet—Breakfast is a Must

We are all so busy nowadays that in our rush to get to school or work, breakfast is often a casualty. You might think: good riddance! After all, if you are trying to keep to a diet and eat less, missing breakfast can seem like an easy way to cut some calories. I used to think that way too and typically skipped breakfast, but that has all changed since I modified my diet. Now I think of the body as an "eating and calorie burning machine" that needs to be jump started with a good breakfast in the morning. Breakfast is the fuel to fire up the body's machinery for the day, so I don't dare skip breakfast. Otherwise, I fear the body would bend my will and get me to take that donut in the morning meeting, or worse, overindulge at some other meal during the day.

What do I eat for breakfast? Earlier I used to settle for milk and cereal plus a cup of coffee. After I switched to a low-carb diet, I now go for a bowl of soup and black tea for breakfast. And I take along a handful of nuts—almonds or walnuts—to munch on the way to work.

For your breakfast, pick whatever suits your diet, but don't skip breakfast—your body will behave itself and, best of all, you won't have to deal with a growling stomach at your 10:00 AM staff meeting!

Tags: diet breakfast lowcarb nuts