“Out of Sight, Out of Mind”? Not a Solution for Aging IT Infrastructure

In the US and in industrial countries around the world, the recent economic crisis has triggered the first serious consideration of national spending priorities for more than a decade. Supposedly, every option is being explored and unfortunately, in many cases deficits are being balanced out by reduction in long-term investments in existing infrastructure. There are a few bright spots, however. For example, in the US, President Obama has included new money for high-speed rail.

But what about roads and bridges and dams? Well, things are pretty bleak. A dam safety study in 2009 showed that out of 84,000 dams listed in the database, 4,000 needed remediation and 2,000 were classified as “high-hazard,” meaning that the dam’s failure would cause loss of life. As reminders of the risk, last summer’s failure of a sludge containment dam in Hungary did enormous environmental Read more …

Trends for 2011 and Beyond

Every year the Cutter Trends Council attempts to come up with the biggest trends for the next 12 months. Unfortunately, this is an almost-impossible task, akin to forecasting the stock market for the next 6 or 12 months. Long range trends, on the other hand, are much easier to forecast. For example, there were a number of economists and brokers who forecast the recent recession (the one we’re still in) but hardly any were able to accurately forecast that it would occur in the early Fall of 2008.

What is true of forecasting economic trends is also true of Business-IT trends. It has been clear for decades that the retirement of the “baby boomers” in North America would cause a lot of problems in great many large (and small) organizations, but what no one could have accurately predicted was Read more …

White Space, Dark Matter, and Enterprise Architecture

For years now, I have made a good living by exploiting Geary Rummler and Alan Brache’s famous subtitle, “How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart” (Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart, Jossey-Bass, 1995). What Rummler and Brache meant by white space in this case was all the activities for which no one was explicitly responsible. My experience, which mirrors theirs, is that those things that fall between the cracks often get overlooked and undermanaged. Much like “white space” is the physics notion of “dark matter.” Dark matter is that unobservable “stuff” that physicists have computed exists in the universe that causes known celestial bodies to behave the way they behave with respect to our most fundamental physical laws.

In both white space and dark matter, there is Read more …

Make Risk Management a Priority for Complex Systems

There are no computer systems that are “too important to fail.” Failure, as any competent engineer will tell you, is always an option. Yet modern societies increasingly depend on systems to be foolproof. Electrical grids, air traffic control, automobile control, and medical equipment are all life-critical systems, and none of us wants to depend on life-critical systems with a high failure rate. Nobody wants to trust a large portion of his life savings to a financial trading system that is subject to unpredictable failure either. The same is true of the Internet itself. What we need to do is take a step back and study the design, architecture, and feedback control of these systems. Without such a discussion, we will experience more of these trillion-dollar flash crashes.

It is clear that interfacing in native mode (i.e., IP) over the Internet Read more …

A New Kind of Software Attack, A Whole New Ballgame

Early this year, fellow Cutter Consultants Mitch Ummel, Mike Rosen, and I wrote an Executive Report on the Smart Grid. In that report, we talked about all the potential that the Smart Grid offers, how it would be designed, and also about the serious problems that such an ambitious undertaking faces — especially problems related to reliability and security. We expressed fears that since the next generation of Smart Grid electrical utilities is based on current standards taken from the Internet and the current generation of operating systems, it would be subject to serious attacks by more and more sophisticated hackers which, in turn, could seriously jeopardize the reliability and security of our most critical infrastructure. Boy, were we on the mark.

The ink was hardly dry before we realized that we were more prescient than we Read more …

Looking into a Market Abyss

Sitting on my desk in my office is a model of one of the most dangerous cars in the history of sports car racing. It is a Mercedes 300SLR. On June 11, 1955, at the Le Mans race, a 300SLR driven by French driver Pierre Levegh was involved in an accident in which 82 people (including the driver) were killed. This tragedy sent a shock through the racing world, and the thinking about race car performance, design and safety was changed forever.

Now, in racing, it is clearly possible to produce race cars that can go 250, or 300 or perhaps 350 mph and stop on a dime. Human beings, even with computer assists, can’t drive such cars safely on the race track. So, it is not that such cars cannot be built, but that such cars would be too Read more …

Building a Business Empire? Follow the Romans

Occasionally, I will ask my students, “Why is the Roman Coliseum still standing?” The answer that I’m fishing for is, “Because the folks who tried to tear it down in the Middle Ages for building material were not as good engineers as the folks who put it up hundreds of years earlier.” All this was recently brought to mind because I’ve been reading a series of historical novels set in 9th century England based around the struggles between the Saxons and the Danes. In a number of places in these novels, the central character comments about the Roman ruins and how no one in his time could understand how the ancient Romans built the bridges, roads, baths, and castles that they did. These references got me thinking about architecture, engineering, and infrastructure.

History tells us that the Romans were not Read more …

A Hunger for Meaning

The other day, Ron Blitstein posted here about the term “SOA”:

The term “SOA” has become very confusing and possesses all the clarity of Web 2.0 (another term that drives me to distraction).

There are a number of words and phrases that I believe confuse those of us in enterprise architecture and/or systems development. The phrases that have most bothered me for the past few years are use cases, nonfunctional requirements, and lights on applications.

Let me start with use cases. My old friend James Robertson, one of the deans of requirements engineering, says that he has found nearly 40 different definitions of use case in modern systems literature. I can’t say that I have come up with that many, but I can say that the term is so frequently used and in so many ways that it Read more …

One Small “Oops” for Amazon, One Giant “Holy #$@%” for Mankind

“Hey, Honey, what happened to my 1984?”

If you were one of the thousands of people around the world who were in the process of reading (or researching) George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 and woke up Friday, 17 July 2009, to find that it had somehow disappeared from your Kindle, take heart: this is not a bug; it is a feature — though a feature that Amazon, we are told, is in the process of reviewing and revising.

That the book that introduced much of the world to the concept of centralized “mind control” was instantly erased on tens of thousands of “connected” devices is just too delicious to let pass — if there is a liberal God, George Orwell must be dancing a jig somewhere.

In what was an absolutely predictable corporate blunder, Amazon quietly removed copies of George Read more …

As the Net Kills Newspapers, Who Pays for Free?

I am, by all accounts, a news junkie. I take two papers every day and three on Sundays. I subscribe to a number of magazines and any number of news feeds. My startup page on the Internet is “Google News.” I have the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist as my favorites. I watch CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC on a regular basis. Earlier in my life, I contemplated moving to a college town with a good library for my retirement. Not anymore; I have the world’s greatest library at my fingertips and better yet the world’s greatest library index system: Google.

Today, I can scan the news of the world, watch videos of recent or ancient events, and see interviews with all manner of famous and infamous people. Read more …