InfoBoom seeks US IT pros to take telephone survey, get stipend

The Infoboom, a site to which I regularly contribute for pay, is doing some research to learn more about how IT and business technology professionals meet their information needs.

The research involves a one-hour telephone interview and they are offering $100 American Express gift certificates to people who complete the survey.

Apply to be interviewed here.

You must be based in the U.S. and you must have significant involvement with business technology, but other than that they are pretty flexible.

This is not a marketing pitch and nobody's going to try to sell you anything. IBM, which underwrites the site, just really wants to know more about what its audience needs. Thanks!

How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices for overall business services delivery improvement.

In this discussion, the last in a series of three, we underscore the conclusions from the forthcoming book and explain how organizations can begin now to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast-changing world.

Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches. In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective.

In our first podcast, we focused on the role and impact of automation and management of applications, and emphasized the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

The second discussion in the series looked at how an enterprise, Delta Air Lines, moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications.

Finally, we're here now with the book’s authors to explore their conclusions. Please join me in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The life of an application is generally the same for all companies. There is a spark of an idea: "We need this. We need software to help us do something in the business."

We make an investment decision somehow. We may do this ad hoc. We may do it based on who screams the loudest. But somehow a decision gets made. We build something somehow. We spec it, build it, release it, run it, poorly or not, and hopefully, although certainly not always, eventually we replace it, retire it, and so forth.

We wanted to take a slightly different approach to how we thought about maturity models. There are lots of them in the industry, not so much around ALM, but in sub-disciplines or in different areas. Our focus was the business outcomes that you see at different levels.

We built out a model for ALM maturity, and it’s in the book.

... We see pressure from the business to change how we do things and the technologies we use. From the business side, you see it in a variety of ways. You see, "Oh, it’s the consumerization of IT, and what I see in my consumer world I want in IT. I see this all moving fast and I don’t feel my business moving." You see that pressure.

But, you absolutely see pressure to change from the bottom-up, from the teams themselves. We want to work in a different way. We want to be able to execute faster. The whole move of agile has been, in large part, if not primarily built, then driven from development and delivery teams up. So, there is a huge motivation there.

If you can understand the results that you are seeing, that ought to help you figure out where you could be. What we've seen is a progression from the spectrum of companies, ... [many] have fairly immature processes.

We see people just getting started, and they have a relatively ad hoc, narrow, point tool, with lots of manual work. It doesn’t mean they are never successful, but results vary highly. They're very mixed. Some project teams are great, and it all depends on the project team, and the next one may stink.

So our idea around maturity -- and tying it to outcomes -- is the results that we see. ... It all comes back to the results. What kind of results am I seeing? If you look at the model in the book, it’s pretty easy to peg yourself as to where you are and the kinds of benefits you'd see from moving up that maturity curve.

There’s a lot of pride when you see the metrics go in the right way. The feedback that I've seen for our clients that do this really well is where the business comes back and says, "Oh, my God. The responsiveness is incredible. Even if I'm not getting the massive stuff that I used to get once every two years, I'm seeing movement on a regular basis, and I love it." And lot of clients that we talk to are really fired up about that.

What we hear from our clients is that things are hyper-competitive and that technology, in particular software and applications, is a huge competitive advantage. So, our ability to move fast and beat the competitors to the punch with capability is enormously important.

More of a scorecard

Hipps: We configured this model trying deliberately not to be ultra-prescriptive. There are many heavy-duty models that do exist, and people can dig into those to their heart’s content. This is as much a maturity scorecard as anything.

One of the examples that you might see or one of the ways you might begin to engage yourself is something like defect leakage. Defect leakage refers to the number of defects that you discover in live in the application that you could have caught earlier.

We have some figures that show that the average is in the neighborhood of 40 percent of application defects that leak into production and are discovered in live. They could have been caught earlier. It may be little higher than 40 percent, which is a fairly shocking number.

But on the high end, the world-class customers we worked with, see less than 5 percent of defects working their way into production. So right off the bat there, you're talking an 80 percent-plus drop in the number of defects that you're experiencing in a live environment, with all the attendant cost savings, brand improvement, and good will in the business that you would expect.

That’s one example of the kind of thing that you can look at, tease out, and begin to get a sense of where might I sit maturity wise. From that, you can potentially take a cue as to where is it that I want to start, where is it that I want to make the biggest investment, as I look to make myself more mature.

There are hosts of sophisticated KPIs we can design for ourselves, but one of the key ones was, "I want to know what the business thinks of us, and whether we are trending in the right direction."

Speaking from the application domain, our friends in the agile communities have been the leading champions of this notion. Our default stand [as development teams] was one of being change-averse.

By that, I mean that there was this whole contractual relationship with business. You tell us what you need, and we're going to document it as best as we can, down to having all the semicolons in the right place.

"We're going to break out the quill pens and ink our signatures. Forever shall it be, and if you change anything here, we're going to hit you with the request for change, and it will go through a cycle of six weeks and maybe we'll agree to it," etc., etc. The longest time that was the mindset. You can look at that and say it's awful, but when I had far fewer applications, and they took far longer to build, it was just the way of the world.

The recognition today for all of the reasons we've talked about in this podcast and others, our applications are everywhere. They're always on. There is nothing I can do in a business that isn't going to touch the application. It fundamentally means, we need to sweep from the table, that notion of being change-averse. Instead, we need to be in a position of embracing change. We do need to be change-ready.

The leading traits

As Mark said, we need to be architected and engineered, from our people process technology perspective, to put ourselves in a position to be that way. In the book, we talk a bit about some of the principles we think come into play for change ready organizations. But, that's why it is one of the leading traits, the leading principles, in world-class organizations.

This could be a mantra of sorts: Think big, start small, scale quickly. The basic idea of think big is the idea that you want to spend some time making sure that you’ve all got a shared vision of where you want to be, and we talk a bit about whether that was a maturity model -- these principles of predictability and repeatability, etc.

Hopefully we've set at least some suggested guidelines for constructing what your end state might look like. But, this point about thinking big is that, as we all know, certainly in IT but probably anywhere, it's every easy to fall into a state of analysis paralysis. We've got to figure out exactly the right metrics to decide exactly what we're going to be. We've got to figure out precisely what our time-line is.

We sort of can borrow from our friends in agile, who have said that you've got to understand the perimeter of what it is you want to accomplish, but still it's bound to change. Those perimeters are bound to shift. You're bound to discover things about yourselves, your organizations, what's feasible, and what's not in the process of actually trying to get there.

It's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

So, it's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

If, you then pluck the low-hanging fruit, the easy things we could do starting this week, starting tomorrow, to advance us at least generally toward these ends, this end objective, that's great. Then, it becomes a matter of just continuing to move, scale, and adapt.

Somewhere, we make the point that, as an application team, certainly at least as an application member, I cared a lot more about measurable progress, seeing things actually advancing and getting better. Then, I cared less about how shiningly brilliant the end-state was going to be or exactly how we were going to get there.

Unconscious sabotage

Sarbiewski: I spent a number of years in a former life doing process change for companies. There were some trade secretes in the firm I worked with. They recognized some unchanging facts that that people can consciously or unconsciously sabotage the greatest plans, any process you want, or any kind of a change.

You have to start with people. It does involve all the people-process-technology in that order, but it's the people considerations. Do we have that shared vision? Who are the skeptics? Where do we think this could go wrong? Are we committed to getting there?

There were some questions we’d as we were embarking on making this change. First of all we said, what project or what pilot -- if we did these changes on it -- would people in the organization say, "If it works for that project, it will work for us as an organization."

So, find that visible pilot project, not one that’s an exception. Don’t find one where there are four developers and they are in the same room. If you try something new, people can say, "Well, of course, it worked for that, but that’s so atypical." So, find that project.

Beyond that, find the champion who is really respected in the organization, but skeptical of the change. We would go looking for one or two people who were open-minded enough to really give it a go, but maybe steeped in how we’ve done it, and have been very successful in how we’ve done it. Then, people can say, "That’s the kind of project we do, so you need to be able to make it work there. If Joe or Mary or whoever it is, if they buy into and it works for them, I believe."

The one other thing I’d say is start thinking about those types of metrics, those cross-silo and lifecycle-oriented goals and metrics.

Maybe, let's reward jointly the operations and the dev teams, if they’ve met those customer satisfaction goals, those service level agreements (SLAs), and those low counts of defects in production. You start to create a different dynamic, when you think more about lifecycle goals and cross-team goals.

Hipps: The spirit of this book, and probably the spirit of a lot of these kinds of books, ... If I have one hope, it’s that we haven’t been so pie-in-the-sky in our thinking that somebody reads this and says, "Yeah, nice idea, but it will never happen here."

So, that would be my hope -- somebody takes one single way that’s implementable in the near-term within their organization.

Sarbiewski: What I’m hoping is that in these hundred or so odd pages that executives in these enterprises that we're talking to have that opportunity to take just a couple hours and have somebody give them a chance to think about how important software is, and what the true life of an application is.

Once you start to go down that path and you start to say, wait a minute, 10, 15 years of evolving this capability, what does that mean? When things are live and I’ve got hot request from the business to make a change, what needs to happen? How much money will I spend on that?

The one "aha" moment is seeing that the 12 to 15 years matter, when I’m delivering value to the business and innovating for the business. In order to be successful during those 10 to 15 years, I will make different decisions when I build this thing. I will focus on a process.

I will build the automation to a different level, because I’ve stopped thinking that my job is done when I go live. If that’s truly the job, you’ll make a lot of shortcut decisions to get to go live. But, if you think bigger, you think about the full life of an application and what it delivers to the business.

All of a sudden, it makes a whole lot more sense to do things a bit differently, to set myself up for 10 years or 15 years of success with the business, as opposed to a moment when I can say, "Yup, I achieved a milestone."

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the third in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications

• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Airlines deliver better business results
  
  
• Dave Shirk on how HP's Instant-On Enterprise takes aim at new demands on businesses, governments
  
  
• HP Shows Benefits from Successful Application Consolidation With Own Massive Global Supply Chain Project

Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Airlines better deliver critical business applications

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement.

Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches. In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective to help head-off poor applications productivity.

This is the second (read more about and access the first podcast) in the series of three podcasts on the "Application Lifecycle Management" book. We're here with the authors, but we are also here to learn about how one enterprise, Delta Air Lines, has moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality and impact and to better deliver real business results from those applications.

So please join me now welcoming our panel, David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta’s eCommerce IT Group, and John Bell, Senior Test Engineer in the eCommerce IT Group at Delta; book c0-author Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of marketing for HP Applications, and c0-author Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solution Marketing at HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The headline for me is that, more than ever, business moves as software moves; as your website moves, as your ERP system is advanced, your supply chain, and your financials.

Businesses are driven so much by software now that it's really the long pole in the tent. Standing up infrastructure is a necessity. Potentially, it can be done really fast. How quickly can I innovate on my capabilities for my customers or my internal users?

So, business moves as software moves. When we look at how we've done over the last 10 or 15 years, I could sum it by saying that legacy applications and approaches are just too slow. Not only are they too slow, they are too costly. They're riddled with security holes, which are increasing the challenges out there.

So, we have this dynamic that the business needs to move faster. Software is a prime driver in innovating for the business, and where we've been is simply too slow. We need to rethink our approach across the board, because there is no one silver bullet. It really boils down to I have to leverage the latest technologies for things like reuse, where I get huge leverage for richer customer experiences that need those wonderful new web application technologies that we have.

I have new processes that I can leverage in forms of agile and iterative types of things. To keep the cost in line. I really want to be able to leverage global teams for flexible low cost, but expert resources around the globe. I want them acting as if they were all local, like a dynamic Tiger Team that was all local.

That’s a lot of change to make happen to serve the ultimate business needs. We took the opportunity to take a step back and ask how all these things come together and how you can blend this modern approach to really deliver what you need to deliver for the business.

Hipps: This is a chance to take a step back and have a bit of brain space to consider and contemplate a lot of things Mark just touched on -- what are these ramifications for my organization?

Nine times out of 10, most of us who are in IT developing applications, trying to get on top of what it is the business wants, don't generally have the luxury of taking a step back and asking has the ground shifted underneath my feet with regard to all the things I am now expected to do and the ways I am expected to do them, whether that’s process shifts, organizational shifts, or technology shifts.

Generally the case is that the ground has shifted. Am I equipped, organized, and oriented to respond effectively to all these changes? That’s one of the driving factors of the book and one of the hopes that gives people a chance to step back, contemplate what these changes have been, and also give a bit of guidance about how we might better get on top of these changes and really wring the benefit out of them that we had expected when we first began to make them.

Innovating for customers

Moses: The biggest thing that we have at Delta is to make sure that we innovate for our customers and give them the latest greatest ability to take control of their situation. If somebody wants to book a flight, they should be able to do it on any media they like.

We want them to be able to make it in as few clicks as possible and as little typing as possible. We really want to make it as convenient for the customer and through the entire experience from the inspiration, all the way to when they are back home. We want to deliver quality products to them.

That comes down to innovation and speed, because you can innovate for ever and never actually release the product. For us, getting it out the door is very, very important. Some of the things that we've heard already from Mark and Brad touch on the need to back away, get out the weeds, and look at your overall lifecycle to make sure that you can get that speed. A lot of times, if you're doing the status quo over and over again, you never realize how fast you can be. So, you raise your head up, look around, and try to make some big changes.

Complexity is always the enemy of speed and innovation, isn’t it? The idea is to make it as simple as possible by having one version of the truth. You really have to get to that point, a central repository of data, a central tool that everyone can use. We use Quality Center. We keep everything in that, requirements, tough cases, automation. We pull scripts and things from there for our test plans. We have one area with all that data, so all of our areas can come to that and pull that information.

Whenever somebody needs to start up a script or anything like that, they’ve got a library that they can pull from. They can bring it into their project. When they are done with their manual testing and they place their test plan back in the library, they can then take those pieces and immediately automate them.

Somebody once said they required a form to find out who they were going to, or what pieces they were going to automate. For us, if you have one version of the truth, you know when things are checked back in. You know when your test plan has been updated and your automation people can make that decision. So, it's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really streamlining.

Recently, we've brought in some of the mobile devices like the iPhone and some of those types of applications. In the past, a large number of our customers have always been using the .com form. Now, we're finding more and more users are going towards the mobile devices.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

We wanted to make sure that a lot of the applications lifecycle testing we had done with the .com could also be used with the mobile. We were able to take automation and a lot of the test cases and type things we had used with .com and use it with mobile.

We did write automation associated with mobile and were also able to bring that back into Quality Center, running that via Quick Test Pro. Even though mobile was a newer area for us, we were able to get the speed to market up on that as soon as possible.

Also, we were able to leverage that and use some of those automated scripts. We run those on a daily basis against our production mobile environment. If something is wrong with that, we know early in the morning. We run these scripts early in the morning before we come in, and we can know right away if something is there.

They can go in and determine what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.

So we were able to take the lifecycle information and the wins that we have got from the .com, and bring that into our mobile apps, and it's really helped us a lot. Our speed to market has significantly improved with that.

Bell: Another case would be our new homepage. We're sitting here at the end of 2010. About two months ago, we released a new, more streamlined homepage, a lot more innovative. A lot of people looked at that. We hid the logo during usability testing, and people were surprised to find out it was an airline website. They thought of us as one of the cool guys out there in the travel world.

We're getting much better in this area. By using all the feedback that we get from the customers, importing information in the Quality Center, tracking everything that we have in there, we were able to look at what we needed to make changes to. Once we released this, it was something that the customers were wanting, so it got a lot of good response.

... One of the things that’s really important to us is that we work with multiple vendors in multiple locations and with multiple time zones. It's important to make sure that all of them are using the same processes and that we're all using the overall tools. We use quality center personally to help organize a lot of the requirements and things like that in our testing efforts.

It's important that all of our vendors, whether it's in-house or people outside, are giving us the same processes and that we are able to leverage any of our automation or any of our business process testing or any of those tools, and that we can actually deliver high quality software quickly, can reduce our turnaround time, make sure that we're giving customers their best experience, and that we are getting our time to market in a timely manner.

Moses: It's truly huge. I mean if you look at Delta.com, it's the main revenue driver for the entire company. So it's our face to the world, and streamlining that process where people are making it better and making the customer experience better is our number one goal. We want to really give our customers what they want and make it easy for them, because we have a wide range of customers.

We have pleasure customers who travel with their families once or may be twice a year, sometimes even less, and then we have people who travel with us every week. So we have two very different types of audiences and we have to cater to both. We have to make it fast and enjoyable and we have to allow them to dream a little bit and be inspired by where they want to go.

It's one of the biggest things that we have on our plate with mobile. Mobile is the future. Everyone is going toward mobile devices and portable devices. You're seeing more and more iPhones, iPads, and Android devices out there in the world, especially when you walk through the airport. We don't like that it happens, but sometimes things are out of our control like weather. And, we are always safe, so these things impact our schedule.

Core lifecycle

Hipps: In the book, when we talk about the core lifecycle, historically the SDLC -- we just call it the core lifecycle, so as not to get lost in alphabet soup. Within that we see traits among world-class organizations. There tend to be four traits that these world class organizations have mastered, and we list these traits as being change ready. They have a high degree of predictability, high degree of repeatability, and certainly their output is of high quality.

So those four: change readiness, predictability, repeatability and quality, tend to be abstracting some traits that we see across these great orgs. Those tend to be the key ones that really they are very effective at. David and John have talked about that we have got data points in each one of those, in some of the examples they have given.

A lot of this change readiness to a large degrees is formed by the point that we made in the beginning in the podcast, which is that fundamentally everything that business wants to do is going to have some applications or set of applications behind it. There is going to be a dependency there.

The business is only as nimble as its applications are. That puts applications teams in a position where they are not holding the business off at arms length, and saying, "No, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. No, that will take months." That rigidity may be historically where we came from, when we had fewer applications. They changed less. They were much bigger, more monolithic, and brittle. That is not the world we live in today.

Today, change is the expectation. David and John have been talking about this code being lead revenue generator and Delta.com being the lead source of revenue on the Delta side. It's a great example. Clearly, anything the business wants to do to advance its market presence is going to come through that application.

You’ve got to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

The fact that they have leveraged automation and asset reuse and taken the time to build requirements traceability are all tick marks you put against organizations that have configured themselves to be change ready. That means they have stripped out as much latency as possible, the time it takes to do impact analysis.

They can see pretty quickly what all the dependencies are as a new change comes across. That’s just speaking of the assessment. There is, of course, the execution, which depends on automation, asset reuse, and all the things they talked about. We probably covered four of those, but certainly the change readiness does stand out.

Moses: You have to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

Second, it’s about mindset and alignment to your goals. You have to have alignment to the customer. You still have to have department goals, but they should be aligned to what the customer needs.

Contradiction in goals

A lot of times, you see a contradiction in goals between the business group and an IT group. Delivering what the IT group wants to do may not exactly get what the business wants. And if the business was focused on the customer and the IT groups are focused on how many projects they can get out, but doesn’t really matter what projects they are, then there's an issue.

So, you have to really align very closely between business and IT, so much so that if you even have something that is a huge impact to your company, you may want to wrap a special forces team or integrity team around that, and have that group be one. Business and IT all in one group -- that way you completely eliminate the us-versus-them mentality. If you can’t do that, definitely make sure that you're aligned to the customer.

Bell: One thing to add to that is that, at first, it can be a little scary moving things in, like moving all your requirements into one area and getting all the test cases and things and even looking at automation.

Sometimes, you have to take a half step back in order to take a full step forward. With us, even as we were moving things and centralizing it, there could be a little pain point in doing that, but that pain point will more than payoff in the long run. A lot of the people who are holding on to the old methodologies and ways of doing business, are thinking, "We're going to have to take a step back to do this."

You're going to get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Whatever step you take in that direction and whatever pain point you take as you move forward, once you start getting the automations in place, once you get these tools in place, you’ll see that you can start moving faster and faster that any initial pain point you took. You're going to exponentially get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Just look at the changing world that we live in. With Delta.com now, we live here in Atlanta. If you go over to the airport, you realize that our business is not just flying customers within the United States in English. We now have kiosks in six different languages, and you meet people from all over the world that are now using our products and our websites in everything from simple Chinese to French.

It’s important that we realize the global nature of what we are doing, and that our methodology and our IT departments have to align ourselves, so that we can move this quickly. Without the automation and without the centralized tools and things we would never be able to put out as much work as we currently do.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications
  
  
• Delta Air Lines improves customer self-service apps quickly using automated quality assurance tools strategically
  
  
• HP Shows Benefits from Successful Application Consolidation With Own Massive Global Supply Chain Project

New book explores automating the managed application lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore the current state of applications in large organizations. Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches.

In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective.

This is the first in a series of three podcasts with the authors the ALM book to learn why they wrote it and to explore their major findings. They are: Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: In most large enterprises, applications have been built up over many, many years. You throw acquisitions into that and you end up with layers of applications, in a lot of which there is redundancy. You have this wide mix of technology, huge amounts of legacy, all built different ways, and the business just wants response faster, faster, and faster.

So, we have old technologies hampering us. We have an old approach that we've built that technology on, and the modern world is dramatically different in a whole host of ways. We're changing our process. We're changing the way our teams are structured to be much more global teams, outsourced, nearshore, far-shore, all of that stuff, and the technology is fundamentally shifting as well.

That's the context for why you see all these horror stories and these stats about the businesses' level of satisfaction with the responsiveness of IT, particularly in applications. If you think about it, that's what the business experience is.

... IT organizations are looking to change the game.

Hipps: A lot of these trends that we talk about -- outsourcing, service-based architectures, more flexible methodologies, whether it's iterative or agile -- you wouldn't necessary call any one of those brand new. Those things have been around for a few years now. Many enterprises we speak with and deal with have been leveraging them for a few years in some form or fashion.

If you're an owner of application teams or of a series of applications within an enterprise, these things tend to sneak in. ... You wake up one morning and realize all of a sudden that fundamentally the way your teams have long operated has been changed.

In some ways, it's death by a thousand cuts. No single one of these initiatives is going to force you to take a step back and say, hold the phone, let's figure out if the way we deliver applications now requires us to, in some significant way, rethink the mechanisms by which we conduct delivery.

From my own experience, it's difficult to get the time or the brain space to do that. Usually, you're neck deep in getting the next application out the door. You've got deadlines. You've got other applications or enhancements coming down the pike.

Necessary questions

You may not have the time to take a step back and say, "Wow, we're using these different methods" or "We're relying more on outsource teams, so we are not all colocated."

One of the objectives of this book was to do just that. Mark and I had the luxury to take a step back and think about what these trends mean soup-to-nuts for the way applications get stood up and delivered, and how -- from an enterprise perspective -- we have responded or not responded to those new complexities.

The nature of an application today is that it's not a monolith. It's not owned by a single project team or a program consisting of several teams.

Leveraging what we can

More often than not, it's something that has been assembled using a series of subcomponents, reusable services, or borrowed function points from other applications, etc. It's this thing that is, in the best sense, cobbled together. Rather than writing it all from scratch, we're leveraging what we can.

We can all agree that this makes sense, it’s the right way to do it, it's much more assembly line production versus handcrafting everything, which is certainly the direction we want to be headed in, from a software perspective.

But, that also presents us a lot of new challenges. How do I have visibility or discover the components that are out there, that are available for me to use? How do I trust that those components are reliable, that they are going to behave and perform in the way I want them to? Given the fact that I, as a given developer, didn't actually create it myself, how can I have faith in it? And, how are we going to authenticate all these different pieces.

It's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

?

So you've got these questions. How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How do we notify each other of defects? How am I aware when something is ready to retest?

Relying on email is, let's just say, less than ideal. And, of course, we may be using different methods. Multiple teams could be using different methods. Those over there are working in agile fashion, we are working in waterfall fashion.

So the catchphrase we have, which may or may not make sense, it's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

Sarbiewski: The idea now is that you need both management and automation to achieve your end-goals.

People have long thought of those things in very narrow ways. They've thought of management of a narrow domain space, like managing requirements and automating GUI functional tests. Those were all good steps forward, important things, but there was little connection between management across the lifecycle and automation across the lifecycle.

You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock.

Part of what we're trying to get at here is this interplay. You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock -- to create the situation where I see what's happening. I see across these very complex endeavors that I'm undertaking, many people, many teams, many stakeholders, lots of projects, lots of interdependencies, so I have that visibility. When we need to step on the gas and go in a particular direction, and speed everything up without blowing everything up, that's when I can rely on nicely integrated automation.

Just about every square inch of the enterprise is automated in some way by software. What it has meant for IT teams is that you now have to understand every square inch of the business, and the businesses are incredibly dynamic. So any part that changes almost drags along, or in some cases, is led by, and has to be led by, innovation in the software to make that happen.

... You need to make software a core competency if you are going to differentiate your business going forward. So it's hugely important.

Hipps: Business can't twitch without requiring some change in a set of applications somewhere. ... We've got applications everywhere. They're going to be under constant review, modification, enhancement, addition, etc., and that's going to be a an endless stream.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing to meet whatever the latest, greatest idea is, and we have got to run them accordingly.

We have got to make sure that once they are out there and available, they are responsive. We have got to make sure that the teams that own them in the data centers are aware of their behaviors, and aware of which of those behaviors are configurable, without even coming back to the application teams.

The legacy view said, "Wow, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the end-all, be-all. If I get the SDLC right, if I get requirements and deployment done right, I win." We realize that this is still critical. What we would describe as the core lifecycle is still where it all begins.

If I'm going to really be successful against what it is the business is after, I do have to account for this complete lifecycle? All the stuff that's happening before requirements, the portfolio investigation that's occurring, the architectural decisions I am making, have got to be true across the enterprise, as well of course as everything that happens once that thing goes live.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing.

How well connected I am with my operation peers? Have I shared the right information? Have I shared test scripts where possible? Am I linked into service desk? Am I aware of issues, as they are arising, ideally before the business is hearing about it?

Those things are what we mean by getting your arms around the complete lifecycle is what's necessary, when you think about the modern delivery of applications.

Sarbiewski: Even in the requirements, there is an aspect that can be a level of automation and a level of management.

Automation can come in when I am building a visualization, a quick prototype, and there are some great solutions that have emerged into the market to help a non-technical user create a representation of an application that has almost the perfect look and feel. We're not talking about generating code. We're talking about using HTML and tools to create the flow, the screen views, and the data input of what an application is going to look like.

... Once we get to that look and feel of an app, at the push of a button, I can interpret all those business rules, all those rules about where was data, what was on the screen, was this data hidden, what was inputted, when did it flow to the next one, under what condition. All of that will get translated into a series of text-based requirements, test assets to test for that logic, and even the results and the rules and the data that needs to be input.

So, I have a process. I have had discussion and used some technology to visualize these requirements. At the push of a button, I automated the complete articulation, with perfect fidelity, including the positive test cases I want to run. I can manage those now, as I have always have, and my systems and teams expected to.

I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game.

Those requirements trigger test and defects and go against code, all of which can be linked. Whenever progress is made in any dimension against those requirements, I have created a test for one, I have run a test for one. I have run ten tests and eight paths. I have checked new coding against the bugs. All of that can be tied together and automated with workflow.

So, you start to see how I've got a creative series of information. I use automation to advance it to the next stage. I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that.

This is what we mean when talk about changing the game and how you deliver software, by doing just that, thinking about, what are the things that I have to manage and how does automation speed things up, and create outputs with greater fidelity and greater speed.

Hipps: The endgame should be that what I've got is a unified way of getting these various operations connected, so that my management picture has a straight flow through from the automated things that its kicked off.

As those automated events occur, I'm getting a single, unified view of the results in my management view, which is, nine times out of 10, not the world we have when we look at big, big enterprise delivery. It is still a series of point tools, with maybe Excel laid over the top to try to unify it all.

... If you want to understand the future of IT, you just need to look at where manufacturing has come. We've plagiarized the lion’s share of what we do in IT and the way we work a lot from what we have seen in manufacturing and mechanical engineering. That extends to lean methods. It starts probably all the way back to waterfall.

Maybe it's no surprise that when you ask us to talk about what you mean by integrated management and automation, we are borrowing an analogy from the world of mechanical engineering. We're talking about what planes can do, what ships can do, and what cars can do. So, I hope this is very much a natural advancement.

Sarbiewski: I talk about the industrialization of IT. Sometimes, there's a little pushback on that, because it feels heavy. Then, I say, "Wait a minute. Think about how flexible Toyota or Boeing is." These companies have these very complex undertakings and yet can manage parts and supplies for providers and partners from every corner of the world, and every other car can be different coming off that assembly line. Look at how quickly they have shrunk their product lifecycles from design to a finished model.

Part of what's done that is exactly what Brad was talking about, an enormous investment in understanding the process and optimizing that, in supporting the various stakeholders, whether it's through design software, or automation on the factory line, all of that investment. We didn't do in IT. We built it ourselves. We used Excel and post-it notes and other things, and we created from scratch everything that we have done, because we can, because we made it easy to do that. We have made it easy to design and build it a thousand different ways.

There is this counterintuitive perception that because there is an infinite number of ways, we hold ourselves to be different than that. People are realizing that's not really the case. In fact, the more I can industrialize and keep it lean and agile, how I do this, the tools I use, if I give the people incredible tools to do it, and not just point tools but integrated, the results really speak for themselves.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process.

When we talk to customers that have done this, they achieve incredible results in three critical dimensions. There's a very longstanding joke that you can't go faster, you can't raise quality and take cost down. It's not just possible. This is this impenetrable triangle or it’s squeezing a balloon. We see with our customers that you absolutely can.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process. Guess what, they go faster, they take cost down, they drive quality up.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on businesses and governments

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Three megatrends are shaping the next generation of successful businesses and governments. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications, highly responsive cloud-computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration.

Indeed, by the year 2020, The Economist newspaper predicts there will be two trillion devices connected to the Internet. And taking a look at where we are right now, McKinsey Quarterly reported in August that in 2010 some four billion people have cell phones, and 450 million have access to a full web experience.

Moreover, Jupiter Research reports that by 2014 there will be 130 million enterprise users involved with mobile cloud activities. Not only is access pervasive, but the amount of information available is also exploding. The Economist again reports that in 2005 mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data … and in 2010 we will create fully eight times more data.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

As these trends literally rearrange business ecosystems, a gap will surely emerge between the companies that master change -- and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

For those that do step up to the challenge -- expect a relentless emphasis on rapidly recurring innovation to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands.

Our latest BriefingsDirect podcast therefore focuses on how these trends -- and rapidly evolving customer, citizen, and user expectations -- are newly impacting the enterprise. We also examine how technology advancements are making it possible to drive innovation to meet these new demands for instant gratification.

Please join HP executive Dave Shirk, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business, as we explore how HP is working to make headway, so that the next few years bring about a generational opportunity -- and not a downward complexity spiral. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shirk: We're seeing a lot of shift going on in the marketplace right now. When we look at where consumers are driving business or where citizens are driving government, it's fundamentally changing the way they operate. We've seen three core things come out.

The business models are all starting to change the way in which people approach markets across the globe. That's having to really rethink the ways in which they've approached them versus traditional methods.

The second thing we see is this whole shift in mobile computing meeting cloud computing and the enterprise trying to figure out exactly how to take best advantage of that to create this competitive advantage. Then, the overall demographic piece weighs into that.

We've seen the rise of the millennials, as they're being referred to. All of these things are forcing business and government to stop and say, "You know what, if we're going to grow or we're going to create a service differentiation, we're really going to need to do things differently and we're going to have to do it way faster than we've ever done it before."

According to the Society for Engineers, you now have over 800,000 graduates in China, over 300,000 graduates in India, 100,000 some in Japan, etc. It's over the last 10 to 12 years that each of those graduation rates has occurred. They are part of the workforce now.

When they went through that process, they were always connected and they always were involved in a social network-based environment. They have a level of their lifestyle that is all tied to this always-connected environment. When you think about the ubiquitous computing that that has brought to them, as they enter the workforce, they are looking at things a lot differently than ever before.

They bring new ideas. They bring new ways to that. They're looking for businesses that will support that kind of methodology and structure. ... So, when we think about that Gen X group that's out there, we see them driving an enormous part of this change.

The last statistic I saw was that they are now over 50 percent of the workforce. The analogy that's always used is that, to them, being connected and always involved in some type of networking-based collaboration or information sharing of some sort is about the same as it is for you and me to pick up our remote controls and turn on our television sets. That's already having a very profound effect on how business and government are changing and the expectations that are out there in the marketplace.

It's this [demand for] immediate or instant gratification: "If I can't get what I want in the following way, I’ll find the business or government environment where I can." While the government piece maybe a bit harder to change, the business piece isn't, and so the competitive pressure to serve this audience, both as the consumer and also as employees, is a big part of that shift.

We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

We call that the "Now Problem." They want this, they want it done now, and they want it to work a certain way. We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

This is probably best represented in the words of Professor Gary Hamel, who is the foremost business visionary person out there in the marketplace. In his book, Future of Management, he described it as "whiplash change."

That's very much the case when I speak with our clients both on the business side and the government side. That's exactly what they're sitting there and thinking and working through right now.

Role of technology

We look at the technology piece of [the change] and say that you really can't [react] any other way -- the pace of it, the speed of it, and some of the complexity associated with it. For a long time, business has tried to use labor as an arbitrage to try to work their way through this and just throw bodies at it. That's quickly dissipating. The speed and the connectedness that we see, and the confidence level that all of these types of services require make it no longer possible to go through that.

What we see is IT completely embedded in the business. Over the next couple of years, that's going to continue to be the trend and the strategy that will play out in the way in which business and government work this. Ultimately, that's going to be the differentiator that drives an ability not only to serve these constituencies but to out-serve them, and that's going to be the name of the game.

[The solution] starts with a desire to change and to drive innovation in a different way. We sit and we think about the fundamental change in this. We talked for years that the business was focused on business processes and business process reengineering. While that’s still very important, it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It's becoming obvious that the bigger driver and the more significant trend is the information process, understanding the segments of business or government that need to be addressed. What their needs are, what they want, what they want to talk about, the ways in which they want to interact is all part of this change that’s taking place.

Closing the gap

So, as we start to pull back and step back from this, we look at that and we look at this vision that we have for the Instant-On Enterprise and how we’re enabling end-users to become a part of that, how we’re enabling businesses and governments to provide that type of capability. It really is about closing the gap between what IT can provide and what the business needs to be able to serve each of those audiences.

What we’ve launched with this vision is to put the foundations in place to make that possible and take a journey with our clients both from the business side and government side and help them move down that particular path, find ways to navigate these challenges and these trends, and to out-serve and to over-serve all the audiences that they need to meet the needs of.

[This change] is inevitable. Different businesses and governments will have, at different times, one of these four elements be more important or more significant to them at different points. All of them share the innovation requirement. We see that in all things.

Our view is that the innovation has to take place throughout that information process. It doesn’t matter whether it happens back at the data center or at every touch point. Innovation has to take place throughout for the business to meet the needs of those segments I’ve referred to earlier -- how it services it, how it conducts itself, and ultimately how it meets our needs or exceeds the needs of the audiences.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used.

Agility, optimization, and risk all vary in and out with innovation in terms of their need and their level of importance.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used. A big part of technology’s trouble in the past was that we created all of these things and we never had a plan for ending their lifecycle or turning them down slightly, so that we could turn up other activities or other possibilities in an instant-on environment and an instant-on enterprise. A core part of the vision that we see is being able to drive that agility to meet those changing business needs.

When HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense. There are some things that are much easier to focus on first and then, over time, to gain more and more of an Instant-On nature.

Critical success factors

Flexibility, security, speed, automation, and insight, those absolutely are attributes that we look for. We see them as the critical success factors in the way in which every part of the environment that IT leverages, drives, and embeds in the business has to come forward.

And yet, everybody is stuck in this mode of an enormous legacy that they have to deal with, and that gets in the way of being able to provide some of these new capabilities.

We’ve spent a lot of time and gotten a lot of expertise over the years trying to figure out the best ways to address these albatrosses that are keeping IT from being able to deal with the needs of the business. In the Instant-On Enterprise journey, that's a big part of the set of steps that we have to work through and work with our clients to make sure that they understand where to prioritize.

In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

Our view is that we work with our clients and figure out ways that they can, as we say, shift that equation. How do you shift from 70 percent of that equation being focused on operational management, and 30 percent, if you are lucky, being spent on new and innovation-based capabilities to help or assist the business and its growth versus shifting it the other way? How do you get to 30 percent operational mode, and move forward with 70 percent focused on the business?

Changing business models

When I spend time with clients and listen to them, a big part of what they're asking for is, "We’ve got these pressures. We're seeing the business models change and we're experimenting with some things. We're seeing the mobile and the cloud computing pieces coming at us like a freight train. At the same time, we're seeing the demographic shift both on the end-user consumer side and on our employee side. We need strategic partners to help us with this. How do we navigate this? What is the way in which we should do that? HP, do you have a point of view?"

We're in a unique position, because we're the only company in the marketplace that has a full suite of consumer products, and yet we stretch all the way back through to the data center. All the capability, all the offerings, that are in between, all the services that are necessary to address each of those pieces, are contained inside the portfolio capability that HP has of hardware, software, and services.

We looked at this and said, "How do we take the best combination of that breadth of portfolio and bring those together in a set of solutions to best address what we are hearing over-and-over from some of the research that we’ve done and listening that we’ve done with our clients?"

They need to figure out how to modernize their applications. We want to make sure that we are there and we’ve got a set of solutions for that. They’ve got huge data-center issues in terms of how they're going to transform their data centers and deal with more virtualization-based techniques and capabilities and bring networking and storage and compute power together in some fashion.

They’ve got this issue of enterprise security. They need to figure out how to secure the enterprise. I don’t mean desktops, but all points, all touch points of the enterprise -- how they build applications, how this information is accessed inside and outside of the organization, and then fundamentally optimizing that information, the ways in which you store it, the way in which you deliver it, the way in which you print it for that matter, all those pieces.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

Then, they need to underpin that by the best way to figure out how to deliver it. Do we do it for them? Do they build it themselves with our architecture, and our capability set, and our consulting expertise? What combination of ways makes the most sense to set that up?

... We help our clients work their way through that with a series of workshops that we do to get in and investigate. We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

There’s an enormous amount of talk about cloud in the marketplace today. HP has been at the forefront of that, but we have a little different position. We think it’s unique and we think we're the only ones out there that are really positioned to do this, which is the concept of hybrid IT, where you’ve got a mix. You’ve got a mix of traditional on-premises-based capabilities, but then you figure out what private cloud or public cloud-based capabilities best serve your business on a global basis.

HP comes in and, unlike other companies that try to force you into a one-size-fits-all structure, we sit down with the client. Our unique IP in this area is that we have an incredible depth of intellectual capital in this particular area, which is helping the clients figure out the best balance or mix of the delivery methods.

We can help them build it. They can host it or we can host it for them. We can provide those services from our public cloud-based capabilities or from our private cloud based capabilities. We really don’t care, if that blend changes over time. That’s the beauty to the journey to this Instant-On Enterprise.

Starting small

Our data says that most customers still start with a small private cloud implementation to really understand the value of the cloud and demystify it. We’ve said that there is going to be something after cloud. We don’t know what that level or that style of computing is going to be, but our architecture is built such that we’ll be ready for that. For our clients, we’ll help navigate them through each of these pieces, and that’s the important thing for us.

We have our new HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service, which is a place for a client to start, get a basic orientation, sit down and understand kind of where we think they might consider beginning that journey. So that, along with a number of other capabilities that we have to help them through these various workshops, I think is really the best place for them to start.

There are a whole series of workshops globally that our teams are set up to do, everything from a small couple-of-hour based interaction to a full suite of in-depth analysis and consulting engagements to work with a client. ... We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

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