Wow!- The BCS Enterprise Architecture Speciality Group has secured John Zachman, the de facto father of Enterprise Architecture, and creator of the "Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture" (ZFEA), to speak at it's next event on Tuesday the 6th of October: Talk about a major coup. The BCS EA SG is really getting busy and is the fastest growing BCS Speciality Group I've seen so far, with 750+ members, and is gaining new members on a daily basis.

Come along and see John speak about "Enterprise Design Objectives - Complexity and Change", at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, 100 Cromwell Road, London SW7 4ER on Tuesday the 6th of October, 2009. You can register your place here: http://www.ea.bcs.org/eventbooking/showevent.php?eventid=esg0908

Of course a serious advantage of the BCS EA SG is that it is framework agnostic, and as such can look at best practice and framework capabilities from across the EA community. In fact less than six months ago a preceding event was an update on the recently released TOGAF 9 standard from the Open Group (typically seen as one of the other major Frameworks, alongside ZFEA, although you often encounter Organisation using a blended, best-of-breed, approach when it comes to EA implementation).

The BCS EA SG has got some other great events lined up, and I'm especially looking forward to hearing "Links with other IT disciplines such as ITIL and strategy" on Tuesday the 15th of Decemeber, 2009, over at the BCS London head quarters at 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA. Details of this event are still being confirmed, but it'll be great to see how thoughts on mapping major capabilities to EA match with my own (I've been doing rather a lot in terms of co-ordinating EA, Service Management and Portfolio Management lately). Plus since TOGAF 9 removed the genuinely useful appendices showing mappings between TOGAF, ZFEA, and other disciplines and frameworks, promising to have them published as stand alone white papers, it's great to know that experience and knowledge in this important area has not been forgotten and in fact is being collated and compiled by the BCS EA SG team.

I'm really looking forward to seeing John speak on the 6th and if you can make it I hope to see you there too! And please do come over and say "Hi" if you get chance.

Got this via email and wanted to pass it on in it's entirety, so here it is, personally I think you should just go to http://www.england2018bid.com/support/register.aspx and vote for Birmingham to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

England is bidding to host the 21st FIFA World Cup in 2018 and Birmingham is one of 16 cities vying for the chance to be part of the official England bid.

We want everyone in Birmingham and the West Midlands to back the city's official England 2018 World Cup Bid and pledge their support by voting for us as a host city at the official website here.

Whether you're a die-hard footie fan - a Blue Nose, Villan or Baggies fan - or just proud to be from the city or the region register your vote now.

The last time the World Cup was hosted in England was in 1966 when we beat West Germany 4-2 in the Final, receiving the Jules Rimet trophy from the Queen and lifting it in front of the fans at Wembley Stadium. Let's do all we can to help England host the World Cup again.

Birmingham and the West Midlands have the sporting heritage, facilities and the passion to guarantee that we would deliver an outstanding backdrop and incomparable atmosphere if we were selected as a host city for the 2018 World Cup. Winning this bid will bring hundreds of thousands of people into the region and provide a much-needed financial boost.

Help bring the World Cup 2018 to the region and show your support at the official England site by voting for Birmingham as a host city http://www.england2018bid.com/support/register.aspx

You can also visit the new Birmingham website http://www.backthebirminghambid.com and also show your support at Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

Support your region and city; let's bring the World Cup to Birmingham and leave a legacy to be remembered by the fans forever.

Back Birmingham, back England 2018!

Obv. you can vote for the City and Country of your preference, but of course I think Birmingham would be the best place to host the World Cup.

Tomorrow, on Saturday the 12th, the local Parish Church, Saint Mary and Saint Margaret's, will be holding a 'Heritage weekend' and fund raising launch for the new 'community church room' that is planned to be built into the church.

We're going to be presented with some of the results of the archaeological dig on the Church grounds (and Castle Bromwich hall, upon whose grounds the Church sits), hear from local historians, and get unprecedented access investigating a church which is at it's heart almost a thousand years old! The gardens of Castle Bromwich hall are also well worth a visit, containing walled baroque gardens that are the only remaining example in the country of a formal English garden design.

If you have an interest in the Castle Bromwich and it's history then perhaps this might be something you'd like to come along to.

Details:

• Time: 14:00
• Date: Saturday the 12th of September, 2009
• Location: St. Mary and St. Margaret's Church, Castle Bromwich, just behind Castle Bromwich Hall.

Here's the flyer for the event:

Links:

• Official Web Site
  http://www.stmaryandstmargaret.co.uk/
• Wikipedia entry for St. Mary and St. Margaret's Church
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary_and_St_Margaret%27s_Church,_Castle_Bromwich
• Wikipedia entry for Castle Bromwich Hall
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bromwich_Hall
• Wikipedia entry for Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bromwich_Hall_Gardens
• Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens Trust and official web site
  http://www.cbhgt.org.uk/

Last Sunday I hosted a barbecue for the Committee of the BCS Birmingham Branch and thought I'd share a few of the photo's that we took with you.

After the Branch Committee's request for new Committee member applicants I'm very pleased to say we had five people come along and take up new positions on the Committee. We're fortunate to be joined by Martin Froggatt, Rob Gilliam, Steve Harris, Dawn Peers and Hugo Russell, and most welcome they are too!

This bring the size of the Committee back up to a healthy twelve members, which is excellent, however we on the Committee thought that it would be good idea to hold a small event to help everyone get to know each other, and hopefully build a sense of camaraderie, outside of the usual Committee meetings and BCS Birmingham Branch events (one of which is on Tuesday the 15th evening). I was happy to host and for my part I wanted to say 'thank you' to the long serving members of the Committee for all of their dedication (as well as a couple of long serving ex-Committee members too).

We've also recently started to reboot the Branches approach to social networking technologies and will be refreshing the BCS Birmingham Branch facebook page, please consider joining if your a BCS member and either associated with or interested in the Birmingham Branch.

And here's those photos I mentioned, as you can see we all had an excellent time, and as Peter Crouch had to say "Thanks also for posting Donna's photos on the Web, now everyone can see what the Birmingham Committee does on a Sunday afternoon!".

The third of my articles on the macro-level issues with (automated) provisioning, which build on the previous articles, specifically the comparison of Enterprise versus "web scale" deployments described in "The problem with automated provisioning (II of III)" and the levels of complexity, in terms of automated provisioning, set up and configuration that is required.

As I've said before in this series of articles provisioning a thousand machines which all have the same OS, stack and code base, with updated configuration information is easier to set up than a thousand machines which use a mixture of four or five Operating Systems, which all have differing patch schedules, patch methods and code release schedules, with a diverse infrastructure and application software stack and multiple code bases. And to express this I've postulated the equation "(Automated) Provisioning Complexity = No. of Instances x Freq. of Change".

What I'd like to move the focus over to is that of runtime stability and the ability of a given system to support increasingly greater levels of complexity.

I find that it is important to recognise the place of observation and direct experience as well as theory and supposition (in research I find it's useful to identify patterns and then try to understand them).

Another trend that I have witnessed in regards to system complexity, including the requirement to provision a given system, is that the simpler and more succinct a given architectural layer, the more robust that layer is and more able to support layers above it which have higher levels of complexity.

Often Architectural layers are constrained in terms of there ability to support (and absorb) high numbers of differing components and high rates of change by the preceding layer in the stack. AKA the simpler the lowest levels of the stack the more stable they will be and thus more able to support diverse ecosystems with reasonable rates of change in the layers above them

The more complex the layer below the less stable it is likely to be (given the number of components and instances thereof and the rate of update which significantly drive up the level of complexity of the system).

This phenomenon is found in the differing compute environments I've been speaking about in these short articles, and again they affect the ability of a given system to be provisioned in any succinct and efficient manner.

More accurate Enterprise

Typically Enterprise IT ecosystems are woefully complex, due to a mixture of longevity (sweating those assets and risk aversion) and large numbers of functional systems (functional as in functional requirements) and non-functional components (i.e. heterogeneous infrastructure, with lots of exceptions, one off instances, etc.).

Subsequently they suffer from the issue that I've identifioed above, that is as lower levels are already compolex, they are constrained in the amount of complexity that can be supported at the level above, the accompanying diagram demonstrates the point.

More accurate Web Scale

Whilst Web Scale class systems often exhibit almost the opposite behaviour. Given they often use a radically simplified infrastructure architecture anyway (i.e. lots of similar and easily replaceable common and often 'commodity' components) in a 'platform' approach, there isn't often the high levels of heterogeneity that you see in a typical Enterprise IT ecosystem (homogeneous). And this approach is often found in the application and logical layers above the infrastructure, i.e. high levels of commonality of software environment, used as an application platform to support a variety of functionality, services, code and code bases.

Subsequently, because of the simple nature of low level layers of the architecture they are much more robust and capable of withstanding change (because introducing change into a complex ecosystem often leads to something, somewhere breaking, even with exceptional planning). This stability and robustness ensures that the overall architecture is better equipped to cope with change and with the frequency of change, and that layers of high levels of complexity can be supported.

And so that concludes my articles on provisioning, and the problems with it, for the time being, although I might edit them a little, or at least revisit them, when I have more time.

Back on my topic of concerns about the UK economy this article looks something which I find highly problematic, that is the UK's spending on research and development (R&D), against world wide spend, and then measured against world wide innovation 'league tables'.

In the theme of trying to get all these 'backed up' blog posts 'out of the door' I'll be keeping this as succinct as possible, avoiding my usual Lovecraftian levels of verbiage, so please excuse the change of tempo.

The UK spends a great deal on R&D, in fact it spends around 2.5% of GDP, about the same percentage it spends on the Military and Armed Forces, which for 2007 comes out at around £54 Billion.

In terms of R&D spend and investment in the future, innovation and science, in $B, the UK ranks 4th after Germany, Japan and the USA. There is another way of measuring this investment, which is by % of GDP, which is a good comparator, but hides the vast amounts spent on innovation.

All well and good you might think, especially if that investment brings us in to the top four benefiting from that investment, but, well, there's your problem, the UK doesn't come in to the top four. It doesn't even make the top ten.

In fact the UK comes in at fourteenth in terms of the "innovation index". I think this is pretty rum as countries with a tenth of our spend on R&D still do much better in terms of the Innovation league tables. Now ostensible you'd be right to ask what is the "innovation index" and what does it measure, unsurprisingly it is a measure of the adoption of new technology, and the interaction between the business and science sectors (it includes measures of investment into research institutions and protection of intellectual property rights).

The UK does slightly worse on the "technology readiness index", coming joint fifteenth. This measures the ability of the economy to adopt new technologies (it includes measures of ICT usage, the regulatory framework with regard to ICT , and the availability of new technology to business).

Now you might say that this is not a fair comparison, in that R&D is not analogous to Innovation nor the way it is calculated nor presented or that the UK's investment in R&D is exhibited in other areas, such as joint work abroad and investment overseas where the end 'innovation' benefit is generated and calculated. And you may well be right, but the numbers are pretty definitive and hard to avoid once you've unearthed them.

So what is the problem? The majority of people that I speak to about the subject seem rather reticent to view the issue from the top down, because of the magnitude of the problem and effectively addressing it at a 'macro' level. Instead the majority of those I spoke with preferred to look at influencing a variety of 'levers' and mechanisms that the government might have to improve the discrepancy.

However I'm really not sure this addresses the root cause, even if such a root cause could be, or had been, identified.

From my point of view the mechanism to get money from the Government (and EU who are also big investors into the UK's R&D funding, followed by business) is highly complex. The number of agencies that work in the sector is high, along with the mechanism itself (i.e. at the most basic level money is divided-up amongst the research councils and funding bodies, predominately by subject and topic area, before being divided up again amongst the universities, education and research establishments, who deliver those subjects).

Another issue may well be the difference in focus in the UK in terms of R&D to much of the World, especially compared to the USA and major EU member nations. For instance 15% of US public civil R&D spending is on development rather than basic or applied research, whilst it is only 2.3% in the UK. It's likely that this better alignment with business means that the investment actually gets a better return on investment.

Possible inefficiencies and complexity of the system may only be one, albeit a major one, of the issues at hand, as is focus of R&D effort and the closeness it has with business. The other popular opinion I hear is that Research Council funding needs to much better meet genuine business needs, which suggests that the relationships between universities and enterprise can continue to be improved upon significantly.

Other items that come up are (i) clarity of Government policy and associated packages, (ii) the relative size and funding of the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and the need to scale up further, (iii) higher availability of business relevant skills and the need to continue to promote STEM skills, (iv) a focus on key technology 'families', (v) better engagment of the SME community with Universities and R&D beyond Tax Credits and supporting and strengthening the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), and (vi) better engaging UK Business with 7th Framework Programme (FP7) perhaps by getting the UK to address the discrepancy between large businesses, SMEs and Universities where FP7 funds only up to 50% at enterprises, whilst universities and SMEs may receive 75%, possibly by 'topping up' funding to make it more accessible to these large companies. However I feel these seven items are minor in comparison to the three major issues above.

There seem to be a couple of threads running through these issues and I'd say that they are complexity of the funding eco-system possibly leading to inefficiency and one of R&D investment alignment to business.

Whatever the root cause, be it one of those, or another, or more likely a mixture of some or all of these issues, 'tweaking' certain items without a fundamental understanding of the aforementioned root causes will likely continue to have a less dramatic effect then the UK rapidly getting anywhere near the no.4 spot in the international innovation league tables.

Apologies to all my blog readers I've been lax of late and haven't posted a great deal recently, and I'm afraid that in an attempt to clear down all the draft blog entries I have prior to the transition and acquisition (of Sun by Oracle, of course) I'll be posting a number of blog entries in quick succession, some of which I expect may need expanding upon in the future.

Topics I have to complete include part three of my provisioning article series, a number of posts on Google and the Google architecture, a number of posts on UK Government messaging systems, specifically DIS, a number of posts on the continuing issues with the economy and innovation and science spending in the UK, as well as a few others.

On the economy side, I was hoping to follow up my articles "DBERR's views on the future growth of the UK economy 'New Industry, New Jobs'" and "Industry contributions to the UK economy and investment in R&D by industry" with pieces which might include looking at:

1. 'innovation' investment in the UK versus the UK's place in the World Wide league tables
2. UK versus US stimulation packages
3. Services Sciences and Web Sciences
4. the state of UK Manufacturing and "Robot"isation in the UK
5. a review of the recent 'Digital Britain' report
6. possibly a comparison of R&D spending and focus in the UK versus other nations (European comparison might be the most pointed)

But for now I'll see how I get on!

The second of my articles on the macro-level issues with (automated) provisioning and focusing again on the theme of complexity as a result of "No. of Instances" x "Freq. of Change" described in the previous article "The problem with automated provisioning (I of III)", but this time comparing an Enterprise Data Centre build-out versus a typical "Web Scale" Data Centre build-out.

Having built out both examples demonstrated I find the below a useful comparison when describing some of the issues around automated provisioning and occasionally why there are misconceptions about it from those who typically deliver systems from one of these 'camps' and not the other.

Enterprise

Basically the number of systems within a typical Enterprise Data Centre (and within that Enterprise itself) is larger than that in a Web Scale (or HPC) Data Centre (or supported by that organisations), and the differing number of components that support those systems is higher too. For instance at the last Data Centre build out I led there were around eight different Operating Systems being implemented alone. This base level of complexity, which is then exasperated because of the Frequency of having to patch and update this (as demonstrated by "Automated Provisioning Complexity = No. of Instances x Freq. of Change" equation) significantly impacts any adoption of automated provisioning (it makes defining operational procedures more complex too).

Web Scale

Frankly a Web Scale build out is much more likely to use a greater level of standardisation to be able to drive the level of scale and scaling required to service the user requests and to maintain the system as a whole (here's a quote from Jeff Dean, Google Fellow, "If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day."). This is not to say that there is not a high level of complexity inherent in these types of system, it's just that in order to cope with the engineering effort required to ensure that the system can scale to service many hundreds of millions of requests it may well require a level of component standardisation well beyond the typical you'd see in an Enterprise type deployment (where functionality and maintenance of business process is paramount). Any complexity is more likely to be in the architecture to cope with said scaling, for instance distributed computational proximity algorithms (i.e. which server is nearest to me physically so as to reduce latency versus which servers are under most load so as to process the request as optimally as possible), or in the distributed configuration needed to maintain said system as components become available and are also de-commissioned (for whatever reason).

Automated Provisioning Complexity = No. of Instances x Freq. of Change

At the most base level provisioning a thousand machines which all have the same OS, stack and code base, with updated configuration is easier to set up than a thousand machines which use a mixture of four or five Operating Systems, which all have differing patch schedules and patch methods, with a diverse infrastructure and application software stack and multiple code bases. I suspect that upon reading this article you may think that it was an overtly obvious statement to make, but it is the fundamentals that I keep seeing people trip up on over and over again which infuriates me no end, and so, yes, expect another upcoming article on the "top" architectural issues that I encounter too.

HPC, or High Performance Computing, the third major branch of computing, build-outs usually follow the model above for that of "web scale" ones. I have an upcoming article comparing the three major branches of computing usage, Enterprise, Web Scale, and HP, in much greater detail, however for the time being the comparison above is adequate to demonstrate the point I am drawing to your attention; that of complexity of environment exasperating implementation of an automated provisioning system. Hope you enjoyed this article, it is soon to be followed by a reappraisal and revised look at Enterprise and Web Scale provisioning.

Referring back to my previous article "The problem with automated provisioning - an introduction" once you get over these too human of issues into the 'technical' problem of provisioning then I'd have been much nearer the mark in my initial assessment, because it is indeed an issue of complexity. The risks, costs, and likely success, of setting up and maintaining an automated provisioning capability is integrally linked to that of the complexity of the environment to be provisioned.

There are a number of contributing factors, including, number of devices, virtual instances, etc., location and distribution from the command and control point, but the two main ones in my mind are "Number of Instances" and "Frequency of Change".

And so 'Complexity', in terms of automated provisioning, at a macro level, can be calculated as being "Number of Instances" versus "Frequency of Change".

No. of Instances x Freq. of Change

By "Number of Instances" I mean number of differing operating systems in use, number of differing infrastctrue applications, number of differing application runtime environments and application frameworks, number of differing code bases, number of content versions being hosted, etc.

By "Frequency of Change" I am drawing attention to patches, code fixes, version iterations, code releases, etc., and how often they are delivered.

The following diagram demonstrates what I frequently call 'The Problem with Provisioning'; as you can see I've delineated against three major architectural "levels", from the lowest and nearest to the hardware, the OS layer which also contains 'infrastructure software', the Application layer, containing the application platform and runtime environment, and the "CCC" layer containing Code, Configuration and Content.

In a major data-centre build-out it is not atypical to see three, four or even more, different operating systems being deployed, each of which is likely to require three or six monthly patches, as well as interim high value patches (bug fixes that effect the functionality of the system and security patches). Furthermore it's likely the number of ISV applications, COTS products, and application runtime environments will be much higher than the number of OS instances, and that the amount of "CCC" instances will be even higher.

I find it important to separate the system being provisioned into these three groupings because, typically they require differing approaches (and technologies) for the provisioning thereof, something I mentioned in the previous article when organisations mistakenly believe that the provisioning technology that they have procured will scale the entire stack, from just above 'bare metal' to "CCC" changes (I've seen this issue more than once, even by a Sun team who should of known better, albeit it was around three years ago).

This model brings to the fore the increasing level of complexity, both of components at each layer, and the frequency of changes that then occur, and although the model above is a trifle simplistic, it is useful when describing the issues that one can encounter with implementing automated provisioning systems, especially to those with little knowledge or awareness of the topic.

I was going to start this short series of articles with the statement that the problem with provisioning is one of complexity, and I'd have been wrong, the predominant issues with provisioning, and specifically automated provisioning, are awareness and expectation.

Awareness and Expectations

The level of awareness of what can actually be done, and often, more importantly, what cannot be done, with automated provisioning, or even what automated provisioning actually "is" is a significant barrier, followed by the expectations set, both by end users with a hope for IT "silver bullets", who may well have been oversold, and Systems Integrators, product vendors and ISVs who sadly promise a little too much to be true or are a trifle unaware of the full extent of their own abilities (positivity and confidence aside).

For instance I was once asked to take over and 'rescue' the build out of a data centre on behalf of a customer and their outsourcerer (£30M+ to build out, estimated £180M total to build and run for the first five years).

Personally I would say that this data-centre build out was of medium complexity, being made up of more than five hundred Wintel servers, circa three hundred UNIX devices, and around two hundred ancillary pieces of hardware including network components, firewalls, switches, bridges, intelligent KVMs and their ilk, storage components, such as SAN fabric, high end disk systems, such as Hitachi 9900 range, high end tape storage, etc., and other components.

One of the biggest problems in this instance was that the contract between client and vendor stipulated using automated provisioning technologies, not a problem in itself, however an assumption had been made, by both parties, that the entire build out would be done via the provisioning system, without a great deal of thought following this through to it's logical conclusion.

Best to say here that they weren't using Sun's provisioning technology, but the then 'market leader', however the issues were not to do with the technology, nor functionality and capabilities of the provisioning product. It would have been as likely the similar problems would have been encountered even if it had.

This particular vendor had never implemented automated provisioning technologies before on a brand new "green-field" site, they had always implemented them in existing "brown-field" sites, where, of course, their was an existing and working implementation to encapsulate in the provisioning technology.

As some of the systems were being re-hosted from other data-centres (in part savings were to be made as part of a wider data-centre consolidation), another assumption had been made that this was not a fresh "green-field" implementation, but a legacy "brown-field" one, however this was a completely new data-centre, moving to an upgrade of hardware and infrastructure, never mind later revisions of application runtime environments, new code releases, and in-part enhanced, along with, wholly-new functionality too. AKA this was not what we typically call a "lift and shift", where a system is 'simply' relocated from one location to another (and even then 'simply' is contextual). Another major misconception and example of incorrectly set expectation was that the provisioning technology in question would scale the entire stack, from just above 'bare metal' to 'Code, Configuration and Content' (CCC) changes, something that was, and still is extremely unlikely.

Sadly because of these misconceptions and lack of fore-thought predominantly on behalf of the outsourcerer no one had allowed for the effort to either build-out the data-centre in entirety and then encapsulate it within the provisioning technology (a model they had experience of, and which was finally adopted), nor allow for the time to build the entire data-centre as 'system images' within the provisioning technologies and then use it to implement the entire data-centre (which would have taken a great deal longer, not only because testing a system held as system images would have been impossible, as they would have to be loaded into the hardware to do any testing, either testing of the provisioning system, or real world UAT, system, non-functional, and performance testing).

Unsurprisingly one of the first things I had to do when I arrived was raise awareness that this was an issue, as it had not fully been identified, before getting agreement from all parties on a way forward. Effort, cost, resources, and people, were all required to develop the provisioning and automated provisioning system in a workable solution. As you can guess there had been no budget put aside for all of this, so the outsourcerer ended up absorbing the costs directly, leading to increased resentment of the contract that they had entered into and straining the relationship with the client, however this had been their own fault because of lack of experience and naivete when it came to building-out new data-centres (this had been their first so they did a lot of on the job learning and gained a tremendous amount of experience, even much of this was how not to build out a data centre).

This is why I stand by the statement that the major issues facing those adopting automated provisioning is one of awareness of the technology and what it can do and one of expectations of the level of transformation and business enablement it will facilitate, as well as how easy it is to do. The other articles in this series will focus a little more on the technical aspects of the "problem with provisioning".

You'd imagine Twitter integration in Disqus couldn't get any better, however speaking with Daniel Ha at Disqus I hear even more improvements are on the way.

If you haven't seen how Disqus integrates with Twitter (and incidentally what Disqus integration looks like with blogs.sun.com, or any other Apache Roller Weblogger based blog system) have a look at this blog entry which has generated a few traditional comments, but quite a few tweets, and see how Disqus displays them all as part of that conversation too:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/reasons_projects_and_programmes_fail

You'll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page, but as you can see Disqus has captured a lot of the tweets and retweets about the article, which I think is pretty cool. Disqus also does the same for Facebook and a host of other social networking platforms as well.

Talking to Daniel he said that tweet and social networking metrics and "count" was on the way as well as other advancements, so I am firmly looking forward to those when they arrive.

The great thing about Disqus is that it is firmly becoming a conversation catcher and conversation engine, which is really what I want, to capture disparate conversations about what I write in an aggregate manner.

If you are interested in integrating Disqus with your Sun blog or any other Apache Roller Weblogger based blog, I have a tutorial and overview over here, along with the code and code examples you need to use:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/disqus_integration_bsc_roller_weblogger

Latest research into mobile web user experience says that overall the experience is "miserable", and cites the major issues with Mobile web usages, as well as looking at overall "success" rates which, although improved from results of research in the mid-1990's are much lower than typical PC and workstation results.

It is well worth a read for those looking at optimising for mobile readership and audience and the full report is available here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

This new report names two major factors to improving the aforementioned success rates; that is sites designed specifically with mobile use in mind and improvement and innovations in phone design (smart phones and touch screens perform best).

Jakob Nielsen, ex-Sun Staff member and Distinguished Engineer is famous for his work in the field of "User Experience", and his site is a key resource to getting advice and best practice in terms of web, and other types of, user experience design.

You might not have seen Bill Vass' blog article series on the topic of the top reasons to use and adopt Open Source software; and as it's such an insightful series of articles I thought I'd bring it to your attention here.

Each one is highly data driven and contains insight that you probably haven't seen before but is useful to be aware of when positioning Open Source to a CTO, a CIO or an IT Director, because of Bill viewpoints (having come from a CIO and CTO background). Often when you see this sort of thing written it can be rather subjective, almost 'faith based', so I'm always on the lookout for good factual information that is contextually relevant.

Bill Vass' top reasons to use and adopt open source:

Improved security

Reduced procurement times

Avoid vendor lock in

Reduced costs

Better quality

Enhance functionality

And before you mention it, I know Bill already summarised these articles in his lead-in piece "The Open Source Light at the End of the Proprietary Tunnel…", but it was such a great set of articles it seems a shame not to highlight them them to you!

In this post I'll be describing the five categories that I've identified of reasons that Projects and Programmes Fail, this categorisation has been built up from doing a large number of system, project and programme reviews and audits over the years, and this article follows on from the project review and programme audit framework which I wrote about recently.

Whatever problems are found in a project or programme in my experience they can be broken down into these five categories:

1. Strategic / Alignment
2. Contractual / Financial
3. People / Politics
4. Process / Procedural
5. Technical / Architectural

For a number of years my categorization of reasons why projects and programmes fail did not include "Strategic / Alignment" as an area, and was a model made up of just the other four categories, but then I kept coming across a couple of definitive reasons why it should be added; more on this below.

So lets look at these five categories individually in more detail:

Strategic / Alignment

A fundamental lack of strategic alignment to the Business has been made.

Basically the project should never have been commissioned in the first place. It is either not required whatsoever (and yes, shockingly, I have come across this happening), or is no longer required (either because of a change of business circumstance, or functionality overlap with another system, i.e. something else does this just fine thank you very much).

A lack of an Executive Sponsor is a good indication that this could be an issue, and even if the project or programme is some form of 'Skunk Works' you would expect the overall 'Skunk Works' innovation concept and framework to be supported by an Executive Sponsor, such as the Head of R&D, and for a watching brief kept over costs versus potential revenues and benefits.

Projects and programmes which are purely or highly non-functional, and provide limited, or unperceived business benefit, may also be an indication of this issue.


People / Politics

Getting people to work together can be complex and difficult, especially when their goals are not co-ordinated. Long term political enemies, people competing for resources, promotions and remuneration, are all potential issues.

This magnifies up at a macro level into business units being in competition for talent, resources and even access to customers and partners. Programmes where multiple business units have to work together and integrate systems and functionality are almost always problematic, even when there are serious penalties if it not done.

In general Governance compliance issues and management failings also fall into this category, as do business conduct issues, moral, etc.


Process / Procedural

The process is 'broken'. Procedures are not in place or are not being complied with. It is either the wrong process to have been used in the first place, is not being adhered to correctly, or is not even being used at all.

A process is in place but it is over subscribed and can not 'scale', alternately a process does not have enough people to service it, perhaps because of downsizing or such.

The status of a capable Project Management Office (PMO), or of stable, authoritative, Document Repository are also indicators that there is a problem in this area, as is a lack of due diligence when managing and implementing change control.

Governance in terms of appropriate operating model and related procedural items are here too.


Contractual / Financial

For some reason the financial arrangements of the project are having a negative impact on the ability to deliver that project. The contract is counter intuitive perhaps, or is weighted in such a way that means that the ends are not easily achieved, or does a poor job of defining the requirements.

If you hear something like the "spirit of the contract" versus the "word of the contract" then this is a good indicator that there is an issue with the contract and that it doesn't cover what is wanted or expected.

Be aware that this is likely to be a problem shared by the client and their vendors as mutual understanding of what can be delivered versus what is wanted and needed by the business. This a re-iterative learning process as the business learns more about what can be delivered by technology and the system defined, whilst those involved in delivery learn the semantics, language and nature of the business and experience more of the challenges that the business has.


Technical / Architectural

This is last for a very good reason, and that is this is often the least contributing factor in terms of projects failing to deliver.

When there are issues in this area in my experience it is often one of not having the appropriate people and skills at the right time, or not even identifying the key individuals you require accurately, rather than hard technology issues.

Other issues are architectural and compositional problems (more on architectural issues in an upcoming article), access to resources at the right time, and the typical technology compatibility issues (i.e. "what works with what") and access to vendor technology and knowledge bases.

As a reviewer of projects and programmes which could be failing it's likely that you will have come from a technology implementation background and that this area is well within your 'comfort zone', but I assure you that in the majority of cases technology may well be a minor contributing factor to the failure of an overall project, nor is the hardest problem area to improve upon (with good recommendations, of course), but it may be an area that you could potentially over focus upon and lose sight of more significant issues at hand.

Again, hope you enjoyed the article, will try and look at some other pieces, such as the top architectural mistakes made, how to identify possibly failing projects and suggestions for rescuing them.

This is a simple example review utilising the project review and programme audit framework that I wrote about in the proceeding article.

In reality any review would be much more complex, especially in terms of how many facts would be gathered, that many of them would interrelated, and would need to be analysed for relationships before any result can be defined, however I wanted to least demonstrate how the framework 'works'.

The example I've chosen is hopefully one that is reasonably familiar to a great deal of my readership, that of n-tier (typically 3-tier) web architecture. For those of you unfamiliar with this type of technology stack let me reassure you that the framework is still valid and that the example given is simple enough to demonstrate how the sections relate to produce the overall review.

Imagine if you will a large enterprise who currently have some problems with their online systems...

Problem(s)

• Our Web Site won't scale to meet demand

Fact(s)

• every so often web servers stop processing requests
  
• web servers keep going into a wait state
  
• the web servers are dependent upon the application servers
  
• application servers occasionally stop when responding to requests from the web servers
  
• the application servers 'pause' because they are swapping connections and session state between DB instances
  
• the application servers are dependent on the DB servers
  
• DB servers are randomly crashing
  
• when a DB server crashes the DB service fails over to another DB server (in an active / passive pair)
  
• the DB servers were due to be patched
  
• the DB servers have not yet been patched

Result(s)

• Because the DB servers have not been patched, which fixes a known problem, they have a tendency to run out of resources, which means that the DB fails over to a near by active / passive instance, the Application servers which are managing session state also then attempt to change the DB server they are connected to and pause whilst this is going on, the web servers are similarly affected in that they are waiting to connect to application servers which are now negotiating the new DB server connection

Conclusion(s)

• unless the web site improves it stability, it will be unable to scale, or to be scaled further, which would mean that it would continue to fail to meet demand and the organisations plans for online growth and uptake, potentially damaging the companies brand and online reputation

Recommendation(s)

• patch the DB servers
  
• perform regression, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), non-functional, HA, backup and recovery, and performance testing as appropriate
  
• Investigate implementing systems monitoring tools and technology which can be connected at every layer in a n-tier system so as to more easily and quickly identify possibly root cause

What I hope to demonstrate to you is the viability of the framework, and how data and facts gathered can be extremely interdependent and that the data and facts hold the key to resolving the issues at hand. Hopefully this is an adequate example to draw out those themes and I wish you all the best of luck in the reviews and audits you actually go on to and continue to perform. Let me know if you use the framework I describe and how you get on with implementing it.

So this is the framework I have developed and use for reviewing and auditing failing projects, programmes and systems. As I might have said before this is a simple, effective, framework, based on my experience, and although you might have seen approaches like this before, this is one that I have personally used to great effect.

To an extent this framework is a description of how I document a review and the process steps that I take as well, the major difference is that the process itself is likely to be re-iterative and you well learn things during the review which generate fresh lines of inquiry.

I get asked to perform these types of review probably because I've done a large number of them and have become quite good at them, however originally I think it was because I have an analytical and inquiring mind, I am tenacious enough to chase down what is really happening in a situation, have a broad and deep appreciation of technology and it's implementation, I have a great deal of project and programme experience across a number of Industry's, and am good at getting people to tell me about the problems they are experiencing. I expect these are the type of qualities you would probably want to encourage to become better at this type of activity; an unkind person might say that being a pedant and didact can help too.

So I separate my reviews down into five simple areas:

1. Problem(s)
2. Fact(s)
3. Result(s)
4. Conclusion(s)
5. Recommendation(s)

I bet you're thinking "well that's obvious Wayne", but simplicity is always an imperative when you set out, because believe me, the complexity of the issues you're going to find can sometimes seem overwhelming. So explaining what I mean by these five headings:

Problem(s)

Or rather perceived problem(s). Because this is what the client thinks is wrong or at the very least is the effect not the cause (unless they know or think they know what the problem is and just want an expert to confirm their opinions). If in doubt this should definitely be why you have been commissioned.

This section should not really be that large, because otherwise I would expect that items from the following sections have 'leaked' into here, most likely from the 'fact(s)' section. For instance if the MD of a company who has commissioned you to review a system starts telling you about all the individual issues that they are having then you are clearly in 'gathering facts' mode and much of this should end up in the next section.

I would typically expect this section to be only a paragraph or couple of paragraphs at the most, if it's running to half a page or more I'd be concerned because in a large review clarity will matter a great deal. Even in a large scale, complex review, be careful of this section because if it is too large it could point to being too over-focused on detail which should be drawn out further in the review or a problem with the level of abstraction used and the problem description.

Examples of 'Problems' I've been asked to investigate include:

• We've spent £10s of Millions on our IT supplier and the web sites which they have built are still not available when they are needed to be, what is going wrong
• We've spent £30 Million plus to date on a data centre build out, which should be complete, and our IT supplier keeps telling us that it could be a month or a couple of months until it's complete, but we have lost confidence in their updates.
• We have spent over £70 Million on a large integration project, which has yet to deliver it's first release to the business and I've just been told it's going to need another £10 Million immediately and another £40 Million to complete
• We are just under two years into a ten year, £300 Million pound a year contract, which has 'ballooned' up to £800 Million per year already, and yet our supplier still hasn't delivered the 'Transformation' that they promised, what is stopping them

Fact(s)

Gather and document facts. This should easily be your largest section because data matters and you will need good data to make an appropriate diagnosis of the situation and to ensure you deliver a credible and believable review.

Obviously there are many ways to gather data, especially technically i.e. gather crash dumps, read through code, measure network, processing and storage performance and capabilities, etc. For non-technical fact gathering you can review contracts, documentation, investigate online and offline document repositories, review authorised and freely given email and communication trails and other 'digital echos' as you see is appropriate, etc.

By far the most effective means of gathering facts in a large scale and complex review is via interviews. In a large scale review you would expect to find the majority of fact gathering comes from interviewing. Inquiry, question development and delivery, structured interviewing and aware and active listening matter a lot here. Never lead an interview in case you are building a case for a theory or 'pet' view that you have. Remain impartial at all times.

It is important to be empathetic enough to be good at relating to people and getting them to open up when doing structured interviewing and active listening; if you are too proud or arrogant you can forget interviewing as a method of gathering data because it's unlikely anyone will open up to you enough, and this will seriously impact your ability to perform reviews and audits in any meaningful manner.

People will be people in the interviews: they will be emotive, some may be reserved, stoic, cynical even, some will care, some won't, a few may be objective, many are wittingly or unwittingly subjective, and all will have opinions.

Remember interviewing is the no.1 manner in which good quality data gathering is done for system, project and programme reviews and audits, becoming fluent in performing interviews and capturing the data thereof is key to performing good reviews.

Do not lead the data, nor start to analyse until a good body of data is gathered. Often once facts have been gathered and started to be analysed more information may be required to perform a good quality diagnosis. Be prepared to ask lots of questions and be prepared to meet people who don't want to answer you. Document everything.

Result(s)

This is where you will be relating facts into results; although some analysis and thought will have been done considering which information to gather and how, much of the real analysis 'foot work' starts here. This section is where you relate the information so far presented and relate it to issues and problems that the client is experiencing. Hopefully you should now have information gathered and documented in the 'fact(s)' section which is causing or could be causing the problems that the client is exhibiting. It is likely that you will be sorting facts and the problems that they are associated with into a basic set of categorisations (and the next article in the series deals with those categories).

A simple example result may be that a defined problem might be "the web server keeps falling over, we don't know why", whilst the related fact may be that "patches were not applied", after more investigation it would probably be fair to link the two together thus "a result of not applying the appropriate patches leads to the web servers being unstable". The reason you shouldn't jump the gun and stop with the first thing you come across is that it may not be the root cause, it could be a contributing cause or even unrelated, the good reviewer is appropriately thorough, without needlessly wasteful of clients time, money or resources.

An example of a conclusion might be "without implementing and maintaining change control the project will continue to move out of control and will be increasingly difficult to deliver to time and budget, never mind delivering the contractually required document deliverables".

If the facts and results do not map to the original issue for which the exercise was commissioned, you would need to consider gathering more data which is more related to the original problem and re-iteratively gathering more information, alternately perhaps testing the validity of the original problem description and politely questioning the original area you were asked to review with the sponsor of the review (secure a meeting and let them know of the concerns and issues you are having). Document any disparity between the originally identified problems, the facts gathered and the results given here.

Conclusion(s)

Defining conclusions is where you look at the Facts and Results and conclude what will happen if the situation continues. This is where you make rational predictions on a future state, suggesting what problems might occur in the future if no action (or what planned action) is taken. It would be dismissive to say that this is where any 'scaremongering' occurs, but it is important to inform, and, possibly even, warn the client about further problems and issues that they might experience if the situation remains unchecked.

It is important that your conclusions address the original problem and although you may like to address any additional problems which have been drawn out during the review it is not imperative to do so; however I almost always do and this is because I feel an obligation to the client and I want to demonstrate my delivery focus too, you however may not find this something you have time, or want, to do.

Again this will probably be a short section, and although you well may have been creative before, this and the next section is where your good ideas need to start to be. You need to ensure that you are not too fanciful, and personally I prefer not to be seen to be influencing any particular recommendation by 'weighting' any possible future state too negatively however I have seen a lot of of reviews which have lacked impartiality over the years.

If things are bad you must be honest and deliver the difficult news; whatever you do do not attempt to 'sugar-coat' the news and detract from the important information and messages you are delivering to the business; although I heavily recommend that you ensure that you inform your sponsor verbally early on so as to ensure you do not deliver any surprises which could have a possible negative effect and lose or diminish their support.

Recommendation(s)

This is where you make suggestions in terms of trying to improve the situation; deliver recommendations which relate to the facts, results and conclusions, and the original problem. If other problems have come to light during the review and you have included them as part of the overall review then you should include recommendations which address those problems as well.

Making recommendations could well be seen as being the easy part to an experienced 'expert' with a certain field, and it is always attractive to the inexperienced reviewer to dive in with recommendations before proper analysis has been completed (i.e. we've found these facts, therefore because the last project had a similar issue and we fixed it by doing X, Y and Z, we will try X, Y and Z here). This behaviour will likely lead to either the wrong problem being fixed, or worsening the current situation, all of which waste the clients time, money and resources.

With recommendations I like to remember the 'pareto principle' (the "80-20 rule"), in that your principal recommendations should by mindful of this and have significant impact on addressing the problem space originally described by the client. Minor recommendations are all well and good, but if they don't "fix" the problem in the mind of the client it's unlikely that you will be being asked to review for them again or that your recommendations are implemented at all.

Above all recommendation are given so as to improve a situation, not to push any personal agenda, and again it is key to be impartial and objective.

The biggest problem you will likely have in using a framework like this, or any other, is early on you will likely have content in the following or proceeding section to the one it should be in, as you become more familiar with the framework and more experienced at doing reviews and audits this should improve.

Also do not imagine that the only place that you bring value is in the 'Recommendation(s)', this is grossly incorrect, because the client may well have not gathered the data you have, analysed it in that same way, nor come to the same conclusions. Your work ultimately will improve their understanding of a situation and allow them to plan accordingly, and this is the genuine value.

Of course a good review document will contain more than the above, probably references, appendices, document control, etc., however the above is the absolute core of a good review in my opinion and experience. If you find yourself arguing with your co-reviewers about the document version control table you are way off the mark, because fundamentally the quality of the review is paramount as well as the effect it brings (hopefully a resolution to the issues for which it was commissioned).

My friend, Chris Loughran, of Deloitte, use a framework even more stripped down and 'lean' than this, delineating into (1) gather facts, (2) relate results, and (3) make conclusions, which is certainly punchier and easier to explain in short order to your typical senior executive or CxO who has very limited time. But of course Chris is one of the leading Business and Technology Consultants in the UK, so this is to be expected and he is highly effective using this approach. Personally, as I've written about in this article, I prefer to document the (perceived) problem and to ensure recommendations are distinct from conclusions.

As usual, I hope you have enjoyed the article despite it being a lot larger than I hoped, and to mention that the next one is looking at the categories of reasons why projects and programmes fail (although I've just decided to deliver and have subsequently written a short article documenting an example of the above review and audit framework too).

One of the things I've done rather too much of is be asked to review failing projects, programmes and build-outs for customers, clients and partners, and come up with solutions and recommendations to help resolve these problems, which is often followed in short order by being asked to help rescue them (often leading to Sun helping them too).

And over the years I've built up a fairly large body of case studies and examples, which when I make the material a little more anonymous and write up I will share, but for now I've put together a couple of articles that use this experience.

First one to follow this leader is an article on a project review / programme audit framework which is a simple, highly effective and yet generic method for setting out reviews.

Secondly is a piece on why project fail, at least the five macro-level reasons why projects fail, within which I've found all programme problems seem to fall. This is of an appropriately high level to be useful to those who review and audit problem implementations and systems, don't expect to find items such as "it was a triple indirected pointer to a function in C / C++ that ended up at the wrong memory location".

Anyway really hope you enjoy the articles, because, well frankly, there is a lot of time, effort, experience, and failing projects knowledge boiled down into these.

Recently I helped update Hal Stern's Innovation@Sun blog on behalf of Hal and Marianne Salciccia, the blog administrator.

Checkout the new design over at http://blogs.sun.com/innovation/

At first glance you might be mistaken to think that aesthetically not a great deal has changed, however Marianne and I did a great deal of work on the site under Hal's direction (mainly, "Yea, I like that, go with it", after he saw the staging site we put together).

So what has changed? Well it's still got the same great content and articles about innovation and innovators at Sun, we just marshalled the content a little better, provided more in site functionality and better meta-data support for all those web robots and crawlers that consume sites ready for inclusion in search engines.

I haven't listed out all of the changes to the Innovation@Sun site that Marianne and I made, because that would make a rather dull and long list, however I have included the review of the original site that I did for Marianne, along with the suggestions I made, almost all of which were implemented.

Probably shows a little of how I think and break problems down too...

I've broken the recommendations into three primary areas: Aesthetic, Functional and Non-Functional, you'll get the idea.

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1) Aesthetic i.e. Look and Feel / Design

1.1) First off I like the design of the site, especially the left and right bordering panels, but they aren't particularly balanced, so perhaps more content on the right hand side to balance this out.

1.2) Secondly if I scroll down by pages all content in the right hand bordering panel is used up in the first page, and all content in the left hand bordering panel is used up in the second page. However the number of posts you have on the site means that it will continue to scroll down for circa 17 pages of blog entries. This means for the majority of entries on the page there is no supporting information to contextualise it (unless you scroll up). Solutions could be move to a single border (not recommended for now), more content down the borders, and less entries per page. I recommend the latter two options, more content down the borders and fewer entries per page (if your going to have fewer entries per page we need to improve how people can find older content too, more on this below).

1.3) Third, less is more, avoid clutter, and minimize, minimize, minimize; check out my blog at http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/ which is actually an interpretation of Tim Caynes Sun Blog, you see I'm a technologist, got a graphic designer, but I do know when to get inspiration and help from other people.

1.4) Fourth, given the images on the banner I think it might be nice to link to those innovations, although this is a nice to have, rather than anything else.

1.5) Fifth, I'd look at how the post bodies are arranged them selves, and look at formulating a standard template model for the posts layout. The Innovation@Sun blog seems to contain one to four types of content per post (supporting text, optional supporting image, optional blog radio control, links). Personally I'd go with a model of Blog Radio control top right floating object, people will soon learn it's always there, supporting text top left and under the blog radio control, any image on the bottom left hand side, followed by links / podcast links. I think this would provide a much easier to read page and thus one people may stay on a little longer and read other articles.

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2) Functional i.e. How the site 'works'

2.1) Jakob Nielsen, ex-Sun staff member, Sun Distinguished Engineer and proclaimed web usability expert first published a list of the top ten web design mistakes in 1996 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
For the most part, his original list of mistakes are still problematic today, he has also published a list of top ten "new" web design mistakes in 1999 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html followed by 2002, 2003 and 2005 too.
As well as the top ten good deeds designers can implement in their web pages http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991003.html
All of these are valuable and relevant sources of good design and functionality information, have a look if you get chance.

2.2) Remove "Blah words" - redundant repetitive text - get rid of it, for instance the calendar used on the site has no entries for this month and so is a 'dead' calendar which doesn't link to anything. Furthermore lots of dates and times for the entries themselves, none of which matters a great deal, because no.1 is the content.

2.3) Next, blog post title doesn't link top the article, they should, it's the number one way people link to the article, plus allows to display article with comments and other data and meta data.

2.4) Current navigation to old articles ("Recent Shows" on the left hand side) link to dates and not titles, this should be changed, so that Recent Shows links to the articles themselves.

2.5) Better Achieve / Old Article retrieval needed, recommend the work I did on creating a "Roller Weblogger Achieve Menu" which creates a year / month achieve list making legacy content very easy to find, and putting it in either the left or right hand border, here's more info http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/roller_weblogger_archive_menu_macro

2.6) You may also want to improve the next / previous function and make it much more obvious and easy for the reader to find (making access to old articles easier to find too of course). Another one of the standard roller weblogger functions I replaced: the next / previous function. Basically I wanted this to be a little more informative, and host it as a menu list in the sidebar. Here's my article on how to do that "Roller Weblogger alternative Next Previous function" available http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/roller_weblogger_next_previous_macro

2.7) You may want to try using a third party comment system, which can increase the number of people seeing your comments, have a look at "Integrating Disqus and Roller Weblogger on blogs.sun.com" which you might like http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/disqus_integration_bsc_roller_weblogger

2.8) Do you have lots of blog postings, possibly over a number of years? And do you suspect that despite embedding search and tag clouds into your blog that your readers are still not finding content related to that they enjoy? In fact do you have evidence of that very problem from your web analytics data but don't know what to do about it? Yes? So did I, so I created this roller weblogger code to generate a list of the most related blog entries based upon tag and category relationships. This is my favorite and most productive functional enhancement to Roller. The article "Roller Weblogger Related Entries and Blog Post code" describes it in detail and shows an example, it really is good, http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/roller_weblogger_related_entries_macro

2.9) Tag display on individual articles, with links to other appropriate content aggregators. I would produce tag links to at least four popular tag destinations, your blog, blogs.sun.com, technorati and del.icio.us. It also ensures that the links are marked as tags, so that crawlers that look for and index tags and tag data will pick them up (microformat and semantic web focused applications, like the 'Operator' plug in for Firefox also pick them up of course). Article "Roller Weblogger blog post tag link code for blogs.sun.com, technorati and del.icio.us" over at http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/roller_weblogger_tag_technorati_delicious

2.10) Twitter integration

2.11) Flickr Integration

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3) Non-Functional i.e. technology behind the site

3.1) Remember that good site design for attracting traffic is about designing the site for human and non-human visitors; a large number of your visitors will be web spiders and crawlers indexing your site for search engines, blog catalogs, directories and the like. So it's important that as well as your human visitors you also design your site to be easily and throughly consumed and interpreted by these electronic visitors. My article "make Google notice your Blog" has lots of background info that can help here http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/make_google_notice_your_blog

3.2) My biggest problem with the Innovation@Sun site is it's lack of semantic / meta data embedded within the main and other pages, this is a significant issue when looking at how this page relates to other sites on the web. The main page should have tag meta data at the very least. You could achieve this with a tag cloud, but frankly tag clouds are becoming rather 'de rigueur' and common place. Whether you want a tag cloud or not we should look at generating tag data for every page. For instance if you run a semantic / meta data analyzer on my site you'll see there is a large amount of machine only readable data, all of which helps spiders index my site the way I want them to.

3.3) Make sure every article has tags and tag data and it is human readable once on the article only page (see 2.9 above which we could double to do this, also ensuring the sites above index it well too).

3.4) Standardise on tags, both format and content. I recommend that you standardize on a Tag format that is search engine friendly. Don't over tag nor under tag, but try and match your articles tags with other similar articles, try and join in with the subject matter's folksonomy if at all possible (i.e. the tags people are using when talking about that subject matter, technorati and delicious are both good examples). My article "Tic, Tag, Tow" here http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/tagging_tags_blog_tag_policy should help. Basically use tags which are already being used by the Sun blkogging community, this will also generate pages which display your content vis the main Sun Blogs interface.

3.6) Google's PageRank algorithms work on links, inbound, outbound, number, and the PageRank of those inbound and outbound links. Link to sources, get inbound links from sources / reciprocal links if possible. Don't forget to trackback articles that you reference, if the trackback fails try leaving a comment with a link to the article that references it.

3.7) Make sure you let sites such as Google know you've updated your site and that you'd like it re-"spider"ed, indexed and advertised. This is done by "blog pinging" search engines and blog directories so that they are informed that your site has been updated and to send over there spiders when they get chance (most search engines / blog directories want to do this quite quickly as they want to be first with any potentially newsworthy content that draws traffic). Personally I wanted a more granular level of control over this than offered with the standard blog ping functionality embedded in roller and so I wrote my own stand alone version, see my article "Free XML-RPC blog ping site submitter: "Blog Ping"" for more information http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/blog_ping_search_submitter_seo

3.8) Other things to consider...

* PageRank of your site and individual pages; how well does your article compete with articles of a similar nature.
* Have pages been bookmarked in del.ici.ous, technorati, etc., i.e. are they being shared.
* Improving site analytics and getting better visibility of visitor interaction with the site and using this to plan the next round of enhancements.

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And don't forget you can become a fan of the Facebook Fan Page and follow Innovation@Sun on Twitter too @InnovatingatSun.

Tomorrow evening I'm going to be hosting a BCS Enterprise Architecture (EA) speciality group (SG) event looking at EA tools in Manchester.

Details for the event:
Date / Time: Friday the 17th of July, 2009 / 17:45 for 18:00, expected to finish at 19:30
Location: Room E0.05, John Dalton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, Chester Street, Manchester M1 5GD

More information and registration over at the BCS EA AG website page for the event: http://www.ea.bcs.org/eventbooking/showevent.php?eventid=esg0906

Event synopsis from the BCS EA SG:

The focus of enterprise modelling is now shifting away from purely technical and system aspects and becoming more holistic, thereby necessitating the use of comprehensive modelling tools to analyse and optimise the portfolio of business strategies, organisational structures, business processes, information flows, and services. Organisations would be ill advised to proceed with Enterprise Architecture without utilising a modelling toolset able to meet all the requirements. A central repository is vital to provide a common information source for everyone involved, also important is the ability to base the process on a framework and customise the models to fit each organisations own situation. The presentation will cover Enterprise Architecture tool evolution, key tool capabilities, and market overview.

We have secured Mark Blowers as the nights speaker; Mark has over twenty years experience in the IT industry, employed by end-users and software houses, working in a number of roles, from analyst/programmer to project manager and account manager, in the manufacturing, retail, and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) sectors. Mark joined Butler Group in August 2000, and is Enterprise Architectures Practice Director. He has worked on a number of strategic and architectural themes over the last few years, including Enterprise Architecture, IT Value Management, Enterprise Communications, and Mobility. Mark has been widely quoted in the press, including the Financial Times, Guardian, Computing, Computer Weekly, Internet news sites, and other trade magazines.

This should be an interesting and informative event, so I'm looking forward to being there already.

Thought you might be interested in the the web analytics used on this blog; in total there are five pieces of technology collecting data and then used for performing web analysis here. They are:

1. SiteCatalyst / Omniture - http://www.omniture.com/ - Sun standard, embedded in blogs.sun.com (and monitors all Sun websites), produces the page hits total
   
2. SiteMeter - http://www.sitemeter.com/ - you can access my results yourself by simply clicking on the SiteMeter logo on this page and here's the link: http://www.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s38horkan
   
3. StatCounter http://www.statcounter.com/
   
4. Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/
   
5. ClustrMaps - http://www2.clustrmaps.com/ - simple location counter displayed as a informative graphic here's the link to my hit counter: http://www2.clustrmaps.com/counter/maps.php?url=http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/

Why use more than one? Frankly web analytics is more than a shaky area, none of them ever seem to catch all hits just as I'd like, nor measure them in a similar fashion, so I use differing web analytic software to 'triangulate' the best view possible (for instance one will count some spiders traffic as hits, whilst another won't, frankly I want to know the difference between humans and the web crawlers, etc.). Furthermore some have functionality which the others don't and some produce quick to see 'snapshots' whilst others produce detailed 'drill-downs'.

For instance Sun's web analytics is the same as the corporate one, so it's enterprise grade and highly flexible, sadly this means it's extremely large scale and quite hard to manipulate because the amount of configuration you have to do is just horrendous (but it can give you the most detail).

So SiteCatalyst / Omniture is too much hassle to produce quick updates and ClustrMaps is really eye candy for users, therefore I only really use SiteMeter for quick updates without logging in, and StatCounter and Google Analytics for more detailed, but quickly available, reports on what constitutes readers favourite articles and pages.

For 2 to 5 above you'll need to sign up for online accounts and add the tracking code yourself, this isn't too hard, it just takes a little time.

For 1 it's already there on all the Sun websites and blogs, however you need to request access to the corporate Omniture / SiteCatalyst web analytics system to get access if you are a Sun blogger, then you have to learn how to use it, then you need to use something else as well (see problems I describe above, because you might prefer a quick info 'fix').

Most of all this is about personal preference, and what works for you; for about two years after starting blogging I was a data demon, wanting to understand and interpret the stats, and now, well I'm a little more relaxed.

Here's a few Cloud Computing reading recommendations from Jim Baty, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Global Sales and Services. I've had these for a couple of months now but I thought I'd post them anyway as they are well worth a read.

some reading that folks are talking about

clouds from Berkeley / Patterson
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf

data intensive supercomputing
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bryant/pubdir/cmu-cs-07-128.pdf

implementation comparison of GAE & AWS
http://www.slideshare.net/mastermark/fowa-miami-09-cloud-computing-workshop-1059049

So whilst a number of my colleagues, friends and peers at Sun are off enjoying JavaOne, the no.1 Java event of the year, and CommunityOne West, I'm going to be in Guernsey, where I'm keynoting at the Itex / Sun Thought Leadership event "A Computing Revolution: Why Cloud Computing Changes Everything".

During the event we'll be looking to cover the following topics:

• What is Cloud Computing and why does it matter?
• Will it benefit my department or business and how will it impact the IT function?
• What are the applications of Cloud Computing, today and in the future?
• What will it mean for small niche jurisdictions such as Guernsey?
• What is the role of Government in facilitating the new computing environment?

I'd just like to say 'Many Thanks' to everyone at Itex who helped organise this event, especially Daniel Fitton, Richard Parker and Chris Eaton, and to Paul Tarantino and Greg Roberts, of Sun UK's Internet and Web2.0 team, who originally put me forward as guest speaker.

Details for the event are:

• Date: Tuesday the 2nd of June, 2009
• Time: 8:15am to 9:00am for Breakfast, 9:00am to 10:30am for the event
• Location: Old Government House, St Peter Port, Guernsey
• Registration: To reserve a place email events@itexoffshore.com or call 01481 710881

Itex have created a flyer for the event, which is available here (in PDF format). Event page is: http://www.itexoffshore.com/NewsAndEvents/Events/May+2009/Cloud_May09.htm

I really shouldn't say be saying this, as JavaOne is big news in the IT Industry, especially at Sun, and has an incredibly exciting line up of speakers and agenda this year, but I'm looking forward to being in Guernsey more.

Frankly I've been to the States a fair amount with work and conferences but I've never been to Guernsey yet; I'm really looking forward to going and think I'll have a great time too. Expect to see slides, write up and photos sometime next week.

Shockingly the latest report from Forrester Research effectively ends up telling us exactly what we all know already; that the majority of CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leadership and operations management, are not interested in power saving.

As reported recently by The Register in the article "Study finds IT heads not interested in power saving" (available here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/30/pc_power_saving/) which confirms what most of us in the IT industry know to be true, in that in the majority of cases because power consumption comes under the remit of Facilities Management in most organisations the IT department is not responsible for paying for Power Consumed (whether that be for compute, storage and network infrastructure itself, or the cooling equipment that is required to maintain that infrastructure either) and so has no reason to be concerned about the size of the companies power bills (or the effect of poor IT power efficiencies on those bills).

Also in almost all companies the Facilities Management department is much larger, and has a much larger budget, than the IT department; easily often in the magnitude of ten times that of the IT department (in some organisations the IT department is part of the Facilities department, and we most often encounter this model when the organisation in question sees IT purely as organisational 'infrastructure' and tends not to see IT as a means to deliver competitive advantage).

Encouraging IT management to be concerned about power efficiency is still highly problematic whilst the IT department is not accountable for managing that Cap-Ex spend, although things are getting better, albeit slowly. Day to day I see large numbers of IT departments and management thereof being set targets for power savings, however I infrequently see any genuine penalties or incentives that ensure these targets are even remotely met (in most cases I see IT departments focus being that of maintaining business critical systems, especially during processing runs, whilst still attempting to build out new functionality at the same time, how little things have really changed).

What constantly amazes me are the number of organisations planning, and determined to, build out new data centre facilities, even now during the downturn. Many of these organisations would be much more sensible to look at refreshing there existing infrastructure, reducing server footprint, getting better energy efficiency and performance, as long as the risk impact and analysis of risk is low, and possibly even reducing their data centre footprint, but that would mean shrinking peoples corporate 'power bases' and personal 'empires' and so often receives a lack of genuine support.

Frankly this would become an important topic if those responsible for the facilities budget where also responsible for the IT budget, but this is rarely the case; IT usually reports to Operations (which may also contain facilities), Finance, or occasionally even the the Main Board or Marketing (including Sales), followed rather infrequently by facilities (this becomes more complex when looking at the IT departments remit, and whether they have significant influence, or control, over the application development team and the business analysts from the profit generating business units).

The most obvious answer would be to get IT and Facilities to work much more closely together, and at least be set joint targets, which are 'SMART' (stands for "Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-framed"). The other that I've heard becoming more popular recently has been to redirect Facilities budgets to IT departments for them to run technology refresh programmes, with a recent example looking at an unprecedented 10% of Facilities budget being transferred to IT, nearly doubling that IT departments budget for the year.

Personally I don't think this will be addressed well in the short term, but I'm hopeful that using budget earmarked for Facilities for Technology Refresh, and planning facilities reductions becomes a more widely recognised and sensible approach to help drive down the amount of energy consumed by the technology at use within enterprises, because, frankly, something needs to be done to reduce enterprise consumption of power and space resources.

In the future, once we're all ensconced in our virtual reality worlds, is this the way it will all end? On February the 28th, 2009, Tabula Rasa, an MMORPG (like World of Warcraft and RuneScape) was shut down, after failing to attract enough subscribers related to the current economic downturn.

In his article "Analysis: Tabula Rasa's Final Moments - A Firsthand Account", Simon Carless evocatively writes:

By the afternoon, the West Coast server Hydra was the last server standing. As more and more of its citizenry logged on for the last hurrah, and foreign players from dead servers poured in to squeeze a few more hours out of the game, it became increasingly congested, buggy, and lag-ridden. The intended scenario was indeed playing out not just in the game and the fiction but as a metagame: the active duty population swelled as humanity prepared to make its final stand.

Simon's description reminded me a little of the recent Doctor Who episode "Utopia", where at the end of time humanity are huddling together as heat death consumes the planets they had colonised. The 'Futurekind' almost like NPCs, also collecting together, prior to being finally terminated.

In a doubly ironic twist of fate, 'Tabula Rasa' is Latin for 'blank slate', or rather 'slate wiped clean', popularised by John Locke as a rather now out of fashion philosophical thesis that individuals are born without any built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception alone (the whole 'nature' versus 'nurture' debate is more balanced now). It also resembles the off state of the server infrastructure that would have supported the game that presumably had it's 'memory' wiped clean, prior to being redeployed to support other functionality.

Thanks to Mick Farren's blog for bringing this to my attention.

Interested in Computing in Birmingham and the West Midlands? Then come along and join us at the BCS Birmingham Branch Annual General Meeting (AGM) this coming Monday, where we are looking for members to come forward to join the Branch Committee.

After the AGM itself I'll be doing a presentation called "An Exploration of Cloud Computing" with the following synopsis:

An exploration of Cloud Computing looking at an overview of the subject of and some of the current common definitions available. Looking at the current state of the Cloud Computing market place and Cloud Vendors, what is actually being sold to people. Will also look at the different types of clouds, the differing approaches to engaging with cloud providers, the business models, impact on Business, and how Businesses can exploit the 'Cloud'.

Answers to key Cloud Computing questions I hope to address include:

• What's Cloud Computing?
• What's different to what we've seen before?
• What's driving Cloud Computing adoption?
• What types of Cloud are there?
• How can I engage with them and use in my Business?
• What's the overview of the Cloud Computing marketplace now?
• How is Cloud Computing likely to change?

A number of the members of the Birmingham Committee will be standing down at the AGM so we are looking for volunteers to join the Committee to take part in planning our activities for the 2009-10 session. If you are interested in joining the Committee please contact John Chinn, Branch Secretary, at john.chinn@manchester.ac.uk or you can come forward at the AGM itself.

Details for the event are:

• Date: Monday the 18th of May, 2009
• Time: AGM at 6pm for 6.30pm, Presentation at 7pm
• Location: Trophy Suite, Tally Ho Sports & Conference Centre, Pershore Road, Birmingham B5 7RN
• Cost: Free, Presentation open to all (including non-members of BCS), no registration required although we would prefer that you contact the Branch Secretary, John Chinn, at john.chinn@manchester.ac.uk or 0161 306 3733, so that we can advise the caterers of the correct numbers for the buffet.

Official BCS Birmingham Branch AGM and "An Exploration of Cloud Computing" page: http://birmingham.bcs.org/agm2009.htm

Very much hope that we will see you at the Branch AGM, and even better if your interested in being involved with the Committee.

We are delighted to invite you to join The Green Grid (TGG) for an EMEA Members Seminar on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 9, 2009 in London at Sun's City Offices. Please note that this is a member-only event and pre-registration is required. During the workshop, attendees will learn about TGG’s objectives to improve energy efficiency in data centers, along with TGG’s collaboration with industry and government bodies. Participants will also discuss TGG’s latest research, including:

• The Green Grid Data Center Design Guide
• Measuring and Reporting PUE/DCiE
• Proxies for Estimating Data Center Productivity
• Using Virtualization to Improve Data Center Energy Efficiency

Places are limited and the event is almost full but if you or any of your colleagues are interested in attending, please email: admin@lists.thegreengrid.org

Feel free to contact TGG Administration at the above email address if you have any questions.

The core details for the event are:

• Date: 9th June 2009
• Time: 14:00 to 17:30
• Location: Sun Microsystems Customer Briefing Center (CBC), 45 King William Street, London EC4R 9AN (near to Monument Tube station, map here)
• Cost: Free, open to TGG members only and pre-registration is required from: admin@lists.thegreengrid.org

Sun's liason with TGG is Mark Monroe, and you'll notice many of the white papers and guidelines available from TGG have Mark as an author, joint author or contributor; Mark is our Director for Sustainable Computing and a member of the Eco-Responsibility Group team working out of SunLabs, our R&D hot house.

Hopefully I should be around, although I'm currently triple booked for the day and am desperately juggling my diary; however there will be Sun staff members to help and answer any questions you may have, as required.

Yesterday I was at the Palace of Westminster, or rather the House of Lords, for the 2009 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of EURIM, the European Information Society Group, which "brings together politicians, officials and industry to help improve the quality of policy formation, consultation, scrutiny, implementation and monitoring in support of the creation of a globally competitive, socially inclusive and democratically accountable information society".

I brought up three points with the EURIM Board, firstly the disparity of R&D spending by Industry sector (and the fact that in the UK 75% of all business R&D is done in the manufacturing industry alone, an industry provides just 13% of the GDP of the UK), secondly I asked what EURIM's position was in response to EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding's call for the US to hand over control of ICANN so it can be overseen by an independent international tribunal, and thirdly in regards to the UK stimulation package and it's support, or rather lack of, the UK's 'Digital Infrastructure' (more on this topic in a separate article as I'd planned for it to be one of my pieces on the economic recovery of the UK).

All three were well received, and I especially enjoyed a discussion that arose around the 'Professionalism in IT' agenda, and it's likely resurgence as a topic of interest across the major stakeholders in the UK after a relatively quiet period of activity.

After the meeting I continued the conversation about IT Professionalism with Michael Gough, Head of Government Affairs at EDS and ex-Chief Executive of the National Computing Centre (NCC) where he spent eight highly productive years (Steve Markwell has taken over the reins of CEO). Of course during his tenure the NCC was one quarter of the "Prof IT Alliance", an alliance of interested parties looking at supporting the IT Professionalism agenda (along with Intellect, the BCS, and the e-Skills Council UK, the sector skills license holder for IT and Telecoms skills).

I also spoke with industry friends and peers (including those from IBM, Microsoft, Atkins, and others), as well The Lord Renwick, EURIM President, and Dr David Wright, EURIM Deputy Secretary General.

Almost everyone asked about the Oracle acquisition of Sun, and I had to say that due to SEC rulings we wouldn't be seeing any integration until the deal was sanctioned by the US Government. This sort of thing is the norm in large scale mergers and acquisitions born out of the US and everyone who asked were understanding of this.

The next EURIM event I'm due at is with the Conservative Technology Forum entitled "The Future of the NHS IT Program" event, where we are due to partake in a forum hosted Guy Hains, EMEA CSC Alliance, Pearse Butler, Dir UK Healthcare CSC, Dr Glyn Hayes, President of the Primary Health Care Specialist Group of the BCS, and Stephen O’Brien MP, the Shadow Minister for Health. More on the CSC Alliance here: http://www.csc.com/cscalliance

I took a few photographs yesterday whilst around and about Westminster and from within the Main Hall (the only place guests are allowed to take photos whilst in the Houses of Parliament), and thought that I'd share them with you too.

This Friday I'll be presenting on the topic of 'Enterprise Architecture Case Studies' in Aberystwyth, in an event organised and hosted by the South Wales branch of the BCS.

For more information the event is advertised here with the BCS. The core details are:

• Date: 8 May 2009
• Time: 17:00 Refreshments / 18:00 Start
• Location: The finger buffet is in the foyer of the Computer Science Building and the talk itself will be in Lecture Theatre `A' in the Physical Sciences Building, both on the Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth.
• Cost: Free, open to all (including non-members of the BCS or IET), no registration required.

Here's what I generally say as an overview of this talk:

The case studies presented explore my experiences with Enterprise Architecture in three major customer engagements. They include an Enterprise Architecture team which led its company into a £70+ million 'pitfall'; the use of Enterprise Architecture to define a Service Oriented Architecture; and an example of how much Enterprise Architecture is about achieving the proper governance model.

Key takeaways:

• Enterprise Architecture best practices drawn from multiple engagements.
• How to use good governance to avoid and limit the 'Ivory Tower' syndrome.
• How to combine Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture to deliver sustainable Transformation.

Given the current downturn I'll also go into some of the issues facing EA programmes due to the credit crunch and what can be done to ensure that they continue to receive executive sponsorship and funding.

Happy to answer any and all questions; please consider that I'll be attempting to condense three major and very large scale Enterprise Architecture case studies into a talk lasting an hour and a half or so, therefore I will definitely be around to speak with afterwards.

'Many Thanks' to Fred Long (of Aberystwyth University) for organising and co-ordinating this event and for Clive King (of Sun) for initially brokering the relationship.

Links to the BCS page for the event:

• http://southwales.bcs.org/event-2009-05-08.htm

Alan Mather has just released his excellent "Enterprise Architecture in Government" white paper from 2003. This white paper has mythic status in UK Government IT circles because of it's visionary roadmap of an implementation for Enterprise Architecture (EA) for the UK. Pre-dating the "Cross Government Enterprise Architecture" (XGEA) work of the CTO Council (who hadn't even been formed at the time, but nor had the CIO Council who commissioned them either) this is the earliest attempt at applying an EA vision to the co-ordination of the UK's IT and IS portfolio.

Alan surely requires little introduction, and is a singularly authoritative voice, having been the been the Chief Exec. of the Office of the e-Envoy's (OeE, then e-Government Unit, or eGU, and finally the CIO Council) e-Design Team (eDT, currently led admirably by it's new Director, Chris Haynes, although the eDT itself is now part of DWP having moved there at the same time as the eGU transformed into the CIO Council). Alan spent a number of years at the heart of the Cabinet Offices push for 'Shared Services' and Government services online programmes, helping to instigate and then deliver the largest UK "Government to Government" (G2G) system, by volume and scale, the Government Gateway.

Writing in his blog article also entitled "Enterprise Architecture in Government" (available from http://blog.diverdiver.com/2009/05/enterprise-architecture-in-government.html) he says:

More than a few people are starting to get active again around shared services, enterprise architectures, shared data centres (and all of the SaaS, HaaS and maybe just plain old aaS that could bring). A while ago I wrote a document that I hoped would lead to a debate on delivering some or all of those things into UK government. The document largely languished on my hard drive gathering virtual dust like so many reports about what government should do to make things better. It never quite got finished although, looking through it now some 6 years after it was written, it still seems to hang together pretty well.

Alan's being rather reserved here because I know it was released to a few, select, senior people across Government, and I genuinely credit this to having furthered, if not initiated, the conversation in Government about planning out it's overall EA (both "as is", "to be", and strategy) in a much more pro-active manner. I'm glad to say I was one of the people Alan chose to review the document back in 2003, but frankly I thought it was excellent at the time and still do.

For the life of me I can't understand why Alan isn't at the epicentre of Government as an integral part of the UK Government EA programme, then again he is running a major programme at the moment, another large-scale system key to the future of the UK, so I imagine know he is kept pretty busy by that delivery.

Anyone and everyone interested in UK Government IT should read this document, I'm sure many of you would be shocked at how visionary the paper is, and how relevant it still is after six years. Alan Mather's "Enterprise Architecture in Government" document is available from box.net (which opens in a new window): http://www.box.net/shared/ki3z6ejjiv

My biggest concern about the UK economy is in two very related areas, firstly the imbalance of industry contributions to UK GDP, and secondly the imbalance of investment in innovation in those industries.

When I speak about the imbalance of industry contributions to UK GDP I'm actually talking about which industry sectors are contributing to the UK GDP.

Over the last few years the GDP of the UK has been around £1.2 to £1.3 Trillion (where 1 Trillion equates to 1,000 Billion); this is traditionally circa $2.35 Trillion for those of you who prefer dollar notation.

If we break down GDP contributions as percentages the most obvious point to be made is that Services makes up the majority at over 75% of the GDP contribution to the UK economy (and up until the credit crunch circa 40% of GDP contribution were from Financial Services alone). Manufacturing as an industry sector currently supports just 13% of the UK GDP (as a comparison the USA is circa 19% and Germany is circa 23%) and the actual amount is around £150 Billion. The rest is made up of Agriculture (hovering at 1% and just below) and 'other' Industry.

It occurs to me that frankly this isn't a particularly balanced model; especially when it comes to global recessions such as the one we find our selves in now which, because of our dependence on single industry sectors, affects us so adversely. And nor is it particularly self sustaining.

I'm not alone in thinking this, Warren Buffet warned long ago that the UK's over reliance on it's service sector exposed the economy to a higher risk of recession, and George Soros has recently been quoted in the UK press that his concern about the recovery of the UK economy is it's dependence on the financial services industry.

Sir John Rose, Chief Executive of Rolls-Royce, and one of the UK's most inspiring business leaders, is vocal about the UK's need to balance it's industries contribution to it's GDP, he has this to say on the subject:

"This country needs a broad portfolio of assets." adding "There is an over dependence on financial services. If you are a one-trick pony, you have to hope that people continue to like your trick. If they stop liking it, you become pet food." and "...the credit crisis gives a unique opportunity to start answering questions about how this country should be earning its living in the 21st century."

You may agree or disagree, or perhaps you'd be interested in what the spread and distribution of UK GDP contributions from differing Industries should or could be, something I believe needs a certain amount of consideration and planning, something you'd imagine would be in the UK's "Industrial Strategy", which according to key experts, sadly, does not exist as a coherent and authoritative source. What is key to me is that we collectively recognise the imbalance and look at what it means and what our options might be, including attempting to encourage or stimulate other areas of the economy where appropriate.

All of this brings me to the second, related area, and probably the one that I find more worrying as I increasingly think about the future of the UK economy; that is the imbalance of investment in innovation across the industry sectors in the UK.

Circa 75% of all UK business Research and Development is in Manufacturing alone. Let me restate that another way to bring the point clearer. 75% of all investment in R&D, innovation and future offerings is done in a single industry sector which contributes just 13% of the economy. Genuinely this worries me a great deal, because therefore, 87% of the economy (which is not manufacturing, and is predominantly services) is contributing just 25% of the entire amount being invested in the future. Yes that's right, nearly 90% of the UK economy will be dependant on a quarter of the total investment in innovation. This does not look like a good investment on the future state of the economy to me. Nor does it give me a warm and fuzzy feeling when it comes to the future of non-manufacturing businesses either, and lets be clear here, the future of the service industry.

These two points could be playing off against each other of course, in that industry contributions to the economy need to be rebalanced, possibly with a larger (or even, much larger) contribution from manufacturing. And that subsequently the imbalance in terms of investment in R&D across industry could possibly be less of a worry than I currently imagine.

However I really don't expect for manufacturing to make up 75% of the GDP contribution anywhere in the future, and I'm still very concerned about the lack of investment in R&D in the Services industry of the UK. I'd really like better awareness of the issue as a whole, and perhaps go so far to look for more focused stimulation from Government to encourage investment in R&D in the Services sector.

Recently the CBI's Innovation, Science and Technology (IST) committee have been working on a number of upcoming white papers, and I have been vocal in having the above issues brought to light in those. Thankfully I got a great of support from the other members of the IST, especially those who are working in the Services sector. I'll let you know when the white papers I've mentioned are available from the CBI web site.

So in a nutshell what am I saying? Firstly let's investigate and hopefully work towards a more balanced, recession proof economy, with a bigger contribution from high value and "just in time" manufacturing, if it is viable, and secondly let's see more investment in R&D, innovation and the future from the Services industry. To achieve any of this we'll need significant support from Government departments like DBERR and DIUS, followed by the Treasury, to act as sponsors, and finally some Government assistance, whether that be legislation, stimulation, or something softer (the current favourite doing the rounds across the political parties is that of the 'nudge' as exemplified by Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, in their book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness").

Please Note: All data in this piece comes from these sources, in this order, the Economist 'Pocket World in Figures (2009 Edition)', the Economist magazine, the CBI, the IoD, and the BBC. Furthermore, despite manufacturing making up 13% of the UK economy, the UK is still the sixth largest manufacturer in the World (although there are some very big gaps between the economic output of the top five and the UK, and so I may very well touch on the state of the UK manufacturing industry in the future).