By Dick Weisinger, on September 2nd, 2008
The on-going slowdown in the economy may be a driver behind rapid growth in the adoption of Open Source software in the enterprise. An O’Reilly report shows that 5 to 15 percent of all open IT jobs mention open source software as a requirement.
And momentum is picking up for the testing and trial of Open Source projects. The number of projects hosted on SourceForge in 2000 was
12,500 and at the end of 2007, the number jumped to 200,000, which works out to nearly 55 percent annual growth. In 2003 there were only 200,000 annual downloads. At the end of 2007 the number of downloads exceeded 800 million. O’Reilly expects the number of annual downloads to break 1 billion in 2009. The report goes on to say that because much of the content on Sourceforge is hosted on mirror sites which don’t get included in the download counts, that the number can actually be much higher.
Until now many of the jobs related to Open Source were somehow related to Linux — demand for Linux skills grew 18 percent last year. But that’s changing now. Applications are now achieving much quicker growth than the Linux OS. Alfresco, Django and Drupal are leading the pack in Open Source apps that are seeing fast growth. Other areas seeing high growth are LAMP, Ruby on Rails, VMware, and MySQL.
By Dick Weisinger, on August 29th, 2008
BI tools can be fantastic for identifying and tracking data and trends in a business. The problem is that it currently takes an army of people to prepare the data for BI while typically just a few analysts are able to interpret it. Data preparation includes loading and transforming data for data warehousing and integration with data dictionaries and OLAP. And automating the flow for keeping all information up-to-date in the BI system.
This is sure to change. To use BI well today, the analyst needs to be able to have good business acumen to know what to look for and to have a deep understanding of the capabilities of the BI tool used. Ideally, different levels of hierarchy and positions within the company should be able to plug into the BI tools — right now most are locked out.
BI and Search tools are sure to have a great influence on each other and are likely to merge and morph into sophisticated and easy to use tools for exploring company data. The result will be tools that empower the average business person with the ability to explore the data. Most BI tools center on the aggregation of data collected from structured data sources — one area of improvement will be the ability to include non-structured data into the blend, expanding the scope of business knowledge in the system.
By Dick Weisinger, on August 28th, 2008
Netherlands-based TechWorld blogger Mike Kavis echoed Burton Group’s assessment that SOA failures are most often a result of problems with people and business culture based rather than technology problems.
Kavis identified 10 reasons for SOA failures. His top five reasons include:
1. Lack of clarity around SOA business value
Failure to match SOA to business problems and processes is the biggest problem. It’s better to work backwards from business problem, drafting a solution, rather than first trying to invest in technology that will later be applied to general business problems.
2. Lack of understanding of the potential impact of organizational change.
Workflow, Re-engineering, and now SOA involve business process changes as part of the solution. Changes in the workplace inevitably become political as people try to determine what change means for their place in the organization. Kavis recommends creating an organizational change management plan to address potential problems.
3. Lack of an executive champion
Without involvement and sponsorship from someone high up in the organization, an SOA project is destined to fail. The project should be aligned with key business drivers and structured in a way to attract the full support of a CXO-type executive.
4. Lack of Budget
The technoloogy costs of SOA include costs for governance tools, training, consulting, infrastructure and security. Trying to skimp on the investment in these tools and consulting needed to bootstrap the effort can lead to disaster. The better approach is to determine potential ROI and use that as a justification for receiving adequate funding.
5. Lack of SOA skills
Skill sets focused on SOA include architects, business process modelers, administrators. SOA implementations can be complex and skills both on the technology and business sides are needed to be successful. The overall SOA plan should include money and time for training and resources.
