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Sun 19 Jun 2011

Two papers at Naples Forum on Service 2011

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Presentation , Article , Academic
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I just attended Naples Forum on Service 2011 in Capri, Italy, on June 14-17, where I presented two academic papers:

  • Explaining the Evolutionary Development of the Web (co-authored with Kimmo Karhu)
  • The Impact of Information Technology Enabled Services on Value Co-Creation (co-authored with Mikko Heiskala and Kari Hiekkanen)

In the first paper, we leveraged Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) approach to provide a meta-level account on the evolution of the Web. Drawing from the ecological notions of Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy (Gunderson and Holling, 2002) as well as a typology of agents (Verhagen, 2000), we constructed a tentative model with three levels of scale and four waves of development. We identified characteristic accumulating resources in each Web generation and discussed how they trigger an evolutionary leap to the next adaptive cycle. Our conclusions included that the control of service consumers over the service diminishes as the Web’s constituent agents increase in autonomy and that the content consumers at each generation tend to become the content producers at the next generation.

In the second paper, we discussed how information and communications technology impacts value co-creation in services. We argued that while IT enabled services eliminate human labor from direct interaction between the provider and consumer of the service in service fulfillment, human discretion is increasingly required at higher strata of work complexity: in handling exceptions and (re)defining service agreements as well as in designing and implementing service systems — i.e. in what we call service negotiation.

 

Sun 22 Aug 2010

The 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2010)

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Presentation , Event , Article , Academic
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The 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2010, took place in Lima, Peru on August 12–15, 2010. This year marked the first time the conference has been held in South-America. The theme of the conference, “Sustainable IT Collaboration Around the Globe”, also expressed the international nature of this year’s forum. In fact, over half of all authors of papers presented at the conference were from outside the Americas region. Over 800 participants of 43 different nationalities were represented.
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Mon 17 May 2010

SOA SIG Spring Seminar: SOA Governance

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Presentation , Event
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Today, the 7th half-yearly mini seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) took place in Innopoli II, Espoo, Finland. Featuring only two presentations this time, the event allowed plenty of time for both presentations and discussion. The first presentation was given by Kari Hiekkanen, Aalto University, providing an introduction to SOA Governance. I gave the second presentation, approaching the topic of the day from Enterprise Governance perspective.

3fa8
 

Thu 29 Apr 2010

Presentation on EA Governance at the Open Group Conference

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Presentation , Event
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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the Open Group Conference in Rome, Italy, and attending to the other sessions of the day. My presentation was entitled “Integrated Approach to Enterprise Architecture Governance” and showed many of the ideas I have been blogging about lately. I wrote a short summary of the presentation and also published the slides on Slideshare.

 

Tue 20 Oct 2009

World Café on Enterprise Architecture Governance

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Event , Organization
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Today, KAOS, a newly formed Finnish community of practice on Enterprise Architecture organized a world café about setting up an EA function. The event took place at OKO Bank in Helsinki. I was asked to host a café on EA governance, which I found a rewarding experience. The small group discussions were intense and it was interesting to hear about  experiences in a large variety of companies.

I opened the discussion with the following set of questions:

  • Which roles and responsibilities pertain to EA governance?
  • What kind of linkages exist between these roles?
  • At which organizational levels are various architectural artefacts governed?
  • Which governance processes pertain to EA governance?
  • Is EA governance centralized or distributed? Are there any underlying structural or other contingencies?
  • How is EAG related to other types of governance, e.g. IT governance?

Half of the questions would have been enough, however, as there would have been no end to the discussion that ensued.

It was concluded that EA governance specifies expectations between people in terms of roles and accountabilities, defines decision-making entities and clarifies communication. It should have a strong link with business development and guide the development of new IT. EA governance should have influence on the project portfolio and be aligned with the project model. It helps enterprise architecture down from the ivory tower and infiltrate the organization.

The governance roles seemed to vary from organization to organization, and we generally deemed that the question about contingencies is, indeed, relevant: there is no universal governance model. However, we were not able to delve into the question in any depth at this time.

 

Thu 1 Oct 2009

Seminar on Model-Driven Architecture and Domain-Specific Modeling

Posted by jjk under Technology , Event
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Today, SOA SIG, MallinnusOSY and SOLEA jointly organized an event on Model-Driven Design. The principles, advantages and challenges of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) approaches were discussed in four great presentations as well as in the panel discussion that followed.

After I had opened the day, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, CEO of MetaCase and co-author of “Domain-Specific Modeling” gave an introductory presentation to the day’s topics, with a special emphasis of Domain-Specific Modeling. He argued that, due to the modeling language specifically tailored to the domain, DSM raises the abstraction of software development to a new level, gives full control of development to the company and increases productivity by hundreds of percents. Not a bad proposition.

Next, we had a great honor and privilege of having a keynote presentation by David S. Frankel from the US, a pioneer in MDA and the author of “Model Driven Architecture: Applying MDA to Enterprise Computing (OMG)”. Mr. Frankel spoke specifically about semantic interoperability in enterprise integration, as “most growth in model-based systems is in model-driven integration”. Whereas the state-of-the-art tools support syntactic mapping, they do not address what should map to what. Integration costs are high to start with, consuming 30-40% of IT budgets, and an estimated 80 % of the integration effort is consumed by semantic interoperability requirements, which is very labor intensive. Even modest improvements in semantic interoperability wil thereby have large economic repercussions. Frankel explained the nature and structure of machine-readable semantic metadata, based on principles of language and called for a link between semantic ontologies and message structures in the next generation integration tools.

After the lunch break, Jan Wirix of Integral ICT, Belgium, recounted his experiences in a large-scale business process automation undertaking, in which model-driven principles had been applied in the form of MERODE methodology. Based on his experience, a clear distinction should be made between IT demand and IT supply, the conceptual and logical specifications independent on the physical implementation. Wirix concluded that MDA is an important factor to preserve simplicity and control projects and a significant step in moving software engineering “from stone age to iron age”. However, MDA can take place if and only if an architect exists.

Finally, professor Matti Rossi of Helsinki School of Economics presented his findings in an academic study that investigated whether domain-specific models are easier to maintain than UML models. The results were statistically significant and suggested that DSM models are, in fact, easier to comprehend and maintain than UML models.

The day was concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Harri Kreus of Auroranet and participated by David Frankel, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Matti Rossi and Juha Mykkänen (University of Kuopio). First, Kreus asked the panelists to take sides in the juxtaposition between MDA and DSM. Not surprisingly, no-one vehemently defended either approach, but everyone acknowledged the applicability of both, confessing oneself as being “Pro Modeling” rather than “Pro MDA” or “Pro DSM”.

At the end of the day, the question comes down to how to efficiently generate good quality code that addresses the business needs. The panelists agreed that although the level of abstraction of languages has risen, there is still a long road to go, before business can be readily executed in software. In the world of PowerPoint as the starting point, how should a language look like that would appeal to the domain experts? Professor Rossi drew an analogy from urban planning saying that high-level models should not describe the world in too detail, but merely as tentative; otherwise, they will be taken as something already decided-upon. Independent of the technology used, Frankel called for human competence in precise expression of business requirements, something a business process specialist or business analyst should be good at.

As a general conclusion, it was deemed that MDA has merits where interoperability is called for, but DSM becomes more applicable the more specific the domain is.

22bf
 

Thu 24 Sep 2009

Lecture: Master Data Management and Data Governance

Posted by jjk under Technology , Presentation
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Today, I was lecturing at the Special Course in Information Systems Integration at Helsinki University of Technology for the fourth season already. This year, the theme of the course is Master Data Management (MDM) and I gave a lecture on MDM and Data Governance.

 

Sat 13 Jun 2009

EAC 2009 in London

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Event
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IRM UK’s Enterprise Architecture Conference took place in London earlier this week. I only had time to attend the second day of the seminar on June 10, but one day alone provided plenty of stimulation, new ideas and good contacts.
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Wed 15 Apr 2009

SOA SIG spring seminar: Web-Oriented Architecture

Posted by jjk under Technology , Event
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Today’s spring seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) featured three great presentations that lightened the subject of Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) from complementary angles.

First, Tuomo Sahipakka of Logica gave an excellent introductory presentation to WOA and the architectural style of REST. He pointed out that REST brings the same agility and scalability as the WWW. Carefully avoiding an outright confrontation with RPC-style and Web Service standards, he posed a few provocative questions to the audience that made us come to the conclusion ourselves that there may, indeed, be something inherently awkward in using WS-flavored SOA: first one needs to find the WSDL description, then understand it, then generate code, then wrestle with interoperability issues… In contrast, RESTful WOA will provide scalable, expandable, interoperable and secure architecture of high performance.

Joni Niemi, VTT, showed an interesting demo of hubi.fi — a portal for developing and testing ubique social applications for the citizens of Helsinki metropolitan area. None of the Hubi services, such as event recommendations, bus schedules or meteorological information, were unique in their own right, but the portal appears to provide a platform for very powerful mashup applications that combine services with geographic information. One example of a cool service integrated in the portal is the vehicle location service of Helsinki City Transport.

Last but not least, Janne Kalliola, Exove, gave an insightful presentation on Web APIs. He spoke from experience about the very latest technologies and provided some practical recommendations on how to design and implement such interfaces.

Thanks to all the speakers and to the small yet attentive and inquisitive audience for an educational morning at the upslope of the hype cycle!

216d
 

Thu 19 Mar 2009

SOLEA 2009

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Science , Presentation , Event , Organization
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Today, the 1st International Symposium on Service-Oriented Locally adapted Enterprise Architecture, SOLEA 2009, took place in Dipoli conference center in Espoo, Finland. Having been planning and organizing the event for the last three months, it was great to see more than 60 people from 7 countries to attend the event.

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