I came across an interview article by Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, with Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the book Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, which she co-authored.  It’s a recommended read for Enterprise Architects.

In the interview Jeanne Ross shares how Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Architects can help lead the way to successful business transformation.

Some key points from the interview:

“high performers in our sample of 102 companies, in fact, had greater architecture maturity.”

“there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.”

“One thing you can’t get by spending more money is discipline, and architecture is very tightly related to discipline.”

“companies who were best at adopting architecture and implementing it effectively had cost pressures.”  Cost pressures force a company to make tough decisions.

“companies are struggling more than we realized with using their platforms well.”

A message for Architects is you need to understand how effectively are people in your company adopt the capabilities and leverage them effectively?  “the value add of the architecture is diminished by the fact that people don’t get it.”  “It requires persistent coaching.”

“The best architects are listening very hard to who is asking for what kind of capability. When they see real demand and real leadership around certain enterprise capabilities, they focus their attention on addressing those, in the context of what they realize will be a bigger picture over time.”

Companies need to ensure their enterprise architecture does not constrain them but instead enables them.  Effective Enterprise Architects can usually see the big picture even when the overall vision is not yet clear.

“What ends up happening instead is architects recognize key business leaders who understand the need for, reused standardization, process discipline, whatever it is.”

She’ll be sharing more insights at The Open Group conference in San Diego later this month.

Between now and January 27th, HP labs has the initial phase of the 2012 Innovation Research Program (IRP).

HP Labs' Innovation Research Program (IRP) is designed to create opportunities at colleges, universities and research institutes around the world for collaborative research with HP. Through an annual, open Call for Proposals (CfP), HP labs solicits the best ideas on a range of targeted research topics with the goal of establishing new research collaborations. Proposals are reviewed by HP Labs scientists and selected to receive funding awards based on their alignment with the chosen research topic and expected impact of the proposed research.

Awards made through the IRP are primarily intended to provide financial support for a graduate student to assist the Principal Investigator in conducting a collaborative research project with HP Labs. Awards provide cash support for one year, typically in the range USD $50,000 - $75,000 inclusive of overheads, renewable up to a maximum of three years at HP's discretion.

A list of the HP Labs’ 2011 IRP awards made last year is publically available.

These collaborative efforts don’t stop there. Educators interested in HP’s Social Innovation in Education programs should visit HP Global Social Innovation for more information.

I was catching up on my email backlog, since I was on the road all this week and a story caught my eye: New Vending Machine Can Guess Your Age. This machine behaves differently based on the perceived age of the patron, in this case providing free samples to those it thinks deserve it.

I am not sure how successful this will be, but it is definitely an innovative approach to capturing attention of the consumer using sensing, mobile…

“Called iSample, Kraft’s vending machine dispenses free samples of trial products to their target audiences. A new pudding product, for instance, is targeted to adults. The machine determines the age of a customer, who then uses a smartphone with a custom code to get the sample.”

Back in May I mentioned some innovations that soft drink manufacturers are using to change the interaction with their customers.

Personal customization and sensing enabled custom interaction are all great examples of how consumer retail is enabling a more personalized experience but using standard, quality enforcing techniques that benefit both the consumer and the provider. We should see some great examples of these innovation expanding into other industries in 2012.

Building the killer app for the energy SmartGrid just got a little easier.  Tendril, an energy industry software company, announced an application developer web site and an “Internet and Smart Home App Contest” to encourage developers to use the Tendril Connect Platform.   The Tendril platform enables access to a wide variety of energy components – meters, smart electric outlets, appliances and future smart devices.

Open accesses to the energy SmartGrid is intriguing but are we ready for it and is there enough interest from the end consumer?

I for one would love to have more control over the individual electrical devices in my house, know which ones are the power hogs and when certain devices go on or off.  If you’re a do-it-yourself type person you can make your own monitor with Tweet-a-Watt.  If the washer/dryer would simply let me know when it’s finished a load by a means other than a barely audible beep I would be grateful.

Given that Google Power Meter and now Microsoft Hohm have both discontinued their energy monitoring services I can only speculate that the idea is just a bit ahead of its time.  But, it’s a time that’s coming fast.

Ed Kettler, HP Fellow, has a recent blog post about the SmartGrid and concerns about vulnerabilities of energy grid components which are now exposed to communications networks that could be accessed by almost anyone.  With the realities of open API’s to the SmartGrid platforms and components the concern is real.  Ed offers some advice and also reminds us that the electrical grid is not the only grid that is getting smarter.  All of the utilities and vital infrastructure components are of equal importance and therefore require appropriate security and risk management.

The Stuxnet virus that struck Iran's nuclear program served as a wakeup call for many utilities, but government and commercial entities of all types need to assess their vulnerabilities.

Research from University of New South Wales and Purdue promises to extend Moore’s law for a number of years further, allowing for more densely defined devices, the smallest wires ever developed in silicon have been shown to have the same current-carrying capability as copper wires.

Experiments and atom-by-atom supercomputer models of the wires have found that the wires maintain low resistance despite being more than 20 times thinner than the copper wires in microprocessors. The wires are only four atoms wide, so Ohm’s Law will Survive at the Atomic Scale.

This kind of research is important to business since it enables the ever increasing functionality at lower prices and power levels that we have come to expect.