Passing By Seventy

Seventy had been sitting by the side of the road for a long time, just waiting patiently for me to come along. I first caught sight of him several years ago in a lucent dream. He would reappear in my dreams from time to time, always in the distance but always a little closer, smiling and waving me forward, as if my journey toward him was discretionary. 

One July morning, I woke with a start. There he was, sitting by my bed, no longer a distant apparition. I was wary of what he had in store for me as he sat there, a gold incisor flashing in his mouth and an overpopulation of liver spots on his forehead. I did not want to be him, and I made what I thought was an athletic leap from under the covers, landing with two feet on the floor as if to show Seventy that I was still a limber young man. But Seventy only chortled and poked me in the calf with his cane. Then he gave me a sympathetic smile as I sat back on my bed, now swaying in resignation as the cramp in my leg was replaced by dull pains across my lower back. My nakedness—because that’s how I sleep—made me feel vulnerable and bare, rather than free and vigorous.

It turned out, though, that Seventy wasn't such a bad fellow. He was the only one in the house who still found my dated jokes witty. Only Seventy thought that my furrowed smile and the muscles that I had never taken the time to properly tone, made me winsome. Only Seventy quietly waited when I took too long to reply to a question, and didn't complain when I asked for something that I couldn't quite hear to be repeated. Only Seventy was okay sharing a lane at the pool, swimming next to me without reproach despite my ambling, waggling pace. He didn't mind if I stopped to rest more than once on mountain hikes. Seventy didn't feel it necessary to comment on my more than occasional need to use the bushes alongside the fairways, or the extra strokes I needed to reach the greens. And only Seventy solicitously applauded when I sang, "The Short Term Memory Loss Blues," even smiling affectionately when my voice struggled to reach the high notes. 

Seventy helped me remember many good times past. But he also let me know that there was still much more road to travel, and that there were things and people ahead that would leave me gleeful: new places to visit, friends to meet, ideas to explore, love to make.  And he reminded me that I could still enjoy a good steak—grilled rare, a glass of fine Burgundy, and the company of Romance, who had been traveling with me all these years.

My time with Seventy was short; I had to keep moving on. Many more things to see and do as I cast my gaze ahead. As I did, there, on the distant horizon, Eighty came into view, smiling and waving me forward. I glanced back at Seventy for a moment and he gave me a nod. He looked much younger now, and full of health. He was no longer a fearsome ghost of what might be, but a memory of what actually was. He had lost his stoop and his cane, and suddenly leaped into the air and gave a celebratory fist pump. I responded with a grinning smile. Then I caught sight of Sixty, now far and away back on the beaten path, his back to me, waving for younger folks to join him. And I thought, it might be nice to be back with Sixty again, but I am just as happy to navigate through some new adventures and have the chance to meet up with Eighty. With that in mind, I strode on, giving a wide-handed, backward wave to earlier years.

Time to Get Serious About the Digital Divide

The Digital Divide, that separates those with access to computers and who have digital literacy from those who do not, is one of the most serious problems facing Americans today. It impacts Americans working in local, regional, national, and international labor markets. It strains the economy. This is not a problem that might impact us if we do not act now, it is a problem that is already felt as America retreats from its history of innovation and technology-driven productivity. The Yankee Ingenuity that fueled our economy in the past can only become available again if we make it so that any American has the ability to achieve economic success. That success is now dependent upon an ever rising level of personal competence as well as higher levels of access to high-performance networks and the resources that live on them. We must halt the growth of the rising underclass of digital have-nots as well as boost the general digital capacity of the nation that has not enough to compete in a global economy.

To Build or Buy?

To build or to buy? We need to put this old chestnut to rest. You can neither engineer nor acquire a business application without some of each. We gain efficiency in software development by building on top of commercial, open source, or internally shared assets. But we cannot implement an out-of-the box solution without significant customization. The question is better shaped as what components pre-built or custom-developed) are needed to achieve a given software solution, and what are the best methods of assembly. 

I have tried to refine my answer to this question--in both a methodological and a practical way--throughout my career. Today I continue that journey. I am engaged with v257 in creating solutions, solution architectures, and supporting the capability of IT organizations to work with Agility in designed and implementing their own solutions. We have found that collaborations among business partners and clients can yield significant success, especially once you set aside the no-go question of build-or-buy and start asking how to assemble the right-sized components into a solution.

Stopping to Smell the Chive Blossoms

For me, guilty pleasures are anything that takes me away from the relentless pursuit of "business." I suppose that its an artifact of being the child of an immigrant. My father, who left a hamlet in Sicily at the age of 20, worked hard to become an American. I don't have quite the same drive. I do travel down roads for pleasure's sake. But not without guilt. My curse. But now that I approach 65, I am resolved to relax and appreciate the sweeter side of life. I truly believe that it will make me more productive in my business life if I learn to have some unqualified fun once in a while.

Today's guilty pleasure? Not what you might expect. Puttering outside, appreciating a very lush spring. Everything is so deeply green. It's like flying over Ireland.

The chives are blossoming. Our tiny patch has become an herbal forest. The purple flowers are so unusual. I like their subtle seasoning in salad.

I was going to post this yesterday, when I shot the photograph. I stopped writing, however, because I was feeling guilty. I have to work on that some more.

Ministratio Ecnephias: the Coming Hurricane of Cloud Services

Future Service Oriented Applications which depend on a mix of Services delivered from the Clouds must be managed with unprecedented agility and discipline.  Development managers ought not lose sight of the fact that the Clouds from which Services are offered up for consumption will form in a highly competitive atmosphere.  The unwary programmer might not perceive, in the gentle rolling of Clouds upon each other, the coming fury.  When external Services are commodities, their availability, performance, and characteristics can change rapidly. They must be closely monitored.  When the Clouds become stormy, organizations must be ready to quickly reassemble their applications in calmer skies.  Putting good governance practice in place now will assure that composite applications can weather any storm.

The ability of application developers to sit on the shoulders of earlier programmers, to reach new heights without reinvention, is a foundational principle of modern software development.  Componentized programs makes it easier to reuse inherited code. When components are Services, the programmer need only consume the output of existing code, and need not reuse the code itself. A promise of Service Oriented Architecture is that richer business applications can be built at lower cost by consuming Services that are available from many sources.  A software development team does not have to forge every component of an application.  Their composite applications can use Services that are delivered from inter-operating Cloud platforms, taking advantage of work that has already been done.

When composite applications are built using Services from many providers, however, orchestration of Services requires constant monitoring.  No longer based on static code, locked in the protective vault of the data center, dynamic Service Oriented applications are subject to the vagaries of the marketplace.  A Cloud platform can go out of business.  A Service can be rewritten that breaks both the Service delivery contract and the running application.  Performance can go into free fall.  These eventualities can happen over night.  They need not spell disaster if the composite application has been built with portability and continuity of operation in mind.

Portability seems like a term from another time.  The debate, a decade ago, was whether applications should be built with portability in mind, allowing a program to be written once, but run anywhere.  Sun offered java as the mechanism for writing portable applications.  The alternative was that software components could be written in any proprietary way—making use of any special resources unique to their environments—as long as their functionality could be consumed via standard interfaces.  Microsoft offered up SOAP as a messaging standard to enable such interoperability.  Sharing Services can have rich rewards. The notion of portability, however, is reborn when one evaluates the risk potential of interoperability.  Because unmitigated trust for the Service provider is a bad strategy, a means to pack up the application and head for another Cloud—that is, a way that Cloud applications can be made portable—becomes important again. 

In a mature cloud computing environment, composite applications must be built with a level of discipline that is uncommon among in-house business software developers today. Service delivery managers must review their system development life cycles and governance procedures without delay to assure that their development efforts can survive the coming hurricane of interoperating Cloud Services.  Deployment managers must assure that business applications are packaged as if for commercial distribution.

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Raijin, the Japanese god of thunder. The image is an extract from "Fūjin-raijin-zu" by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, a work in the collection of the Kyoto National Museum


"Ministratio Ecnephias" is Latin for a storm of business services.  Ecnephias references a hurricane which was thought to arise from two clouds clashing.  Ministratio references ministerial services.