Category: Links
November 21st, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 8:11 am
Categories: Links
Tags: Buzzword, Blogging, Internet, Joe McKendrick
There’s no shortage of buzzwords buzzing around the blogosphere, analystsphere, consultantsphere, conferencesphere, and everywhere else-sphere. (And yes, they spill over into this blogsite as well…) Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder takes a poke at the buzzword bubble that often gets in the way of tangible and solid evidence that things work.
From Geek & Poke http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/
By the way, the buzzphrase ‘Business-IT alignment’ gets my vote for the most overused, yet most useless, phrase of all.
November 11th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 10:15 am
Categories: Business ROI, Links, Management, SOA Surveys and Research
Tags: Information Technology, Janne, Strategy, Management, Joe McKendrick
Are your investments in IT bearing measurable results? Or are the benefits more “feels-right” types of results? Perhaps IT can’t deliver measurable productivity because the measurements are wrong.
Perhaps IT can’t deliver measurable productivity because the measurements are wrong
Every time I’ve spoken to a CIO and IT manager over the past decade, one question I always ask is if he or she has been able to measure the results of programs, be it service oriented architecture, CRM, Web-to-host, what have you. And, I have to admit, I rarely hear measurable numbers — it’s usually anecdotal evidence, such as speedier processing, or positive end-user or customer feedback.
Don’t blame the CIOs, though — it’s just that the benefits of IT are inherently difficult to quantify at any high level. In this vein, Janne Korhonen just published an interesting piece over at ebizQ, explaining why it’s so hard to measure the productivity impact of information technology.
Janne quotes MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, who in 1993 published a landmark paper on why the productivity impacts of IT is so hard to measure: 1) measurement error due to use of conventional productivity-measurement approaches; 2) time lags in IT payoffs; 3) localized optimization; and 4) lack of explicit measures of the value of information.
We don’t seem to have come too far in the 16 years since Brynjolfsson published that analysis — at least in Janne’s opinion. He delves into Brynjolfsson’s four challenges in some detail. For example, he notes that when it comes to measurement errors — caused by outmoded ideas about constitutes productivity — he calls for “rigorous new means to measure IT productivity and output are needed to account for IT’s role in innovation and new value creation, commensurable with IT-enabled efficiency.” IT’s contribution to “operational improvements, new capabilities, new products and new markets” — long underestimated — is a good place to start.
As discussed here at this blogsite, there are benefits and gains that are either tough to capture, or tough to tie directly back to a particular IT initiative. “Business agility” is a classic example — how do you measure business agility? This is the benefit touted for service oriented architecture — how much agility is being delivered by an SOA initiative, versus other systems? The businesses at the forefront of SOA tend to be at the forefront of other advanced management practices as well.
Then there’s the whole matter of oversell, companies pouring money into IT products and services that may be, on the whole, unnecessary or overkill. Or worse yet, end up as shelfware. You don’t need to be a productivity expert to see the waste there. So you have the combined storm of hundred of thousands of dollars being spent on something for results that, if measured, will be measured against archaic productivity standards. Will cloud breath clarity into this confusion? Probably not.
It should be noted that Brynjolfsson hasn’t been entirely pessimistic on the ability of IT to deliver business success since that 1993 paper. More recently, he and MIT’s Andrew McAfee published data that shows IT making a big difference at a macro level. They observed that industries that made the greatest investments in IT during the 1990s have become the most competitive. “On average,” they said, “the whole U.S. economy has become more ‘Schumpeterian’ since the mid-1990s. [Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" in 1942] What’s more, these changes have been greatest in the industries that buy the most software and computer hardware.”
Again, it’s more than pouring money into products. McAfee and Brynjolfsson state that even with a lot of IT, “both innovation and replication require a combination of leadership and insight from executives. Take innovation: Many companies use IT to capture huge amounts of data from their operations, but relatively few have been able to use this data creatively.”
And it takes perceptive management to identify the technology solutions that will make a difference, and be able to effectively measure the impact of those solutions. As Janne put it:
“Not all IT projects are productive. They may even be detrimental to the business, but misaligned incentive schemes and other structures sustain non-optimal IT decision-making with predominantly short-term planning horizon and focus on operational and cost efficiency. IT investments should be judged by their overall bottom line impact, including not only cost reductions and efficiency gains but also the indirect impact that IT has on increasing business effectiveness.”
The bottom line is that there has never been an expectation that IT would be solely responsible for a company’s rise or fall. Adroit management, supported by the right IT tools, makes the difference. A company that smartly and innovatively leverages its IT in new and creative ways will move to the head of the pack. And, thanks to IT, you don’t need a workforce of thousands to do so. And we need to measure these changes in more holistic ways.
November 6th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 2:42 pm
Categories: Links, business process management
Tags: Business Process, BPM, SOA, Modeling, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Operational Planning, Research & Development, Business Process Automation, Enterprise Software, Web Services
Business process management (BPM) and SOA don’t have to live in two different worlds. In a new Q&A tutorial, enterprise architect extraordinaire Todd Biske provides practical advice about pairing BPM modeling tools with service oriented architecture.
The key lies in the registry/repository of services created to support SOA: “One of the most important things to consider is the ability of the BPMN tooling to take advantage of service metadata that exists in a registry/repository,” Todd explains. “Whether modeling within the tool is being done by process analysts or by developers, the ties back to your service repository are important.”
Then consider the two roles that engage in this collaborative process:
Process analyst: These individuals may be working with a BPMN model, which will consist of flow objects, connecting objects, swimlanes, and artifacts. The two items that have relevance within SOA are the activities (part of the flow objects), and the swimlanes, which represent ownership boundaries of functional domains, Todd points out. “If you have this taxonomy in your service registry/repository, it would be great to have it accessible to you during your modeling efforts.” Service invocations should be shared across processes, and integrated into the registry/repository.
Developer: It is up to these folks to “take that model and turn it into something that can be managed by the runtime BPM engine,” Todd explains. Developers ensure that automated information-generating activities are correctly mapped to the message flow, via the connection between the service registry/repository and the BPM tool.
October 29th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 7:15 am
Categories: Links, Standards Watch, Web Services
Tags: IPv4, IPv6, IP, Internet, Networking, Telecommunications, Joe McKendrick
The impending changeover from IP version 4 to IP version 6 won’t really be a big deal, and most people won’t even notice it as it happens. But the Internet will be running on both protocols for a while, and the head of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) cautions that some online applications may run slow as a result. Online content providers need to start preparing as well.
In a recent interview, John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN, explained why businesses need to sit up and take notice of the impending shift that is taking place as we move from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to the more expansive IP version 6.
What’s happening is the original Internet numbering system — which assigns addresses such as 192.168.1.1 — is running out of numbers. IPv4 is a 32-bit system with four billion possible combinations. “That sounds like a lot of numbers, but it really isn’t when you think about the size of the globe and the number of devices being connected these days,” Curran says. In fact, we’re due to run out of numbers within 700 days, he warns. IPv6, with 128-bit addressing space, enables “numbering of all of the molecules in the galaxy,” he says.
As soon as the last IPv4 number is used up, every new device or site that comes along after that uses IPv6. Don’t loose too much sleep over your systems, however. Industry planners have been aware of this matter since the 1990s. Most hardware and software has been ready for IPv6 for some time.
However, Curran advises businesses to check their configurations before the changeover takes place, as glitches may come up. “We can’t actually get an IPv6 host and an IPv4 server to talk to each other, because the IPv4 server only knows 32 bits. It’s much like if your telephone was set up to only ever dial seven digits, and it wouldn’t let you dial 10. Sure you could almost have a conversation, but you couldn’t call most of the world.”
When the changeover occurs, “ISPs are going to have to start using IPv6 to connect customers,” he explains. “Then, they’re going to have to put IPv6 gateways in, boxes that work like network address boxes, to translate IPv6-connected customers to the IPv4 websites on the Internet. That will work, but that’s going to be suboptimal, because those are gateways doing the translation.” This may slow down online applications such as Skype, Voice over IP, real-time video games, which “won’t necessarily run smoothly going through those translators.”
Curran points out that the Internet will be running on two protocols for some time. “If you really want to start a business that’s Internet based, you’re going to want to take your equipment, and make it connected by both IPv4 and IPv6.”
Some businesses have more of a challenge ahead of them than others, Curran continues. While the major ISPs have been underway with IPv6, “the content providers are just beginning to work on this,” Curran says. “And that’s going to take a lot of work, and they need to enable a lot of software that we think of as the Web 2.0 software infrastructure. While all the parts may run IPv6, that doesn’t mean your infrastructure is ready.”
Consider the two years remaining to address IPv6 configuration issues as an opportunity to get a jump on the competition, says Curran. “I would recommend that people start thinking about the fact that the IPv4 Internet has a fixed size, and the global Internet is going to keep growing. What this means that you don’t want to be left behind on the fixed-size network. You don’t want to be left behind on a fixed-sized network in an Internet ‘backwater.”
By the way, the interviewer, Howard Greenstein, said it’s important to get this cautionary message out on ZDNet and other popular channels — so there you go, Howard!
October 23rd, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 4:32 pm
Categories: Business ROI, Enterprise Architecture, Links, Management, SOA Events, Standards Watch
Tags: SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
As mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to join a group of highly motivated and very smart people at the SOA Symposium in Rotterdam to formulate what is being called the SOA Manifesto. Here is the final version of the document, spelling out the core values and related principles that should be part of service orientation and SOA. Hopefully, they will help guide your thinking on the SOA journey:
SOA Manifesto
Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation.
We have been applying service orientation to help organizations consistently deliver sustainable business value, with increased agility and cost effectiveness, in line with changing business needs.
Through our work we have come to prioritize:
- Business value over technical strategy
- Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
- Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
- Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
- Flexibility over optimization
- Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection
That is, while we value the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
SOA Manifesto Guiding Principles
We follow these principles:
- Respect the social and power structure of the organization.
- Recognize that SOA ultimately demands change on many levels.
- The scope of SOA adoption can vary. Keep efforts manageable and within meaningful boundaries.
- Products and standards alone will neither give you SOA nor apply the service orientation paradigm for you.
- SOA can be realized through a variety of technologies and standards.
- Establish a uniform set of enterprise standards and policies based on industry, de facto, and community standards.
- Pursue uniformity on the outside while allowing diversity on the inside.
- Identify services through collaboration with business and technology stakeholders.
- Maximize service usage by considering the current and future scope of utilization.
- Verify that services satisfy business requirements and goals.
- Evolve services and their organization in response to real use.
- Separate the different aspects of a system that change at different rates.
- Reduce implicit dependencies and publish all external dependencies to increase robustness and reduce the impact of change.
- At every level of abstraction, organize each service around a cohesive and manageable unit of functionality.
October 19th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 6:00 am
Categories: Links, Management, SOA Events
Tags: SOA, Service Orientation, Enterprise Customer, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
There’s been a hubub going on for years now on whether ‘reuse’ is a valid value proposition for service oriented architecture. Maybe reuse is simply the wrong word.
Luca Cutolo, the galloping SOA gourmet, recently posted a business-focused perspective on SOA that faults the lack of “vision” in many SOA efforts, and makes the following point:
“SOA means mainly to do things in a re-sell-able way. Service orientation is a way to make re-use of components and features across the Enterprise and to sell them between departments, line of businesses or to customers by defining service level agreements (SLA).”
Maybe it’s time we threw out “reuse” as a term for describing SOA-based services, and started couching services in terms of “resale.” After all, it’s all about being able to sell capabilities to the business, and the business being willing to pay for them in some way (either through inter-departmental funding or direct purchase).
Look to the emerging cloud computing model, that introduces the rigors of the market to services, be they internal or external, for this vision. For example, SOA could be run as the foundation of an internal cloud business. ZDNet colleague Dion Hinchliffe, for one, recently proposed that SOA-based services be deployed the same way cloud businesses deploy their open APIs. In other words, managing an SOA effort as an internal business, providing services to the rest of the enterprise, with profits or losses, a la cloud. Dion pointed out that cloud providers face the rigors of the marketplace and have to prove their value every day. So why not model internal service orientation efforts after the experiences of those external providers?
Cloud computing also introduces more marketplace-enforced cost structures to the SOA ecosphere as well. In a panel discussion I hosted earlier in the summer, David Bressler raised the issue of cost structure, and how cloud — for better or worse — provides greater visibility into hidden costs that SOA does not address.
An enterprise customer is far more sensitive to the costs of external cloud services versus internally provided services. That’s because “the cloud providers will provide their services at a specific cost, that’s the actual cost plus whatever the margin may be,” Dave said. “Whereas, internal IT has always been kind of subsidized. If you need a project, you get internal IT to put it together for you, and delivered for you, and a lot of those costs either were hidden, and were dispersed across the enterprise. Cloud is forcing organizations to look at the actual cost of service delivery and perhaps the alignment more with what the market will be.”
This all makes sense, as companies are becoming both consumers and providers of services. Such service delivery occurs internally as well as outside of the corporate boundaries. By applying market-driven pricing inside and out, companies will see the true value of SOA and cloud formations.
October 17th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 8:15 am
Categories: General, Links, Management
Tags: SOA, Geek & Poke, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder reminds us that designing and putting a great SOA-based infrastructure out into the enterprise is only half the battle.
October 14th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 7:14 am
Categories: Event processing, Links, SOA Surveys and Research, Web Services, business process management
Tags: SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
Does event driven architecture (EDA) represent the next phase of SOA? This is a subject of continuing debate, but Udi Dahan makes the case for EDA as the next logical stage of SOA. In a recent post, he connected the dots between SOA and EDA, suggesting that EDA will shift the inherent nature of SOA.
Dahan makes his case thusly: SOA is currently based on a “commonly used request/response communication pattern of service consumer to service provider in SOA,” in which the consumer delivers the command, and the provider service responds accordingly. “Commands are often named in imperative, present-tense form—for example, ‘update customer’ and ‘cancel order.’”
With EDA, this relationship gets reversed, he points out:
“In EDA… Consumers do not initiate communication in EDA; instead, they receive events that are produced by emitters. The communication is also inherently unidirectional; emitters do not depend on any response from consumers to continue performing their work.”
Developing an architectural approach that employs both SOA and EDA principles will go a long way toward better so-called “business-IT” alignment, Dahan observes. The fusing of the two approaches may be the key. Either approach alone won’t do it. As Dahan illustrates:
“Architects can explain to the business the ramifications of their architectural decisions in ways that the business can understand—’There might be a couple of seconds during which these two bits of data are not in sync. Is that a problem?’—and the answer to those kinds of question is used to iterate the architecture, so as to bring it into better alignment with the business.”
SOA and EDA have been moving closer in recent years, as companies start to understand the value of event processing to ongoing operations and opportunities.
October 12th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 3:00 am
Categories: Business ROI, Links, Management, Standards Watch, Vendor Watch, business process management, cloud computing
Tags: Software, Information Technology, Lean IT, Strategy, Management, Joe McKendrick
Customer in a restaurant: Waiter, bring me a steak, and make it lean.
Waiter: Okay, sir. Which way?
As reported in my last post, Sandy Kemsley has done a great job of covering Forrester’s Business Technology Forum, which focused on Lean IT.
But which way is IT supposed to lean? Alas, it seems Forrester is helping to heap another buzzphrase on the world that seems to describe things that have already been in motion for years. (Some say this is the case with service oriented architecture as well, by the way.)
What, exactly, is ‘Lean IT’? Wikipedia’s definition of Lean IT is vague and convoluted:
“Lean IT is the extension of lean principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.”
Yeah, so? Again, haven’t organizations been battling waste in IT since day one?
I don’t know who coined the phrase “Lean IT,” but it takes a page from “Lean Manufacturing,” which tightened up that sector in the 1980s and 1990s to survive the onslaught from more efficient and quality-driven overseas competition. Noah B. Kindler, Vasantha Krishnakanthan, and Ranjit Tinaikar of McKinsey & Company discussed the concept back in May 2007, claiming that application development and maintenance (ADM) productivity can be boosted up to 40% by eliminating waste from routine processes. “Application development and maintenance is a prime candidate for lean methods not only because it involves a great many processes with the potential to be optimized but also because large differences in productivity among organizations suggest that some are far less efficient than others,” they said. As they put it:
“Each category of waste in manufacturing has a counterpart in ADM, which can be thought of as a kind of factory that develops new applications according to business requirements. Changes to an application’s requirements are one common source of ADM waste, causing many of the classic varieties identified in lean: designers rework their specifications, coders wait for specifications to stabilize, testers overproduce as their testing environments have to be set up repeatedly, unmet requirements pile up in a large backlog. As in manufacturing, systematically eliminating these sources of waste improves the delivery time, quality, and efficiency of the ADM end product.”
So they equate IT operations with a manufacturing process. Which makes sense, and is something we’ve discussed in this blogsite before (here, here, and here). By introducing assembly-line processes and greater automation to software development, we can definitely tighten up the process.
In past posts, I quoted IBM’s Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Microsoft’s Jack Greenfield, both who said we were at the dawn of a new era of IT — “industrialization.” Wladawsky-Berger said that IT-delivered services are starting to become more componentized, standardized, and mass-consumable across the spectrum, just as manufactured goods were a century ago. Greenfield talked about the concept of the “software factory,” defined as “a development environment configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application. While software factories are really just the logical next step in the continuing evolution of software development methods and practices… introducing patterns of industrialization.”
He said, however, that “our IT infrastructures are nowhere near ready to handle this explosive growth of information and service. Much of IT, - including applications, data centers, systems management, and so on, - is way too ad-hoc and custom designed, sort of like manufacturing was decades ago….”
So, is Lean IT the right thing at the right time to seize upon this impending industrial revolution of IT services? The McKinsey authors identify the following areas for “waste reduction” in software assembly: flow processing to reduce overcapacity or excess inventory; release schedules to help prioritize projects; staff and supplier workload balancing; greater standardization; segmentation of projects by complexity to route projects to the proper resources; and and by avoiding unnecessary overhead for simple tasks; and quality ownership that extends to all groups involved in software production — not just QA.
These are are well and good goals, and I’m sure every organization can benefit greatly by applying these principles to their IT operations. But is there anyone who hasn’t been already trying to move these efforts forward? What does Lean IT bring to the table? Consider everything that has been underway in recent years:
- Service oriented architecture: Formerly siloed applications are decomposed into reusable services that are made available across enterprises.
- Agile development: Developers work side by side in an iterative way with business users throughout the process.
- Virtualization: Physical IT systems and resources are abstracted into a software-based enterprise service layer.
- IT automation: Routine IT processes formerly handled manually are handled on a systematic basis by the software and machines themselves.
- Cloud computing/outsourcing: Non-critical IT tasks and applications are acquired from more specialized providers, mainly on a pay-per-use or contractual basis.
- Business process management: Business workloads are decomposed and automated.
- ITIL: Best practices and principles for IT services applied uniformly across organizations.
References I’ve been seeing to Lean IT seem quite provincial — optimizing IT processes at the ground level without bringing in the larger picture — the transformation of the business. Lean IT lacks the expansive thinking that Wladawsky-Berger and Greenfield have in mind for the coming industrial revolution in IT services.
And, again, it begs the question: what does Lean IT offer that we haven’t been trying to do already?
October 9th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 8:48 am
Categories: Business ROI, Links, Management, SOA Events, business process management
Tags: Information Technology, Forrester Research Inc., Semiconductors, Hardware, Joe McKendrick
Answer: It depends if you wear a ponytail.
Sandy Kemsley has been providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Forrester Business Technology Forum in Chicago, and picked up on an interesting panel discussion on the role of packaged applications in Lean IT. (Lean IT is the theme of Forrester’s confab.)
Sandy’s reports on Forrester BTF are a good read for anyone trying to get their heads around the concept of “Lean IT.” (She starts here with her series.) I mean, isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do for the past 20 years anyway? (Not that things have turned out that “Lean” yet. We’ll see if it works this time around.)
According to Sandy’s report, Forrester’s John Rymer argued that “packaged apps can never be Lean, since most are locked down, closed engines where the vendor controls the architecture, they’re expensive and difficult to upgrade, they use more functions than customers use, they provide a single general UI for all user personas, and each upgrade includes more crap that you don’t need.”
Chip Gliedman, a Forrester analyst, argued the opposite side, stating that the opposite of packaged apps — custom-grown apps — are just about as bloated and klunky as you can get. You need packaged apps to pave the way to Lean IT. Sandy quotes Chip as “pointing out that you just can’t build the level of functionality that a packaged application provides, and there can be data and integration issues once you abandon the wisdom of a single monolithic system that holds all your data and rules.”
I like Sandy’s summary of the whole thing: “Clearly, Gliedman is either insane or a secret plant from [insert large enterprise vendor name here], and Rymer is an incurable coder who probably has a ponytail tucked into his shirt collar. :) Nonetheless, an entertaining discussion.”
October 9th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 8:07 am
Categories: Enterprise Architecture, Links, Management, SOA Events, SOA Surveys and Research, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing
Tags: Gartner Inc., SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
In a new report, Gartner analyst Yefim Natis is quoted as saying that the success of cloud computing hinges on having good service oriented architecture underneath. “Prepare for the cloud by developing SOA skills,” Natis says. “The arrival of cloud as an option for the delivery of business applications could finally cement SOA into the IT mainstream,” he adds.
Natis urges enterprise IT shops to continue investing in service-oriented architecture skills and initiatives if they are to be able to take full advantage of the emergence of the cloud infrastructure. SOA may eventually become the standard way by which applications are accessed through a cloud service, he adds. This will also propel adoption of private clouds, contained with the firewall.
We’ve been banging the SOA-Cloud drum for years here at this blogspot (e.g., here in 2005; here, here, and here in 2007), and it’s good to see respected analysts also taking up the theme. SOA is evolving into the underlying enabler for private clouds, to the point where they almost can be considered one in the same. SOA has often been a tough sell. The good news is that the business readily grasps — and even likes — the idea of private and public clouds as a way to better organize and manage computing resources.
October 6th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 3:21 pm
Categories: Enterprise Architecture, Links, Management, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0, Web Services, cloud computing
Tags: SOA, WOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
Has the time come for a change in the way we do SOA?
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet’s resident Enterprise Web guru, has posted an interesting analysis of the state of service oriented architecture, and what it will take to kick-start it into the future. SOA has a couple of issues that is keeping it from reaching its potential, Dion wrote in new post over at ebizQ.
- First, the velocity of SOA seems too slow to keep up with the rapid changes buffeting organizations:
- Second, SOA service consumption remains at “depressingly low” levels;
- Third, SOA projects tend to be over-engineered.
What’s a beleaguered SOA proponent to do? Time to move to a new level, Dion says: Web Oriented Architecture. Dion calls WOA a “parallel track” for SOA that’s evolved in the more open Internet space, versus behind the opaque walls of corporate enterprises. Or as Dion puts it: WOA has grown “organically in the wilds of the online world to meet many of the same challenges that we have in our organizations today.”
Dion defines WOA in terms of open APIs, such as we see in cloud-based or Enterprise 2.0 services. WOA will help SOA reach its next level of performance. Ways we will see this evolve is the trend toward running SOA more like a business in itself; cheap, lightweight service delivery models; and access via REST-based interfaces and mashups.
The WOA approach makes a lot of sense, in no small part because of its relative simplicity and cost-effectiveness. SOA evolves from being an IT-centric megaproject to a series of initiatives in which business end-users can partake. Yes, there are many instances where iron-clad SOAP Web services are required. But everyone is already doing mashups, and the extended enterprise may benefit from the rise of WOA.
Dion will be talking about the SOA-WOA evolution at the SOA in Action conference I will be emceeing October 28-29.
October 3rd, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 8:38 am
Categories: General, Links, Management
Tags: CIO, Geek & Poke, Joe McKendrick
Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder shows us what CIOs like to hear…
September 29th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 7:33 pm
Categories: Event processing, Links, SOA Surveys and Research, business process management
Tags: SOA, EDA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), EAI, Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
In recent years, we’ve been hearing a lot about the rise of event-driven architecture (EDA), and how this will factor into SOA efforts. This combination may form the foundation of emerging “smart systems.”
CalTech’s Dr. K. Mani Chandy, one of the pioneers of EDA, and author of Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies, says we will be surrounded by SOA and EDA in the years to come. In a new interview with Peter Schooff, Chandy explains:
“I see a great opportunity for both [SOA and EDA] in the next, I say, 20 years starting now. …I really see them being used in all aspects of daily life. I mean management of food, water, energy, health, security and logistics… And what we call smart systems. A lot of talk about smart systems and smart system architectures are fundamentally based on principles from EDA and SOA. And the benefits of these event-driven architecture applications will be directly visible to the business, they’ll be directly visible to the customer and so I think acceptance of these applications and demand for these applications will grow virally and so I see a great future for them.”
Chandy has a formula that illustrates how and why demand for EDA will grow in enterprises in the years to come: “PC-cubed,” for push for ‘price, pervasiveness, performance” accompanied by demand from “connectedness, celerity, and complexity.” The need to process complex events will not only arise in large enterprises, but also in the consumer space as well. “We see really complex events where you’re trying to detect patterns of stock prices and relate them to commodity prices. But you also see complex events in consumer applications where you’d like to know when a given item becomes cheap with one vendor versus another,” Chandy points out.
EDA has been around in various forms since the 1970s, Chandy explained. It’s roots can be traced back to enterprise application integration and sense and response systems. “EDA appeared in the 1970s in message queuing systems and later in enterprise service buses, and this is the EAI ‘parent,’” he said. “The other ‘parent’ is sense and response. In the last decade, many companies have developed sense and respond applications in finance particularly in trading. Now however, sense and response systems are being used in every aspect of life including management of water, food, energy, security, health and so on.”
September 28th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 5:46 pm
Categories: Links, Vendor Watch
Tags: Google Inc., Mobile, SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing
“Android guy” Sam Herren points out that the applications that run or will run on Android are interoperable in a service-oriented way. “I would like to position Android’s client interface with Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail as mobile SOA,” he says.
Applications such as Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, and Google Voice “are separate and have separate UIs, but they share common data that lives on the phone and simultaneously in the Google cloud,” Herren observes. “Android was built as a mobile deliverer of Google’s main services so instead of being layers of apps above the OS they are tightly integrated.”
Hmm. Based on this line of thinking, you could look at iPhone as a mobile SOA device as well. And, as previously surfaced here at this blogsite, there’s a strong analogy that can be made between SOA and the way iTunes is structured. Or, MP3 for that matter. Along with the big honking enterprise SOAs we focus on, we’re also surrounded by lots of mini-SOAs.
September 24th, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 8:45 am
Categories: Data managemetnt, Links, Standards Watch, Vendor Watch, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0, Web Services, cloud computing
Tags: Enterprise Mashup, Enterprise Mashup Markup Language, Joe McKendrick
As reported a couple of days ago, the enterprise mashup market promises to be a huge one, growing to almost $2 billion in a few years. So it’s high time people involved in this space start organizing and working around some standards everyone can agree on.
Can enterprise mashup proponents avoid the mistakes made with ESBs?
A new consortium, called the Open Mashup Alliance, is the first effort to coalesce around this growing phenomenon. The group’s stated mission is to promote “the successful use of Enterprise Mashup technologies and adoption of an open language that promotes Enterprise Mashup interoperability and portability.”
One of the founding members is ZDNet’s resident Enterprise Web 2.0 guru, Dion Hinchcliffe. Additional charter members include Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow Technologies, ProgrammableWeb, Synteractive, and Xignite.
One of the OMA’s first endeavors is to shepherd the budding Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) specification for submission to a standards body. EMML is an XML-based, domain-specific language that was designed to address the characteristics that make mashups easier to create and reuse.
There were a bunch of supporting quotes included with the OMA’s announcement, but I think Michael Ogrinz, principal architect at Bank of America and author of the book Mashup Patterns, said it best: “For enterprise mashups to take hold, we need to remove the ‘vendor lock-in’ concerns raised by today’s proprietary toolsets. We also need to inspire the innovative minds of the open-source community to start working in this space. By establishing an open standard for mashups, the OMA and EMML addresses both of these issues.”
Perhaps the industry learned some lessons from another development that proliferated without guiding standards — the enterprise service bus. One of the fiercest criticisms of ESBs has been the way vendors took off in all different directions with their implementations before standards could be established. Perhaps we can avoid this with enterprise mashups. But the looming market size must be a huge temptation.
September 23rd, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 7:25 pm
Categories: Business ROI, Case Studies, Enterprise Architecture, Links, Management, SOA Events, Vendor Watch, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0, business process management
Tags: SOA, Cisco Systems Inc., Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
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.”
September 22nd, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 9:28 am
Categories: Links, SOA Surveys and Research, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0, Web Services, cloud computing
Tags: Enterprise Mashup, SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
A new report from Business Insights predicts that the enterprise mashup market, worth around $161 million in 2008, will expand more than tenfold to $1.74 billion by 2013.
About 33% of companies now use enterprise mashups, Business Insights says.
The catalyst for the enterprise mashup market will be SOA — Business Insights puts the SOA platform market at about $1.4 billion in 2008, which will double in size, to about $2.77 billion by 2014.
It’s interesting that the enterprise mashup market, which currently is about 11% the size of the overall SOA platform market, will soon be 63% the size, or getting close to comparable. This is huge for the front-end part of the equation, if these numbers pan out. But does it make sense?
September 21st, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 9:00 am
Categories: Business ROI, Links, Management, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing
Tags: SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
“Cloud computing is already beginning to unleash the potential of SOA and much more is on the way.”
Cloud is the target platform SOA has been lacking until now
That’s the view of Gray Hall, a veteran of the IT hosting industry, in a recent post on the growing role of SOA in cloud formations. Gray states that SOA is an architectural pattern and cloud is a target platform for that pattern. The significance of cloud, he adds, is that SOA has languished since its inception, and the reason is because it has lacked a “target platform.” As he puts it:
“[It] is correct to call SOA an architectural pattern. [It] is correct to call cloud computing a ‘target platform.’ But the real news in this story is that a target platform is exactly what SOA has been lacking all these years. All applications must run somewhere; applications need infrastructure. SOA is an application architecture; cloud computing is an infrastructure architecture. It’s that simple. This marriage is long overdue.”
Gray says that cloud processing (dynamic allocation of CPU resources) and cloud storage (Web services API access to storage resources) infrastructure “is the most natural target platform for SOA apps because cloud infrastructure is designed to scale in the way implied by the SOA approach to application architecture.”
Cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace have made SOA real to many companies, he says. “Until recently, where could a SOA app find a venue to stretch its legs?”
Gray has hit upon something here. SOA’s value is not seen within services built for a single silo, or even those shared between two or more silos. SOA begins to pay off as the result of a network effect — services built and consumed across a growing Web of providers and consumers. Cloud-based services are broadening organizations’ vistas as to when and where they can access services.
(Thanks to reader csarkar for the pointer to Gray’s post.)
September 21st, 2009
Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 6:00 am
Categories: Business ROI, Data managemetnt, Links, Management, Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0
Tags: SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Joe McKendrick
Is service reuse a worthy part of the SOA value equation? This is a question that has been endlessly debated in recent years.
Mashups may hold the key to long-term SOA value
For example, last month, we quoted Forbes’ Dan Woods, who argued that companies are focusing on building SOA-based services that will be available for reuse as soon as they are tested and released to the registry/repository. Perhaps, he says, we should worry less about reusability at the beginning phase of service development.
Or, even if reuse does deliver ROI, it may only have a limited reach. Marc Rix recently weighed in on the topic, suggesting out that “basing SOA on reuse only modernizes 20% of IT and, thus, does not yield agility.” The other 80% of the equation, he says, is based on deployment of data services.
He arrived at the 20% figure by calculating the fact that reusable services tend to be the most popular or mainstream services, and “tend to orbit around relatively static business data (employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, etc.).” Building and deploying these services means relatively immediate reuse, and therefore, ROI. However, there’s little ROI beyond the immediate rush, he says.
For SOA value, Marc says, look to the ” Long Tail of IT” — data taken out of core enterprise systems and manipulated by business users, in applications such as business intelligence and analytics. “This is where business is really conducted and this is where SOA is really needed,” he says.
Why I hear Marc saying is the real meat of SOA will be seen in more dynamic, user-created (or at least user specified) composite apps. Enterprise mashups come to mind in this context. In these situations, end users can create their own interfaces as business requirements demand. They can be quickly built and used. However, what is needed is a way to make this possible within a governed framework. With SOA governance and best practices applied on this end at the architectural level, organizations have assurance that these enterprise mashups are subject to the same security and vetting as core SOA services.
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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