Lawrence Wilkes

Or how to connect the architecture dots to support a smart connected planet. Introduction The notion of a connected planet is far from new. However, the number of connections as illustrated in figure 1 is growing at an exponential rate, and it is fast becoming a reality in which many organizations must operate. However, I doubt many organizations are preparing for this in a systematic way. More likely, experience suggests that dozens of connected ‘solutions' will permeate the organization via myriad routes and just add to the complexity of the business and IT landscape, becoming yet more spaghetti that someone is left to untangle. Architecture is key to dealing with this. However, architectural practices must evolve to themselves become more connected, and not a set of isolated disciplines as they are often practiced today. Hence, in this note as well as considering ... (more)

Connected Architecture for the Creative Economy

Steve Denning’s insightful blog post ‘Leadership In The Three-Speed Economy’ has me pondering on the correlation with IT. Does ‘IT in the Three-Speed Economy’ follow a similar pattern? I am not sure it is cut and dried. My experience suggests that IT can be like the example of GE that Steve provides, where all three economies can exist in the same organization and where pockets of creative IT thinking exist within the morass of traditionalism.  That said, IT in most Traditional Economy organizations will probably follow the pattern in the table below. Table 1: Traditional vs Creati... (more)

Service Concepts 101

The use of the term ‘Service' is somewhat overloaded. Everyone will have heard or used the terms Business Services, IT Services, Software Services, and now Cloud Services, and yet often there is much confusion and misunderstanding in their use. As my colleague David Sprott suggested in a CBDI Journal Report, "Everything is a Service" . In that report David suggested that the idea that "everything is a service" could be developed to clarify the taxonomy for Cloud Services and Services in the form of a Unified Service Model that would deliver convergence of business and IT perspe... (more)

Cloud Computing Reference Architectures, Models and Frameworks

Reference ‘Things’ A Reference Architecture (RA) “should” provide a blueprint or template architecture that can be reused by others wishing to adopt a similar solution. A Reference Model (RM) should explain the concepts and relationships that underlie the RA. At Everware-CBDI we then use the term Reference Framework (RF) as a container for both. Reference architectures, models and frameworks help to make sense of Cloud Computing. Unfortunately, such formality is absent from the various reference architectures, models and frameworks that have been published for Cloud Computing; t... (more)

In the Service Oriented Cloud, All Roads Lead to SOA

Cloud Computing is intrinsically service-based. But this is not just in the highly generalized sense of the term ‘service’, but also in the more specific Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) use of the term, where capabilities are provided via published service interfaces. In this research note we consider why SOA should not be forgotten just because more fashionable terms have risen to the top of the toybox. It might be easy to conclude that SOA was yesterday’s issue. In fact according to some pundits SOA is dead and business transformation, application and IT modernization, and... (more)