The rise of Pair-Programming

As agile is getting into more and more software development teams so is the importance of pair-programming.

At core pair-programming is all about two people sharing single development workstation and working on same development task. They code & watch/review in turns.

While at first look it just seems to be wastage of efforts, the reduction in time taken to complete the task and improvement in quality of code delivered, outweighs any additional effort. Here are some statistics:

Read the below paper and start practicing pair-programming today.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~lwilliam/Papers/ieeeSoftware.PDF

The Illusions of Big Data

Gartner’s Svetlana has made an interesting post on current expectations from Big Data and how much of it can be realized. Do not miss this one ….

http://blogs.gartner.com/svetlana-sicular/the-illusions-of-big-data/

IASA World Summit

IASA World Summit has been scheduled on Dec 6th and 7th.

Core Topics include following :

• Cloud Computing
• Enterprise Architecture
• Software Architecture
• Business Architecture
• Information Architecture
• Architecture Career
• Women in IT
• Best Practices
• Case Studies.

Get more information here :

http://www.iasaglobal.org/iasa/IWS.asp

Free eBook : Agile for Dummies

Download it from here :
http://adtmag.com/whitepapers/2012/08/ibm-agile-for-dummies-ebook.aspx

Starbucks Experience and Productivity

Recently came across this interesting video on how to improve customer interaction experience by influencing the productivity on customer side also. The author in this video talks about how Starbucks took a disruptive approach which may not be as customer friendly but improves overall service experience for both sides.

After watching this I realized, how much I have been practicing the same approach for many years during my career with my clients. I as a consultant mostly work with large enterprises which have many people to spend lot of time on long calls which can be done quickly. So to improve mine and their productivity, I mostly end up influencing their work style. What is your experience ?

Video : http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2012/05/how-starbucks-trains-customers.html

Obama and Technology–The wish list

Now that Mr. Obama has been elected President for another 4 years, what is our wish list for him related to Technology ?

We have in 4 areas.

Education : Encourage and Promote STEM education.

Skills : Facilitate importing of skills which are in shortage.

Government : Create policies which facilitate technology adoption and let Government agencies be the leaders in adoption.

Research : Fund and Promote research in areas where Sustainability is the core interest.

Why traditional journalism is still so important ?

This is the next post in the series for ‘Content Curation’ :

• Content Curation in 5 Steps

• Content Curation Tools and examples

• Content Curation Types

• Scoop.it : All in one Curation Engine

With so much digital action happening in consumer world, digital curation is becoming utmost important. From individuals to marketing professionals, everyone wants perfect digital curation tools. Amongst all this, there is a question if traditional journalism and newspaper still delivers value.

The answer to this is absolute ‘YES’.

If you apply the Theory of Need and Want to digital curation world, you know that while digital curation tools address mostly the ‘Want’ part, the traditional journalism addresses mostly ‘Need’ part.

My recommendation, enterprises apart from adopting digital curation tools should also have a traditional journalism group within to help employees know what they need to know.

Scoop.it : All in one Curation Engine

This is NOT a sponsored post.

Recently I got a chance to use the free version of Scoop.it and I must admit, it came very close to my model of Curation Engine.

You can read more about previous posts on Curation Engine model here:

• Content Curation in 5 Steps
• Content Curation Tools and examples
• Content Curation Types

Visit www.scoop.it and try for yourself. You will love it.

Content Curation Types

This is third post in Content Curation series.

You can read the previous two posts here:

1. Content Curation in 5 Steps

2. Content Curation Tools and examples

There are basically three types of curation engines:

Individual – This is the one which we all do to get best and add our part to it. We use Twitter, facebook, Google Reader, etc to aggregate best of content for our reading. We even share our curated content with others to consume.

Crowd – Yes, the wisdom of crowd. This is what you see on digg or trending topics on twitter.

Software – This is the only automated engine and is becoming more and more popular and efficient. These are the agents which continuously scan the web for popular and highly rated content. Two of the good examples are:

News gadget on iGoogle 

www.LikeButton.com

Every type of engine has its own pros and cons. While the individuals can do a personalized curation, software based curation helps in discovering new content.

The goal is to create an engine which brings best of all three types.

Do you know of any such engine ?

Content Curation Tools and examples

Continuing to my earlier post on Content Curation in 5 Steps, here is list of some digital content curation tools. The list can be endless and so I have picked few popular ones.

Most of the tools come under one or more of the following categories

Twitter is an example of personal and aggregator content curation.

The Huffington Post is a great example of team of humans doing curation which includes lot of content creation too.

Paper.li works very well with twitter hastags and does create a page automatically.

So, what are the content curation platforms you use in your daily routines ?

WEF Technology Pioneers 2012

The World Economic Forums’ Technology Pioneers 2012 report is out and here are few of the interesting companies featured in Information Technologies and New Media category.

Appirio enables companies to navigate today’s complex cloud computing ecosystem. Provides rapid application development platform over existing cloud platforms.”Appirio was able to build a cloud-based CRM (customer relations management programme) for Starbucks in just four weeks, based on a SalesForce.com software framework”

CloudFlare’s intelligent network accelerates Web traffic over the Internet while deftly dodging abusive bots, crawlers and denial of service attack. The virtual scaled out Web.

DoubleVerify provides tools designed to restore public confidence in business forced to operate in a global net environment increasingly exposed to swindlers, malware and cyber theft.

Dropbox connects the cloud to everyday life. We all know DropBox.

Kickstarter’s innovative crowd-funding platform lets the public in on venture capital funding for imaginative projects.

Living PlanIT develops operating systems for future cities.

Mocana’s responds to the “Internet of Things” with a deviceindependent secure platform for smart communications.

Palantir pioneers an engineering-centred approach to radically change the way data is analysed.

Download complete report from http://www.weforum.org

The Green Cloud

While each one of us are well aware of the biggest benefits of Cloud Computing which are Cost efficiency and Agility. There is an increasing consensus that technologies like virtualization, data center and cloud computing helps in efficient use of resources like electricity and in turn helps reducing carbon emissions. In summary helps IT shops becoming greener.

• ICT as an industry contributes  over  2% to  the  overall  global  CO2 emissions,  a similar level as the aviation industry.

• Recent surveys by Gartner show that sustainable business practices will be a top five priority for more than 60 percent of Western European and North American Chief Executive Officers in the year to come.

“Cooling  currently  accounts for  up to  50% of a  Datacenter’s power consumption, therefore there needs to be a new focus on how businesses can improve the efficiency in how they deliver their IT services which in turn would lead to reductions in both heat generated and power consumed”

So, what are your thoughts on this ? Beyond hardware consolidation, how can you design greener architectures ?

Calligo has some interesting thoughts on this. http://www.calligo.net

CIO and 2012 : What will keep CIOs busy

2012 is going to be a busy year for CIOs and their Teams. The trends which got introduced to enterprises in last 2 to 3 years are going to make a big push into the enterprises. The CIO have no choice but to embrace them.

The trends can be classified into following three broad categories:

• Data & Insights : Coming from Business, this will require converting the tsunami of data getting generated into competitive advantage.
• Cloud : Coming from Vendors and Technology suppliers, with promise of only good, is all about agility and cost savings.
• Consumerization of IT : Coming from Employees, driven by mobile and online social revolution, this will require blurring the corporate IT boundaries.

In future posts we will get into details of each trend and some useful resources.

Cloud vs Enterprise IT : Competition View

Few days back I blogged about a trend where Cloud is posing an entirely different kind of challenge for Enterprise IT, which is Competition .

Cloud and Enterprise IT : Partners or Competitors

I posted the same thought on Forrester community forum and here are few thoughts from there :

“The trend you are seeing may be related to the fact that IT may already have established outsourcing relationships with consultancies that do not have cloud capability. In this scenario, it is more efficient if the business does an end run around IT to avoid previously sane SLAs but now seem archaic.”

“I've certainly spoken with some firms that regard cloud service providers as competitors to their established way of doing things. In fact, at least a few want to stay away from a "pay by the drink" chargeback model because it put them in direct competition with various infrastructure as a service alternatives.”

“I think this thinking has been going on long before cloud came along, it's just another in a line of approaches that have potential for reducing the headcount in a corporate IT department.  In my opinion, any enterprise IT department that is seeing IaaS or PaaS providers as competition wasn't a partner with the rest of the business to begin with.”

You can read complete set of thoughts here http://community.forrester.com/thread/5875?

So what are your thoughts on this ?

Consumerization of IT : CITE conference and expo

Few days back I blogged about it CIO vs Millennials : Blurring Corporate IT firewalls

Key Topics on the CITE agenda include:

• Cost-effective, business-smart mobile application strategies
• Mobile device procurement, management and policies
• The latest strategies and policies for Bring Your Own Technology to work
• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
• Cloud services and governance
• Where unified communications with video offers business benefits
• User interface/gamification
• Data Access and integration
• Organizational, skill and role shift
• Managing service providers, contracts and SLAs

http://www.citeconference.com

CIO vs Millennials : Blurring Corporate IT firewalls

I was going through Accenture’s research report on Millennials and the challenges they are bringing to CIOs. Its an interesting research which highlights some challenges which can be considered as one of the drivers for cloud adoption and mobility. Overall the trend it shows is called Consumerization of IT (CoIT).

Most of the new workforce entering corporate firewall belongs to Millennials generations and CIOs belong to one prior to that. Clearly, there is a generation gap. CIOs have mandate to protect the enterprise data and comply to regulatory and audit requirements while workforce wants following:

• While entering into workplace, they do want to feel as if they are entering a prison and still want full view to outside world. They want technology at workplace which is latest and unrestricted.
• While leaving workplace, they want to take it with them. They want flexibility to work from anywhere using any device.

Here are some interesting infographics from the report:

They feel technology is must to perform at workplace.

Here is the shocker .. technology available plays an important role in selection of employer.

CIOs must be prepared for all of this. While the above points highlight only internal challenges, soon similar kind of expectation will start coming from customer, partners, etc as they are also overtaken by Millennials.

Next is Strategies for Embracing Consumerization.

Is Enterprise Architecture losing interest ?

Google Trends is an interesting tool to measure general interest in any topic based on the number of search queries made for that topic. So, today I decided to try for ‘Enterprise Architecture’ and was surprised seeing the results.

The interest in Enterprise Architecture as a topic has been constantly decreasing over a period of last few years based on queries submitted. Though the news published related to EA has increased.

So what this signifies ?

To understand the above trend I tried correlating it with Gartner’s Hype Cycle on EA and things were much clearer.

Yes, EA as topic has moved from Peak of Inflated Expectations to Trough of Disillusionment. People know that it is not a magic wand and requires lot of hard work to get value out of it. It is important and so it is getting institutionalized instead of just being a buzzword. I am sure from here we will only see rising interest in it in coming years.

Is Cloud ready to hold your money ?

Here are few excerpts from web which shows how Financial Industry is approaching the Cloud computing. It includes Financial Institutions, Cloud Providers & Banking software providers.

Financial Institutions

“Boston branch of the Wall Street Technology Association remain wary of public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon's EC2, but some have started building out the private cloud.”

“It's understood in Boston financial circles that State Street Bank was ahead of the curve in adopting virtualization and was about 72% virtualized by the time the topic of cloud computing became popular two years ago. State Street now operates seven racks of virtualized servers as its private cloud, with users able to provision servers for themselves.”

“startups are skipping the data center investment .. directly going to cloud”

“Robert Hegarty, global head of market structure-enterprise for Thomson Reuters, said the biggest challenge for IT staffs in financial services is the changing regulatory climate”

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/articles/231902472?printer_friendly=this-page

Cloud Providers

“Data intensive processing is a common early uses case for financial services customers, including risk analysis, algorithm and model testing and financial simulations. Web and mobile applications and storage and content distribution are also common use cases.”

“Security is top of mind for many customers”

http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/231901838

Banking Software Provider

“PaaS is where the future and true value in cloud lies for the financial services industry. PaaS is about the use of intelligent software infrastructure and programming capabilities to enable the convergence of applications, structured and unstructured data, dynamic processing power, and connectivity with intelligent devices.”

http://www.temenos.com/temenos-online/Function/Technology/Moving-To-The-Cloud/

Pillars of Agile Development

Businesses & CIOs across the world see lot of value in going Agile for Software Development. Development teams also have been quick enough in adopting the Agile methodologies. But in majority of cases, teams have failed to capitalize on the value of Agile development and in fact reduced their efficiencies by going Agile. There is also a trend where teams have started reverting back to the old way of software development.

The primary reason for this failure is that teams have failed to understand what it takes to get value out of Agile. Just by doing SCRUM or hiring a Scrum master doesn’t make you agile. In fact it creates chaos. Going Agile is a multi-dimensional approach and is based on three foundation pillars. If the team is not matured enough in even one of these, they will fail to get value out of going Agile. Higher the maturity in these pillars, more effective the agile approach will be.

The foundation pillars of Agile Development are:

1. Test Driven Development. It is about coding against tests instead of requirements. Requirements are translated into test cases and developers code to satisfy those test cases. This considerably reduces the testing cycle but increases focus on writing right test cases.

2. Agile Project Management. This is about correctly prioritizing the requirements and right sizing the iterations. I am sure everyone must have heard stories about Google having a sprint cycle of 2 days and Facebook having it of less than a day. Start with a sprint size with which the team is comfortable, even if it is 30 days. As you mature in other 2 pillars, you can start reducing your sprint duration.

3. Continuous Integration & Deployment. This is the last leg of an iteration and requires lot of support from tools. It involves building & integrating the code frequently, running automated tests and moving it to production. Some of the tools like Microsoft TFS, Cruise Control and others can help in this.

So, if you are planning to go agile for your development make sure you address it from all sides.

This is called Customer Experience

Most of the companies today irrespective of which industry they are in, are focusing a lot on customer experience. But some companies take it real seriously and even do not hesitate to break the long running traditions.

Recently I was answering a feedback survey of an airline and was amazed to see by the simplicity of the options of the survey. While most of the surveys will have numbers (1 to 5)  or (excellent to poor) to rate satisfaction, this survey actually tried capturing the emotions of the customer by giving options as real as actual emotions.

Though they forgot to provide the same experience with ‘N.A.’ which an average customer may not be able to decipher.