Crafting a Data-Driven Transformation Following a Proven Blueprint for Success

In this fast-paced digital age, data has emerged as the lifeblood of successful enterprises, offering invaluable insights and powering informed decision-making. To harness this transformative potential, your organization must align its data strategy with its broader business goals, evaluate its analytics maturity, make prudent choices in data architecture and technology, build the right data analytics team, implement effective data governance, and create a strategic roadmap. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore these key pillars of a data-driven transformation, providing your organization with a roadmap to unlock the full potential of data, foster a culture of innovation, and gain a competitive edge in today's data-centric landscape.

While data governance is very important to your data strategy, it’s important to understand that just like your level of data and analytics maturity is unique to your organization, so is your need for data governance. Although there are some great tools on the market to support the effective application of governance, data governance itself isn’t a tool or platform your organization can purchase. To avoid this, the data governance program your organization outlines should account for your company’s needs, size, urgency, maturity, and capabilities.

Read more in this white paper from Bluedog...

Quantum Computers are Good at Randomizing -- so how about a service for that?

 A new commercial endeavor offers up progress in the devilishly complicated field:

Last week, Cambridge Quantum Computing announced the first commercial, verifiable quantum random generation number service designed to run on an existing IBM quantum computer. Initially, the service will only be available to the 100 or so corporate and academic members of IBM’s Q network but it will be open to other users later this year. Its first applications are likely to be for cryptography, material science, computer games, insurance and options pricing.

Read more at over at the FT... 

Why Process is Important to Scale Agile

Using SafeAgile and other lean software development approaches require customization for the organization. It isn’t good enough to just duplicate the efforts of others. Organizational change management means addressing top-down control that is in opposition to change — this will undermine agility.

Each agile team is different and needs to learn what works. In many cases, this means scaling agility outside of functional areas. Breaking down silos is key to the cross-over benefits of agile, reflecting the cross-functional nature of agile. Agility means putting in place defined engineering practices, with process controls.

While daily stand-ups and Kanban boards are important, to build high-quality software quickly, organizations should incorporate automated builds, automated testing, and automated deployments, among other things.

Read more... about SafeAgile

After 18 Years, SAAS provider NetSuite Pays off Big

Oracle is to acquire NetSuite, a software-as-a-service provider that makes the ambitions claim of being the very first cloud company. NetSuite has been working for 18 years to develop a single system for running a business in the cloud.


Read more here...

Cloud Computing Concepts Explained

This is a good summary of cloud computing concepts...

Direct link

Tired of Scrum? Get Ready for the "Open Development" Methodology

While Scrum and other agile methodologies have made inroads since 1990s, much has changed. Startups and enterprises with workforces spread across time zones can no longer co-locate their employees as they were once expected to be able to. As the world shrinks, organizations are finding themselves in a position to decouple the software development approach from traditional means. We see open source everywhere in 2015 -- with the diversity of teams developing for the most popular open source projects, one wonders how to succeed without the benefit of managers, meetings, and code sprints?

With "open development," decisions are made in public view, and Project Managers and engineers are responsible for their own actions -- autonomous but accountable. The approach emphasizes more than just code delivery, but collaboration and transparency. The other aspect of open development method is in keeping the peer review process business-like and professional.

Another consideration is the role of software patents, an issue that remains controversial in the software industry. There has also been much discussion in the software development community over the increasing use of Web 2.0-style software services, otherwise known as Software as a Service (SaaS) or the ‘Service Cloud’.

As part of an open development method, code quality is paramount, so code should be legible, able to be tested, module and minimally verbose. Each of these factors benefits not only the development team, but stakeholders (and, ultimately, end users). Here's a quick summary of the open development philosophy.

Queuing - Single Queue Works, But Why Doesn't Everywhere Do That?

Queuing theory utilizes applied mathematics to deal with the phenomenon of waiting -- arising from the use of mathematical analysis to improve production processes. So why doesn't McDonald's utilize this approach? Customer what times over 90 seconds can be problematic. But perceived wait time is more critical - like page loads in your web browser. If the UI/UX designer has come up with a novel way of loading content, a user will wait out the progress bar. Or, if the content is so compelling (think, your bank account, or cat videos).

But it helps to think of getting your french fry fix take-out as involving a series of work stations, each with a separate task. And each task takes time (e.g. ordering food, instructing workers, retrieving hot fries, putting into packaging food, payment). These stations are generally attended in sequence, and each station takes some time to process one customer. The sequence of stations is a pipeline. But some steps take longer than others -- so building in wait time at certain points actually serves to move the production process along without bottlenecks. McDonalds provides several queues in parallel, the first for ordering and paying, and the second, an (invisible) station where customers wait while their food is gathered and served. The time it takes to cook the food is accounted for in the time taken to gather the food items.

The same analysis can be applied to packet switching with internetworking, or with automobile assembly. For my masters work, I looked at a supplier to a Japanese auto manufacturer -- with a supply chain represented as a multi-input, multi-stage queuing network. An input order to the supply chain was represented by stochastic variables, for the occurrence time and for the quantity of items to be delivered in each order. I had seen such an approach when learning about the (now sunsetted) wide area network at the central bank, where I was involved with information security. A "star" network topology has a central top level node that all other nodes connect to. "Packets" are passed through the central node. This helped me understand alternate ways of queuing -- something I have carried forward with my efforts at automating workflow in Bluedog's SAAS offering, where 'jobs' have to be passed from one stage to another, based on business rules.

The typical first-come, first-serve system of waiting in line is incredibly inefficient, in terms of both time and space. First, it essentially rewards people for wasting their time: Those who arrive first get the goods, but they also spend more hours of their precious time on Earth standing around and waiting. Second, long lines tend to create congestion and bottlenecks that cause problems for others. Think of the traffic jams that form as cars try to leave a football game, or the long boarding line at an airport that snakes across the walkway, getting in everyone else's way.

Read more here... Danish Researcher Report or read this guy's ideas.

Designing Software That Works for Your Organization

When undertaking a major -- enterprise -- software project, it may be useful to consider Conway’s Law, named for Melvin Conway, which states: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Consider this person's approach: “We should model our teams and our communication structures after the architecture we want.”

I have seen a looming problem for many of my customers: making effective use of big data is impeded by data being scatted around silos, across departments or even teams. At Bluedog, we do not have a top-down model. The management is not hierarchical management, so Workbench doesn't focus on centralized tools or reporting, which many managers see as necessary to control workers. Bluedog's architecture is focused more on the needs of the end users than on the needs of management. Perhaps report proliferation indicates a hunger for data, but difficulty for business analysts to define what is important?

If you've read my books, you know I have seen application structures evolve from the late 1980s from monolithic to modular solutions of this century, using techniques such as encapsulation and abstraction to reduce coupling and increase cohesion. With service oriented architecture, the purpose of doing so is obvious – the results are software systems that are easier to understand, change, reuse, and enhance.

How has Bluedog been successful? We start with as small a team as possible. We avoid making architectural decisions at the top, but keeping the team "understaffed," to reduce the possibility of building complexity, or over-architecting. If possible, we put the developers in the same room as the customers, business analysts, GUI designer, database gurus. Proximity encourages communication.

When Your Service Provider Can Sink Your Business

This is an amazing (and sad) story -- a mid-sized business relies on its web hosting service provider for its web site. Typical, really. But they were also utilizing the hosting service for their entire back-office data -- CRM, accounting, payroll, and more.

Without an understanding of the ramifications -- perhaps lacking even a systems administrator, let alone a CIO -- the company was processing and storing all its data on its website. One day, a developer was optimizing the database and removing records that the business no longer needed (so he thought). But a single, poorly formed delete query wiped out the database table. This minor error in a SQL command deleted the sum of the company's data; the company was rocked to the core. In a few months, they went belly-up.

Lesson: choose a proper SAAS provider that can handle your data properly. Know what you want, what you are getting into, and what happens to your data.

Read more here... Death by Delete

Good News, Everybody! (well, bean-counters) SAAS is Deductible!

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released an accounting standards update, which covers the fees paid for cloud computing. This is part of FASB's simplification initiative aimed at eliminating unnecessary complexity in accounting standards. In the first update, “Accounting Standards Update No. 2015-05—Intangibles—Goodwill and Other—Internal-Use Software (Subtopic 350-40): Customer’s Accounting for Fees Paid in a Cloud Computing Arrangement,” FASB noted that existing GAAP does not include explicit guidance about a customer’s accounting for fees paid in a cloud computing arrangement. These can include software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and other similar hosting arrangements. FASB said it heard from stakeholders that the absence of explicit guidance resulted in some diversity in practice, along with unnecessary costs and complexity, in evaluating the accounting for those fees.

The guidance already exists in the FASB Accounting Standards Codification, but it's included in a subtopic applied by cloud service providers to determine whether an arrangement includes the sale or license of software. The amendments in the latest update provide guidance to customers about whether a cloud computing arrangement includes a software license.

If a cloud computing arrangement includes a software license, then FASB said the customer should account for the software license element of the arrangement consistent with the acquisition of other software licenses. If a cloud computing arrangement does not include a software license, the customer should account for the arrangement as a service contract. The guidance will not change generally accepted accounting practices GAAP for a customer’s accounting for service contracts.

Read more at... Accounting Today!

Ask Your Developer: Is this a Web or Cloud App?

When a customer asks, should we go Cloud vs Web, my response is frequently, what's the difference? Then, I try to illuminate with the following. These days cloud applications are all the rage… but what’s the difference between a cloud app and a web app, if they both run in your browser? And are mobile apps cloud-only? Confused? Don’t be. Here’s a quick primer on the differences (and similarities).

Let’s start with web applications — software accessed over a network such as the internet or an intranet via a web browser such as Safari or Chrome. Such tools are built with= a browser-based language (e.g. JavaScript), displayed with HTML and accessed with a common web browser. In web apps, the software as well as the database resides on a central server. This saves software developers from building and maintaining multiple client versions for a specific operating systems.

Cloud apps are hosted by cloud providers (Amazon, Google, others) and are accessed over the Internet. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider owns the software while the customers “rent the app” in a pay per use model. As web apps, they are used through a web browser so nothing needs to be installed locally. Cloud apps are generally architected to support multi-tenancy — enabling multiple customers (tenants) to be aggregated into the same application). Pricing is based on actual usage or per-user.

They seem similar, don’t they? Both types of apps are stored on a server and delivered through a browser interface over the internet. Cloud apps should have high availability (through mirrored installations in multiple locations) as a feature, while many web apps are limited in ability to support a fixed number of users. Cloud apps may offer extra security and integration with other systems via web services. Administrators of cloud apps can easily configure workload and traffic patterns in order to utilize the exact amount of infrastructure offered. Web applications are usually developed for a given platform, limiting scalability.

Mobile apps that access the same back-end over the internet would be considered cloud apps if the architecture and supporting infrastructure are cloud-based.

Want to Compete Against the Big Players? SAAS can give you an edge...

Government contracts should be well-versed with the spreadsheet, juggling around materials, labor and subcontractor costs until the perfect financial balance is reached for a given government opportunity. When IT is thrown in, however, projects achieve a new level of complexity -- and uncertainty. When small contractors lack support from internal tech teams or have no in-house expertise, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offers up solutions in a small business environment with comprehensive automation. If given a chance to erase IT expense in favor of an agile, pay-as-you-go operational model, most business decision makers would jump for joy. This can be accomplished with SaaS -- where software delivery via browser or mobile device, configuration, maintenance and update responsibilities are on the service provider. With a vast selection of tools to benefit small government contractors, small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs) can dramatically reduce IT support needed, and tap into a pool of automated tools to help run a small business like a large one -- so the business can evolve into a large one.

Read more at Forbes...

The Virtue of Starting Fresh

Bluedog is working on a new version of its product, Workbench "Always on the Job!"© And we are facing new challenges everyday. It is great to be back writing code, and on the front lines of working with end users. This is how better mousetraps get built, IMHO.

When we opted to upgrade, we went around in circles at the beginning about Ruby vs WebObjects. About keeping legacy code as a base layer, or starting fresh. Ripping up the SDD and starting again is one of the hardest decisions to do even — especially when its your baby.

At other places I have worked, too many people have invested too much in an on-going project. There are too many stakeholders, too much institutional momentum. As a result, the impulse is to try to fix what is there.

When I got my MBA, one of the best things I learned — and embraced — is the concept of “sunk cost.” So, cleaning the white board made the most sense for Workbench 2.0 -- while cloud computing, n-tier MVC architecture, and the web are going strong, there are many exciting new opportunities in the world of software-as-a-service. And the economic turmoil recently has encouraged our customers evolve. So we have.

When Steve Jobs took over Apple again in the 1998, one of his first moves was to throw overboard projects that weren’t working – such as, the “Newton” handheld device (which, as readers may know, I loved). He started over, wanting a clean slate.

I am lucky — with the great team at Bluedog, I am able to ask, “If we were just to start fresh, what would we do?” That’s what we are doing, and I am excited to see us get to the launch pad!

Monday Morning - let's talk tech: Service First, Apps Second

In the service oriented world cloud computing lives in, it behooves us to think in terms of the interface first, the resultant apps, second.

For example, think of a database you want to share with thousands of users. Who knows how individuals might want to access that data? How will you manage fine-grained permissions? Lightweight business logic, perhaps tied to an enterprise authentication solution such as LDAP, provides one path. One may also benefit from performance, as frequently accessed data could be cached. As “consumed” data flows through a web services layer, it is desirable to have fine-grained access control and analytics of the consumption of said services — and who doesn’t love a dashboard view of utilization?

The Bluedog approach is to think in terms of application programming interfaces (APIs), in the form of web services, so that organizations can open up legacy systems, improve efficiency and encourage others to tap the information resources already in use across the spectrum of IT assets. An API is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a software application. An example is the Google Maps API, which enables developers to embed Google Maps on a web page using a JavaScript interface. The Google Maps API is designed to work on mobile devices and desktop browsers, showing how flexible the approach can be.

The libraries in our software-as-a-service Workbench handle connectivity, access control, and search so our developers can focus on building a great user experience, whatever the platform (iPhone or iPad, browser, or even machine-to-machine).

Cloud vs Virtualization: A short primer

Virtualization is software that separates physical infrastructure from the servers (or, in some cases, routers) to create various dedicated platform resources. Virtualization software enables a hosting provider run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same server at the same time, in partitioned allocations of memory -- making servers, desktop environments, data storage and file systems independent of the physical hardware layer.

Cloud computing can be thought of as the service that results from the application of virutalization, when those virtual resources do not require human intervention to be enabled, and are accessed via the internet. The so-called "cloud" is the availability of shared resources, software, or data — as an on-demand service via the Internet.

The cloud most often includes virtualization resources to deliver the service or services. The cloud provides a self-service capability, elasticity, automated management, scalability, and pay-as you go service that is not in place with virtualization out-of-the-box.

At larger organizations, data center consolidation and modernization might result in so-called "private" clouds.

Sofware-as-a-service (SAAS) lets anyone enjoy software applications (such as Workbench "Always on the Job!"©) by licensing user "seats" on that is deployed by a provider, usually delivered in the browser or via a tablet or smart phone. The provider maintains the hardware and software, upgrades facilities and fixes problems -- users' total cost is lowered by eliminating deployment of the application in an organization's data center. SaaS applications are accessed over the Internet.

Virtualization is a technology that allows one or more physical server to appear to applications as multiple "logical platforms." These platforms can be accessed via the Internet, with automated tools, making them "Cloud" based.

Why Does the Government Still Shy Away from the Cloud?

We know the U.S. government is notoriously slow in adopting new technologies (except, of course, for spying). But the cloud is hardly new. At Bluedog, we describe cloud computing as a whole range of infrastructure, software, data and applications residing in the cloud -- that's to say, outside your data center, accessed via the Internet. You know, like Google.

At a recent event, GSA's Mark Day, the acting deputy assistant commissioner in the Integrated Technology Services office of the Federal Acquisition Service, said agencies spent more than $550 million on cloud services through governmentwide acquisition contracts, while they spent less than $100 million on cloud-specific contracts, such as email-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service. Day said the difference in the spend shows integration services are important to agencies.

"There's a cloud broker who can help do security, single sign-on tie-ins for all cloud providers. You could have a cloud broker do security monitoring in a standardized way across all cloud providers, giving you a single pane of glass to manage from. You could integrate legacy and cloud so it's easier to manage your pieces," Day said. "There's a whole set of layers as you start to think this through that a cloud broker could do. Now the question is, which of those functions can a cloud broker do economically and efficiently for the federal government? Where do they add value? Where do they drive speed to market? Where do they make it easier for the consumer to know what they've actually gotten and be able to anticipate problems and react to problems better? And where frankly, are they just an added cost?"

Of course, the U.S. is hurting the program -- when our own government makes cloud computing a non-started by spying on everyone, the fallout is wide spread. Other governments lose confidence in U.S. industry. The European Commission is looking to promote EU-based cloud services with the urgent drafting of a new charter.

The mounting evidence is that the U.S. Prism spying scandal may damage the global market share of US-based tech companies involved in the cloud computing sector. So even if the Feds starting buying more SAAS and other Cloud products/services, we are all going to suffer with the reputation that the U.S. spies on everyone -- its own citizens, not just our global allies.

Here's Professional Point's Summary of SAAS Pros and Cons

From the blog at Professionals Point,

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a type of Cloud Computing. SaaS is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software". In SaaS, software and associated data are centrally hosted on the cloud. SaaS is typically accessed by users using a thin client via a web browser.

Advantages of Software as a Service (SaaS)

1. SaaS (Software as a Service) is Cheap

Software as a Service allows organizations to access business functionality at a cost typically less than paying for licensed applications since SaaS pricing is based on a monthly fee. Unlike traditional software which is conventionally sold as a perpetual license with an up-front cost (and an optional ongoing support fee), SaaS providers generally price applications using a subscription fee, most commonly a monthly fee or an annual fee.

2. Less Hardware Required with SaaS (Software as a Service)

Software is hosted remotely, so business organizations don't need to invest in additional hardware. To support scalability, the application is installed on multiple machines (called horizontal scaling).

3. Little Maintenance Required with SaaS (Software as a Service)

Software as a Service removes the need for organizations to handle the installation, set-up and often daily upkeep and maintenance. Initial setup cost for SaaS is typically lower than the equivalent enterprise software. SaaS vendors typically price their applications based on some usage parameters, such as the number of users using the application. So SaaS provides easier administration. SaaS does automatic updates and patch management. No compatability issues will arise by using Saas as all users will have the same version of software. SaaS reduces IT support costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the SaaS provider.

Diadvantages of SaaS (Software as a Service)

1. Security Issue: As data is stored on cloud, security becomes a major issue.

2. Latency Issue: Again as data is stored in cloud far away from end user, it may take more transactional time as compared to traditional approach. So, SaaS model is not suitable for applications that demand response times in the milliseconds.

3. Total Dependency on Internet: Relying on an Internet connection means that data is transferred to and from a SaaS firm at Internet speeds, rather than the potentially higher speeds of a firm’s internal network.

4. Switching between SaaS vendors is difficult: Switching SaaS vendors may involve the slow and difficult task of transferring very large data files over the Internet.

Applications of SaaS (Software as a Service)

SaaS has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), management information systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), content management (CM) and service desk management.

Future of SaaS (Software as a Service)

SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mature and new developmental approaches, such as AJAX, become popular. Meanwhile, broadband service has become increasingly available to support user access from more areas around the world.

So You Want to Run Your Business in the Cloud? What About Integration?

Ellyn Phenea rightly points out the difficulties of an integrated view of IT systems for organizations relying on software-as-a-service (SAAS).

As small and midsize businesses (SMBs) leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) to scale more quickly, they can end up with disparate applications that do not integrate. This gives rise to security issues as companies will bypass security protocols governing these software, and result in data residing in silos in different cloud services.

It seems to be true that IT policies around governance and identity management could become harder to enforce in a dispirit environment, where differing vendors supply back-office solutions. But careful planning with an eye towards security can avoid this pitfall. For example, maintaining control over the central user identity credentials -- in an LDAP or Active Directory -- goes a long way towards maintaining vigilance. For many, their FaceBook account is the easiest way to log into Internet-provided services.
Authorization and access are the first station stops on the journey to SOA. Instituting An OpenID or other solution can give users a similar experience, but sometime revocable policies are difficult to propagate. Read more about this concept here.
Data sharing becomes easier when the SAAS solutions you choose have web services APIs to "open the door" to accessing information. While one could consider a simple solution to "publish" data from one service (perhaps via Atom, RSS or some other XML format), real application integration requires a lot more than data mapping. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be more readily realized when you implement such as content-based routing, process flow control, exception handling, and messaging. Finding SAAS offerings that provide such tools can be challenging, but worth the effort, to help you avoid the need to understand complex APIs when developing web services. Look to deploy into cloud offerings with SOAP or REST interfaces, so you can link systems across the Internet. Open data storage is the next stop on the journey to SOA in the cloud, and many options are available to accommodate large or small data sets.
Security and Integration are achievable with SAAS, because many offerings are designed with SOA in mind.
- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Need Cloud Expertise? Who Ya Gonna Call?

While Amazon and Google have pressed ahead with cloud offerings, the ability of large organizations such as government agencies, Fortune 500s or non-government organizations to leverage this vast set of resources is constrained by finding trustworthy experts to help guide and shape the future.

Architects and engineers who fill these new hybrid jobs -- as well as the set of skills needed to execute them -- are still morphing, both substantially and semantically. Some, like cloud architect, cloud software engineer or cloud developer, cloud systems administrator, do obviously pertain to this lofty new environment.

But the skills transfer for most technicians and others remains murky. At the early stages of adoption, organizations should seek out thought leaders who understand service oriented architecture (SOA), the role of mobile computing, and who can bridge the gap between techno-jargon and clear language, so CIOs, CFOs and business strategists can find the right path.

Read more at InfoWorld...

- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Location:Washington DC

Another in the series: Services You Can Use, IRL

In real life, the World Wide Web can be used for entertainment, information gathering, socializing and more. For small businesses, the Web can be a whole new avenue for sales. Tackling a web site (that merely advertises what a business is all about) is one aspect of using the Web to grow a business. But the most direct means of leveraging the Web to expand is via e-commerce. Of course, roll-your-own solutions abound, if you have a talented IT staff and dedicated highly
available internet connection to wire your servers up to.

At Bluedog we define e-commerce as any online business that runs a website where customers can purchase goods or services directly. In the best case, account management, order processing, and perhaps even warehouse/order fulfillment are in someway integrated.

Or you can take the software-as-a-service approach and use a service such as eDirectHost ecommerce website builder. This approach makes excellent sense for a business new to the web, or one that has limited technical resources to maintain an e-commerce site. Medium size enterprises can take advantage of the service provider's infrastructure, for higher traffic situations.

With a service you should expect a complete web site with reliable up-time, a store management front-end, a product catalog, and of course a shopping trolley. Secure processing of orders and payments protects you and your customer. If you look at how the big boys handle e-commerce, you will quickly recognize that a complete feature set from an e-commerce provider is the standard these days.

I've advised a number of ventures with that old saw, "'It's no use changing for changes sake…" But be aware that if your business is not embracing change, you can bet your competitors are.