It's a great time of the year! |
It's a great time of the year – no matter where you are, it's got to be Spring, at least some for a few days here and there. And, it's a great time in IT! Some of the services being offered over the Web are technologies that have been predicted for a long time. "Utility computing," where companies provide computer time just as other vendors provide electricity and let customers pay for what they actually use, is here. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Amazon's system management service allows companies to rapidly provision large amounts of computer capacity and pay for it as needed. It's a simple Web service interface that allows users to obtain and configure capacity and pay for actual usage. Also check out Bungee Connect. This service provides on-demand access to development tools and services from companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Developers can build and test applications for free and access application components that other developers have made publicly available. More and more new products and technologies daily.
Are you keeping up?
Here's the schedule. Or you can view the complete Schedule on our website.
CSTA Web sessions:
May 2, 3
June 13, 14
July 25, 26
CSTA classroom sessions:
May 8 - DC area
May 23 - Atlanta area
June 5 - Chicago area
UITJ (Understanding IT Jobs) Web sessions:
May 31
July 26
TR Web session:
May 16
July 31
Keep in touch . . .
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Enterprise Architecture
There's much going on in the world of development, starting with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and open source development. EA (Enterprise Architecture), while not used as much as SOA and open source, is definitely making an impact. EA is a system that provides a strategic planning framework that relates and aligns information technology (IT) with the business functions that it supports. It does work throughout the entire enterprise, and describes not just the IT systems, but also IT personnel and organizational units so they align with the companies core goals and strategic direction. The "company" most into EA is the U.S. government. In fact, the government mandated the use of a formal Enterprise Architecture process for all Federal agencies. Other companies including BP, Intel, and Volkswagen, are using the technology.
EA starts with developing an architecture framework to describe a series of current (as-is), intermediate (to-be), and target (the migration plan) reference architectures and applying them to align change within the enterprise. These frameworks detail all relevant structure including business, applications, technology and data. This framework will provide a classification scheme and a data model that identifies what processes a business performs and detailed information about how those processes are executed.
The framework covers four areas:
• Business: includes strategy, goals, and corporate policies, identifies hardware and software vendors, defines business processes, and provides organization charts.
• Applications: includes application software, the interfaces between the applications, and links to parties both inside and outside the company.
• Information: includes metadata and data models, conceptual, logical and physical.
• Technical: details hardware, platforms, and hosting, shows servers and their physical location, includes diagrams for all networks (local, wide area, Internet), identifies operating system and infrastructure software including application servers, database systems, etc.
Ideally, enterprise architecture documents the current state of the technical components listed above, as well as the desired perfect future state, and a target state which is the result of tradeoffs and compromises.
Enterprise Architecture works well with other key technologies. In particular, it relates to the practice of BPM (Business Process Management), including its sub-categories of Business Performance Management and Business Process Modeling. Modeling is Vendor-specific frameworks.
New jobs have been defined in IT reflecting EA. These jobs start with an Enterprise Architect, the person charged with setting up and maintaining the architecture. This job, by the way, requires at least 10 years of experience and pays at least $300,000. EA management jobs are:
• enterprise architect: Senior level job responsible for building an overall framework to ensure that all IT functions throughout the enterprise operate in sync with each other and follow the business objectives of the enterprise. Sets strategic direction, manages risks, defines standards, and maintains cross organization communication. Usually requires 10 - 15 years of experience.
• applications, or solutions architect: Senior applications developer responsible for understanding the business functions and translating them into technical specs. Primarily concerned with a single system and integrates in-house and purchased software. Develops baseline requirements.
• data, or information, architect: Senior job position responsible for ensuring that data is organized properly and supports the application systems. Works with enterprise data and with more than one system. Develops and maintains standards/compliance issues, manages and maintains user interfaces to data, creates conceptual, logical and physical data models, and builds data dictionaries, database schemas.
• infrastructure architect Senior job position responsible for the physical (hardware) infrastructure of the company. Deals with resource capacity, network capacity, server clustering, administration, and security.
It will be interesting to see the increase in the use of EA. It is completely compatible with both SOA and open source development, so that is not a problem. Moving to EA is, however, a move that affects the entire company and must have the backing of upper corporate management to be successful. It is a major undertaking.
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1. How can bacteria be used in IT?
2. What are the CODiE awards?
3. Now, what won the CODiE award for Best Storage Software Solution for 2007?
4. What IT professional might put "skinning" on a resume?
5. Which of the following does not belong:
a. MySpace
b. Wikipedia
c. LinkedIn
d. YouTube
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Caution – Make sure You’re Keeping Up |
It seems sudden, but we know it's been steadily building. New products and technologies are "suddenly" appearing in many different areas. We already talked about the availability of significant new services (Amazon S3 and Bungee Connect), but that's only the start. There are over 18,000 definitions in TechRef®, and over 200 of them are products that have been released or updated already this year. TechRef® is the #1 technical resource for business people. Every one of those 18,000+ definitions are written in plain English and contain the information important to business men and women. They define what, they do not go into the details of how. Techies need to know how the software and hardware works, we only need to know what it does, what it works with, and what it's used for. If you're not subscribing to TechRef®, check it out. If you work with technology you need this reference.
And, all this new technology is included in CSTA – the one day seminar you need to get a complete picture of the IT world. If you're new to IT, or haven't attended CSTA in a while, you should consider it. A one-day investment gets you to the base of knowledge you need to understand this changing world. Then TechRef® keeps you up to date as the changes appear (a one-year subscription is included with your CSTA enrollment).
CSTA will be in the DC area on May 8th, Atlanta on May 23rd, and Chicago on June 5th. Or, check out the Web sessions: May 2-3 and June 13-14.
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Web 2
Is it Web 2, or Web2, or Internet 2, or Internet2? Well, all of those are used interchangeably to refer to the same thing – web usage in which the content is supplied by the user. And this includes a lot of different technologies.
Web 2 Computer terminology that covers services available on the Web that allow people to collaborate and share information. These services include blogs, wikis, RSS (Rich Site Summary) or (Really Simple Syndication), mass publishing, and other interactive functions. The distinction of sites in Web 2 is that the content of these sites is provided by users, not by the owners of the site. Web 2 includes social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and business networking sites such as LinkedIn, and reference sites such as Wikipedia. In addition, companies are adding tools such as blogs and wikis to their own Web sites, usually starting with blogs.
blog Communications. Internet diary, or log. An author posts information. Some blogs are really personal diaries where the author is posting his or her own thoughts, experiences, whatever. On a professional level, some blogs discuss a single aspect of technology and are used to keep peers and coworkers up to date on changes or progress. Stands for Web log.
podcast Communications. Internet system where a digital media file is distributed over the Internet using syndication feed for playback on portable media players and personal computers. It can be distributed automatically using software capable of reading feed formats such as RSS.
RSS (Rich Site Summary) or (Really Simple Syndication) Communications. Protocol and standards for exchanging data between Web sites through syndication, or subscription-based exchanges. XML-based standard originally created as a simple way of syndicating news headlines. Designed to be lightweight, simple to use and inexpensive to implement. Commonly used with portal sites to automatically populate the portal with articles and information from other sites. Developed by Netscape in 1997. Version 2.0 offered by Harvard in 2003.
social network, social networking Communications terminology that refers to a network that is created for social reasons and enables people to connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication. Individuals join the network, and establish a personal connection with others in the network. The network maintains relationships between individuals and includes sites such as MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
wiki A collaborative Web site in which anyone can edit, delete or modify content. Similar to a blog, except that a blog is usually the work of a single author and readers can add comments but not change the original text. Wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian. The best known wiki is Wikipedia. Originally created: 1995.
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1. In February, a Japanese university announced a new technology that uses bacteria DNA as a medium for storing data long-term, even for thousands of years. This technology, creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence. The university has successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis.
2. The CODiE awards are presented each year by SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) to new products in the software and digital content industry. Over 30 categories include, e.g., Best Asset Management Solution, Best Business Intelligence or Knowledge Management Solution, and Best Data Security Solution.
3. Amazon Web Services' Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). This is a storage management service that provides companies with as-needed storage capacity over the Internet. Provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Charges are based on the number of GBs (Gigabytes – each a billion bytes) of data stored and transferred. Service available: March, 2006.
4. That would be developers, or specifically, Web designers. A skin, or a theme, is a customizable graphical appearance of an application or a Website. Users can change what appears on their computer screens according to individual taste. Software which allows this is defined as skinnable, and the process of writing or applying a skin is known as skinning.
5. Actually, they all belong. All are part of Internet 2, or Web 2. These terms cover services available on the Web that allow people to collaborate and share information. These services include blogs, wikis, RSS (Rich Site Summary) or (Really Simple Syndication), mass publishing, and other interactive functions. The distinction of sites in Web 2 is that the content of these sites is provided by users, not by the owners of the site.
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