I am looking into enterprise architecture at work, and I saw this rather interesting article from 2006, quite old really by news standards or blog standards

Enterprise Architecture - Lessons from the Laudry room

What the author is trying to say is that the role of an Enterprise Architect is to understand the business impact of those technology decisions that we are grappling with every day. Maybe this is a good way to explain SOA, the Three Letter Acronym that brings out so much passion and hatred at the same time.

~paul

I found this game mod for Team Fortress 2, where the traditional soccer game is combined with the Unreal Tournament’s firepower! pretty funny indeed

The other day as I was driving home in pouring rain (typical Melbourne weather), stuck in not-so-typical bad traffic, I decided to catch up on my overdue pod casts, one of them being the ABC counter point program. If you listens to AM radio at all, I highly recommend taking a look at this program, as at times I have found this very thought provoking.

Last week’s counter point program interviewed Matt Mason, an ex-pirate DJ who recently wrote the Pirate’s Dilemma, The book takes an interesting look at the whole piracy issue in the music industry. And as you’d expect from a veteran pirate radio DJ, he has decided to make the book available completely free. Well… as you check out the book, you can decide how much money to pay him, and if you pay $0, your copy of the ebook shall be aptly named “thepiratesdilemma-pirate_copy.pdf” Nice one Matt

But Matt Mason delves much further than that, tracing back in history early signs of underground movement initiated by the public to go against the huge corporations. He terms this as punk.

Punk in its broad sense defines the underground subversive movement where the individuals defy convention, either by operating outside the existing legal framework or creating an entirely untested territory. And punk capitalists are those pioneers that took advantage of such niche and vacuums where traditional businesses or organisations fail to satisfy or fulfil that demand.

Given his background in the entertainment and music industries, most of his examples are from there. He went into considerable length in describing the activities of pirate radios where local DJs can experiment on alternative music genres. This ultimately can not be stopped by commercial radio stations as they can not cater for all music tastes and instead stick with the fail-safe option of the pop charts. Pirate radios on the other hand allows for specific focus on particular music tastes and become real incubators for up-and-coming musicians and in turn en-mass a considerable number of listeners. Once this has created enough listenership, the mainstream media cannot help but accept defeat in the most fluttering manner, i.e. broadcast music that originally was showcased on pirate radio. In fact many pirate DJs have gone mainstream and finding themselves running commercial radios after they have gained respect and acceptance in the pirate ether.

Matt then further proposes that history has shown such pirate movements before.

…Edison, in turn, went on to invent filmmaking, and demanded a licensing fee from those making movies with his technology. This caused a band of filmmaking pirates, among them a man named William, to flee New York for the then still wild West, where they thrived, unlicensed, until Edison’s patents expired. These pirates continue to operate there, albeit legally now, in the town they founded: Hollywood. William’s last name? Fox.

He obviously isn’t endorsing patent infringements. What’s really important here is that;

1. Technologies like peer-to-peer when used by pirates are ‘game-changing’ to the music and entertainment industry. How can any corporation compete at the scale and value which digital pirates are? The price free, mode of distribution the on-demand torrent network, which is infinitely scaleable and would dwarf any commercial distribution networks.

In that respect, musicians and artists in general are far more adaptable and therefore are abandoning record labels and using the internet themselves to distribute their content. No longer are they tethered by the strict contracts that record labels force them to sign, and they also have far more control over the revenues that their concerts and shows command. Many shows now broadcast freely on youtube, the latest US TV series are now made simultaneous available on the net, on air globally. Alternative revenue streams are sought rather than the traditional TV advertising.

2. Sometimes patents will impede the progress of innovations. Matt shows what’s already happening in our daily lives. Around the world, companies are patenting cure for diseases or genetic codes of 200 plus variety of wheat stocks. Such corporate greed is causing backlash in many third world countries, where its citizens can not afford the exorbitant prices demanded. Many countries have put up provisions in law where the patents concern genetic materials and life-saving drugs.

The idea that capitalism will thrive by individuals pursuing purely for their own self-interests are numbered. Increasing evidence is there that a sense of altruism that exists and prevails. That we do indeed derive satisfaction by helping each other to move forward.

Many open source software are made better by thousands of people around the world devoting free time and effort for the betterment of the general public. Many technologies are now developed and incubated in the open source world, before they get picked up by corporations. Why stop at music and softwares? How about the next battery operated car? People are sharing more than ever before and in the process becoming individual enterprises interacting with the mainstream organisations on level playing fields like never before…

Perhaps this is what Matt meant by punk capitalism. There will forever be punks and pirates, turning what’s happening at the fringes into mainstream, tapping into the trickles of information and transforming that into torrents. May there be a bit of punk in all of us

~paul

Last week, at work we had a number of sales people from Oracle to do a presentation, since I lamented somewhat about Oracle, I was curious to find out from them what exactly are going to be included from the BEA product suite into the Oracle suite. I was told politely to wait for the 1st of July announcement. I didn’t register for the webcast, but I did manage to squeeze in the 2 pod casts on the road with Thomas Kurian. Here are some take-aways for me, and I hope you will find this somewhat useful:

• Weblogic JRockit is here to stay, and existing Oracle products can now running on top of this very efficient JVM and the nowly aptly named Oracle Weblogic Application Server. Some features from existing Oracle App server will be incoporated.

Thumbs up for me on that one, you get no arguments from me here. JRockit is a proven solution, and a crown jewel from BEA. I am not too familiar with the Oracle App Server, maybe others can add their 2 cents here.

• Aqualogic Service Repository will be incorporated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Well, you need a service repository to hold all your artifacts for your service as well as providing governance, and the means to publish such details to it, so the point is sorta moot here.

• Oracle WebCentre Suite (formerly Aqualogic User Interaction) will bring out a whole host of enterprise 2.0 capabilities that are going to be based on the Weblogic Portal servers.

This is very similar to what IBM just announced with its plans on the WebSphere Portal v6.1. I am interested to know what you think about this portal approach. Is it because many of the clients have already bought into portals so it is a way to recap the investment into existing infrastructure?

• Tuxedo is incorporated into as a key offering from Oracle as a transaction processing solution, making it available on more OS platforms, tigher integrations with Oracle database etc etc.

There are no surprises there, given that Tux has been used by a lot of enterprises for mission critical transactions.

• Enterprise Service buses from both AL and Oracle will interoperate and comply to the Service Component Architecture. The Weblogic Event server lives on in the BPM suite, everything else seems to come from the existing Oracle products.

I think AL has been following the SCA path for some time now, may be there are just some re-jig from the Oracle’s fence. That’s all from me, I hope you enjoyed my rant, and your comments are always welcome as always

~paul

I find GetSatisfaction, a Web 2.0 start up that aims to connect companies with consumers quite a refreshing idea. I thought this is a great idea, where users can submit ideas, problems and questions to any companies that care to listen.

In the past user forums have sprung up everywhere focusing on particular products, and those that en-mass enough users do get representatives from respective companies to answer some of the questions/feedbacks/complaints from fellow users. Whirlpool comes to mind, where it started off as a forum and news bulletin dedicated to broadband internet for Australia, very quickly as the user base expanded, so have the forums and the topics, from fridges to the latest Hunda CRV to the best bluetooth headset for your mobile phone… The list well goes on

Now back to GetSatisfaction, many companies have already created accounts where their employees can provide that direct representation. This is a great example where users that participate get immediate value for themselves, either by getting your questions answered, or learning new tricks from others who have used the same products. Needless to say, not all companies will openly embrace this, after all, it takes a great deal of courage from the corporations to meet its customers at the coal face, the consumers market is getting more and more transparent. Judging from the growing list of companies that there, it clearly leans more towards the technology and consumer electronics sectors rather than the traditional businesses… Things will catch on I am sure

I wish GetSatisfaction all the best, for I have already used it to rant about my Treo 680 phone to the company Palm. Now Palm are you listening?

~paul

Given my interest in the integration, I can’t help but to pay close attention to the progress of the aquisition by Oracle of BEA.

It seems that the BEA SOA teams are being broken up to manageable bits so it is more palitable to the Oracle monster… The SOA dream of Aqualogic is coming to an end… Joe McKendrick’s report on this is also not looking good…

What are your thoughts on this? Needless to say this greatly impacts customers who are using BEA Aqualogic as their integration middleware.

~paul

My patience is sorely tested with the current supposedly public stance of ’stamping out child sexual exploitation’ with the recent art exhibition of an Australian photographer, artist Bill Henson.

The NSW police seized a number of photographs by Bill Henson from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, on the grounds of depicting minors in an ‘indecent sexual manner or context’. Since we are so focused on the term context, I think it is only just to describe the ‘full’ context under which this event takes place and the significance of it.

Bill Henson is a well known artist, who had his first exhibition at the age of 19, at the National Gallery of Victoria. Since then he has had many exhibitions of his work both nationally and internationally. In 1995, he represented Australia at the 46th Venice Biennale. The exhibition in question at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery contained a number of images depicting girls under the age of 16 in the nude.

It is important to point out that Bill Henson’s artistic interest on his teenage subjects. During an interview by Dominic Sidhu at EGO magzine, this very question was asked:

Your teenage subjects seem to exist outside of society in an almost hypnotic state.

The reason I like working with teenagers is because they represent a kind of breach between the dimensions that people cross through. The classical root of the word “adolescence” means to grow towards something. I am fascinated with that interval, that sort of highly ambiguous and uncertain period where you have an exponential growth of experience and knowledge, but also a kind of tenuous grasp on the certainties of adult life.

Great, so now we have the full context of which we can now see and examine Bill Henson’s work.

Now my own personal critique of this quagmire which Bill has himself now landed in. I am saddened by the fact that we now live in an age of political correctness so pervasive that every facet of a modern man/woman’s life now must pay homage to.

Our media would sensationalise when Madonna (a pop icon) kisses Britney Spears (uhmmm … another sorta icon?) full on the lips; glamourise the Royal families and run images of their babies full across our high-definition LCD screens; and have you and me fixated on the goings-on around us in 5 seconds sound bites that would have you submerged in this soup of headlines and trite stories that even a full F-18 sonic boom would not shake. phew… that felt good

Our legal systems seem to be marching to the same tune, I wonder if great artists of the world would now be tossing and turning in their graves. What would Leonardo Da Vinci say about Bill Henson’s work? What if the famous Mona Lisa smile is from that of dare I say a 14 year old teenage girl? Considering the fact that some of his sculpture works all explored the nude human bodies, it is probably highly likely that he would had young models working for him at the time.

Naturally, I digress After all we are living in an age of ever insurmountable dangers, danger from terrorism, danger from global warming, danger from global recession, and last not least danger from dangerous elements in our society who sexually exploit children. Our legal systems and the incumbents of the government of the day must and shall uphold that very delicate veil of security in this age of dangers and uncertainty.

So it seems that our politicians and governments keep telling us, we need to be so vigilant that Bill Henson’s work can not and will not be shown in this society, without understanding the very context under which his works are shown.

Maybe one day, some of the seized works from the Roslyn Oxley9 would see the day of light in a public forum where we all get to vote if these works are indeed works of a sexual intent or otherwise.

~paul

I have decided to be ‘buzz-word’ compliant and used the venerable term ‘Enterprise 2.0′ as part of the title to the post.

Disclosure: I am a consultant working for a global consulting firm, and invariably I am interested in SELLING work to clients, by proposing VALUES to them.

Enterprise 2.0 is no different in that regard and nor should it be.

I think there has been quite a lot of articles out there covering the technologies and the concepts behind enterprise 2.0, and to some extend the underlying values it proposes.

There is even recognition that to make enterprise 2.0 successful in an organisation, it requires a cultural change, and you can read Harvard Business School Associate Professor Andrew McAfee’s description on the ‘Empty Quarter‘, where he describes the quarter where the non-adopters reside. I think his depiction of types of people in an organisation with respect to enterprise 2.0 is quite accurate.

In any organisation there are young graduates and IT professionals whom using facebook, del.icio.us, gtalk is simply second nature. Then there are those who generally (but not always) hold senior posts whom religiously uses e-mails with huge attachments and store everything in Word documents.

Andrew proposes the key challenge for enterprise 2.0 adoption is how to get the people from this ‘Empty Quarter’ to participate and more importantly get value out of it for themselves.

Now I am interested, because the people in the Empty Quarter are the very people, I and many others need to pitch ideas to, to sell consulting services and finally to bill our hours ;-). How do we convince them the value proposition of enterprise 2.0?

Just like all the other works we have successfully pitched and sold in the past to our clients, be it a CRM system, or an EAI project or dare I say an SOA project, we need to travel through the same road.

Then I thought perhaps apart from funky demos and flashy PowerPoint presentations, we need to go for something we all understand, yes something even the people in the ‘Empty Quarter’ will immediately recognise and understand.

That is an economics angle, and more importantly the concept of a market. A market is where its participants trade with each other. Take a look at the stock market as a classic example, traders buy and sell shares. These trades happen as traders make decisions based on the information that is available at the time, and then make a judgement call. Economists devote large amounts time and money to analyse the behaviours of traders in such markets, and how information is shared and flowed and how that in turn influence the market outcomes.

In many economics text books, you will see the following lines quite often.

…assuming rational behaviour;

and everyone has perfect and complete information…

Hmmm… perhaps I was paying attention in my university lectures. It’s really this perfect and complete information that is interesting and relevant here. We now know (perhaps some of us always did) that in any real markets, it is often not possible to have perfect and complete information for all the participants, hence markets are not efficient.

Why? Because information costs money and time to obtain, and sometimes there are inside information whether we like it or not hence not shared, and sometimes information is tacit, and simply requires too much effort to organise and decipher.

Enterprise 2.0 provides a cheap medium of which information can be shared. The cost of participating in this ‘market’ is low, and there is no barrier to entry (at least not technological ones). From an organisation’s perspective, managers and executives need to ensure their time is spent efficiently. Since everyone’s time is finite, they need to ensure that the good set of information is arriving at their finger tips so that they can make sound decisions just like the traders in the stock market are making the right buys and sells.

If we can convince the key decision makers this, then we should be able to get management support to implement such systems and spread the good news.

~paul

Mountains and Streams
Chinese Paintings from the Asian Collection

A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition

13 April 2006 to 10 September 2006 Asian Temporary Exhibitions Space, Level 1. FREE ENTRY

THE WISE FIND PLEASURE IN WATER

THE VIRTUOUS FIND PLEASURE IN MOUNTAINS.’

The Analects of Confucious (c. 6th-5th century B.C.)

This exhibition is worth seeing as it draws upon material from the National Gallery of Victoria’s impressive collection of Asian art, in particular Chinese paintings. It includes objects from the 14th to the 21st century such as landscapes or `mountains and streams’ depicted in paintings on scrolls and on porcelains, Daoist (Taoist) mountain in jade carving, cosmic mountain in archaic bronze as well as black-and-white photographs of sacred mountains in China. It also includes so-called `dream stones’ (marble plaques evocative of misty mountains).

Artist Zong Bing (375-443) relates how he re-experiences his former travels as he painted from memory:

`And so by living in leisure

By nourishing the spirit

By cleansing the wine-glass

By playing the lute

And by contemplating in silence

Before taking up the brush to paint

Although remaining seated

I travel to the four corners of the world…’

 

A Taoist poem depicts nature as a spiritual refuge from the mundane everyday life:

‘…To tranquilize one’s mind is to nourish one’s spirit;

To nourish the spirit is to return to Nature.’

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/mountainsandstreams