Note: This is the second post in my Freedom within a Framework series, which is about enabling the coexistence of enterprise and opportunistic applications. You can read the introductory post here.

As I stated in my introductory post, I believe that it is possible to achieve a balance between the need for stability in enterprise applications, and the need for quick and agile innovation in opportunistic applications. They key to this balance lies is in determining where the domain of control for IT can safely transition into a environment of open access to information. This is a “line of demarcation” that allows for a clean separation of certain types of applications. The best way to picture this concept is to imagine a line on an X-axis, with control of technology at the left side, and anarchy at the right. “Command and Control IT” typically lives as close to the left as is possible, while the world of “consumer-driven IT” lives quite far to the right. There are opposed to be sure, but it is possible for IT to reconcile these differences and foster both sides by creating a shared understanding around which classes applications should be enterprise-class and which can and should be treated as opportunistic.

Another way to visualize this concept is with the “Long Tail,” which is depicted in Figure 1 below. The “Long Tail” was a term coined by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine to describe how the business models of companies like Amazon or Netflix enables them to profitably offer a wider range of goods and services than traditional organizations. The concept (also referred to as a heavy-tail or Pareto distribution) is a well-known statistical occurrence where a high-frequency population (depicted by the region in green below) is followed by a very long low-frequency population that gradually diminishes in area (or “tails off”). In many cases, the long tail portion of the graph, colored in yellow below, can actually represent the majority of the area under the line in the graph, even though the frequency is lower along that portion of the line than it is in the green area.

Figure 1 - The Long Tail

When applied to Amazon and Netflix, this concept is used to illustrate that organizations with powerful distribution channels can make just as much or more selling ten copies each of 10,000 obscure books as they could selling 100,000 copies of one best-selling book. The application to many organizations is just as powerful when information is the product. Assume for a moment that the green portion of the graph represents enterprise-class applications with a large internal user base and the “long tail” or yellow portion represents opportunistic applications with a much smaller number of users. This is depicted in figure 2 below.

Figure 2 - The Long Tail for Applications

In this scenario, the “long tail” theory argues that an organization could serve more users with several hundred opportunistic applications than it does with a small number of enterprise-class applications, but at a much lower cost. Thus, a “long tail” model can enable an information-driven organization to serve its customer base effectively without greatly increasing the cost of software delivery. Such a model does so by enabling the kinds of opportunistic development which most IT organizations would likely never have the bandwidth or justification to pursue because they are applications which are tactical in nature and which may only serve a small number of users.

While a “Long Tail” mindset enables us to create a clear line of demarcation, simply classifying one type of application or information set as enterprise and another as opportunistic isn’t enough. It is entirely possible for IT to pursue this demarcation with good intentions, and then stifle innovation by requiring that all applications, including opportunistic ones, be developed using only one type of platform or programming language. Thus, another key to creating “Freedom within a Framework” is that IT must give up as much control as is possible, while at the same time recognizing the assets and information over which the enterprise should retain control. In my next post, I’ll discuss the concept of an IFaP architecture which, I believe, provides a powerful architecture for enabling open innovation while, at the same time, providing IT with a framework to manage its information assets.

For the past several weeks, we’ve been working on creating a viewpoint of our future-state architecture that enables a greater degree of low-hurdle innovation with technology than we currently enable. The goal is to enable anyone across the globe, inside of the organization or out, to make use of public information we provide to create applications of value, even if that value is only seen by a single individual. Call it Web 2.0; Call it Enterprise 2.0. Call it what you will. We’re calling it either Freedom within a Framework or the Framework for Rapid and Empowering Development (FRED) depending on to whom we’re currently pitching the idea. The latter is our EA marketing savvy at work…

The idea is simple: We want to create an environment when enterprise applications can be created and managed in an enterprise way, and opportunistic applications (i.e. ad-hoc process applications and mashups) can be created freely and with little to no involvement from the IT organization. IT does what it does best, but explicitly steps back from “owning” all information and technology in an organization. From concept to implementation, I believe that one way to foster such an environment is to allow the world of WS-* and the world of REST to co-exist within the enterprise. Rather than an either/or decision, we want enable and encourage both styles for certain types of situations.

The culmination of our work around this idea was a paper published internally at the end of November, along with a demo that provides an example RESTful interface (which depends on our existing SOA) and a couple of applications which consume information presented by those interfaces.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to post excerpts from this paper and some of the meat from the demos. My intent in doing so is twofold:

1) To posit an alternative to the REST vs. WS-* debate. I am certainly not the first to argue for cohabitation of these styles. I only wish to add my voice and provide another perspective.

2) To obtain feedback from Enterprise and SOA Architects who have either already considered, are considering, or have implemented a similar design. I’d love to hear feedback in the coming weeks from anyone wanting to way in on any of the topics below.

I’ll publish the first post tomorrow, and the subsequent ones every couple of days after that. Here are the topics I plan to post about, in order:

• Embracing the Long Tail
• IFaPs: Enabling the Long Tail and Protecting the Enterprise
• REST: The Entry Point for Innovation
• Benefits of a RESTful Interface
• REST and Security
• A Demo RESTful Interface
• Demo Opportunistic Applications

As I add posts, I’ll return to this post and add the hyperlinks.

Looking forward to the discussion!

Back in September, I published a couple of excerpts from an internal paper I wrote on Composite Applications (you can read them here, here and here). At the end of my second post, (which I probably should have broken up into 2-3 posts at least) I discussed the four types of Application Composers. If you missed that section, (which would be proof that I should have broken them up) here’s a recap:

1) Business Service Developers - These are IT developers focused on providing value-added common business services to all customer solutions teams. Their technical depth is high and a CAF targeted at these users would be similar to what is provided by SOA today.

2) Customer Solution Developers - These are IT developers focused on creating customer-centric solutions by leveraging software infrastructure. Their technical depth is moderate to high and a CAF targeted at these users would need to abstract away service creation and assembly.

3) Business Analysts - These are customer consultants focused on helping customers determine which business needs are best met with technology. Their technical depth is moderate and a CAF targeted at these users would draw many features from current BPM platforms.

4) End Users - These are the users of the solutions created by customer solutions teams. Their technical depth is low and a CAF targeted at these users would need to abstract away nearly all of the technical aspects of application creation and should provide very intuitive context- and metadata-driven methods for application assembly and customization.

While these still make sense to me, I think I completely missed number five on this list. It’s a bit of a wildcard, and it may not apply to every organization, but I think it will apply to more and more organization in the coming years. Here it is:

5) External Developers - These are developers who reside outside of one’s own IT organization, but who have development expertise that they wish to leverage to create value-added services that benefit your organization. Their primary interest is in consuming available organizational data and recombining this data with external data or services to create new composites not offered or envisioned by the organization itself.

Now I think that the reason I missed this was because I was thinking internal only when laying out a strategy for Composite Applications in my organization. However, my fearless leader and I have been talking at length about creating a framework by which certain subsets of our information (the right information, of course) could be made available to anyone with the wherewithal to create useful services that we never thought of. Thus, our framework for Composite Applications now has another persona to enable.

So what do you think? Is this a valid addition, or did I have it encompassed in another one of the four? Furthermore, is just one more enough? That fifth category encompasses a ton of people, so do I need another for the technically savvy end user who doesn’t write code, but who screams at creating inventive Yahoo! Pipes applications. I suspect that #4 could represent this individual with a slight modification, but what do you think?

Saw this post from Brady Forest on O’Reilly Radar, which points to the official announcement on the AWS blog. This may not mean as much to many of you who have been using S3 for a while now, but it’s big news for a guy like me because I know better than to bring technologies like S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk into any serious internal conversation unless I can say “yes” to that SLA question. Looks like AWS is getting ready for prime time. And why not? Most of us have been expecting this for a while now.

I will echo Arthur’s request for more to the SLA, specifically for stats on uptime and availability. I think that all services should provide information like this to be as clear as possible in letting you know what you are getting by consuming said service (and our internal guidelines say as much), but this kind of information is especially vital with services in the cloud. I’m confident that they’ll get there, but in the meantime, I’ll echo that feature request.

On another note, why the heck is O’Reilly charging $149 for a glorified whitepaper on developing applications for Facebook? I use Facebook. I like Facebook. I think there is something to be said about developing applications for it… in certain situations. But could we just take a moment to breathe here before they hype train carries us all away?

• Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries - Kudos Microsoft. No question that this is a good move.
• TED 2007 - The seemingly impossible is possible (Video) - Hans Roslings uses some of the best information visualization I have ever seen (Google must agree, because they bought his Gapminder tool) to deliver a great 20 minute presentation about how our cut and dry segmentation of the world into developed and developing countries is wrong and that we have the means and ability to eliminate poverty in our lifetimes. It’s well worth 20 minutes.

• Is Twitter Useless, Asinine, or The Crocs of The Web? I love the comparison of Twitter to Crocs and think it’s true: There are those that find Twitter pointless (my wife) and those that can’t understand why people can’t see the simple elegance of power of it (myself). But more than the ability for me to know where my friends are going for dinner, Twitter is a paradigm for multi-channel information sharing and that can be quite powerful for organizations as well as individuals.

• Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs - Steve Jobs’ amazing presentation skills isn’t news to anyone, but I like this post largely because of the side-by-side depiction of a Bill Gates slide deck and a Steve Jobs slide deck. It makes a strong point…

A friend of mine just wrote an application that generates game cards for Sports Party Bingo. He put together a website where you can generate cards for home games for free. check it out at http://sportspartybingo.com.

And if you’ve never played Sports Party Bingo before, you need to check it out. It’s a blast and really makes for a fun time, even for people who don’t like football.

And while you’re there, you can thank Chuck by clicking on a few of the ad links since he’s been so gracious to give the game cards away.

Thanks for sharing the fun with us Chuck!

Football, Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Bingo

At work today, I gave a 40 minute presentation on Ajax, ASP.NET “Atlas,” and what we can do to prepare ourselves for the changing world of web development. I presented the talk in MindManager, which actually has a spiffy Presentation Mode, and wanted to make it available to anyone else. So, click the link below to get my MindMap presentation on Ajax and ASP.NET “Atlas.” The license on the map is the same as this blog: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5, so feel free to pass the map around, post it on your site, or link back to me.

And if you have any comments or criticisms on my presentation or interpretation of the facts, feel free to post them here. I’ll be the first to admit that it (the presentation) and I (Brandon Satrom) are far from perfect.

Enjoy!

Building AJAX Applications using ASP.NET “Atlas” MindMap (460 kb)

If you’re new to MindManager, you’ve got a couple of options for consuming this map. You can download the viewer here or you can use the browser plug-in, which can be found here.

Ajax, ASP.NET “Atlas”, Web2.0

Update: If you’re using IE, you’ll notice that your browser will tell you that this Map file is actually a .zip. It’s just not true, but IE seems to be confused. If you “Save As…” and rename the extension from “.zip” to “.mmap,” the Map should open just fine. Sorry for any confusion…

I’m not going to wax much on this whole issue from the “did he or didn’t he copy digg.com code” pseudo-scandal (for the record, he didn’t really). But I saw an O’Reilly Radar post from this morning that contained a very interesting and accurate quote:

This is a classic Web 2.0 problem: it’s hard to aggregate the wisdom of the crowd without aggregating their madness as well.

I promise you that this is going to start becoming more of an issue. For all of the supposed “wisdom” that a crowd may have, there will always lurk an individual leaning toward the “Hive Mind.” Let’s not forget this and other cautions as the new media continues to drool over the promise of Web2.0.

digg.com, O’Reilly, Web2.0, Steve Mallett

If I wasn’t so backlogged in my reading, I would have seen and made reference to this in my earlier post about Sun and Google’s vague partnership.

Information Week has what could be considered almost a response article to the Sun/ Google partnership article: “Coming From Microsoft: ‘Hosted Everything’”

The interesting quote is at the end of the article, on page two:

When asked which other products and services Microsoft would host, another Microsoft insider said, “Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.” - Information Week, “Coming From Microsoft: ‘Hosted Everything’” Oct. 26, 2005

Now, in my mind, Microsoft sometimes plays another role that we see in “old guard” companies, opposite to what I read into Schwartz’s comments last week: That of the behemoth company still trying to look like a hyperactive startup. But every master plan that Google doesn’t have, Microsoft has twenty that regulate every decision they make.

In any case, Google and Sun should watch out. And if they plan to repurpose StarOffice for the web, “leak” it now because Microsoft knows how to hype.

Microsoft, Hosted Office, Office 13, Sun, Google, StarOffice

A few weeks ago, I was skimming through Information Week when I ran across an article entitled “Office Politics: Google-Sun Alliance Squarely Targets Microsoft.” (Click the title for the electronic version) In that article, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz said something that I found interesting:

“‘Working online is great for E-mail or writing a blog, but not for writing a Ph.D. thesis.’”
- Information Week, “Office Politics: Google-Sun Alliance Squarely Targets Microsoft,” Oct. 10, 2005

Really? I can think of a couple of web-based document editors I wouldn’t mind using to write a Ph.D. thesis. But I’m not crazy enough to write a PhD. thesis. Isn’t enabling this kind of historically client-server technology (partially) what the AJAX craze is all about? Why would Sun say such a thing in an article that highlights their partnership with a Web 2.0 pioneer? I think the sentence before the quote explains why:

“Sun itself gave up on developing a Web-based version of StarOffice years ago.”
- Information Week, “Office Politics: Google-Sun Alliance Squarely Targets Microsoft,” Oct. 10, 2005

If they gave up years ago, I don’t blame them. Years ago was back when the web was merely a hypertext system and commerce-enabler. Years ago, no one save Netscape and a few yahoos ever said “the web is a platform.”

Sun’s “we’ve tried that already” attitude, with a disregard to how the web has changed since they abandoned StarOfficeOnline, is exactly the reason why the “old guard” software companies are falling behind. Sun should rethink their approach because packaging the Java Runtime Environment with Google Desktop isn’t going to do anyone any favors.

Personally, I hope that Sun’s partnership with Google means that they are rethinking the StarOffice initiative and that their comments are just a smoke-screen.

Web2.0, AJAX, Sun, Google, StarOffice, JRE, Google Desktop, Sun-Google partnership