Monthly Archives: September 2014

Impact of App Maintenance on brand

26 Friday Sep 2014

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I have recently been working on some guidance on when to use mobile or web applications for my employer. What has been interesting is that there is plenty of information on the technical dimensions that should be considered. But not so much on the negative brand impact that could occur if the application isn’t targeted at users properly, and most crucially sustained.

Let me show what I mean by highlighting some common, but relevant observations.

Many end user businesses tend to work on a project or programme basis, so once a solution whether internal, B2B or B2C once delivered gets handed over to the operational teams to monitor and keep alive. Even for devops once the solution is deemed complete the bulk of the team will move to new objectives. Net result is that the solution remains static until new functional requirements are needed.

As businesses, we would like to increase the ability for customers to serve themselves and ‘shape their customer journey’ to what they want. All of which means we will increasingly see 1st point of customer engagement either as new or returning customers through apps in the same way as websites have prior to the rise in mobility.

We know that mobile devices are evolving at a tremendous rate driven by vendor competition. This has resulted in things like ever changing screen sizes and resolutions which have largely been growing but with Apple jumping into the watch market I think we’ll see another change in the next couple of years.

Not only have the screen resolutions changed, the interaction and presentation styles have been evolving. Take the huge change for IOS7 with the adoption of the ‘flat’ design paradigm, and with IOS8 subtler but important changes to allow changing of the feel of aspects like the keypad. This all before you think about the change and evolution of other solutions that you might want to integrate with such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

So, back to my original point, what does this mean? Well essentially if you’re going to invest in mobile apps you have to keep up the investment with regular updates to keep the experience current, you can’t really use the project model. With stats like Gartner’s around security (75% of apps not passing security tests by 2015) there is a clear need also to invest in capability to drive quality into the solution in all the less visible non functional issues and examining the solution continually from the user view point. This all adds upto a mobile application not being cheap.

Just to bring my point home, below are some screen shots from the Apple App Store taken very recently which reflect what happens and the impact you could end up with (and the feedback in a form that you’re unlikely to address). Not to mention Virgin is a pretty brand aware organisation, so we’d have thought they wouldn’t have got caught out by these challenges.

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What Ghandi said …

16 Tuesday Sep 2014

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According to Ruby Wax in here serious but humourous book Taming the Mind …

Gandhi said, ‘There is more to life than speed’. Unfortunately he didn’t tell us what, he just left us hanging while he pranced around in his nappy.

Wax, Ruby (2013-06-06). Sane New World: Taming the Mind (Kindle Locations 171-172). Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.

Next Generation SOA book – part of the Thomas Erl Series

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General

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I recently contributed to the prepublication review of the Next Generation SOA book. Aside from offering feedback, I also provided some praise for the book which has been published at servicetechbooks.com/nextgen and quoted below …

“This is the perfect book for anyone who wants to refresh, or get a handle on the foundations of SOA without delving into the deep technical details & implementation specifics. By working from the principles, the book shows how the SOA concepts and goals have matured, influenced and grown with technologies such as Master Data, Virtualization and Cloud. The book points to other volumes in the series for the depth of detail and technicalities, allowing you to get the broad picture view and without any vendor colouration.”

– Phil Wilkins, Enterprise Integration Architect

I would actively recommend the book to anyone who has an IT leadership role.

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Adopting Collaboration Tools in the Workplace

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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I was recently reading an article from MIT Sloan about the use of collaboration tools in the enterprise. The article made the point that collaboration tools are being introduced into the workplace, but not being effectively leveraged and people continuing to use email. I think there is a correlation here to some of the statistics for mobile and web applications.

So let me start with some facts, and some thoughts before I bring it back to the point about office collaboration.

We know from research from organisations such as PEW (general view of use, older generation view) that there is a correlation between age and use of mobile devices, and mobile apps. This I believe reflects on technology in general. As collaboration technology goes, it is a fairly young set of ideas. Although many will associate collaboration with social – there is a difference when social is more simply just sharing information. Collaboration is not just sharing but collectively working on assets such as documents.

Add to this a view of the demographics of any enterprise leadership (although IT is something of an exception) and you will see that leadership is an older generation (illustrated by this FT article). So, understandably less likely to lead an organisation into technology adoption.

Add to this the constant noise and increased pressure on information security, remembering that the most harmful security compromises originate internally. So with this sort of consideration you’re likely to see downward pressure to keep things tightly controlled. Such tight reigns seriously impact collaboration from my experience.

The last key thread, is the fastest way to encourage adoption of something is for the executive and senior leadership visibly adopt something. Organisational role comes with an inferred command (a well established piece of psychology) best illustrated by a story where a chief exec wanted to motivate staff, so spent time wondering around talking with his staff, and in doing so made observations and suggestions to people thinking he was helping. But as his role inferred a level of command, he sound discovered that those suggestions and ideas had been read as instructions and his staff where rapidly implementing such suggestions.

So here you have a recipe, where executives potentially don’t get the power of collaborative technology, potentially nervous of the security implications and least of all not using position to leverage it. You can see why the technologies aren’t being effectively exploited.

What is worse, is that you will see hotspots of collaboration which will be established by those who get the ideas and will inspire their colleagues. This is the true risk of collaboration as it is unlikely to controlled or properly secured with no contingency or remedial actions in the event of a security breach as those situations aren’t being dealt with by

Mastering Puppet Review

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

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Packt’s Mastering Puppet kicks off with substantial first chapter on how to setup Puppet in a manner that can then scale. The core of this is driven by an explanation of the constituent parts of a Puppet solution and where the workload is. In terms of execution this is as much about understanding the configuration of things like Apache, Passenger and Ningx as it is Puppet. As part of the explanation there are indicative numbers in terms of supportable scale which reflects the knowledge of the product.

Looking at configuration distribution for headless deployments with Git is a solid well considered piece and the writing suggests considers all the needs of a solid deployment of a production quality solution such as access control, whilst supporting collaborative working etc. it would be interesting to have seen how that would have stacked against capabilities such as Zookeeper.

As we move through the chapters the books continues with more advanced themes such as using Hiera as a object hierarchical framework for managing configuration and on into leveraging Puppet forge and various Git repositories (and the challenges when linking to git repositories of the latest code vs a release). With the repositories we can draw in additional tooling and how to incorporate these capabilities into a deployment. This includes looking at several modules that practical experience from the author would recommend.

By chapter 6 we’re into writing our own custom modules and facts and deploying them. So you can do things such as create modules to manage your custom solutions.

The next natural step is to look at the reporting aspects of Puppet, orchestration through marionette collective (mCollective). Obviously to report you need to gather the activity information, so the book touches on the out of the box (OOTB) approach and moves onto the idea of using IRC; presentation via Foreman and Puppet Dashboard. Finally then with a reporting view, the next step is to dynamically query the nodes in Puppet environment which uses mcollective to communicate back & forth with the nodes.

So now we have a dynamically configurable set of Nodes, which can report and have dynamic querying against the nodes.  Final chapters cover the use of things like PuppetDB, roles & profiles and developing and debugging your puppet environment.

Reading the book, I get the feeling that a fair grasp of Linux system administration would help (i.e. a bit more than the average developer). There are a few useful touches that I think could have been included, such as external references such as man pages for RPM or site for the Pulp tool mentioned. But, as criticisms go, this as much me being too lazy to Google. The only other refinement would be inclusion of some diagrams to support the words. As they say a picture can tell a 1000 words, even if this was to just show the hierarchy or directory structures involved.

Compared to the recently reviewed Puppet Reporting book, this book isn’t for someone starting out with Puppet (but the Packt site says as much). You atleast need to have got some basic understanding or practical exposure to Puppet,  and exposure to a development environment is an added bonus.  So if you’re setting out with Puppet you might consider starting with the Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide (Amazon) or Instant Puppet 3 Starter (Amazon).  Having got those under your belt, try this book to to really develop the use of Puppet configuration and deployment.  When it comes to reporting I’d look at this book along with reporting book (reviewed here).  This book feels like more options are on offer, but Puppet Reporting is a lot richer (but you’d expect that given the different book emphasis).

In summary – good solid book, full of practical experience and ideas.  But don’t try to use this as a jumpstart to Puppet.

Below are a few links I thought might be helpful as they aren’t in the book:

  • YAML – human readable serialization format
  • Pulp – software repository management app
  • Ruby – Open Source OO programming language
  • Foreman – tool capable of extending puppet to deliver PXE capabilities along with capabilities such as reporting
  • Splunk – BigData style analytics on log files etc
  • Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana (ELK) – set of tools to provide analytics against log files
  • ActiveMQ – Apache implementation of a JMS compliant messaging solution used my mcollective

Mastering Puppet at Amazon.