Category: Case Studies
November 20th, 2009
Panel: do cloud computing economic advantages break down in enterprises?
The purpose of information technology is “to provide compute and storage. That’s it. full stop. That compute and storage can be provided by mainframes, private data centers, distributed networks, or by the cloud.”
- Allan Leinwand, venture capitalist
At this week’s Interop conference in New York, I heard a great panel discussion, moderated by AT&T’s Joe Weinman, on the economics of cloud computing. Weinman was joined by Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, Allan Leinwand of Panorama Capital (which invests in cloud vendors), Andy Rhodes of Dell, Harris Tilevitz of Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, and William Forrest of McKinsey & Co., author of the last spring’s watershed report on “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing.”
A public cloud provider, private cloud operator, consultant, network provider, and venture capitalist debate cloud’s business value
McKinsey’s Forrest, for one, stated that while his research “found significant amounts of workloads today could be moved to public cloud providers,” it still “wouldn’t make economic sense to move large chunks of data centers to the cloud.”
Nevertheless, he predicts, “there will be a continued move to the cloud, as there are increasingly attractive economics over people building their own data centers.” He says that these economics keep getting better because “the public cloud guys have built a better box, they buy in volume, and operate more efficiently than most enterprises.”
“The idea that you buy an individual server, that is going away. You either buy racks of servers or go to the cloud.”
Amazon’s Selipsky, needless to say, was bullish on the cloud computing paradigm. He noted that in a government CIO rountable last week, Vicek Kundra, the US CIO, “certified that 45% of all government IT could run on public clouds.”
Selipsky went on to say that cloud computing is suitable for both large and small enterprises. “For start-ups, its a total no-brainer. We also have a lot of big enterprises using our services.” He foresees many enterprises moving to a hybrid cloud environment in the coming years. And, he noted that cloud providers also bring another advantage beyond cost savings: “The biggest benefit of the cloud is that is it enables focus. You can take the intellectual capital of your staff and focus on your business — not IT.”
VC Leinwand, however, says he still sees a “huge gap” between cloud services offered and the ability to effectively manage them in an enterprise environment. “Cloud storage costs one-tenth of onsite data storage,” he points out. But what about configuration, integration, data deduplication, and monitoring? There’s a gap between what the enterprise is used to doing behind the firewall and what cloud providers can do.” He added that he is seeking to fund companies that can help close that gap.
AT&T’s Weinman, for his part, raised doubts about the sustainability of cloud computing economics, which may break down as enterprise management requirements come into play. “I’m not sure there are any unit-cost advantages that are sustainable among large enterprises,” he said. A more likely scenario that will be seen is hybrid adoption of cloud computing in some areas, and private capabilities for others where it makes business sense.
Another option is private clouds, and Skadden’s Tilevitz reports great success at his global law firm of 2,000 partners. Originally, the initiative started after September 11, 2001, as a way to ensure business continuity by operating three regional data centers. Now, built on a Citrix environment, the virtualized environment has evolved into an internal cloud of sorts, from which the firm’s various office access online services. For example, he related, a partner may need to load five million pages of documentation into an online format overnight. “We have more than a petabyte of image data that we keep for seemingly forever that we use for litigation,” he said.
Economies of scale have also kicked in as well. “Our expenses for this private cloud have dropped over time,” Tilevitz said. “I see it as almost a reversion back to the mainframe world. Everyone is now using applications and data remotely.” Tilevitz also said his firm is looking at becoming a “public” cloud provider of sorts as well, selling excess disk capacity online.
November 18th, 2009
No SOAP for this Navy
This is the third of three installments of my discussion with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives. In the first post, Munson and Jennis described the business case for SOA within the Coast Guard. In the second post, they discussed how they built organizational support.
Coast Guard opts for ‘lightweight’ services; now tackling governance and security issues
The US Coast Guard prefers more lightweight services for its maritime and inventory tracking systems. “We are very REST oriented,” Munson explains. “We like the REST model very much. So where applicable, we have leveraged it in a significant way to develop our service oriented architecture. Internally, Munson points out, the prevailing standard is POX, or Plain Old XML for message exchange. “We do not subscribe to the extra wrappers and envelopes and overhead that’s required to serve out SOAP-based services.”
“What we have found within the Coast Guard is that the Web services model, particularly the traditional RPC-style Web services, are not suitable for implementation in the Coast Guard’s architecture,” he explains. “Our architecture is fundamentally message based. Where we do implement Web services interfaces, they’re all document-driven Web services for external users, where those kinds of interfaces are required.”
Munson and Jennis are also seeing some reusability in its SOA-aware services, particularly for lower-level services. However, Munson cautions, “we certainly don’t want to oversell that yet.”
That’s because the SOA team is still wrestling with the technical aspects of service governance. “The issue around SOA governance is still a challenge for us as it is with any organization,” he explains. “We have not implemented, for example, any formal service registry or automated service discovery. Were continuing to look at how we want to do that.”
The issue with registry and repository solutions on the market, he says, is that they are oriented toward the traditional SOAP-based Web services. “Most of them are still tailored to the Web services approach,” he says. “Many of them don’t have good answers for non-WS-* type of registration.”
Data security is another challenge for the Coast Guard’s SOA team, and this is holding back the ability to offer services to port partners and other outside parties. “One of the challenges in an enterprise service bus, and an SOA architecture in and of itself doesn’t solve this, are all the security challenges surrounding data services, particularly once you get outside of your organization,” Munson says. Internally, within the Coast Guard organization, the security around services is pretty straightforward. But starting with sharing with external partners at any level, security rapidly becomes a challenge for us. Like other folks, were still looking at how to crack that nut, and we still don’t have a silver bullet for that yet.”
The Coast Guard soon intends to make some services available to other federal agencies and its port partners. For example, the Coast Guard is participating in an inter-agency program called Watchkeeper, in which data is provided as part of a homeland security system. “We have probably a dozen or more services that are in testing that will be deployed as part of that system,” Munson says.
Additional services being piloted — and still in development — will feed data to and from WatchKeeper to other Coast Guard systems, such as MISLE, MAGNet, MASI and others, Munson adds. Additional services leveraging the Coast Guard’s ESB and SOA include systems for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surrounding Right Whale speed enforcement zones, as well as a system for monitoring and tracking Self-Locating Data Marker Buoys (SLDMB) for Search and Rescue.
The Coast Guard is making substantial progress with its SOA effort, and Jennis and Munson credit this to the close coordination between their teams and the Coast Guard management. “If you define what SOA means for your organization, and go forward with that, you’ll get SOA right,” Jennis advises. “In our case, we’re very much tied to the Coast Guard’s mission, and the doctrine of the Coast Guard. But if you go with a lot of the buzzwords, and you don’t have a clearly defined meaning for what your SOA will look like, you’ll get in great trouble in a hurry.”
November 17th, 2009
SOA promotes a sea change for the US Coast Guard
This is the second of three installments of my discussion with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives. In the first post, Munson and Jennis described the business case for SOA within the Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard dipped its toes cautiously into the SOA waters
The Coast Guard’s SOA initiatives had top-level support early on from the upper echelons of management. “We’d been challenged by our new commandant, Admiral [Thad] Allen, to become a department leader in SOA, and the department was taking a hard look at that time on where they wanted to go with their SOA roadmap,” Munson explains. “So it was just an opportune moment for us to dive into this, and see if there was any technologies that made sense, and that we could leverage. So we’ve taken a very deliberate, very measured approach to this, and started with a lot of small pilot projects, to validate, not only the technologies, but the architectural concepts that we’re trying to support with them.”
Even with strong organizational support, the Coast Guard’s SOA team approached the effort from the ground up, starting with smaller pilot projects. The approach was “build a little, test a little,” Jennis says. “We took a very measured and deliberate approach to SOA – no ‘big-bang’ projects. Everything was carefully architected and focused at the business architecture, the mission support of the Coast Guard first and foremost. And the technology implementations were validated and tested against that architecture in business-focused pilots. That is key to our success so far – being able to take things slow, validate the architecture, focus on the business, and make sure got it right before we started rolling this stuff out in production.”
Since the Coast Guard’s IT budget is small and highly fragmented across functional areas, the team did not have a big budget in which to engage its SOA effort, Jennis and Munson say. But the effort has delivered results well beyond the relatively lean expenditures made for the program. For example, the Coast Guard now can quickly pull up real-time data on ships that are entering US waters.
“We can also support maritime domain awareness by fusing data from multiple different data sources,” Munson adds. “We have, for example, requirements from homeland security for ship-arrival notifications 96 hours before a vessel enters a US port. That data can be fused with a long-range tracking system that identifies whether vessels are really going where they say they are going. Its tremendous value to promoting homeland security.”
The Coast Guard has also employed SOA to better track and manage its spare parts inventory – potentially saving the service tens of millions of dollars. “We developed what we call an ‘authoritative parts service’ that was able to identify and accurately catalog the value of the Coast Guard’s spare parts inventory,” Munson says. “We identified in that category more than $60 million worth of incorrect Coast Guard inventory evaluation. Measuring that against the federal cost of funds index – which is like interest on your money – it saved the Coast Guard $60 million, times the value of the federal cost of funds.”
Next post: By necessity, a RESTful approach — and unresolved issues.
November 16th, 2009
SOA helps Coast Guard navigate new tides of homeland security
Did you know the movement of any ship headed toward US waters is tracked by an SOA-aware service running on the US Coast Guard’s systems? And that SOA services are being employed to provide data to an international registry of maritime activity? And there is also an SOA service keeping track of the all the spare parts, equipment, and other assets the Coast Guard maintains? 
The Coast Guard already has close to 25 services that are either already or about to go into production as part of its growing SOA initiative – and more are planned. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives.
The Coast Guard – part of the US Department of Homeland Security – started looking at SOA in early 2007, as a way to address growing requirements to be able to share information not only across its own various units, but with federal, local and international agencies concerned with keeping an eye on vessels entering and leaving US shores. “We had the same conundrum of silos of excellence that many IT organizations have – IT systems tailored in stovepipes within lines of business,” says Munson.
Prior to its SOA implementation, the Coast Guard relied on slower and more manual methods of data sharing with its port partners. “It would either be some form of composed file that would be potentially handed over, or many times, a hard-copy printout or phone call,” Munson relates. In addition, sharing data with its fast-moving cutter fleet was also a challenge. “The cutters get underway and go where they’re needed, so we have fairly low-bandwidth connectivity to these kinds of assets at best,” Munson says. “So were also looking at not only data sharing, but also if there’s a better way with emerging technology to help address some of the problems of being able to use our systems with deployed assets.”
To address these requirements, the Coast Guard implemented an enterprise service bus-centered SOA that enabled asynchronous messaging from Fiorano Software Technologies. The solution was employed in the Coast Guard’s Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) system, which at any given time, is tracking up to 6,000 vessels moving toward or in US waters as well as vessels anywhere else in the world. LRIT tracks signals emitted from vessels every six hours. “That information is running entirely on the Coast Guard’s SOA framework in production,” says Munson. As a result, the Coast Guard SOA requires extremely high-volume services, “processing thousands of messages per second.”
A second system, the Nationwide Automated Identification System (NAIS), relies on a second transponder on ships exceeding 300,000 gross tons, broadcasting navigational information for ships of 300 gross tons or more at three-second intervals. These broadcasts from US territorial waters result in about 2,000 messages per second received in the NAIS system. The Coast Guard is currently protoyping various data services around this system for maritime domain awareness, Munson says.
This is the first of a three-part series. Next post: How the Coast Guard built organizational support for SOA.
November 12th, 2009
US defense department IT managers describe latest assault on complex and siloed IT systems
A vexing issue that comes along with service orientation is figuring out who will fund the services being shared across the enterprise. Things get even more interesting in really large organizations with lots of multiple business lines. So you can imagine the complexity of service funding in something as large and complicated as, say, the US Department of Defense.
Funding, establishing user dialog, federation, quicker turnarounds are latest challenges for DoD
Speaking a a recent roundtable on government SOA implementations, Dan Risacher, staff member with the CIO’s office at the Department of Defense (DoD), says DoD is bullish on SOA, and is undertaking serious efforts to service orient its multiple systems. However, one of the greatest challenges is deciding how various services get funded, Risacher says. “In the defense department, we have a tiered structure — very high-level DoD and military departments underneath that. One of the particular challenges with SOA within an enterprise environment, whether that be a federal agency or business, you have different business units each providing their own services. Often the chargeback and the incentive models are the greatest difficulties. We’re struggling with that.”
The roundtable, hosted by Dave Chesebrough, president of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), also included Matthew Swartz, branch head of Enterprise Initiatives for the US Navy, and Mike Darretta, JBoss solutions architect for Red Hat, and covered issues such as funding, integration, and paybacks.
Risacher said DoD formulated and published its SOA strategy in May 2007. The goals of the effort are to “get people to provide services on the network, make sure that those services are visible, accessible and understandable to other users, incentivize people to use them, improvise and use them, and figure out how to manage them from a network operations standpoint as well as a governance standpoint.”
There is a centrally funded model for SOA-based services that exists within the intelligence community, but Risacher says it may be a difficult model for DoD to follow. “The problem is lots of people use a service, and that makes the cost go up — but doesn’t provide any additional resources and revenues to the organization providing that service.”
Overall, however, a service-oriented approach is helping DoD speed up the application development and deployment process, and better target functionality where it is needed. “We have a concept we call ‘communities of interest,’ in which we get groups of related users together who need those capabilities to actually help define what do the services need to be,” Risacher says. “We don’t want to have to wait and figure out in great detail what those services are before we start providing them. But having that dialog enables us to provide services that are actually responsive to what people need.”
The US Navy is also taking an enterprise view of its information technology, according to Matt Swartz. The availability of the Navy Enterprise Portal, along with the Navy Enterprise Information System (NEIS) is seen as a key “initial tactical step towards enabling SOA-type services or the ability for our users in the Navy to access enterprise services.” The various systems and portals are being integrated and federated through an enterprise service bus, he says. “We see this as one day potentially being an enterprise service bus for other capabilities or enterprise SOA services across the Navy, and ultimately connect and federate with other DoD services” he adds.
These capabilities are now delivered via two platforms — Oracle Fusion middleware for NEIS and Microsoft SharePoint for the portal, Swartz elaborates. “We belive that the portal environment will allow us to bring distributed applications together, and also enable information sharing that not currently available to the sailor or the warfighter in these distributed environments.”
For the defense department, SOA has been an incremental journey, versus a huge sweep of its technology landscape, says Risacher. “We’re focusing on things that are scalable, cost effective. How do I do things in a spiral kind of capability… where I’m fielding new capabilities as I go along — rather than trying to take a big-bang waterfall type of approach, trying to figure it out all up front in the requirements phase.”
There is enormous cost-savings potential as well, especially from an integration standpoint, he added. “For large DoD systems, we often find that each connection costs $1 million a year to maintain – that’s not an exaggeration. When I have to go out pay one big defense integrator and some other second defense integrator to make their systems talk to each other — and inevitably something changes either in the interconnect or the data standards change — it ends up being very expensive to have a whole lot of those links. So I’m trying to get that down to where we have a much smaller set of interfaces, rather than a very large set of interconnections.”
The name of the game is faster turnaround of IT capabilities, Risacher continued. “We’re trying to influence acquisition strategy needs to focus on smaller and shorter deliverables, so we can task as we learn, reduce risks, and get those capabilities out faster. We’re focusing on standards and open architecture, and how to share some IT resources. It’s a big, difficult shift for an organization as large as defense department.”
It’s interesting to see how a large, complex organization such as DoD is wrestling with many the same issues — and sees the same kinds of opportunities as smaller, commercial organizations. As DoD and other federal agencies work through some of the issues around service orientation — such as governance, funding, federation, and security — there will be some best practices emerging for private businesses as well.
September 23rd, 2009
Cisco practices what it preaches, crosses boundaries with SOA
Cisco Systems apparently is doing a great job of practicing what it preaches when it comes to doing business over the network. The network systems provider — which promotes SOA and SONA (service oriented network architecture) — recently launched a “Commerce Transformation” initiative, based on SOA principles, that enabled the company to create a solid architectural and technology foundation for both existing and future application development. And the company is getting measurable results.
Cisco more than tripled transactions to $4 billion in a year via its SOA-based partner application
The initiative netted Cisco top honors as the most compelling case study for 2009, as determined in a competition held by the SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine. Brenda Michelson, a colleague over at ebizQ and a judge for the case study competition, provides a detailed description of the Cisco Systems SOA program.
The first project, the Partner Deal Registration (PDR) application, provided outside partners secure access to “Cisco pricing concessions and programs, leveraging reusable enterprise-class business services such as corporate pricing, configuration, and partner profiles that were coupled with flexible business rules for price lists, contractual discounts, and promotions, among others.”
Part of the challenge was bringing together more than 400 diverse applications based on various acquisitions, Brenda relates. “Consequently, several core business processes such as product ordering and pricing were becoming inconsistent, monolithic, complex, and inflexible to change. A lack of comprehensive end-to-end monitoring was also a concern.”
Benefits seen as a result of the program included improved process agility, productivity, detail tracking, and growth in the number of partners, deals, and bookings. “Six months after initial project rollout, the system had more than 9,000 partner users worldwide and had processed 37,000 deals worth $1.2 billion. Nearly a year later in June 2009, there were close to 20,000 partner users, and 56,000 deals worth $3.92 billion net had been processed.”
Cisco had a very comprehensive governance structure for its SOA, led by cross-functional councils comprising business and IT leaders were tasked with the planning and execution of an integrated capabilities roadmap, Brenda relates. Once the roadmap was finalized, an SOA project team consisting of an enterprise architecture team, business architects and IT architects evaluated the use of SOA. The EA team, which also acted as an SOA center of excellence, built a framework for the identification, creation, reuse, governance and monitoring of services and composite applications.
Brenda outlined some of the lessons learned. Some are well-accepted operating procedures across the industry, such as SOA governance, being about the business versus technology, and employing both a top-down and bottom-up approach becoming essential. Interestingly, one of the lessons is that business process management (BPM) needs to be part of the SOA equation. Also, the Cisco folks point out, “when you are a large company, most of the benefits will come from volume, so target simple things (services) with high volume.”
August 25th, 2009
Study: unified communications doesn't deliver -- yet
It would seem that converting technology that has existed as proprietary, embedded-code hardware-driven solutions to service-oriented software would be very productive.
Needed: baselines to measure UC gains
However, unified communications (UC) approaches still have yet to prove their ROI mettle, a new Forrester Research study claims. As reported by Tim Greene in Network World, half the world is not convinced of the efficacy of UC. Forrester’s Henry Dewing is quoted as observing that half the companies he spoke with don’t yet see the business value in UC. “When you talk to end users, they want a 12-month return and a triple-digit ROI,” he says.
For many businesses, the challenge is determining a baseline of costs before UC is implemented, Dewing says. UC brings various communications methods — including IP telephony, instant messaging, email, and voice mail — into more integrated settings running on standard IT systems. Benefits include measurable, quantifiable metrics such as cutting down on business travel (in favor of teleconferencing) and enabling the decentralization of call centers.
However, there are many soft benefits such as cutting down wait times and increased end user productivity. Good stuff, but notoriously difficult to measure. Perhaps we will start seeing more cloud-based UC services that will add incremental pricing into the equation.
August 4th, 2009
Surgical decisions: How to change business executives' minds about information technology
Let’s face it, without IT, there’s no business. But, IT has always been viewed by business executives as a cost center, versus a strategic asset. A relatively new work published by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross puts forth some ideas how to turn this thinking around.
In IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain, Weill and Ross say forward-looking businesses are transforming themselves with technology. They are building a “platform of digitized processes,” which are integrated environments, often anchored by an ERP or CRM system.
The core of success through IT apparently rests on competing on analytics, in which data from all parts of the organization is brought in and presented, via dashboards and the like, as insightful information to decision-makers.
Weill and Ross cite the following corporate success stories:
Aetna: “Aetna… uses the data generated from its core transactions to empower decision makers…” The authors report that Aetna was on the brink of failure in 2002, but employed savvy IT to turn itself around within five years. The company employed an executive information system to employ data to drive decisions. “Firmwide delivery of transparent and consistent performance data gave them an opportinity to train the company how to think about problems… Armed with useful data, Aetna’s senior managers started making what one observer called ’surgical decisions’ on prices in their proposals to institutional customers. The executive information management system was just the first step in using IT to make Aetna’s people smarter and more productive… Aetna started providing customers online access to medical advice and information about their accounts and history. These efforts have transformed Aetna into a highly respected and profitable health care company.”
7-Eleven Japan (SEJ): “SEJ uses IT to empower its people — all its people — with information…. Every salesclerk at SEJ has access to a handheld device for ordering stock… a constant flow of graphical data, showing recent sales, weather conditions, and product range information…”
United Parcel Service: “UPS equips its drivers with a DIAD (delivery information acqusiion device), which captures a customer signature and uploads data on each delivery to the company’s package information database. UPS analyzes this data to better understand the profitability of individual customers and packages, which leads to improved routing and pricing decisions.”
The ability to quickly access enterprise information made a difference to these companies, and illustrate the power of valid, actionable information to work smarter and faster. These success stories didn’t happen overnight, of course — there was plenty of sweating to achieve back-end integration, develop enterprise data models, and get business units on board. It takes visionaries both within IT and in the business to make this all work.
July 27th, 2009
The value of enterprise architecture in tough times: report from Open Group (2)
Is enterprise architecture the right strategy for tough economic times, or should organizations throw away the deliberative long-term planning to fight more immediate fires?
Here are more dispatches from John Meyer of The Open Group, reporting on the group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, held last week in Toronto. Highlights from day two are summarized below. Day one is summarized in my previous post.
David Foote, founder and CEO of Foote Partners, LLC, said two diverging opinions dominate the discussion about the value of enterprise architects in an economic recession. One says architects are poorly suited to emergency situations where return on investment hurdles are primary directives, and another opinion argues that continued investment in architecture skills is critical during chaotic cycles. This session examined these positions and the current state of the architecture profession, drawing from Foote Partners rigorous proprietary trends research involving more than 1,900 US and Canadian employers, plus salary and skills/certifications pay benchmark surveys covering 87,000 IT professionals.
According to Foote’s study, those architecture skills that have shown the most demand based on compensation growth over the last year include project management, business process management, infrastructure architecture, business analysis, and ITIL. Read the rest of this entry »
July 23rd, 2009
Enterprise architecture heads north: report from Open Group
John Meyer of The Open Group sent some detailed dispatches from the group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, being held this week in Toronto. Thanks to John for a great job summarizing many of the key insights coming from the conference — some highlights from day one are summarized below:
Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, kicked off the conference with a keynote address about his organization’s use of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). Brown began his presentation with an overview of the key business drivers for embracing TOGAF, and the unique challenges experienced along the way by small organizations that lack the resources to hire an enterprise architect or purchase the standard implementation tools. In addition, Brown illustrated how The Open Group has incorporated the Operating Model from the book, “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” and how they also used OMG’s UML.
Following Brown’s keynote, Alain Perry, Treasury Board Secretariat, Chief Information Officer Branch for the Canadaian government, delivered a presentation on the collaborative nature of the Canadian Government’s EA program, which spans 130 different agencies and 350,000 people. Perry provided a comprehensive overview of the Canadian Government’s Reference Model for enterprise architecture, which he and his team are building as the basis for EA throughout the entire country. Read the rest of this entry »
May 8th, 2009
'SOA is Dead' debate lives on and on
I didn’t see the brilliant analyst Anne Thomas Manes at either of this week’s IBM IMPACT or Software AG’s SOA Summit events, but boy, was she there in spirit. The topic still on everybody’s minds and lips at both events was Anne’s pronouncement at the beginning of the year that “SOA is Dead; Long Live Services.”
While the preamble of the title, “SOA is Dead,” grabbed a lot of headlines and generated huge discussion, it’s the second part that often got lost in the shuffle. But some commentators did pick up on what Anne meant; that businesses need to get busy focusing on delivering services that fix a problem or deliver more value; and not get caught up in the idea of having some kind of an “SOA project.”
Anne’s blockbuster statement was also a part of a panel discussion I had the opportunity to moderate at the just-concluded Software AG’s SOA Summit 2009 in Phoenix. The panelists — which included Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink, Bjorn Brauel of Software AG, Susan Cramm of ValueDance, Kevin Flowers of Coca-Cola, Miko Matsumura of Software AG, and John Rymer of Forrester — engaged in a rousing discussion of what the next phase is for SOA, and how to sell the concept to management and the organization. The panel brought together many of the day’s speakers for a wrap-up session with the audience.
In his presentation kicking off the summit, John Rymer said that Forrester’s surveys show plenty of strength in SOA adoption plans — for example, 27% of the largest enterprises currently have SOA in place, and 33% are committed to moving in this direction. SOA principles themselves did not die, but rather, “SOA died a marketing death,” meaning that the approach has become so vital and basic to enterprises and as a part of packaged applications that marketers have moved onto the next big thing. “When a technology becomes vital, it dies in a marketing sense,” he explained. “It’s time for SOA to ‘die’ since it’s not distinguishable anymore since everybody’s using it.”
By the way, John had a very amusing adaptation from Anne’s original “asteroid” graphic (seen here), in which the asteroid (economy) was seen bearing down on SOA (the dinosaur). In John’s slide, the asteroid represented SOA, bearing down on the dinosaur representing “IT inefficiencies.”
A lot of the speakers talked about moving into “Phase 2″ of SOA, which moves the methodology from technical projects to that of business transformation enabler. This is the phase when business value is being recognized and documented. This is also a time when SOA proponents need to step up and show the value of these approaches to the business.
In his keynote, Miko Matsumura, chief strategist for Software AG, said the time has come to ’step out of your silo,” as SOA is providing many companies a way out from the complexity that has built up over the years. Along with complexity, he adds, “on top of every silo is a tribe.”
Kevin Flowers, director of enabling enterprises for Coca-Cola Enterprises, described his SOA journey, which began with the service-enablement of merchandisers through mobile technologies. Previously, merchandisers — who work out in the field, visiting stores — keep in touch via an 800 call-in number and paperwork forms. Kevin’s team set out to provide Blackberries with links to all merchandising services, and in the process save tens of millions of dollars in phone charges and travel expenses.
Interestingly, corporate management wanted to pull the plug on the project, but Kevin’s team believed in the project so much they just plowed ahead with it. Now, he says, the effort is delivering so well and efficiently that the sales organization is demanding that they get the same kind of solution as well.
Organizational resistance is perhaps the biggest roadblock to service orientation, so it was also neat to see that an organizational leadership coach was brought into the program to show how SOA proponents can take a leadership role in move things forward. Susan Cram, a leadership coach with ValueDance and author of the “Have IT Your Way” blog, outlined the four ways to promote SOA adoption in enterprises, even when there is resistance:
- Make SOA the default way to build and offer services.
- Find the opinion leaders in organizations — especially those resisting SOA efforts — and spend more time working with and influencing these individuals. “People are pack animals and want to fit in,” she says.
- Employ scarcity. People place higher value on things that are scarce. Make SOA-based services a premium offering that not every department can simply sign up for.
- Monetary incentive. Cramm says penalties for non-use of SOA may go a lot further than attempting to reward SOA adoption.
April 29th, 2009
Top off SOA with enterprise mashups
Here’s an example that illustrates the connection between SOA and cloud, and how this can be facilitated:
Mashups — any way the customer wants them
Mike Kavis reports that he is involved in a cloud computing startup, and a challenge was to develop output medium for his company’s services. As Mike put it, he would rather spend his time adding new business services that contribute to his company’s bottom line than fussing with the ways customers and partners want to consume his company’s data services — whether they be RSS feeds, gadgets, SMS messages, Web pages, Facebook applications, or portals.
Mike found the solution in enterprise mashups, which provide partners and customers the flexibility to access his company’s products and services “in ways that are convenient for them without having to wait on my IT shop to decide if (a) we think the request is important enough in our priority list, (b) if we have the time and resources to work on it, and (c) how much we will charge them.”
He adds that with SOA governance and best practices applied on his end at the architectural level, “we can be assured that whatever mashups our customers and partners create, they will be subject to the same security and governance as the services we have developed.” In the enterprise mashup layer, data services are exposed for customers to consume.
The result, Mike says: “I can now present various data services in a secured and governed fashion to my customers and partners without being concerned on how they want to consume it… this is the Icing on your SOA cake.”
Enterprise mashups represent the latest approach to buiding composite applications that are the centerprise of many SOA efforts — and make SOA real to business users. Mike encourages organizations to add an Enterprise Mashup Platform on top of their SOA stack. “This is the ultimate flexibility and agility that SOA promises.”
April 15th, 2009
Moving SOA beyond 'service oriented integration'
“All this money is going into ESBs and Web services, and they get a dozen or two integration projects going, but are they getting any business value out of that? I don’t see it.”
-Anne Thomas Manes, quoted in SearchCIO
There’s been a simmering debate going on out there about the ultimate purpose of SOA — is it for integration, or for a “higher” purpose? Loraine Lawson has been tracking the argument back and forth. She calls out Anne Thomas Manes’ and Todd Biske’s remarks that SOI, or service oriented integration, serves a more limited purpose than SOA.
To quote Todd’s definition of SOI:
SOI, service-oriented integration, is probably best stated as WSOI — Web Services-Oriented Integration. It’s simply the act of taking the same integration points that arise in a project and using Web services or some other XML over HTTP approach to integrate the systems. Could this constitute a service-oriented application architecture? Absolutely, but in my mind, there is at best incremental benefits in this approach versus some other integration technology.
A new article by Christina Torode lends credence to the higher-purpose side of SOA, noting that spending millions of dollars on SOA simply to achieve application integration is overkill. Rather, SOA efforts should be linked to wider-reaching business process management (BPM) initiatives.
Torode provides some examples of SOA as business transformation enabler:
- A marketing company employed SOA practices to overhaul 20-year-old, siloed business processes it used to produce printable coupons for retail customers. However, the IT department, which feared being outsourced, resisted the change. By bringing all units of the business together, and helping all parties recognize that they could employ SOA to help eliminate redundant processes and cut operational costs here by 50%, “the business started to own SOA.”
- At a telecommunications company, SOA played a key role in a reorganization that reduced product turnaround times. The CIO regrouped the staff to reflect business processes rather than business units. “The SOA portion, including the staff reorganization, has allowed IT to develop generic, reusable services that are fine-tuned to fit a business unit’s request, versus building a new service from scratch every time a business unit wants to launch a new product.”
January 22nd, 2009
SOA repositories pave the way for financial mergers
We’ve been speculating that SOA and integration proponents would be kept very busy with all the shotgun weddings and all other manner of turmoil going on within the financial services sector. ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner has just released a discussion with Harry Karr and Hemesh Yadav, IT architects at Wachovia, who talk about integration challenges as their organization gets absorbed into Wells Fargo.
Dana observed that “managing and consolidating data from various systems of record may create multiple information systems that may ‘disagree’ about the same piece of information. Using SOA and repositories effectively, however, can pave the way for harmonious data integration and service mappings across these critical systems. Getting your systems-of-record act together in conjunction with enterprise repository solutions provides more flexibility for change and disruptions — challenges not unheard of in today’s tough economy.”
Yadav explained how an enterprise service repository can very effectively pave the path of integration. “If you don’t have a common place to store and keep the information in very organized way, if you don’t have a single repository and you don’t have a good taxonomy to classify those services, even though you have a single enterprise solution, it doesn’t really make you very productive…. if you build an enterprise repository and implement a single enterprise metamodel, it will be very easy to classify, store, access, and understand data.”
January 15th, 2009
Eighty-five paths to SOA success
Prentice Hall just announced the release of Thomas Erl’s latest work, SOA Design Patterns, the industry’s first-ever catalog of design patterns for SOA and Service Orientation. Adoption of these proven patterns should help in addressing the quality and capabilities of SOA efforts.
I had the pleasure of participating in the formal launch of the book at the SOA Symposium in October with Thomas, and am in the process of conducting a series of podcasts interviewing Thomas and co-authors including Clemens Utschig, Mark Little, Thomas Rischbeck. and Herbjörn Wilhelmsen. (The first introductory podcasts with Thomas Erl are posted.)
The 85 patterns identified in the book include Canonical Schema Bus, Composition Design Patterns, Enterprise Service Bus, Inventory Design Patterns, Policy Enforcement, Reliable Messaging, Service Design Patterns, Service Grid, Three-Layer Inventory, and Transformation.
Thomas and his colleagues have been working on identifying and sculpting SOA patterns since 2004. If we’re going to do SOA, we need to do it right, and borrow heavily from best practices identified and laid out by industry practitioners. The ability to develop services that can seamlessly integrate with each other will save a lot of resources and time. In addition, following design patterns help alleviate pressure to align services with business processes.
The patterns currently published were also well vetted and tested as part of a multi-year community participation and review process. There are also a number of candidate patterns working their way through the review process, including REST-related patterns. Members of the SOA and patterns communities are welcome to contribute, review, and use the content on this site and can submit their own candidate patterns.
December 29th, 2008
Ten examples of SOA at work, circa 2008
What has changed about SOA over the past year? Well, many companies have finally moved on beyond the experimentation and pilot stages. As Judith Hurwitz would put it, there are a lot more SOA implementations now than ever before. In writing the next release of her team’s book, SOA for Dummies, Judith observed they were able to document 24 live examples across nine verticals. Just two years ago, for the first edition, most people were still trying to grasp what SOA meant.
In that spirit, here are some stellar examples of where and how SOA made a difference for some companies in 2008. These stories are culled from my “SOA in Action” site over at ebizQ, where I document working examples of service oriented architecture.
To modernize ’special’ applications with limited reuse potential. Allstate Insurance moved to SOA to standardize a generation of “special” systems it had built over the decades. Anthony Abbatista, Allstate’s vice president of technical solutions said the company managed to automate most of its systems and processes in the 1960s and 1970s with hand-crafted and hand-coded “special applications.” Everything from policy administration to underwriting was captured on the company’s array of mainframe computers. However, the company needed to embark on a more consolidated, service oriented architecture if its systems were to continue to deliver value. Areas being modernized include claims processing, which was spread across nine different mainframe-based silos tied together by custom-built middleware. The company employed an enterprise service bus to handle claims processing through a single interface across the entire enterprise. Another initiative was to establish a common integration layer for the company’s fast-growing data environment.
To address ’simple’ problems, and grow from there. OppenheimerFunds first leveraged SOA to get duplicate data entry under control. Then things took off from there. The company took this initiative to think long term, and not only deal with the data entry, but then to also launch a long-term effort to take down the silos and eliminate redundant processes. After an address-change service was leveraged, another service was created to update bank information, then to enable electronic imaging of paper-based documents. Today, there are 22 legacy applications used, in various combinations, by customer service agents. (Source: ITWorld)
To underpin new cloud-based offerings. Service-now.com, begin in 2004 as an on-demand IT Service Management solution provider, recently launched a cloud-based offering that combines the best of everything — ITIL v3 with Web 2.0 technology and SOA — to provide a rich user experience to address a firm’s problem management needs. For Service-now.com, SOA means extreme competitive advantage. According to the company’s founder and president, “there were no alternatives, no decisions to be made. There was no other way than with a SOA mindset.” (Source: CIO)
To support Extreme Transaction Processing. The ability to capture huge data flows is what’s been powering business at a leading Canadian online bookstore site, AbeBooks.com, which has harnessed the power of XTP as part of its service oriented architecture. Abebooks.com manages a database of more than 110 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books via Web services links to 13,500 booksellers. Previously, transactions hit the back-end databases directly. “We’re in the first stages of design and implementation of service-oriented architecture,” according to Leith Painter, manager of development at AbeBooks. “We’re sponsoring it from an IT level. We’ve got some initial services we’ve developed in a design phase, and we’re currently developing design principles.” (Source: SearchSOA)
To modernize a 40-year-old system. Until recently, both Lufthansa and United Airlines — part of a consortium called the Star Alliance — were using a 40-year old reservation system, written in Assembly language. The airlines migrated their green-screen-based systems, which couldn’t integrate with other systems and services to SOA, which covers the product suite for reservations, inventory and passenger check-in. The mirgration as the equivalent to a “heart transplant,” according to Shama Patel, business program manager of the SOA effort for United and Lufthansa. Eventually, Lufthansa and United plan to roll out a common platform that can also be used by other members of the Star Alliance. “The modernization project will impact 20,000 people in 350 locations in a three- to four-year time frame, and it will touch 20 company divisions.” (Source: CIO)
To increase logistics efficiency. A $5 billion logistics and trucking company ought to know plenty about economies of scale. It may cost $1,000 to ship one refrigerator from New York to Los Angeles, but cost a penny if it’s intelligently bundled with another shipment. Con-Way has been applying this multiplier effect to its information technology infrastructure, with significant paybacks over the long run. Con-Way set out a number of years ago not knowing how much services would be reused — but this was very much their design goal. “When we built services at that point in time, we built every piece of functionality as a reusable piece of code,” said Shibashis Mukherjee, Con-Way lead enterprise architect. “We had no idea whether it was going to be reused or not.” However, reuse across the company’s various business lines took off. “You don’t generally see the benefits in the first project you do. We also had executive management buy-in and we had a long-term vision. So as project after project is done, our development time was cut as we reused components built by the previous projects.” (Source: SearchSOA)
To speed up mergers and integrations. Dematic, a $1.5-billion global logistics company, recently replaced its core IT architecture in 72 days with a platform built on SOA and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Sound implausible? The company’s IT department was given a 90-day mandate to integrate its systems when Siemens sold the company to Germany-based Triton in late 2006. CIO Allan Davies said the company saved money by abolishing legacy systems which Davis said chewed up a considerable amount of cash. “Our expense management system, hosted with Siemens, required four daysa month of manual data entry into our enterprise management system,” he said. “SOA lets us basically plug and play. I know how painful legacy systems are and this means we don’t need to mess around because we need to be very responsive. We have a lot of feeds from our systems that have to be managed and we tended to write a lot of interfaces — we have eliminated the legacy systems.” (Source: CIO)
To cut IT costs through reuse. At Delta Airlines, SOA is cutting the cost of ownership by half for its various applications and systems. “Reuse is one of the big drivers for our SOA environment,” said Bret Martin, principal enterprise architecture for Delta Technology Inc. Delta’s SOA, for example, is reusing the same customer and operational data across a range of systems, from the Delta.com Website to ticketing kiosks to ticketing counters and gate systems. “It allows check-in to happen in a uniform way,” he explained. Another way services are being leveraged are by exposing services to vendors and partners, such as American Express or operations companies.
To help plan regional natural resource consumption. The Southwest Florida Water Management District originally managed data and transactions on a mainframe system, but in planning for is Water Management Information System (WMIS) — designed to automate and streamline the paper- and time-intensive well-construction permitting process — it was decided to move off the mainframe and onto a distributed system developed to support SOA approaches. The new system will better automate the permit application and approval process, while providing Web access and supporting geospatial data. The District reports that 86% of its 17,000 annual permits for well construction are now handled electronically, and 35% of Web services applications are reusable across the agency. (Source: Redmond Developer News)
To prevent black holes from tearing the space-time fabric. It doesn’t look like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced any black holes (unless you count the stock markets), but it’s nice to know that the European Organization for Nuclear Research is employing state-of-the-art technology to keep things in check in case a black hole does accidentally form. CERN is employing SOA-based software to monitor and manage potential Large Hadron Collider (LHC) emergencies. CERN employs an enterprise service bus to form the communications backbone of its Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) system, which collects, evaluates, stores and distributes data about 2.1 million items every day from 150 different systems and 60,000 different measuring points. The ESB unites disparate data and systems without hampering CERN’s research efforts by underpinning their ability to get systems back and up running as quickly as possible in the event of a fault. “It’s all about speed of detection and action - we can stop and restart systems in a matter of seconds with the software,” said Eric Lienard, CERN technical infrastructure manager. (Source: ITPro)
December 24th, 2008
SOA unplugged: what readers had to say about SOA in 2008
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all you readers out there for visiting this blogsite over the past year, and I appreciate all the feedback and commentary received through the TalkBack feature. A lot of compelling and frank views were shared and discussed.
I thought it would be interesting to repost some of the comments that some of you provided over the past year as they relate to SOA issues discussed.
On the relationship between SOA and Complex Event Processing, James Taylor said: “I think one of the powerful effects of automating and managing operational decisions is that it helps link SOA, EDA/CEP and BPM. Decision-making logic must be shared effectively across these different approaches and that means that decisions must be identified and managed as first class objects.”
On the relationship between SOA and business process management (BPM), Chris commented on the challenge of achieving stateless and loosely coupled services: “We have been looking for ever more flexible ways of creating components. We have been looking for as little coupling as possible between our components because that makes it easier to localize changes and reduce unwanted side effects. We have been looking to increase cohesion because keeping ‘things’ that belong together together gives us an easier way to manage the thing. We create deployment mechanisms that allow us to scale our components by adding new instances. We create deployment mechanisms that keep the functional behavior away from the operational details. But still we have trouble with the right level of abstraction to get value out of the components. That’s partially because we have relative complexity in our businesses, we are encouraged to design for the ‘pretty case,’ i.e. the case where stuff doesn’t break and we don’t deal with timing and ambiguity well… So the hope of having ‘process stateless’ services is a longshot. Nice to strive towards, but not easily achievable.”
On SOA and economic conditions, Kirstan said: “If the economy is turning down, then free and open source tools to help build and run an SOA make more and more sense. Open source tools like XAware for data services, ActiveEndpoints for orchestration, Mule or ServiceMix for ESB, are quite mature. Aside from saving money in a downturn, open source tools make even greater sense for ‘project level SOA,’ where a company can build an SOA in the small before committing to an expensive enterprise-level SOA.
On SOA even makes the US Marines nervous, Jabailo1 said: “SOA is the only way to go. Unfortunately for large organizations which have grown fat and stupid on “application servers”, outsourcing and management pay increase, it also takes finesse, intelligence, hard work and most of all — that bugaboo word — programming! Yeah, all those guys you laid off seven years ago? Those are the guys you want. All those guys you kept and made into “technology managers” and gave 14% per annum pay rises while they shipped the budget to Bangalore? Those are the guys you want to get rid of…”
On the “emergence” of event-driven architecture (EDA), Rob Eamon said: Analyst groups “have been promoting the notion of the event-driven enterprise for over a decade. In my opinion, EDA and SOA are orthogonal notions. One doesn’t subsume the other. A business or enterprise architecture is likely to adopt, or should adopt, principles from both approaches.”
On reuse being a primary goal of SOA efforts, Eelcoh said: “SOA should not be about reuse at all. If there is, and will be, only one consumer, there might be two different situations: 1 - The providing department is wrongfully made responsible for the process (that might happen). In this case, it does not make a lot of sense to have that department provide the service, but unless the right department is found, the alternatives aren’t that good either. 2 - It just happens to be that there aren’t that many consumers. In the second case, there should be no question about who should provide the service. The alternative would be that the consumer one way or another replicates the process. That is what SOA prevents. So one could say it is not about reuse, it helps to reduce. In the end, in my opinion, SOA is about isolating change, but I doubt whether the vendors understand that.”
On ‘how to tell it’s not SOA,’ Tonymcs flipped the scenario with ‘how to tell if it IS SOA: “If it it doesn’t work, it’s SOA…. If its a 3 hour lecture with no information content, it’s SOA… If it’s recommended by non-tech people, then it’s SOA… If it’s as useful as art criticism, it’s SOA… If it’s slow, it’s SOA…. If it’s spaghetti Javascript, then it’s probably SOA….. If it’s a bunch of services you’ll never use, it’s SOA…. If it’s a category looking for a reason to exist, it’s SOA.”
On the evolution of computer science to “service as a science,” Storm14k said: “Sometimes I laugh at these paragraphs that basically say nothing or restate common place scenarios with a lot of business buzzwords: ‘Service systems are complex systems that dynamically configure access to resources (people, organizations, technology and information) to interact with other service systems and mutually create and capture value….’ Now ask one of these guys to build a concrete example of this and then the truth comes out. Its a load of crap and once they do figure it out they’ll turn to the nearest guy with a CS degree to implement it anyway.”
On selling SOA to the business, Jean-Jacques Dubray said: “There is nothing ethereal about SOA. The very reason why most people think SOA is ethereal is precisely because most developers, architects, business analysts were never presented with a comprehensive view of SOA. Most people claimed they were doing SOA 20 or 30 years ago and that WS-* is not SOA. The reality is quite different, concepts such as bidirectional interfaces (WSDL), semantically accessible data structures (XML), orchestration (BPEL), forward compatible versioning (XML, XSD, WSDL)… are all brand new ideas that never existed before 1998 or so. SOA is only ethereal if you care to ignore these concepts.”
On SOA as a strategy for times of economic turbulence, Robert Morschel said: “Not convinced. The biggest problem that SOA is trying to solve is the total cost of ownership and the lack of agility caused by years of tack-on systems development. That’s where the big money saving potential is, not making business processes more efficient. I agree SOA introduction needs to be iterative, but against the backdrop of an already persuaded business who are sick and tired of paying 60-80% of their IT budget just on maintenance costs not new development.”
On whether SOA may be a faddish — and even sloppy — approach to management, Donald said: “Those who say that SOA is just a fad or a buzzword do not really understand all the necessary concepts, governance, new application development and execution paradigm, and technologies needed to implement the simple concept of SOA. For a decade people had hoped that PKI [Public Key Infrastructure] would just go away because implementation is too complex for most people to want to understand. But today PKI is the only name in town for various identity purposes. SOA will not go away because it is the only name in town to shorten time to market and to save millions of dollars.”
On whether SOA is more about integration or architecture, GGruber66 said: “SOA=Integration is a very narrow view. And most people who are looking at it that way aren’t just missing 1/2 the point of what SOA can do, they’re also missing 1/2 the point on integration. SOA is not a panacea for integration. Passing data is easy, but if you’re not moving to the business process aspects of ‘what do I do with the data now that I have it’ you’ve missed the boat. And SOA doesn’t do that. Frankly if all you want is integration, just use a service like Boomi. SOA’s real impact is felt when people expose services to others and allow people to create new capabilities and new products or services (I don’t mean Web services). And when they take their eye off the fact that as you state SOA is an architecture, the services that they create probably won’t meet the requirements for reliability and availability that businesses large and small demand. This is what happens when people fall in love with a buzzword and don’t try to understand the business value that it’s supposed to create. The SOA projects that fail most are the ones that start with SOA as the answer before anyone really thinks about what the question was.”
December 19th, 2008
SOA for the greatest logistical night of all
Dave Linthicum just posted this very keen look at the business and manufacturing operations at the North Pole, wondering if service oriented architecture would increase efficiency and agility.
I’m sure Santa Inc.’s operations go year round, but everything has to be ready to be shipped, on time and without defects, within a single night. Packages have to go out to more than a billion customers (the world’s children under 12) within a 24-hour time frame. With just one vehicle to make all those deliveries. That’s pressure, even if you do have 364 days to prepare.
Dave suggests RFID-tagging all goods, with information flowing real-time across an SOA-enabled system. SOA can also ease integration with Santa Inc.’s business partners, which I’m sure are a far-flung global network. Of course, cloud computing resources can be leveraged as well.
Dave also suggests this would be a good way to downsize North Pole operations. Ho ho ho.
September 2nd, 2008
Another view: do we spend too much time trying to sell SOA to the business?
We expend plenty of bytes in this site repeating a mantra that also is echoed in conferences and analyst briefings across the globe: For SOA to work, get the business involved. Early if possible. The blanket criticism for the “failure” of SOA has been to blame IT for making it too much of an IT activity, and not a business thing.
‘At the end of the day, SOA is a pure IT problem’
However, one practitioner begs to differ on this conventional wisdom. SOA Enterprise Architect Jean-Jacques Dubray, who has put SOA in place at a major financial institution, says we’re actually spending way too much time worrying and trying to get the business interested in SOA. Businesspeople aren’t the key stakeholders in SOA — IT staff and developers are, he says. Perhaps its more important to spend the time and energy getting these people on board.
Dubray was reacting to a recent blog post by Loraine Lawson, who frequently discusses the requirements for better aligning SOA and integration with the business. Loraine said that an effective way to promote adoption of integration or SOA projects is to “publicize the results to the board…. brag about it constantly and loudly every chance you get”“involve IT decision makers and brag about the results” — which I agree with. However, Dubray said perhaps business managers aren’t the people that need to be educated about or sold on the concept:
“My experience is that the key people that you have to focus all your energy on are the developers, architects, business analysts, QAs and operations. If they don’t get SOA, you won’t have much to brag about. Sure I understand why she is saying this, SOA and Integration may cost a lot of money and you can’t always hide the deployment of SOA infrastructure components within projects, but at the end of the day this is a pure IT problem.”
Dubray points out that while the business needs to care about solutions, SOA in and of itself is not a solution — it’s an architecture. “It is IT and IT’s only responsibility to decide whether they want to do SOA and for what reasons. IMHO, we wasted years trying to convince the business to throw money at SOA and to a certain degree disappointed them when we missed the most critical success factor: get delivery and operations organizations knowledgeable and on board.”
He then drives his point home thusly:
“If you want to fail your Service Oriented Architecture ignore delivery and operations and focus all your energy on ‘business architecture,’ go play golf with your CEO and CIO and get a big budget to buy expensive products.”
Just to be clear, Dubray acknowledges that SOA needs to stay closely aligned with the business, and his first piece of advice is to create an SOA center of excellence. But his contention is that SOA is fundamentally owned by IT, and its care and feeding should remain within IT’s domain.
Dubray says SOA is a “pure IT problem.” But in this era of the online collaborative organization, when we rely on technology for every aspect of our business, are there really any “pure IT” problems?
July 16th, 2008
Seven SOA experts explain how to 'just do it'
“No one thinks it all through at once. No one puts all the pieces in place perfectly. But once on the right path, it is more straightforward than it first seems, and additional pieces fall into place logically.” 
I recently had the honor of emceeing the launch of a new book called An Implementor’s Guide to SOA: Getting It Right. (The Webcast can be accessed here at the Composite Software site.)
The beauty of the book is that it’s a quick read, and drills right down to the essentials of getting moving with SOA. As author and editor Jim Green, CEO of Composite Software, explained, he purposely kept the length of the book to about 100 pages. “We wanted to write something that could be absorbed over the course of a coast-to-coast airplane ride,” he said.
That wasn’t an easy task, since he was also incorporating chapters from six other well-known SOA experts– including Paul Butterworth, Luc Clement, Hemant Ramachandra, Jeff Schneider, Hub Vandervoort, and David Besemer.
The theme of the book? I can boil it down to three words (to quote Nike): “Just Do It.” It doesn’t matter what kind of SOA budget you have, or even if you have a budget at all — there are still practical steps you can take today to get started.
In fact, one of the most powerful messages coming out of the book is that SOA is not a luxury reserved for the corporations with the deepest pockets. SOA is something everyone can take advantage of and benefit from. You don’t need to get caught up in trying to boil the ocean. Transformation starts with small steps, and SOA success will happen in increments.
Service-orienting large-scale systems cannot be fully thought through in the early stages, Jim Green said. One of SOA’s greatest failures is that it often is subjected to paralysis by analysis. “The longer that you ponder the imponderables as you plan, the lower the probability of your success.”
Some snippets of the key recommendations coming out of the book:
- Getting Started: “Don’t let anyone overwhelm you by trying to reach you everything at once.”
- Designing Services: “Base your services on vendor independent industry standards to ensure the best reuse and interoperability.”
- Registries and Repositories: “Recognize the importance of documenting and maintaining a formal system of record of your services, their revisions, and their service level agreements.”
- Enterprise Service Buses: “Analyze your interoperability issues and determine whether you will need an ESB to reconcile incompatibilities.”
- Runtime Management: “Understand and control your service network — detect, diagnose, and ultimately prevent problems that arise during the operation of the service network.”
- Preparing the Organization: “Set up and empower centralized groups to enforce governance and evolve them as needed.”
- Assessing SOA Skills: “Develop a training roadmap that integrates with your SOA strategy.”
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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- Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now
- VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
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- More from IBM
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- How to Drive Better Business Outcomes with Exceptional Web Experiences Download the eBook
- Driving Business Agility through SOA Connectivity & Integration Read the White Paper from IBM
- Linking Decisions and Information for Organizational Performance Read the Tom Davenport study
