SaaS integration - making the ERP mistakes on a bigger scale

One of the most frustrating things in IT is the totally amazing ability of people not to learn from past experiences. The following are all the sorts of things I've recently heard at conferences, vendor presentations, business presentations and in company architecture practices.

"We don't need an MDM solution as Salesforce is going to be our only customer repository"
"Integration is simple, its all just REST or Web Services, we don't need to worry about that"
"We are moving to SaaS because it doesn't require integration and dealing with IT"
"The business are on their own if they do SaaS, we just deal with the internal IT"

And a whole litany of others over the last few years. The general theme is that business folks are commissioning SaaS solutions and in collusion with the technically naive are setting up entire new estates beyond the firewall. Meanwhile the internal IT groups are often washing their hands of this deliberately and fighting against the change.

Lets start with the first statement, as its the one I've heard several times.

I don't need MDM, my SaaS CRM is my master


This probably wins it in my book for the least ability to learn from IT and business history.  This is exactly what folks did in the first CRM rush in the 90s and have spent the last 15+ years trying to recover from.  Fragmentation of customer information is a fact, even more so in these days of social media, so starting a strategy with the idea that an externally provided solution in which you have little or no say and which is set up to be good as a SaaS solution not as an enterprise source for customer matching, merging and dissemination is like doing a CRM project in the 90s by lobbing money at consultants and saying "build whatever you like lads".... really not a good idea.

If you are going to look externally for SaaS, and there are good business reasons to do so, then the first question should be how to create the unified information landscape that modern businesses require.  That is an MDM problem, which only gets bigger as you include suppliers, products, materials and all of the other core entities that exist.

Integration is simple, its just REST/Web Services
While the CRM one is a joint IT/biz error then its this one where IT really excels itself in ignoring the past.  Integration is a hard problem in IT, its made much harder if you don't have MDM style solutions, when looking at SaaS the fact that you have published interfaces helps slightly but you still have the challenges of integrating between multiple different solutions, mapping the information, mapping the structure and of course updating all this when it changes.  That however is of course just the technical plumbing.  Then you have to look at your business processes that span across SaaS solutions and the enterprise as well as where to add new services into that environment.

The spaghetti mass of ERP and enterprise in the 90s which EAI aimed, and mainly failed, to solve will be nothing compared to this coming morass of externally competing companies who have a real commercial reason to keep you locked to their platforms and approaches and have the actual ability to make things tough as they can change their platforms as they want without asking for permission.

We are moving to SaaS so we don't have to deal with IT
This is a common refrain that I hear, but its very short sighted, what it really means is that the current IT department is broken and not meeting the demands of the business and not even properly explaining to the business what is going on.  This really is just storing up problems for the future, or just delegating the problem externally to another group who will end up being your IT department in future, but probably harder to shift and change that your current group.

If the business do SaaS that is their problem, we just do internal IT
I like to think of this as the IT redundancy programme, its a wilful attempt to ignore the real world and it really is only going to end badly.

Summary
The point here is that moving to SaaS is actually a bigger challenge for integration and information management than the old ERP challenge, but most companies are entering it with the same wild-eyed wonder that companies entered the ERP/CRM decade of the 90s.  Leaping in and just assuming that historical problems of integration will disappear.  The reality is that companies need to be more structured and controlled when it comes to SaaS and the IT departments must be more proactive in setting up the information and integration infrastructure to enable this switch.



Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Microsoft's Eastern Front: the iPad and mobility

For those who study European Wars the decision to invade Russia consistently stands as one of the dumbest that any individual can attempt. Not because Russia as an army was consistently brilliant or strong but because the Russian country is just too big and the winters too harsh to defeat via an invasion.

For years this has been the challenge of those taking on Microsoft, they've attacked the desktop market. Created products to compete with the profit factories that are Windows and Office, even giving them away in the case of Open Office, but the end result was the same... Microsoft remained the massively dominant player. Even when Linux looked like winning on Netbooks the shear size and power of the Microsoft marketplace ensured that there would be no desktop victories. Sure Apple has leveraged the iPod and iPhone to drive some more Mac sales but the dent has been minor.

From one perspective Microsoft has also been the biggest investor on another front, the front of mobile and mobility, billions upon billions have been poured into the various incarnations of Windows on Mobile devices, from Tablets and WindowsCE to the new Windows 7 Mobile it has consistently been a massive set of money for a very, very small slice of the pie. This disappointed people who invested in Microsoft but as long as the profit factories were safe then all was fine.

I think however that this failure is about to really hurt Microsoft. Today I'm sitting in a train carriage (treating myself by going First, on my own cost) and there are now 7 iPads open and 2 laptops (of which one is mine), I'm using my Laptop as I'm creating PPTs but if I wasn't I'd be on the iPad too.

The fact that I'm on a Mac is irrelevant, the key fact is that after Neil Ward-Dutton asked if the stats were good I took a walk down the carriages and found that a 3:1 iPad/slab to laptop continued through-out first class and dropped to 1:1 in standard class. So in the "best" case scenario you had 50% of people using and working on iPads (or equivalents) and in the management section is was at 75% iPad domination.

These people are emailing, browsing, creating documents and generally getting on with mobility working. That is a massive shift in 2 years. 2 years ago it would have been laptops out and people using 3G cards or working offline, now its all about mobility working. This represents a whole new attack on Microsoft's profit factories and one from a completely different direction than they are used to. With rumours saying that Windows 8 for slabs not being available until late 2012 or even early 2013 this means that a full desktop/laptop refresh cycle will have gone through before Microsoft can hope to start competing in this space.

I'm normally asked a couple of times on this 5 hour train journey about my ZAGGmate keyboard for iPad and where I got it from with people saying "that is really good, I could ditch my laptop with that". This concept of mobility extends to how you use things like email. Sure Outlook is a nice rich Email client, but the client on the iPad is pretty good and has the advantage that you don't have to VPN into a corporate environment but just use the mobile Exchange (an MS product) connection so mobile signal quality doesn't impact you as much. As an example, on this trip I've had to re-authenticate on VPN about 12 times, normally with the iPad I of course don't have to do it once.

Its hard to not feel that while MS has invested billions in eastern front of mobility that in reality its left with no actual defences, a Maginot Line if you will which has now been roundly avoided by a whole new set of technologies which are not competing with Microsoft in the way they expected.

How long can the profit factories be considered safe? With 1% of all browsing traffic already from the iPad and mobility being the new normal its a brave person who feels that another 12 or 18 months won't deliver long term damage to Microsoft's core profits.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Why Google Apps plus Google+ would change the market

Okay I managed to get into Google+... so what did I find? Well first off I found something with an unusual view on privacy and security. I can send a message to a specific Circle and then anyone in that Circle can then share that information with anyone they want. So the ability for private information to go viral is absolutely straight there... this is something that needs to be changed for Circles to have any weight. Sure the Cut and Paste angle is liable to remain but that is quite different from the immediacy of sharing.

Secondly however I saw a massive opportunity of what Google could do if they combine Google+ with Google Apps, specifically the GAPE products for business. Companies like Yammer are building a nice business in enterprise collaboration. With a bit of focus on security then this is exactly what Google could do too... but better.

How?

Well first off there needs to be the idea of "administrated" Circles, i.e. Circles which are officially vetted and which people can request to join. This would allow not just the sort of FB fan pages to be created but more critically would allow companies to create internal project or information area circles to promote collaboration. I think administrated Circles would be a +ve on both the social and enterprise side. On the Social side I think there should be "closed" admin where a limited set of people can approve access and "open" admin where a group is established and people self-vet themselves in (and potentially out).

Secondly there needs to be the idea of Google+ restricted for a given domain, ala yammer, where everyone on it has to have a specific GAPE account. This means that a company can have a private Google+ environment, which when combined with administrated Circles would enable companies to set up collaborative environments rapidly and link it back to corporate directories and the collaborative technologies of GoogleApps, for instance a Circle could automatically be established for everyone who is editing or reviewing a document....

Thirdly, and this is where I think Google+ + GAPE would be a real killer, there should be "bridge" Circles between different GAPE domains. These are external collaboration circles where people can be added to the environment from multiple specific companies to provide a cross company collaboration. In a world where collaboration between enterprise partners is becoming key I think that this sort of integration between GAPE (which allows this collaboration on documents) and Google+ would provide a step-change in simplicity for inter-enterprise collaboration.

So there it is, three things that would give Google+ a paying audience for its technology in a place where FB and Twitter just have not been able, nor seem willing, to go. A large market where Google+ could be used as a wedge into GAPE and where Google's security and sharing vision could be put to brilliant use.

Personally I said that not bundling Orkut back in 2007 into GAPE was a mistake, now its time for Google to prove that decision was right because they've now got the technology to do much more than simple a corporate social network.

Now they've got the ability to create a fully collaborative company and drive inter-company collaboration.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Geo-Privacy bubbles: controlling smart phone features based on location

The new iOS 5 integration with Twitter is great and the ability to geo-tag posts is fine and dandy. But there is a problem, when I get home and tweet I don't want to send the location, nor do I want to send the location when I pick the kids up from school or do any number of stalker/burglar friendly things. These elements are almost always related to specific physical locations that I don't want to be recorded.

So here is my next idea, the concept of physical privacy or functional bubbles, places where you draw a circle in Google Maps (or similar) and state that when you are within that bubble you do no want your location to be recorded. This could be extended to other functions on a smart phone, for instance by setting "no call" zones in places where you go fishing or setting a inverse zone for a kids smart phone so they can only access the internet when at home or school.

So in this example we've got two "no location" bubbles, one "no call" bubble and an "auto location" bubble, the later is basically for places where you want to automatically check-in to as soon as you get near, for instance the airport, work, etc.

The concept here is that people can manage their privacy, particularly their geo-social privacy, my marking out places on a map where these features will become disabled on their smartphone. So rather than having to remember "oh I'm at home, must turn location off in Twitter" you instead just mark these zones and the features are automatically disabled on the phone as you enter into that zone. This gives parents the ability to better control what their children are accessing and gives individuals greater automatic control over the information they are sharing online.

Now the reason why I haven't just written an app to do this is I quickly realised that this needed some pretty low-level integration with the device in order to make it happen (iOS doesn't like apps changing fundamental settings!) so its something that Google or Apple would have to do rather than it being a download from an app store (unless someone proves me wrong) but I also wanted to make sure that there was published prior art in case someone in future tries to patent what is, for me, a ruddy obvious next development.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

The problem of mobile places in a geo-social world

I'm sitting writing this on a train, a specific train, the 06:37(ish) leaving St Austell Station and heading to London Paddington. Later in the week I'm going to take a specific train to Paris from London and then probably another to get back to the UK. A few weeks ago I took a specific flight to get to the US.

When considering the current state of the Geo-Social world its clear that movement is not something that is being expected of places but I think this is a classic case where a new technology can, and should, make it easier in the future.

Today for instance if you want to find out if a UK train is on time then your best bet is to go for something like Live Departure Boards which tell you about trains to a station and from there you can find out about a specific train.

Now however lets imaging a future world where moving entities are integrated into Geo-Social solutions. Now instead of "checking in" to the station, I would "check-in" to the actual train. This would then allow me to be automatically tracked, if I want, as my journey progresses until I "check-out" of the train at a specific station.

What are the advantages of this? One of the first is that for plane journeys people could check-in and the person picking them up could check their profile, via FB for instance to get the flight details and from there actually get the current status of the flight, its gate information, etc. Someone picking someone up from a station, or waiting for someone in a meeting, could see that a train is delayed and hence the person will be running late. Indeed by automating these pieces through Geo-Social you could set up notifications of delays automatically in the way that certain travel companies enable you to do today when, and only when, you book tickets with them.

Now there is of course the obvious privacy question of being able to track someone for an extended period of time, but for me if you are signing up to geo-social then you should be considering your privacy and what to share/not to share on a regular basis.

Part of this post is about prior art, namely me making sure there is something on the internet that could be cited as prior art if some numpty in the US tries to patent the idea of mobile geo-social places. The other part is prediction that this will happen.

Geo-social for public transport I can certainly see... for private transport? Probably only in the valley.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Has de-normalisation had its day?

Ever since the relational database became king there has been a mantra in IT and information design.  De-normalisation is critical to the effective use of information in both transactional and, particularly, analytical systems.  The reason for de-normalisation is to do with the issues around read performance in relational models.  De-normalisation is always an increase in complexity over the business information model and its done for performance reasons alone.

But do we need that anymore?  For three reasons I think the answer is, if not already no, then rapidly becoming no.  Firstly its to do with the evolution of information itself and the addition of caching technologies, de-normalisation's performance creed is becoming less and less viable in a world where its actually the middle tier that drives the read performance via caching and the OO or hierarchical structures that these caches normally take.  This is also important because the usage of information changes and thus the previous optimisation becomes a limitation when a new set of requirements come along.  Email addresses were often added, for performance reasons, as child records rather than using a proper "POLE" model, this was great... until email became a primary channel.  So as new information types are added the focus on short term performance optimisations causes issues down the road directly because of de-normalisation.

The second reason is Big Data taking over in the analytical space.  Relational models are getting bigger but so are approaches such as Hadoop which encourage you to split the work up to enable independent processing.  I'd argue that this suits a 'normalised' or as I like to think of it "understandable" approach for two reasons.  Firstly the big challenge is often how to break down the problem, the analytics, into individual elements and that is easier to do when you have a simple to understand model.  The second is that grouping done for relational performance don't make sense if you are not using a relational approach to Big Data.

The final reason is to do with flexibility.  De-normalisation optimises information for a specific purpose which was great if you knew exactly what transactions or analytics questions would be answered but is proving less and less viable in a world where we are seeing ever more complex and dynamic ways of interacting with that information.  So having a database schema that is optimised for specific purpose makes no sense in a world where the questions being asked within analytics change constantly.  This is different to information evolution, which is about new information being added, but is about the changing consumption of the same information.  The two elements are most certainly linked but I think its worth viewing them separately.  The first says that de-normalisation is a bad strategy in a world where new information sources come in all the time, the later says its a bad reason if you want to use you current information in multiple ways.

In a world where Moore's Law, Big Data, Hadoop, Columnar databases etc are all in play isn't it time to start from an assumption that you don't de-normalise and instead model information from a business perspective and then most closely realise that business model within IT?  Doing this will save you money as new sources become available, as new uses for information are discovered or required and because for many cases a relational model is no-longer appropriate.

Lets have information stored in the way it makes sense to the business so it can evolve as the business needs, rather than constraining the business for the want of a few SSDs and CPUs.

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