ERP for IT Helps Dutch Insurance Giant Achmea to Reinvent IT Processes to Improve Business Performance Across the Board

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Achmea Holding has taken big strides to more successfully run their IT department like a business within the business.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving performance of their services to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end-users alike.

I am now joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast, Georg Bock, Director of the Customer Success Group at HP Software, and he's based in Germany. Welcome, Georg. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Georg Bock: Thanks a lot. Welcome, everybody, to this podcast.

Gardner: Our discussion today will take a deep look at Achmea Holding, one of the largest providers of financial services and insurance in the Netherlands, and we'll examine how they've taken large strides to run their IT operations more like an efficient business.

We'll learn how Achmea has rearchitected its IT operations to both be more responsive to users and more manageable by the business, based on clear metrics.

To learn more about how they've succeeded in making IT governed and agile -- even to attain enterprise resource planning (ERP) for IT benefits -- please join me now in welcoming our special guest, Richard Aarnink, leader in the IT Management Domain at Achmea in the Netherlands. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Aarnink: Thank you very much and welcome, all, to this podcast as well.

Gardner: Let me begin with asking you, as an IT architect, why is running IT more as a business important? Why does this make sense now?

Aarnink: Over the last year, whenever a customer asked us questions, we delivered what he asked. We came to the conclusion that delivery of every request that we got was an intensive process for which we created projects.

It was very difficult to make sure that it was not a one-time hero effect, but that we could deliver to the customer what he asked every time, on scope, on specs, on budget, and on time. We looked at it and said, "Well, it is actually like running a normal business, and therefore why should we be different? We should be predictive as well."

Gardner: Georg Bock, this notion of running IT with the customer most in mind is different than say 10 or 15 years ago. Is this something you are seeing more and more of in the field?

Trend in the market

Bock: Yes, we definitely see this as a trend in the market, specifically with the customers that are a little more mature in their top-down strategic thinking. Let’s face it, running IT like a business is an end-to-end process that requires quite a bit of change across the organization -- not only technology, but also process and organization. Everyone has to work hand in hand to be, at the end of the day, predictable and repeatable in what they're doing, as Richard just explained.

That’s a huge change for most organizations. However, when it’s being done and when it has lived in the organization, there's a huge payback. It is not an easy thing to undertake but it’s inevitable, specifically when we look at the new trends around cloud multi-sourcing, mobility, etc., which brings new complexity to IT.

You'd better have your bread and butter business under control before moving into those areas. That’s why also the timing right now is very important and top of people’s minds.

Gardner: Before we learn more about what you have done with your IT operations, Richard, tell us a bit about Achmea, the size of your organization, what you do, and why IT is so fundamentally important to you?

Aarnink: As you already stated, Achmea is a large insurance provider in the Netherlands. We have around eight million customers in the Netherlands with 17,000 employees. We're a very old and cooperative organization, and we have had lots and lots of mergers and acquisitions in the last 20 years. So we had various sets of IT departments from all the other companies that we centralized over the past years.

Aarnink

If you look at insurance, it's actually having the trust that whenever something happens to a customer, he can rely on the insurer to help him out, and usually this means providing money. IT is necessary to ensure that we can deliver on those promises that we made to our customers. So it’s a tangible service that we deliver, it’s more like money, and it’s all about IT.

Gardner: Tell us a bit more about the scope of your IT department and how you're able to bring together a variety of different IT departments, given your mergers and acquisitions activity, just a bit more detail on your IT organization itself.

Aarnink: Of the 17,000 employees that we have in the Netherlands, about 1,800-2,000 employees work in the centralized IT department. Over the last year, we changed our target operating model to centralize the technologies in competence centers, as we call them, in the department that we call solution development.

We created a new department, IT Operations, and we created business-relationship departments that were merged with the business units that were asking or demanding functionality from our IT department. We changed our entire operating model to cope with that, but we still have a lot of homegrown applications that we have to deliver on a daily basis.

Changing the department and the organizational structure is one thing, and now we need to change the content and the applications we deliver.

Gardner: You are leading in the IT management domain area and you also have a strategy and governance department. How has that briefly allowed you to better manage all of the aspects of IT and make it align with the business? What organizational structure have you been able to benefit from here?

Strategy and governance

Aarnink: To answer that question I need to elaborate a little bit on the strategy and governance department, which is actually within the IT department. What we centralized there were project portfolio and project steering, and also the architectural capabilities.

We make sure that whatever solution we deliver is architectured from a single model that we manage centrally. That's a real benefit that we gained in centralizing this and making sure that we can, from both the architecture and project perspectives, govern the projects that we're going to deliver to our business units.

Gardner: Georg, this notion of a strategy and governance department that helps to standardize these processes, align for automation, and make visible what’s actually going on in IT in a common way, I suppose gets at that systems-of-record approach and even ERP for IT approach. Is this something Achmea is in a leadership position on? Do you see this as a model for others, or is this something that’s happening more generally in the market?

Bock: Absolutely, Achmea is a leader in that, and the structure that Richard described is inevitable to be successful. ERP for IT, or running IT as a business, the fundamental IT processes, is all about standardization, repeatability, and predictability, especially in situations where you have mergers and acquisitions. It’s always a disruption if you have to bring different IT departments together. If you have a standard that’s easy to replicate, that’s a no-brainer and winner from a business bottom-line perspective.

In order to achieve that, you have to have a team that has a horizontal unit and that can drive the standardization of the company. Richard and Achmea are not alone in that. Richard and I have quite a number of discussions with other companies from other industries, and we very much see that everyone has the same problem, and given those horizontal teams, primary enterprise architecture, chief technology officer (CTO) office, or whatever you like to call those departments, is definitely a trend in the industry and for those mature customers that want to take that perspective and drive it forward that way.

It’s not rocket science from an intellectual perspective, but we have to cut through the political difficulties.

But as I said, it’s all about standardization. It’s not rocket science from an intellectual perspective, but we have to cut through the political difficulties of driving the adoptions across the different organizations in the company.

Gardner: Let’s look a bit more deeply, or in a detailed way, at the journey that Achmea has taken. Richard, what sort of problems or issues did you need to resolve, what were some of the big early goals that you had in terms of changing things for the better?

Aarnink: We looked at the entire scope of implementing ERP for IT and first we looked at the IT projects and the portfolio. We looked at that and found out that we still had several departments running their own solutions in managing IT projects and also budgets. In the past, we had a mechanism of only controlling the budget for the different business units, but no centralized view on the IT portfolio, as a whole, for Achmea.

We started in that area, looking at one system of record for IT projects and portfolio management, so we could steer what we wanted to develop and what we wanted to sunset.

Next, we looked at application portfolio management and tried to look at the set of applications that we want to currently use and want to use in the future and the set of applications that we want to sunset in the next year and how that related to the IT project. So that was one big step that we made in the last two years. There's still a lot of work to be done in that area, but it was a big topic.

Service management

The second big topic was looking at service management. Due to all the mergers, we still had lots of variations on IT process. Incident management was covered in a whole different way, when you looked at several departments from the past.

We adopted service desks to cater to all those kind of deviations from the standard ITIL process. We looked at that and said that we had to centralize again and we had to make sure that we become more prescriptive in how these process will look and how we make sure that it's standardized.

That was the second area that we looked at. The third area was more on the application quality. How could we make sure that we got a better first-time-right score in delivering IT projects? How could we make sure that there is one system of record for requirements and one system of record for test results and defects. That’s three areas that we invested in in the first phase.

Gardner: One of the things I hear from organizations, Richard, is that some people fear that by going to standardized processes and rationalizing their portfolio, they will lose control over applications or they won’t be able to customize or change applications. I think, however, that that might be a false premise.

Is there something that you found in moving towards more standardized processes that allows you to be more responsive and agile with your applications? Has the ability to change applications been effective?

Aarnink: It’s still a little bit early to say, and your thoughts are right. There's always a discussion with the business units that in the past owned their own set of applications. They want to control that for being agile, but they also see that the cost of having all those applications is running up and up. We become less agile, because we have to solve many problems in all kinds of applications that they are currently running.

Something had to change, and the financial crisis that we've had from 2008 on emphasized that we need to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) on IT.

Something had to change, and the financial crisis that we've had from 2008 on emphasized that we need to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) on IT and we had to do something about it. So it was also a top-down statement that we had to do something about it. We changed the governance to enable us to control that and to make sure that we got the right mandate to enable us to drive application virtualization.

The other thing is that if you standardize your IT components and your IT applications, you also enable yourself to deliver faster. It was the first time that we succeeded in delivering a new policy, a new product, into the marketplace in six weeks, instead of having it in six months or so.

That's is the aim or the goal that we're after, but it’s still too early in the process to look at benefits in that area and to see the cultural change that this embraced, instead of rejected, from the business perspective.

Gardner: Well it certainly sounds like the progress that you’ve made so far has allowed you to increase the time to value, that is to say, make the ability to deliver apps and services to your end-users, to your customers, happen more rapidly. Is that something that we can attribute to the changes you’ve made or is it still too soon for that?

Change going on

Bock: If you ask our customers, they'll say it's still too soon, but we see that the changes in our internal IT organization are already going on. I expect that in 2013, we'll gain the first benefits from this.

Gardner: Georg. I’ve heard this notion of ERP for IT for some time, and I've also heard people be a bit cynical -- it’s a vision, it’s esoteric, or it maybe science fiction. What is it that you're hearing from Achmea and what have you have seen in the market that leads you to believe that ERP for IT is not a vision, but is, in fact, happening and that we're starting to see tangible benefit.

Bock: That’s a very good question. I hear that very, very often and across various distinct contingencies, but Richard very much nicely described real, practical results, rather than coming up with a dogmatic, philosophical process in the first place. I think it’s all about practical results and practical results need to be predictable and repeatable, otherwise it’s always the one-time hero effort that Richard brought up in the beginning, and that’s not scalable at all.

At some point you need process, but you shouldn’t try that dogmatically. I also hear about the Agile versus the waterfall, whatever is applicable to the problem is the right thing to do. Does that rule out process? No, not at all. You have to live the process in a little different way.

Technology always came first and now we look for the nail that you can use that hammer for. That’s not the right thing to do.

Everyone has to get-away from their dogmatic position and look at it in a little more relaxed way. We shouldn’t take our thoughts too seriously, but when we drive ERP for IT to apply some standard ways of doing things, we just make our life easier. It has nothing to do with esoteric vision, but it's something that is very achievable. It’s about getting a couple of people to agree on practical ways of getting it done.

Then, we can draw the technological consequences from it, rather than the other way around. That's been the problem in IT from my perspective for years. Technology always came first and now we look for the nail that you can use that hammer for. That’s not the right thing to do.

Gardner: Just to be clear, this isn’t something that’s specific to Achmea or a certain vertical industry. This is really across all industries in all regions. This is moving towards a more scientific and practical way of doing IT.

Bock: Absolutely. From my perspective, standardization is simply a necessary conclusion from some of the trial-and-error mistakes that have been made over the last 10-15 years, where people tried to customize the hell out of everything just to be in line with the specificity of how things are being done in their particular company. But nobody asked why it was that way.

If you ask that question, you very quickly get to the revelation. It’s not that different. Richard, if you recap some of the discussions we had with your architect colleagues in other companies, I think you might want to comment on that.

Aarnink: I completely agree. We had several discussions about how the incident process is being carried out, and it’s the same in every other company as well. Of course there are slight differences, but the fact is that an incident needs to be so resolved, and that’s the same within every company.

Best practice

You can easily create a best practice for that, adopt it within your own company, and unburden yourself from thinking about how you should go for this process, reinvent it, creating your own tool sets, interfaces with external companies. That can all be centralized, it can all be standardized.

It’s not our business to create our own IT tools. It’s the business of delivering policy management systems for our core industry, which is insurance. We don’t want all the IT that we need in order to just to keep the IT running. We want that standardized, so we can concentrate on delivering business value.

Gardner: Now that we've been calling this ERP for IT, I think it’s important to look back on where ERP as a concept came from and the fact that getting more data, more insight, repeatability, analyzing processes, determining best processes and methods and then instantiating them, is at the core of ERP. But when we try to do that with IT, how do we measure, what is the data, and what do we analyze?

Richard, at Achmea, are you looking at key performance indicators (KPIs) and are using project portfolio management maturity models? How is it that you're measuring this so that you can, in fact, do what ERP does best, make it repeatable, make it standardized?

The IT project is a vehicle helping you deliver the value that you need, and the processes underneath that actually do the work for you.

Aarnink: If you look from the budget perspective, we look at the budgets, the timeframes, and the scope of what we need to deliver and whether we deliver on time, on budget, and on specs, as I already said. So those are basically the KPIs that we're looking for when we deliver projects.

But also, if you look at the processes involved when you deliver a project, then you talk about requirements management. How quickly can you create a set of requirements and what is the reuse of requirements from the past. Those are the KPIs we're looking for in the specific processes when you deliver an IT project.

So the IT project is a vehicle helping you deliver the value that you need, and the processes underneath that actually do the work for you. At that level we try to standardize and we try to make KPIs in order to make sure that we use as much as possible, that we deliver quality, and we have the resources in place that we actually need to deliver those functionalities.

Gardner: I'm afraid that we're almost out of time but I wonder, Richard, if you wouldn’t mind putting yourself in the position of a master here and relating some of your experience for an organizations that may not have started down this path towards ERP for IT to the same degree. Now that you’ve done it and now that you’ve been involved with it, do you have any 20-20 hindsight or recommendations that you could provide from your position of experience to someone who’s just beginning?

Aarnink: It’s a difficult question. You need to look at small steps that can be taken in a couple of months’ time. So draw up a roadmap and enable yourself to deliver value every, let’s say 100 days. Make sure that every time you deliver functionality that’s actually used, and you can look at your roadmap and adjust it, so you enable yourself to be agile in that way as well.

The biggest thing that you need to do is take small steps. The other thing is to look at your maturity. We did a CMMi test review. We didn't do the entire CMMi accreditation, but only looked at the areas that we needed to invest in.

Getting advice

We looked at where we had standardized already and the areas that we needed to look at first. That can help you prioritize. Then, of course, look at companies in your network that actually did some steps in this and make sure that you get advice from them as well.

Gardner: Georg, just quickly, any thoughts on either affirming what Richard said or other ideas for organizations that are just beginning down the ERP for IT path?

Bock: I absolutely agree with what Richard said. If we're looking for some recipe for successes, you have to have a good balance of strategic goals and tactical steps towards that strategic goal. Those tactical step need to have a clear measure and a clear success criteria associated with them. Then you're on a good track.

I just want to come back to the notion of ERP for IT that you alluded to earlier, because that term can actually hurt the discussion quite a bit. If you think about ERP 20 years ago, it was a big animal. And we shouldn’t look at IT nowadays in the same manner as ERP was looked at 20 years ago. We don’t want to reinvent a big animal right now, but we have to have a strategic goal where we look at IT from an end-to-end perspective, and that’s the analogy that we want to draw.

If we're looking for some recipe for successes, you have to have a good balance of strategic goals and tactical steps towards that strategic goal.

ERP is something that has always been looked as an end-to-end process, and having a clear, common context associated from an end-to-end perspective, which is not the case in IT today. We should learn from those analogies that we shouldn’t try to implement ERP literally for IT, because that would take the whole thing in one step, where as Richard just said very nicely, you have to take it in digestible pieces, because we have to deal with a lot of technology there. You can't take that in one shot.

Gardner: Okay, very good. I am afraid we will have to leave it there. I want to thank our co-host, Georg Bock, Director of the Customer Success Group at HP Software. Thank you so much, Georg.

Bock: My pleasure. Thank you.

Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our supporter for this series, that is HP Software, and remind our audience to carry on the dialogue through Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn. You can also gain more insights and information on the best of IT Performance Management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance.

And you can always access this and other episodes in our HP Discover Performance Podcast Series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

And now, I'd like to thank our special guest, Richard Aarnink. He is the leader of the IT Management Domain at Achmea in the Netherlands. Thank you so much, Richard. Very insightful.

Aarnink: Thank you, and you're very welcome.

Gardner: And lastly, a thank you to our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series. We appreciate your attention, and please come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Achmea Holding has taken big strides to more successfully run their IT department like a business within the business. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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The Open Group Panel Explains How the ArchiMate Modeling Language and The Open Group Architecture Framework Impact Such Trends as Big Data and Cloud

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the role of enterprise and business architecture in helping enterprises exploit and manage technology and business transformation.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview series coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference recently held in Newport Beach, California.

Cardner

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host and moderator throughout these business transformation discussions. The conference itself is focused on "big data -- the transformation we need to embrace today."

We recently assembled a panel of experts to explore new trends and developments in enterprise architecture (EA) as businesses grapple with such issues as big data, cloud computing, security, and overall IT transformation. We'll learn more on how EA is evolving and specifically how the TOGAF® framework and the ArchiMate® modeling language are playing increased roles worldwide.

With that, please join me in welcoming our panel: Chris Forde, General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver Band, Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Enterprise Architect at The Standard, a diversified financial services company; Mike Walker, Senior Enterprise Architecture Adviser and Strategist at HP and former Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell; Henry Franken, the Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing Director at BIZZdesign, and Dave Hornford, Chairman of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and Managing Partner at Conexiam. [Disclosure: The Open Group and HP are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Gardner: Chris, at the conference you me with a lot of folks, and there is a lot of activity in socializing and whatnot. Is there something about the role of the enterprise architect that you sense is shifting, or are people, maybe even trying to project their roles differently in their organizations?

Consistent theme

Forde: At these conferences, generally there is a fairly consistent theme. It goes from "We're having difficulty defining our role in the context that makes it relevant and useful to the business," to "We're having a great opportunity with our business partners to drive business transformation." It really goes across the spectrum.

Forde

What I'm hearing in the conference, not just based on the themes, is a lot of discussion about that transformation topic and the role of the enterprise architect in moving the organization along. That's a very, very typical conversation to hear in the hallways.

Gardner: When it's a dynamic environment, lots of change, lots of movement, the enterprise architects' value can go up. If things were slow, constant and predictable, perhaps their value wouldn't be as high. Any thoughts about that?

Franken: Well sure. What you see is that the challenge within large organizations on business transformation is increasing and the number of good enterprise architects is small, so their value increases. It's simple mathematics.

Gardner: Mike Walker, how do you see EA and the role of the architect changing, vis-à-vis your experiences?

Walker: I’ll provide the perspective of the an EA leader and practitioner in the trenches of not only my company but also talking with colleagues in other companies as well. I see a lot of what was referred to from Henry and Chris. To add to that, there is more and more focus on reinvigorating the EA practices. There is less of a focus on the traditional things we come to think of EA such as standards, governance and policies, but rather into emerging areas such as the soft skills, business architecture, and strategy.

Walker

To this end I see a lot in the realm of working directly with the executive chain to understand the key value drivers for the company and rationalize where they want to go with their business. So we're moving into a business-transformation role in this practice.

At the same time, we've got to be mindful of the disruptive external technology forces coming in as well. EA can’t just divorce from the other aspects of architecture as well. So the role that enterprise architects play becomes more and more important and elevated in the organization.

Two examples of this disruptive technology that are being focused on at the conference are big data and cloud computing. Both are providing impacts to our businesses not because of some new business idea but because technology is available to enhance or provide new capabilities to our business. The EA’s still do have to understand these new technology innovations and determine how they will apply to the business.

To Henry's point around the need to get really good enterprise architects, it’s difficult to find good ones. There is a shortage right now especially given that a lot of focus is being put on the EA department to really deliver sound architectures.

Not standalone

Gardner: We've been talking a lot here about big data, but usually that's not just a standalone topic. It's big data and cloud, cloud, mobile and security.

So with these overlapping and complex relationships among multiple trends, why is EA and things like the TOGAF framework and the ArchiMate modeling language especially useful? Iver?

Band: One of the things that has been clear for a while now is that people outside of IT don't necessarily have to go through the technology function to avail themselves of these technologies any more. Whether they ever had to is really a question as well.

Band

One of things that EA is doing, and especially in the practice that I work in, is using approaches like the ArchiMate modeling language to effect clear communication between the business, IT, partners and other stakeholders. That's what I do in my daily work, overseeing our major systems modernization efforts. I work with major partners, some of which are offshore.

I'm increasingly called upon to make sure that we have clear processes for making decisions and clear ways of visualizing the different choices in front of us. We can't always unilaterally dictate the choice, but we can make the conversation clearer by using frameworks like the TOGAF standard and the ArchiMate modeling language, which I use virtually every day in my work.

Gardner: And so the more moving parts and the more complexity, the less likely that you can wing this or use traditional, linear tools. You need something that's a bit more up to the task. Dave, help us understand how these tools can grapple better with these multiple levels of complexity and then also bridge some of these communication gaps among different constituencies in these large organizations.

Hornford: The fundamental benefit of the tools is the organization realizing its capability and strategy. I just came from a session where a fellow quoted a Harvard study, which said that around a third of executives thought their company was good at executing on its strategy. He highlighted that this means that two-thirds are not good at executing on their strategy.

Hornford

If you're not good at executing on your strategy and you've got big data, mobile, consumerization of IT and cloud, where are you going? What's the correct approach? How does this fit into what you were trying to accomplish as an enterprise?

An enterprise architect that is doing their job is bringing together the strategy, goals and objectives of the organization. Also, its capabilities with the techniques that are available, whether it's offshoring, onshoring, cloud, or big data, so that the organization is able to move forward to where it needs to be, as opposed to where it's going to randomly walk to.

Forde: One of the things that has come out in several of the presentations is this kind of capability-based planning, a technique in EA to get their arms around this thing from a business-driver perspective. Just to polish what Dave said a little bit, it's connecting all of those things. We see enterprises talking about a capability-based view of things on that basis.

Gardner: Because we're here with a couple of the chairpeople from these forums, where a lot of the development and direction for these tools comes about, let's get a quick update. The TOGAF framework, where are we and what have been the highlights from this particular event?

Minor upgrade

Hornford: In the last year, we've published a minor upgrade for TOGAF version 9.1 which was based upon cleaning up consistency in the language in the TOGAF documentation. What we're working on right now is a significant new release, the next release of the TOGAF standard, which is dividing the TOGAF documentation to make it more consumable, more consistent and more useful for someone.

Today, the TOGAF standard has guidance on how to do something mixed into the framework of what you should be doing. We're peeling those apart. So with that peeled apart, we won't have guidance that is tied to classic application architecture in a world of cloud.

What we find when we have done work with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) for banking architecture, Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) for security architecture, and the TeleManagement Forum, is that the concepts in the TOGAF framework work across industries and across trends. We need to move the guidance into a place so that we can be far nimbler on how to tie cloud with my current strategy, how to tie consumerization of IT with on-shoring?

Franken: The ArchiMate modeling language turned two last year, and the ArchiMate 1.0 standard is the language to model out the core of your EA. The ArchiMate 2.0 standard added two specifics to it to make it better aligned also to the process of EA.

Franken

According to the TOGAF standard, this is being able to model out the motivation, why you're doing EA, stakeholders and the goals that drive us. The second extension to the ArchiMate standard is being able to model out its planning and migration.

So with the core EA and these two extensions, together with the TOGAF standard process working, you have a good basis on getting EA to work in your organization.

Gardner: Let’s also go back to the big data concepts that are driving this conference. I've been interested in this notion of the information architecture, data architecture and how that relates to the TOGAF framework. Mike, you've been doing some interesting writing on this subject. Fill us in on some of your thoughts about the role of information architecture vis-à-vis the larger business architect and enterprise architect roles.

Walker: Information architecture is an interesting topic in that it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of attention until recently.

Information architecture is an aspect of enterprise architecture that enables an information strategy or business solution through the definition of the company's business information assets, their sources, structure, classification and associations that will prescribe the required application architecture and technical capabilities.

Information architecture is the bridge between the business architecture world and the application and technology architecture activities.

The reason I say that is because information architecture is a business-driven discipline that details the information strategy of the company. As we know, and from what we’ve heard at the conference keynotes like in the case of NASA, big data, and security presentations, the preservation and classification of that information is vital to understanding what your architecture should be.

Least matured

From an industry perspective, this is one of the least matured, as far as being incorporated into a formal discipline. The TOGAF standard actually has a phase dedicated to it in data architecture. Again, there are still lots of opportunities to grow and incorporate additional methods, models and tools by the enterprise information management discipline.

Enterprise information management not only it captures traditional topic areas like master data management (MDM), metadata and unstructured types of information architecture but also focusing on the information governance, and the architecture patterns and styles implemented in MDM, big data, etc. There is a great deal of opportunity there.

From the role of information architects, I’m seeing more and more traction in the industry as a whole. I've dealt with an entire group that’s focused on information architecture and building up an enterprise information management practice, so that we can take our top line business strategies and understand what architectures we need to put there.

This is a critical enabler for global companies, because oftentimes they're restricted by regulation, typically handled at a government or regional area. This means we have to understand that we build our architecture. So it's not about the application, but rather the data that it processes, moves, or transforms.

We didn’t have to treat information as a first-class citizen. Times have changed, though.

Gardner: Up until not too long ago, the conventional thinking was that applications generate data. Then you treat the data in some way so that it can be used, perhaps by other applications, but that the data was secondary to the application.

But there's some shift in that thinking now more toward the idea that the data is the application and that new applications are designed to actually expand on the data’s value and deliver it out to mobile tiers perhaps. Does that follow in your thinking that the data is actually more prominent as a resource perhaps on par with applications?

Walker: You're spot on, Dana. Before the commoditization of these technologies that resided on premises, we could get away with starting at the application layer and work our way back because we had access to the source code or hardware behind our firewalls. We could throw servers out, and we used to put the firewalls in front of the data to solve the problem with infrastructure. So we didn’t have to treat information as a first-class citizen. Times have changed, though.

Information access and processing is now democratized and it’s being pushed as the first point of presentment. A lot of times this is on a mobile device and even then it’s not the corporate’s mobile device, but your personal device. So how do you handle that data?

It's the same way with cloud, and I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working as an adviser for a company, and they were looking at their cloud strategy. They had made a big bet on one of the big infrastructures and cloud-service providers. They looked first at what the features and functions that that cloud provider could provide, and not necessarily the information requirements. There were two major issues that they ran into, and that was essentially a showstopper. They had to pull off that infrastructure.

The first one was that in that specific cloud provider’s terms of service around intellectual property (IP) ownership. Essentially, that company was forced to cut off their IP rights.

Big business

As you know, IP is a big business these days, and so that was a showstopper. It actually broke the core regulatory laws around being able to discover information.

So focusing on the applications to make sure it meets your functional needs is important. However, we should take a step back and look at the information first and make sure that for the people in your organization who can’t say no, their requirements are satisfied.

Gardner: Data architecture is it different from EA and business architecture, or is it a subset? What’s the relationship, Dave?

Hornford: Data architecture is part of an EA. I won’t use the word subset, because a subset starts to imply that it is a distinct thing that you can look at on its own. You cannot look at your business architecture without understanding your information architecture. When you think about big data, cool. We've got this pile of data in the corner. Where did it come from? Can we use it? Do we actually have legitimate rights, as Mike highlighted, to use this information? Are we allowed to mix it and who mixes it?

When we look at how our business is optimized, they normally optimize around work product, what the organization is delivering. That’s very easy. You can see who consumes your work product. With information, you often have no idea who consumes your information. So now we have provenance, we have source and as we move for global companies, we have the trends around consumerization, cloud and simply tightening cycle time.

If we look at data in isolation, I have to understand how the system works and how the enterprise’s architecture fits together.

There was a very interesting thing that came out of a PricewaterhouseCoopers CEO summary, which said there has historically been cycles where the CEOs were focusing on innovation or cost. What they have observed over the last few surveys is much tightening of those cycles. We used to be a bit worried about cost for a few years. Then, we would worry about innovation for a few years. Now, it’s worrying about it for a year. What came out in the last survey? Both are rated number one.

How do we in global, tightly connected, information-rich environment manage? Do we have access to the information? Our competitors may, our customers do and our suppliers probably do. How do we fit into that? If we look at data in isolation, I have to understand how the system works and how the enterprise’s architecture fits together.

Gardner: Of course, the end game for a lot of the practitioners here is to create that feedback loop of a lifecycle approach, rapid information injection and rapid analysis that could be applied. So what are some of the ways that these disciplines and tools can help foster that complete lifecycle? Let’s go to Iver.

Band: The disciplines and tools can facilitate the right conversations among different stakeholders. One of the things that we're doing at The Standard is building cadres equally balanced between people in business and IT.

We're training them in information management, going through a particular curriculum, and having them study for an information management certification that introduces a lot of these different frameworks and standard concepts.

Creating cadres

We want to create these cadres to be able to solve tough and persistent information management problems that affect all companies in financial services, because information is a shared asset. The purpose of the frameworks is to ensure proper stewardship of that asset across disciplines and across organizations within an enterprise.

Gardner: If they add to the fostering of that nirvana of a full lifecycle that it cuts across different disciplines in the organization.

Hornford: The core is from the two standards that we have, The ArchiMate standard and the TOGAF standard. The TOGAF standard has, from its early roots, focused on the components of EA and how to build a consistent method of understanding of what I'm trying to accomplish, understanding where I am, and where I need to be to reach my goal.

When we bring in the ArchiMate standard, I have a language, a descriptor, a visual descriptor that allows me to cross all of those domains in a consistent description, so that I can do that traceability. When I pull in this lever or I have this regulatory impact, what does it hit me with, or if I have this constraint, what does it hit me with?

If I don’t do this, if I don’t use the framework of the TOGAF standard, or I don’t use the discipline of formal modeling in the ArchiMate standard, we're going to do it anecdotally. We're going to trip. We're going to fall. We're going to have a non-ending series of surprises, as Mike highlighted.

The businesses value of TOGAF is that they get a repeatable and a predictable process for building out our architectures that properly manage risks and reliably produces value.

"Oh, terms of service. I am violating the regulations. Beautiful. Let’s take that to our executive and tell him right as we are about to go live that we have to stop, because we can't get where we want to go, because we didn't think about what it took to get there." And that’s the core of EA in the frameworks.

Walker: To build on what Dave has just talked about and going back to your first question Dana, the value statement on TOGAF from a business perspective. The businesses value of TOGAF is that they get a repeatable and a predictable process for building out our architectures that properly manage risks and reliably produces value.

The TOGAF framework provides a methodology to ask what problems you're trying to solve and where you are trying to go with your business opportunities or challenges. That leads to business architecture, which is really a rationalization in technical or architectural terms the distillation of the corporate strategy.

From there, what you want to understand is information -- how does that translate, what information architecture do we need to put in place? You get into all sorts of things around risk management, etc., and then it goes on from there, until what we were talking about earlier about information architecture.

If the TOGAF standard is applied properly you can achieve the same result every time, That is what interests business stakeholders in my opinion. And the ArchiMate modeling language is great because, as we talked about, it provides very rich visualizations so that people cannot only show a picture, but tie information together. Different from other aspects of architecture, information architecture is less about the boxes and more about the lines.

Gardner: All right, thank you Mike. Chris, anything to add?

Quality of the individuals

Forde: Building on what Dave was saying earlier and also what Iver was saying is that while the process and the methodology and the tools are of interest, it’s the discipline and the quality of the individuals doing the work.

Iver talked about how the conversation is shifting and the practice is improving to build communications groups that have a discipline to operate around. What I am hearing is implied, but actually I know what specifically occurs, is that we end up with assets that are well described and reusable.

And there is a point at which you reach a critical mass that these assets become an accelerator for decision making. So the ability of the enterprise and the decision makers in the enterprise at the right level to respond is improved, because they have a well disciplined foundation beneath them.

A set of assets that are reasonably well-known at the right level of granularity for them to absorb the information and the conversation is being structured so that the technical people and the business people are in the right room together to talk about the problems.

This is actually a fairly sophisticated set of operations that I am discussing and doesn't happen overnight, but is definitely one of the things that we see occurring with our members in certain cases.

There is a point at which you reach a critical mass that these assets become an accelerator for decision making.

Hornford: I want to build on that what Chris said. It’s actually the word "asset." While he was talking, I was thinking about how people have talked about information as an asset. Most of us don’t know what information we have, how it’s collected, where it is, but we know we have got a valuable asset.

I'll use an analogy. I have a factory some place in the world that makes stuff. Is that an asset? If I know that my factory is able to produce a particular set of goods and it’s hooked into my supply chain here, I've got an asset. Before that, I just owned a thing.

I was very encouraged listening to what Iver talked about. We're building cadres. We're building out this approach and I have seen this. I'm not using that word, but now I'm stealing that word. It's how people build effective teams, which is not to take a couple of specialists and put them in an ivory tower, but it’s to provide the method and the discipline of how we converse about it, so that we can have a consistent conversation.

When I tie it with some of the tools from the Architecture Forum and the ArchiMate Forum, I'm able to consistently describe it, so that I now have an asset I can identify, consume and produce value from.

Business context

Forde: And this is very different from data modeling. We are not talking about entity relationship, junk at the technical detail, or third normal form and that kind of stuff. We're talking about a conversation that’s occurring around the business context of what needs to go on supported by the right level of technical detail when you need to go there in order to clarify.

Gardner: Thank you Chris. I believe we'll have to leave it there. We're about out of time. We've been talking about the enterprise architect’s role, how it's evolving, and how TOGAF and ArchiMate are playing increased roles worldwide.

We've seen how EA is being creatively employed as businesses grapple with such issues as cloud computing, security, big data, and overall IT transformation.

We're talking about a conversation that’s occurring around the business context of what needs to go on.

This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach, California.

I want to extend a big thank you to our panel: Chris Forde, the General Manager Asia-Pacific and Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver Band, Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Enterprise Architect at The Standard; Mike Walker, Senior Enterprise Architecture Adviser and Strategist at HP and former Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell; Henry Franken, Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing Director at BIZZdesign, and Dave Hornford, Chairman of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and a Managing Partner at Conexiam. Thanks to you all.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator through these thought leadership interviews. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the role of enterprise and business architecture in helping enterprises exploit and manage technology and business transformation. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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The Open Group Conference Panel Explores How the Big Data Era Now Challenges the IT Status Quo

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from The Open Group Conference in January on how big data forces changes in architecting the enterprise.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Watch the video. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview series coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference recently held in Newport Beach, California.

Gardner

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host and moderator throughout these business transformation discussions. The conference itself is focusing on "big data -- he transformation we need to embrace today." [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of this and other BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We assembled a panel of experts to explore how big data changes the status quo for architecting the enterprise. We'll learn how large enterprises should anticipate the effects and impacts of big data, as well the simultaneous impacts of cloud computing and mobile.



It’s been an interesting thread throughout the conference for me to factor where big data begins and plain old data, if you will, ends. Of course, it's going to vary quite a bit from organization to organization.

But Chris Gerty from NASA provided a good example: It’s when you run out of gas with your old methods, and your ability to deal with the data -- and it's not just the size of the data itself.

When an enterprise architect and the business architect looked at data a few years ago, they might not have been as aware of these boundaries and the importance of data. They perhaps were thinking that the database administrators and the business intelligence (BI) folks would take care of that, and they just had to manage the fruits of the data vis-à-vis applications and integration points.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore, and one of the points we're going to get into now is where the enterprise architect needs to be factoring the impacts of big data.

Furthermore, there seems to be the need to do things differently, not just to manage the velocity and the volume and the variety of the data, but to really think about data fundamentally and differently. For many companies, data is now a product itself. That data can be monetized.

The analysis from the data becomes important to more and more people in the company, so that your employees, your partners, and those in your supply chain will be interacting with your data -- and the analysis from your data -- more than before.

So I think we need to also think about data differently. And, we need to think about security, risk and governance. If it's a "boundaryless organization" when it comes your data, either as a product or service or a resource, that control and management of which data should be exposed, which should be opened, and which should be very closely guarded all need to be factored, determined and implemented.

Expert panel

With that, let me now introduce our expert panel: Robert Weisman, CEO and Chief Enterprise Architect at Build The Vision; Andras Szakal, Vice President and CTO of IBM's Federal Division; Jim Hietala, Vice President for Security at The Open Group, and Chris Gerty, Deputy Program Manager at the Open Innovation Program at NASA.

Chris, let’s start with you. You mentioned that big data to you is not a factor of the size, because NASA's dealing with so much. It’s when you run out of steam, as it were, with the methodologies. Maybe you could explain more. When do you know that you've actually run out of steam with the methodologies?

Chris Gerty: When we collect data, we have some sort of goal in minds of what we might get out of it. When we put the pieces from the data together, it either maybe doesn't fit as well as you thought or you are successful and you continue to do the same thing, gathering archives of information.

Gerty

At that point, where you realize there might even something else that you want to do with the data, different than what you planned originally, that’s when we have to pivot a little bit and say, "Now I need to treat this as a living archive. It's a 'it may live beyond me' type of thing." At that point, I think you treat it as setting up the infrastructure for being used later, whether it’d be by you or someone else. That's an important transition to make and might be what one could define as big data.

Gardner: Andras, does that square with where you are in your government interactions -- that data now becomes a different type of resource, and when you are not able to execute or avail yourself of its value, then you know you need to do things differently?

Andras Szakal: The importance of data hasn’t changed. The data itself, the veracity of the data, is still important. Transactional data will always need to exist. The difference is that you have certainly the three or four Vs, depending on how you look at it, but the importance of data is in its veracity, and your ability to understand or to be able to use that data before the data's shelf life runs out.

Szakal

Some data has a shelf life that's long lived. Other data has very little shelf life, and you would use different approaches to being able to utilize that information. It's ultimately not about the data itself, but it’s about gaining deep insight into that data. So it’s not storing data or manipulating data, but applying those analytical capabilities to data.

Gardner: Bob, we've seen the price points on storage go down so dramatically. We've seem people just decide to hold on to data that they wouldn’t have before, simply because they can and they can afford to do so. That means we need to try to extract value and use that data. From the perspective of an enterprise architect, how are things different now, vis-à-vis this much larger set of data and variety of data, when it comes to planning and executing as architects?

Robert Weisman: One of the major issues is that normally organizations are holding two orders of magnitude more data then they need. It’s an huge overhead, both in terms of the applications architecture that has a code basis, larger than it should be, and also from the technology architecture that is supporting a horrendous number of servers and a whole bunch of technology stuff that they don't need.

The issue for the architect is to figure out as what data is useful, institute a governance process, so that you can have data lifecycle management, have a proper disposition,  focus the organization on information data and knowledge that is basically going to provide business value to the organization, and help them innovate and have a competitive advantage.

Can't afford it

And in terms of government, just improve service delivery, because there's waste right now on information infrastructure, and we can’t afford it anymore.

Gardner: I suppose big data is part of the problem, dealing with so much in redundancy and duplication through the lifecycle of data and what have you, but the data is also part of the solution in terms of getting the knowledge about what you should or shouldn't be doing as a business. So it's difficult to know what to keep and what not to keep.

I've actually spoken to a few people lately who want to keep everything, just because they want to mine it, and they are willing to spend the money and effort to do that. Jim Hietala, when people do get to this point of trying to decide what to keep, what not to keep, and how to architect properly for that, they also need to factor in security. It shouldn't become later in the process. It should come early. What are some of the precepts that you think are important in applying good security practices to big data?

Jim Hietala: One of the big challenges is that many of the big-data platforms weren’t built from the get-go with security in mind. So some of the controls that you've had available in your relational databases, for instance, you move over to the big data platforms and the access control authorizations and mechanisms are not there today.

Hietala

Planning the architecture, looking at bringing in third-party controls to give you the security mechanisms that you are used to in your older platforms, is something that organizations are going to have to do. It’s really an evolving and emerging thing at this point.

Gardner: There are a lot of unknown unknowns out there, as we discovered with our tweet chat last month. Some people think that the data is just data, and you apply the same security to it. Do you think that’s the case with big data? Is it just another follow-through of what you always did with data in the first place?

Hietala: I would say yes, at a conceptual level, but it's like what we saw with virtualization. When there was a mad rush to virtualize everything, many of those traditional security controls didn't translate directly into the virtualized world. The same thing is true with big data.

When you're talking about those volumes of data, applying encryption, applying various security controls, you have to think about how those things are going to scale? That may require new solutions from new technologies and that sort of thing.

Gardner: Chris Gerty, back to your experiences at NASA. You've taken the approach of keeping as much of that data and information as open as you can, fostering more research and the ability for people to do things with the data that you may never have been visioned yourselves. When it comes to that governance, security, and access control, are there any lessons that you've learned that you are aware of in terms of the best of openness, but also with the ability to manage the spigot?

Gerty: Spigot is probably a dangerous term to use, because it implies that all data is treated the same. The sooner that you can tag the data as either sensitive or not, mostly coming from the person or team that's developed or originated the data, the better.

Kicking the can

Once you have it on a hard drive, once you get crazy about storing everything, if you don't know where it came from, you're forced to put it into a secure environment. And that's just kicking the can down the road. It’s really a disservice to people who might use the data in a useful way to address their problems.

We constantly have satellites that are made for one purpose. They send all the data down. It’s controlled either for security or for intellectual property (IP), so someone can write a paper. Then, after the project doesn’t get funded or it just comes to a nice graceful close, there is that extra step, which is almost a responsibility of the originators, to make it useful to the rest of the world.

Gardner: Let’s look at big data through the lens of some other major trends right now. Let’s start with cloud. You mentioned that at NASA, you have your own private cloud that you're using a lot, of course, but you're also now dabbling in commercial and public clouds. Frankly, the price points that these cloud providers are offering for storage and data services are pretty compelling.

So we should expect more data to go to the cloud. Bob, from your perspective, as organizations and architects have to think about data in this hybrid cloud on-premises off-premises, moving back and forth, what do you think enterprise architects need to start thinking about in terms of managing that, planning for the right destination of data, based on the right mix of other requirements?

Weisman: It's a good question. As you said, the price point is compelling, but the security and privacy of the information is something else that has to be taken into account. Where is that information going to reside? You have to have very stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) and in certain cases, you might say it's a price point that’s compelling, but the risk analysis that I have done means that I'm going to have to set up my own private cloud.

Weisman

Right now, everybody's saying is the public cloud is going to be the way to go. Vendors are going to have to be very sensitive to that and many are, at this point in time, addressing a lot of the needs of some of the large client basis. So it’s not one-size-fits-all and it’s more than just a price for service. Architecture can bring down the price pretty dramatically, even within an enterprise.

Gardner: Andras, there's this mash up of cloud and big-data trends, the in-memory approaches, where we are no longer taking batches of data, cleansing it, and deduping it and bringing it into a warehouse, going through batch. We're still doing that' of course, but it seems that for a number of different applications of data and analytics, in-memory technology particularly, if you can control that in a cloud environment, private cloud or otherwise, it’s starting to change the game for that fast, real-time feedback loop benefit.

It's a roundabout way of asking if the cloud and big data come together in a way that’s intriguing to you and in what ways?

Szakal: Actually it’s a great question. We could take the rest of the 22 minutes talking on this one question. I helped lead the President’s Commission on big data that Steve Mills from IBM and -- I forget the name of the executive from SAP -- led. We intentionally tried to separate cloud from big data architecture, primarily because we don't believe that, in all cases, cloud is the answer to all things big data. You have to define the architecture that's appropriate for your business needs.

However, it also depends on where the data is born. Take many of the investments IBM has made into enterprise market management, for example, Coremetrics, several of these services that we now offer for helping customers understand deep insight into how their retail market or supply chain behaves.

Born in the cloud

All of that information is born in the cloud. But if you're talking about actually using cloud as infrastructure and moving around huge sums of data or constructing some of these solutions on your own, then some of the ideas that Bob conveyed are absolutely applicable.

I think it becomes prohibitive to do that and easier to stand up a hybrid environment for managing the amount of data. But I think that you have to think about whether your data is real-time data, whether it's data that you could apply some of these new technologies like Hadoop to, Hadoop MapReduce-type solutions, or whether it's traditional data warehousing.

Data warehouses are going to continue to exist and they're going to continue to evolve technologically. You're always going to use a subset of data in those data warehouses, and it's going to be an applicable technology for many years to come.

Gardner: So suffice it to say, an enterprise architect who is well versed in both cloud infrastructure requirements, technologies, and methods, as well as big data, will probably be in quite high demand. That specialization in one or the other isn’t as valuable as being able to cross-pollinate between them as it were.

Szakal: Absolutely. It's enabling our architects and finding deep individuals who have this unique set of skills, analytics, mathematics, and business. Those individuals are going to be the future architects of the IT world, because analytics and big data are going to be integrated into everything that we do and become part of the business processing.

Gardner: Well, that’s a great segue to the next topic that I am interested in, and it's around mobility as a trend and also application development. The reason I lump them together is that I increasingly see developers being tasked with mobile first.

When you create a new app, you have to remember that this is going to run in the mobile tier and you want to make sure that the requirements, the UI, and the complexity of that app don’t go beyond the ability of the mobile app and the mobile user. This is interesting to me, because data now has a different relationship with apps.

We used to think of apps as creating data and then the data would be stored and it might be used or integrated. Now, we have applications that are simply there in order to present the data and we have the ability now to present it to those mobile devices in the mobile tier, which means it goes anywhere, everywhere all the time.

Let me start with you Jim, because it’s security and risk, but it's also just rethinking the way we use data in a mobile tier. If we can do it safely, and that’s a big IF, how important should it be for organizations to start thinking about making this data available to all of these devices and just pour out into that mobile tier as possible?

Hietala: In terms of enabling the business, it’s very important. There are a lot of benefits that accrue from accessing your data from whatever device you happen to be on. To me, it is that question of "if," because now there’s a whole lot of problems to be solved relative to the data floating around anywhere on Android, iOS, whatever the platform is, and the organization being able to lock down their data on those devices, forgetting about whether it’s the organization device or my device. There’s a set of issues around that that the security industry is just starting to get their arms around today.

Mobile ability

Gardner: Chris, any thoughts about this mobile ability that the data gets more valuable the more you can use it and apply it, and then the more you can apply it, the more data you generate that makes the data more valuable, and we start getting into that positive feedback loop?

Gerty: Absolutely. It's almost an appreciation of what more people could do and get to the problem. We're getting to the point where, if it's available on your desktop, you’re going to find a way to make it available on your device.

That same security questions probably need to be answered anyway, but making it mobile compatible is almost an acknowledgment that there will be someone who wants to use it. So let me go that extra step to make it compatible and see what I get from them. It's more of a cultural benefit that you get from making things compatible with mobile.

Gardner: Any thoughts about what developers should be thinking by trying to bring the fruits of big data through these analytics to more users rather than just the BI folks or those that are good at SQL queries? Does this change the game by actually making an application on a mobile device, simple, powerful but accessing this real time updated treasure trove of data?

Gerty: I always think of the astronaut on the moon. He's got a big, bulky glove and he might have a heads-up display in front of him, but he really needs to know exactly a certain piece of information at the right moment, dealing with bandwidth issues, dealing with the environment, foggy helmet wherever.

It's very analogous to what the day-to-day professional will use trying to find out that quick e-mail he needs to know or which meeting to go to -- which one is more important -- and it all comes down to putting your developer in the shoes of the user. So anytime you can get interaction between the two, that’s valuable.

Gardner: Bob?

Weisman: From an enterprise architecture point of view my background is mainly defense and government, but defense mobile computing has been around for decades. So you've always been dealing with that.

The main thing is that in many cases, if they're coming up with information, the whole presentation layer is turning into another architecture domain with information visualization and also with your security controls, with an integrated identity management capability.

It's like you were saying about astronaut getting it right. He doesn't need to know everything that’s happening in the world. He needs to know about his heads-up display, the stuff that's relevant to him.

So it's getting the right information to person in an authorized manner, in a way that he can visualize and make sense of that information, be it straight data, analytics, or whatever. The presentation layer, ergonomics, visual communication are going to become very important in the future for that. There are also a lot of problems. Rather than doing it at the application level, you're doing it entirely in one layer.

Governance and security

Gardner: So clearly the implications of data are cutting across how we think about security, how we think about UI, how we factor in mobility. What we now think about in terms of governance and security, we have to do differently than we did with older data models.

Jim Hietala, what about the impact on spurring people towards more virtualized desktop delivery, if you don't want to have the date on that end device, if you want solve some of the issues about control and governance, and if you want to be able to manage just how much data gets into that UI, not too much not too little.

Do you think that some of these concerns that we’re addressing will push people to look even harder, maybe more aggressive in how they go to desktop and application virtualization, as they say, keep it on the server, deliver out just the deltas?

Hietala: That’s an interesting point. I’ve run across a startup in the last month or two that is doing is that. The whole value proposition is to virtualize the environment. You get virtual gold images. You don't have to worry about what's actually happening on the physical device and you know when the devices connect. The security threat goes away. So we may see more of that as a solution to that.

Gardner: Andras, do you see that that some of the implications of big data, far fetched as it may be, are propelling people to cultivate their servers more and virtualize their apps, their data, and their desktop right up to the end devices?

Szakal: Yeah, I do. I see IBM providing solutions for virtual desktop, but I think it was really a security question you were asking. You're certainly going to see an additional number of virtualized desktop environments.

Ultimately, our network still is not stable enough or at a high enough bandwidth to really make that useful exercise for all but the most menial users in the enterprise. From a security point of view, there is a lot to be still solved.

And part of the challenge in the cloud environment that we see today is the proliferation of virtual machines (VMs) and the inability to actually contain the security controls within those machines and across these machines from an enterprise perspective. So we're going to see more solutions proliferate in this area and to try to solve some of the management issues, as well as the security issues, but we're a long ways away from that.

Gardner: Okay, I am going to put you on the spot a little bit, because I want you to provide to us some examples of how you think big data is being used in a way that's fundamentally different than traditional data.

If you don't have permission to name these people don't, but you can just describe the use case. Let's just start with you Chris. You probably have quite a few in your own organization, but are there any ways that you're aware of that people are using big data that illustrate how fundamentally different and powerful this is going to be?

Most compelling

Gerty: We have several small projects that have come out of the events that we’ve worked on. The International Space Apps Challenge I mentioned before. These are mostly in the visualization realm, but it's the problems that go beyond those events that are really the most compelling. I’ll briefly touch on one.

A challenge that we’ve put out in the last Space Apps Challenge was to write an app that would allow someone to use NASA data to allow a farmer anywhere in the world to have an iPhone app or iPad app and say. "I live here. What should I grow? What could make me the most money and help my village the most?"

The team that worked on it quickly realized that even great satellite data didn't work for their application. There are too many other factors. There was the local economy, the runoff levels, and things that they just didn't have access to from the NASA data. So they decided that this was more than a just weekend project and they wanted to build that data set that they needed, so that they could finally make the product.

They found other collaboration mechanisms to continue the project after the Spaces Apps Challenge. They’ll be returning this year to the second one that we do in April with an entirely different view on the world, because they actually have some data sets now that they've been building up. They made some mechanism to capture it from the local environment.

Gardner: So that’s a great reminder that we’re not just talking about big data, but we’re talking about multiple big data and which ones you can pull together -- joined or otherwise -- to collate and produce big-data analysis results for something very, very interesting.

Gerty: Big data, by itself, isn't magical. It doesn't have the answers just by being big. If you need more, you need to pry deeper into it. That’s the example. They realized early enough that they were able to make something good.

Gardner: Chris, that’s a very good cause, but in a purely commercial sense, as we see more companies doing cloud ecosystem and partnership activities, when they start to share their data with that big "if" of secured and provisioned properly with other people in their markets, in their businesses, very powerful and interesting things can happen. Jim Hietala, any thoughts about examples that illustrate where we’re going and why this is so important.

Hietala: Being a security guy, I tend to talk about scare stories, horror stories. One example from last year that struck me. One of the major retailers here in the U.S. hit the news for having predicted, through customer purchase behavior, when people were pregnant.

They could look and see, based upon buying 20 things, that if you're buying 15 of these and your purchase behavior has changed, they can tell that. The privacy implications to that are somewhat concerning.

An example was that this retailer was sending out coupons related to somebody being pregnant. The teenage girl, who was pregnant hadn't told her family yet. The father found it. There was alarm in the household and at the local retailer store, when the father went and confronted them.

Privacy implications

There are privacy implications from the use of big data. When you get powerful new technology in marketing people's hands, things sometimes go awry. So I'd throw that out just as a cautionary tale that there is that aspect to this. When you can see across people's buying transactions, things like that, there are privacy considerations that we’ll have to think about, and that we really need to think about as an industry and a society.

Gardner: Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Allen Brown: Can I put some of the questions in and see how you can do with them? The first one is more of a bit of a security question, but also concerns things like thoughts on self-protecting data, like the Jericho Forum issues, and another one that says, in terms of security, that big data may not have strong confidentiality and availability requirements, but for collaboration, doesn't integrity nearly always need to considered. Other examples are that there is no integrity requirement.

Gardner: Jim, I think it’s best directed to you to start. These are issues about controlled managements. Any thoughts?

Hietala: I'll get straight to the integrity piece. The integrity of the data, whether it’s on older platforms or big data, is certainly an issue. When folks are using big data, that data has to have integrity, and there has to be adequate controls protect the data. So I think that is kind of a fundamental thing for big data as well.

Gardner: Anyone else on these issues of protection?

Gerty: It’s not only a matter of data protection. It's what we do with the data. Big data is a term that is kind of heading towards the end of its usefulness, because it's not the data and how large it is that's useful. It's actually how we apply these deep analytics solutions, for example Watson. You saw the Watson win on Jeopardy, but now Watson is a product that’s being used to help some customers diagnose disease and work with the insurance companies.

How you actually utilize that data to derive value through this deep analytics solution is through a new set of artificial-intelligence applications called cognitive computing. So cognitive computing, how you drive all of this information, and how you apply it in the context of its usefulness to privacy and security is going to be huge in the following years.

Gardner: Allen, other questions from the audience or online?

Brown: Interoperability is the focus of a couple of questions. One is asking if you can address the expected interoperability issues across semantics of big data. The other part of it asks what’s the unique challenge or problems that unstructured, big data from Twitter, Facebook, and so on present?

Gardner: This might be an area where the concepts work for traditional data, and it might still be the case that is we have to pull all these different data types, structured and unstructured, together to work in some holistic fashion. Bob, any thoughts about big data, correlating of different data is that different from the past? Is there something new?

Weisman: I'm looking at techniques that were pioneered 20-30 years ago on the artificial intelligence, knowledge base system side, and are still is relevant today. As a matter of fact they're more relevant than they've ever been. There is lot opportunity, but it doesn’t forego having a good interoperability architecture, understanding where your contacts are, and being able to integrate data. Right now most of analytics is kiboshed, because they spent all their time doing data integration, versus analytics, and it’s a great waste of a lot of people's times.

So if you architect this from the get-go, get the proper metadata, which will address some of the integrity, and understand the concept of data quality which is what’s coming through, that will go a long way to resolving some of these issues, but the architecture is going to be key, as is rigorous planning.

More usable

Gardner: Andras, same question. Is there something new or different about treating data in order to make it more useable?

Szakal: Big data is coming to us in all sorts of forms and formats. It’s coming from different sources. We don't really know the validity. The validity is determined by the application of the analytics solution. You'll have to have some internal process, some governance process, to determine whether you're getting the validity of the data that you expect.

When I was working as a graduate student for the psychology department as the SPSS programmer, people would bring their work to me. They would try to apply analytics to make any point they possibly could. It's the old story about making statistics mean anything you want. But you have to be very careful about how you do that, because it’s going to have a huge impact on your business.

Gardner: Jim, in the realm of privacy and security, any thoughts about what types of unstructured content you may or may not want to bring in? Is this something now that you need to consider, picking and choosing of data types with an overview or lens towards security and privacy issues?

Hietala: In terms of unstructured content, there’s a whole lot of work to be done there to understand the growth of that stuff in average enterprise and what's really in unstructured content stores. A lot of that is ending up in collaboration platforms today, and most organizations don’t have a great understanding of what’s really in there.

It’s the regulated data in there, sensitive data in there. That’s an area where there’s work to be done by most enterprises to understand that unstructured content and the risk that it represents to the business.

Gardner: We haven’t got into it,, but another factor is the whole social sphere of data, and information that is being generated constantly.

Brown: The next question is a concern about whether it's causing a disruption to object orientation. Object-oriented data is encapsulated by the application, and making big data shared seems to break this approach. What are your thoughts on that?

Gardner: All right, from an architectural standpoint we're treating data a little bit differently, separating it entirely from an application or service.

Hietala: We just did a study that of this exact same question and problem. We found that there's no official programming model of the big-data world or in the cloud, although it is all about the client and integration with services. But there are all sorts of programming models out there. I would say that you apply the one that’s got the best and most appropriate approach.

Information centric

Weisman: It’s starting to put the emphasis back on the information syllable and information technology. Object orientation was meant to basically support an information-centric approach, and now it’s being used much more as a service-centric approach. Now we’re going to go back to a much more information-centric, information-engineering approach and a lot of the architecture enabled by big data.

Gardner: Maybe you could just expand that a little bit for me? Does that mean we have a different type of application? That is to say that data is the application? What were the implications of what you just said?

Weisman: When object orientation first came out, the idea was to take the data and build services around it. Now, we have services that pass data back and forth. Most organizations have hundreds of applications with encapsulated data within them, and they can’t share it. Often the same information is found in hundreds of applications, which causes a huge security headache. Now we should be looking at getting much more information centric which is the core of information technology, information related technology.

Gardner: So really it's a flip architecturally, when you think about maintaining a pool resource of information, and applications are either newly built to expose and leverage, or all your existing applications also have to bring into and connect to and integrate. Fair enough?

Weisman: I think it’s a separation between process-centric services and information-centric services and harmonizing those. That will probably be the best bang for the buck.

Gardner: So now we're into IT transformation and business transformation, and you have to rethink your data center and your entire apparatus for supporting your storage. People are going to get into that anyway for some of the reasons we talked about, but again, we could look at big data and say this is an accelerator to some of those transformation efforts.

Brown: Something that has been troubling me is around the data architecture. Mike Walker, now at Dell, on the live stream, is asking what specific guidance and best practices can you give to enterprise data architects to properly architect their information architectures.

Weisman: We're talking that this afternoon. There’s going to be an entire track or two tracks on data architecture, which will be providing the guidance and it’s big-data centric.

Gerty: You're still going to be able to identify the service that provides the authoritative source for a set of data and marry that with other information, as necessary, whether it be sentiment analysis or what not, but you're always going to have to be able to point to that authoritative source.

Brown: Well, data architectures can be highly structured and big data can be somewhat unstructured. How do you marry the two?

Authoritative records

Gerty: How do you marry the two? Transactional systems are still very important. You have to be able to identify the authoritative records. Big data usually comes in multiple sources from multiple, different venues. The best example of the use of big data is around sentiment analysis, taking feeds from Twitter, Facebook, and these multiple sources, and then being able to analyze the information to the context of the authoritative sources. So your analytics have to take all of this into consideration.

Brown: Okay, we are just out of time. I just want to get a quick comment on these two other live streams. How are companies dealing with the shortage of big data scientists? Are they training current employees?

Gardner: A key question is who is actually spearheading this? Who is in the best position to be qualified? Under whose auspices do these big data initiatives fall? Let’s start with you Chris. Any insight as to how you've done it at NASA?

Gerty: I would draw a parallel from when I was in Mission Control and pretty highly trained. They wipe your brain and fill it up with everything you need to know, but we weren't really enabled to make those decisions, until we went through the data, page by page, and looked at each individual blip. If you can automate those, then you need less of whomever it is who's doing the job.

Automation there would have helped us immensely to make those decisions on the fly, rather than going over pages and pages of data from our batteries charging. It's not maybe that you need more data scientists, but you need the right data scientists. Then you need to be able to leverage off of other people’s data scientists. That's why open source is so attractive to us. You only need to do it once and then you can go off of it.

Gardner: Jim Hietala, the people that should be doing this, their qualification certification, organizational structure, any thoughts?

Hietala: It's way too early to certify people in this category right now. We really need individuals who went to graduate school to understand the proper application of analytics and mathematics. Those individuals would be highly valuable and prized, especially as they learn to how to apply that knowledge to your business.

Gardner: It’s tough to find the people who have deep and the wide expertise. Last word you, Bob?

Weisman: We have to take a look at career development within the CIO ranks. Making sense of data requires good business knowledge and too many people are being isolated within the CIO rank. They should be circulating throughout the companies, so they know what the company is doing, and then come back in. It's much more valuable.

There are some programs now that are joint ventures between the computer science departments and the business schools, and I think those are at the graduate level. As Andras was saying, they could provide people in their early 30s that can really do a fantastic job, and we really start taking advantage of this.

Brown: That's all we have time for. I think you've done a marvelous job, thank you very much.

Gardner: We’ve been talking with a panel of experts on how big data changes the status quo for architecting the enterprise. We've heard how large enterprises should better anticipate and prepare for the effects and impacts of big data, as well the simultaneous impacts of cloud computing and mobile.

This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach, California. I'd like to thank our panel: Robert Weisman, CEO and Chief Enterprise Architect at Build The Vision; Andras Szakal, Vice President and CTO of IBM's Federal Division; Jim Hietala, Vice President for Security at The Open Group, and Chris Gerty, Deputy Program Manager at the Open Innovation Program at NASA.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator through these thought leadership interviews. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Watch the video. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from The Open Group Conference in January on how big data forces changes in architecting the enterprise. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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