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How to Create and Maintain the Magic of Technology
By Tracy Sharpe, DISA Corporate Communications

Robert Wiseman, the chief technology officer for Sabre Holdings Inc., spoke to the audience on how to build a successful, service-oriented business.

He began his presentation by relaying how he amazed his mother, an octogenarian, with the camera function of his BlackBerry® and how he could e-mail the photo to the drugstore and have it printed. She reacted as if his BlackBerry® was magic.

"We are creators of that magic; we are currently stewards of taking it to the next level," said Wiseman. "The decisions we make, those of our companies and organizations, will dictate and predict how successful the next generations will be in continuing to make that magic happen as we face a more competitive world."

Wiseman noted that the Internet is equally the most incredible thing and the most frightening thing to happen to civilization.

"It exposes data and content that was never built to be presented that way, and it allows volumes of transactions that we were never ready to accept," said Wiseman.

He elaborated on how his company is challenged by the rapidly-changing Internet. Because consumers expect fast performance, Wiseman and his company must ensure that information is provided 100 percent of the time, even though transaction rates are increasing and revenue is decreasing per transaction. As challenging as that scenario is, Wiseman claims it makes a stronger workforce at Sabre by meeting the customers' needs faster and cheaper year after year.

However, in the midst of keeping ahead of the competition, the underlying technology must be maintained and, more importantly, improved.

"I've tried to simplify technology because it is over-complicated — it's unnecessarily complicated," said Wiseman. "The more we, as companies of this world, continue to support and propagate unnecessary complexity, the less chance we have to divert resources that are figuring out the complexity and work on the evolution of this technology."

He advised DoD and industry partners to focus on their differentiators and then figure out how to share so that they can benefit from collaboration.

"Why do we propagate the complexity within our divisions? Why don't we share more?"

With sharing comes a focus on improving the technology. Wiseman strongly advised commoditizing technology.

"Commoditization of technology forces vendors to compete on things that matter to us, which are service and price," he said.

He also suggested pursuing open source software. "It allows you visibility into the code," he said, adding that the ability to work with the code frees the user to repair any bugs left in the software and not have to wait for the vendor to help.

And although no one gets fired for having too much capacity, said Wiseman, he advised careful acquisition of capacity. He explained that it is more cost-efficient to keep a majority of servers at 85-percent or 89-percent capacity. When a server reaches 90-percent capacity, another server is provisioned automatically.

In addition to maintaining maximum capacity on the servers, Wiseman also strongly advocated standardizing technology. He told the audience to rapidly select the IT solution and move on, not to dwell on choosing from several different technologies.

But users must realize that whatever technology they purchase won't be the right technology in 10 years.

"We have to abstract ourselves from technology and resist temptations to take advantage of some of the proprietary capabilities of application server underlying technology, knowing that this technology will be gone in a few years. We need to make it as easy as possible to move from it."

Corporations and agencies should actively pursue the latest developments and prepare to easily escape from outdated technology by practicing vendor agnosticism.

"Remain as vendor agnostic as possible," said Wiseman, advising the audience to not remain too attached to any supplier but to remain flexible and available for change.

"The way to force vender competition is to prove that you have an executable exit strategy. If they can't give you the right technology at the right price, you can move."

Another important aspect of designing and acquiring systems is to design for failure, Wiseman advised.

"Everything we build and deploy will fail; it's not a case of if it fails, it's when it fails. What are we going to do when it fails?" he said. If a company plans for what to do when something fails, it allows them to limp along but not completely fail.

Wiseman concluded his presentation by reiterating the need to standardize to be able to provide customers with fast, comprehensive service.

"As leaders of this industry …we have to make these changes. We have to get all of our systems on standard commodity sharable hardware across everywhere that we work and everywhere that we visit because otherwise we are going to lose and we are going to pay that price."

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