Ethan Hadar

Uncovering cultural perceptions and barriers during knowledge audit

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce and illustrate the importance of uncovering tacit perceptions during knowledge management (KM) audit, in order to identify cultural barriers that may interfere with KM initiatives. The goal of such KM initiatives is to leverage a firms capacity to efficiently produce value from knowledge held by employees and embedded in processes. Current audit practices analyze the explicit information gained through interviews and questionnaires, focusing on the organizations culture, existing KM processes and the improved KM processes it wishes to implement. The paper seeks to suggest an approach for uncovering and analyzing tacit perceptions identified through interviews and discussions as an inherent part of KM audit.Design/methodology/approach – The research was conducted during a KM audit in a large international software development organization. The research methodology was composed of two disciplines. The first, used for data collection, was a knowledge‐engi...

Agile architecture methodology: long term strategy interleaved with short term tactics

Tactical agile development and strategic architectural evolution are viewed as opposite ends of the development spectrum, with the long-term value of applying an architecture-centric approach seemingly at odds with rapid development, featuring its informal documentation activities. The value of a long-term vision, or ar-chitecture, is particularly high in the context of product integra-tion and research. However, there is also benefit in rapid and early feedback on incremental deliverables, as featured in agile development. To extract the main benefits of both worlds we introduce the CA Agile Architecture (C3A) method, targeted for the architec-ture and design phases of the development life cycle. Its founda-tion is the Reference and Implementation Architecture, which features a lean one-page per component contract, as well as sev-eral abstraction levels. The C3A artifacts are governed by a cyclic process of architectural evaluation and evolution, with accompa-nying coaching and training activities. This work-in-progress is being prototyped with three product teams, varying in team size, product maturity and complexity, and geographical location. C3A features a common tactical-focused agenda for the functional and system architectures, with mini-mally overlapping strategic views.

Optimizing the IT business supply chain utilizing cloud computing

Information technology applications and systems are essential to businesses and enterprises as they implement business components of the enterprise. In some cases, IT is the business, such as with financial services. Optimizing Return-on-Investment (ROI) in the IT area is essential to the business performance. Reducing cost is one component of ROI, however the predominant value is increasing revenue. IT is essential to the enterprise agilely to exploit new business opportunities. Cloud computing is emerging as a technology for optimizing IT costs and supporting agility. Enterprises are incrementally moving to cloud computing in an exploratory, ad hoc manner. Since, enterprises think in terms of IT Services that IT provides to the business, and an IT service is interconnecting hardware and software resources, the management aspects are conceptually similar to a manufacture or retail supply chain. As a result, exploiting cloud computing is a supply chain management problem for IT services using cloud computing. This paper describes the architecture requirements and implementation of a set of components for optimizing the IT supply chain using cloud computing.

Architecture in an agile world

The world is moving faster than ever, and our software development techniques are struggling to keep up. On one hand, we are under pressure to deliver more features in our software products, so we need to have an agile feature set. On the other hand, we know that we need to have a well-defined and understandable architecture to prevent our project from being in chaos. How do we manage the balance between architecture and agility?

Friends or foes?: a conceptual analysis of self-adaptation and it change management

Self-Adaptation as a vision promises to enable software systems which can autonomously adapt to changes of their context and requirements. Thus, it facilitates the autonomous evolution of the software without manual intervention. However, in practice we cannot expect that all systems with self-adaptation are developed anew and that all their behavioral aspects are handled in an autonomous manner. Instead an evolutionary approach leading from todays systems to partially self-managed systems is required. To enable such a path, we explore in this paper what a conceptual model and processes for self-adaptation should look like using the current practice in ITIL Change Management as initial reference point. We define the required responsibilities and a generic conceptual object model and map them to the ITIL Change Management roles to evaluate the similarities and differences. Moreover, the implications for the co-existence of self-adaptation and Change Management are discussed. Finally, examples for self-adaptive systems are used to exemplify our concept.

The Overall Value of Architecture Review in a Large Scale Software Organization

Software architecture review is an important part of architecture construction and evaluation, aimed at ensuring high-quality architecture thus leading to high-quality product. The literature recognizes the different benefits gained by architecture review. Yet, our empirical findings obtained in a large scale software organization show that (1) not all architects are fully aware of the review contribution, and (2) in addition to improving the quality of the architecture, the review encompasses other value propositions, such as promoting collaboration, knowledge sharing, and verifying alignment with the organization’s strategy. The study presented in this paper is a first step in an ongoing research aimed at improving existing architecture review processes, methods and tools for enhancing the review’s various contributions.

CURA: Complex-system Unified Reference Architecture - Position Paper: A Practitioner View

Constructing enterprise-level solution requires integration of existing, modified, and new modular technologies. A customer specific solution is instantiated from a reference implementation owned by the services organization, as a result of multiple products and their reference design created by the R&D organization. Yet, the disciplines of R&D and enterprise architecture differ in their analysis and design processes, artifacts, and semantics, leading to a mismatch in product design, knowledge and requirements interpretation. The Complex-systems Unified Reference Architecture (CURA) was developed as a common platform for both field and R&D practices. This methodology binds a 4-layered structure and a 4-phased architecture process, controlling the solution architecture lifecycle from reference design to reference implementation and solution instantiation, and fits both agile and DevOps methodologies. The presented version of CURA was tested and implemented with several customers as a lean and minimal blueprinting approach, serving as part of the architectural deliverables. CURA can be adjusted to other visual binding notations such as UML and TOGAF modeling languages, and can scale up to system-of-systems design.

The 4x6 Tiered Architecture Method: An Approach to the Design of Enterprise Solutions

Enterprise architecture software design is all about composing applications to assemble value-added solutions rather than standalone products. Yet, each product and technology may have been designed and developed separately because of software engineering practices, management control over the deliverables, or technology acquisitions. To promote efficient assembly, solutions must be architected in a similar style, adhering to fundamental design principles while leveraging capabilities available in modern environments and relevant platforms. Furthermore, business agility and cost requirements dictate the identification of common capabilities and their development as reusable components across products and solutions. The 4x6 Tiered Architecture Method presented in this paper imposes a structured design, in terms of steps to follow, structure and documentation, for the logical view of an enterprise solution. Application of the 4x6 method to the analysis of an enterprise solution yields a six-tiered architecture structure and an abstract architecture specification. This specification expresses the various components, dependencies and design patterns using a graph-based data model (or “architecture catalog”) and blueprint, the latter expressed as both a diagram and XML document. The 4x6 Method has been applied in practice; this experience indicates that this method results in higher quality architecture and requires lower effort for both constructing and reviewing the architecture and its documentation.

Escaped from the lab: innovation practices in large organizations

What are the effective practices for taking new ideas and innovating them into products based on software while avoiding the challenge of under-delivering on too high expectations? Often, the feasibility of The Grand project is assumed based on scope/scale-limited tech trials. Feasibility is further constrained by market pressure on both schedule and resources resulting in costly projects that linger on and never deliver. Panelists will discuss how invention translates into innovation and product while mitigating the risks of software development, the conflicts of organizations and the lure of market opportunity.