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Practitioners Soapbox on SOA Sustainment Factors -- New Podcasts

In the "let's try this" spirit, at the September SOA Consortium meeting I tried something new, our first ever SOA Soapbox Derby.  The intent was to create an informal forum for practitioners to exchange ideas on activities that are critical to sustaining SOA success.

Each derby participant was given 15 minutes to soapbox on a single SOA Sustainment topic of their choosing, followed by another 15 minutes to engage in related conversation with meeting attendees.  The rules were simple:

• No ranting about particular products, organizations or individuals

• No filibusters, 15-minute limit will be enforced

• Engage your peers

• Have fun

I'm happy to report, the rules were followed, we all learned something and it really was a lot of fun.  We'll definitely hold another Derby, either at a SOA Consortium meeting or another industry event.  Until then, we are releasing podcasts of four soap-boxers:

• Todd Biske, Senior IT Architect, Monsanto on SOA Governance

• Mike Kavis, Chief Technologist, Kavis Technology Consulting on SOA and Organizational Change

• Victor Harrison, Partner, CSC on SOA and Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

• Britta Schatz, Director, Information Technology, Penn National Insurance on SOA Success at small and medium sized businesses

Lifting my text from the SOA Consortium Insights blog, here's what went on:

Todd Biske, Senior IT Architect at Monsanto soap-boxed that SOA Governance is a critical element to SOA success. “SOA Governance, done right or wrong, has most impact on an organization’s SOA effort.” Todd defines SOA Governance as "the combination of people, policies, and processes that an organization uses to achieve a desired behavior”.

During his session, Todd pointed out the importance of having clearly defined, measurable outcomes associated with SOA adoption, and then establishing policies and processes to support the attainment of those goals. In respect to processes, Todd emphasized the importance of policy definition, communication and education and continuous evaluation and improvement. When these three processes are well executed, then the fourth process, enforcement becomes less onerous to the governed and governors.

Follow-on conversation with meeting attendees included defining decision-making and decision rights, balancing differing points of view between service consumers and providers, SOA center role and composition, project managers, SOA and measurement, and the value of a shared understanding on the functionality, availability and performance of services.

To listen to Todd’s soapbox, please go here. For more of Todd’s views on SOA Governance, please visit his blog or see his new book on SOA Governance.

Mike Kavis, Chief Technologist, Kavis Technology Consulting soap-boxed on the importance of recognizing and managing the organizational change implications of SOA adoption. “Organizational implications need to be managed and planned as part of SOA roadmap, with defined milestones.”

During his talk, Mike shared insights from his experience leading an organization’s transition to SOA and BPM to solve a pressing business need. Despite starting with formal communication from the CIO, and having a communication plan, Mike and his team realized they underestimated the work to support organizational change. As Mike shared, “people don’t hate change; they hate the way change is introduced. People need to understand why the change is happening and what the implications for them are.”

From that context, Mike described the work his team did to bridge the change gap, and offered advice on how organizations should address organizational change on their SOA initiatives. Follow-on conversation with meeting attendees included measuring the change program, the criticality of winning over middle managers and recognizing not everyone will make the transition.

To listen to Mike’s soapbox, please go here. For more of Mike’s views on SOA, please visit his blog.

Victor Harrison, Partner, CSC soap-boxed that sustainable SOA success is inextricably tied to the use of a model-driven approach. Although SOA shares a technology lineage with earlier distributing computing paradigms, SOA differs in respect to dynamism. This dynamism is present in the architecture, via mediators, and the end-solutions, via conjunctive composition or mashups.

Building his case, Victor spoke of the technical and human capabilities required to support SOA’s dynamism. “As agility goes up, so does (almost exponentially) the engineering rigor that is required. Engineering rigor is not easily socialized or scaled. A way of dealing with this is to embody this knowledge in a set of models…Moving knowledge from individuals to models allows you to socialize your development and delivery and get a better result more quickly at less cost.”

Follow-on conversation with meeting attendees included skills shortages and transitions, the relationship between MDA and BPM, resolving the gaps between BPMN and UML, and the use of modeling to create a shared language between business and IT professionals.

To listen to Victor’s soapbox, please go here.

Britta Schatz, Director, Information Technology, Penn National Insurance soap-boxed that SOA is not out of reach for small and medium sized companies. Supporting Britta’s stance is Penn National’s win in the CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium case study contest.

Britta covered a lot of ground during her talk, sharing insights on the similarities and differences when employing a SOA approach in respect to gaining business buy-in, risk identification and mitigation, service design, project coordination, governance and testing. Britta emphasized the importance of disciplined systems development, project management and change management practices, and the criticality of load and performance testing.

Follow-on conversation with meeting attendees included technology platforms and integration points, executive steering, the architecture team’s role and formalization, extending SOA success and governance beyond the initial project, metrics, measurement and service levels, and the performance testing environment.

To listen to Britta’s soapbox, please go here. For more information on Penn National’s winning case study, please go here.

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]

Assorted Links - December 2, 2008

I say 'assorted', but all but the last relate to IT efficiencies.

Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software - BusinessWeek

If you need some examples of Open Source Adoption and an exec friendly article on open source, check this one out. "As the recession puts pressure on tech spending, many companies are turning to open-source software to handle more IT tasks"

Why an Open Source SOA stack makes sense

Speaking of Open Source, Mike Kavis shares his open source SOA stack preference and points out a few others.

elemental links: Open Source Considerations

One more on Open Source. I wrote an open source considerations paper in October 2005. This post excerpts those 'considerations', which practitioners tell me still hold. Folks have incorporated some of these key points into new Open Source strategies for their organizations.

Continuations: Kaizen for Software Development Series

Intro to Kaizen for Development Series, check out the 5 posts to date. "Kaizen means loosely translated continuous improvement. It is a bundle of techniques applied by Japanese manufacturing companies. The goal of Kaizen is to break out of the notion that there is a fixed cost-time-quality tradeoff. Traditional thinking was that if you wanted higher quality it would imply more cost and longer production times. Kaizen posits that with the right process improvements you can get higher quality at lower cost and faster speed."..."I have found that Kaizen practices are also highly applicable to software development. Yet it seems that not that many folks in the software development community are familiar with the tenets and practices of Kaizen. So I am planning to write a series of posts that describes Kaizen principles and how they are applicable to software development."

When "IT Alignment with the Business" Isn't a Buzzword

disciplined approach to cost containment: "Well, let's be careful. First, project costs associated with large business initiatives are only one portion of IT spending. Additionally, cutting costs is easy; you just decrease the services you offer the business. Instead, we wanted to cut costs in ways that would enhance our business alignment, and increase (rather than decrease) the services we offer. To do that, we had to expose all of the costs in IT (PMO and non-PMO) in terms that the business could understand. In other words: business applications. We enumerated all IT budgetary costs by application, and then bucketed them based upon whether they were (1) existing services (i.e. keeping the "true" IT lights on) or (2) new services being installed in 2008. We then launched a theme of "convergence" in IT, which would allow us to converge to fewer technologies/applications that offer the business the same functionality, while increasing the level of service for each offering."

Inside Architecture : Creating a distinction between business services and SOA business services

Nick Malik provides a different perspective. His metamodel varies from mine, but an interesting point-of-view nonetheless. "A business unit may provide zero or more business services. Not all of the capabilities required by a business unit may be involved in a business service. SOA provides the ability to share features. Those features may provide information, or calculations, or data manipulation. They may also include the limited automation of some elements of a business process. SOA services are provided by "installed software""..."The point of this post is to provide sufficient context to challenge the notion that SOA provides shared business services. It does not. SOA provides shared features that many business units call upon. Those features are required by the business processes within those business units."

Next week, SOA Consortium Meeting in Santa Clara -- SOA Success, Lessons & Futures -- Public Welcome

Why so quiet? I took a couple days around Thanksgiving for an unplanned home project, and now I'm prepping for next week's SOA Consortium meeting in Santa Clara.  As always, the meeting is open to the public.  The meeting theme is SOA Success, Lessons and Futures. 

Featured sessions include Ross Altman of Sun Microsystems on the Future of SOA, Harvinder Kalsi of Cisco on Cisco's internal SOA implementation, and a special two-part panel discussion with several of our case study contest winners.

Ross Altman, CTO, SOA and Business Integration, Sun Microsystems, on The Future of SOA -- Myths and Realities

Clearly, over the next five years, more vendors will put more "SOA" into more applications and tooling.  And, just as clearly, more enterprise developers will use SOA to inform the architecture, development process and governance model that they implement for their future projects.  But, what does that really mean?  How many services provided by the COTS application vendors will be reusable?  How many of these vendors will endorse and implement standards that make their services "pluggable"?  How many development projects in end-user enterprises will develop services that can be leveraged by multiple projects within that enterprise?
This session will discuss these and other questions that get at a key dilemma facing IT over the next five years: Is SOA really going to rule the future of IT? Or, will SOA be dismissed as "just another good idea that was over-hyped and misunderstood"?

Harvinder Kalsi, IT Architect, Cisco Systems on Success with SOA: a Cisco IT Case Study

Cisco’s IT organization has adopted SOA as a key pillar of its IT enablement strategy. In this session, Harvinder Kalsi, an IT architect responsible for SOA across Cisco, will describe the evolution of SOA adoption within Cisco IT, including steps taken along the way to overcome several enterprise-scale technical and operational issues, as well as actions taken to improve business-IT alignment which have become internal best practices.  Key to Cisco's successful use of SOA has been consideration of available network services early in the process in order to ensure that security, performance, and scalability were maintained as application services were rolled out on a global scale. The resulting solutions have delivered solid improvements in efficiency and productivity throughout the company.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest Winners Panel Discussion

Adoption of Service Oriented Architecture is now ramping up, but most organizations are still finding their way. These organizations, however, have shown more than promise -- they've shown return on investment. The SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine are proud to present three winners of the SOA Consortium / CIO Magazine SOA Case Study Awards Program. Winners in government, healthcare and technology will explain how they succeeded with SOA, lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest Winners Panel Discussion Part 2: Futures

In a follow-on to the lunch-time panel discussion, our case study contest winners will discuss SOA futures, touching on a variety of topics related to taking their SOA to the next level, including, business value opportunities, organizational implications (people, process, roles), technology and industry gaps (practices, technology and skills).

And those great sessions are just the beginning... 

On Wednesday afternoon, Professor Gregor Engels from Capgemini sd&m AG will share insights on Service Oriented Design, a Key Competency for SOA Success.  After Professor Engels' talk, I'll lead the group in a discussion on SOA lessons, reaching into our vast collection of case studies, anecdotes, best practices and tips related to adopting SOA for business value.

On Thursday morning, we have three great invited speakers:

Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect, EDS Civilian Government & DoD Healthcare Portfolio on The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare

As a market sector, the healthcare industry is generally a market laggard, especially when considering technology adoption relating to information systems. While there is a strong appetite and interest in cutting-edge medical devices and technologies, investment in systems is viewed as an expense that takes away from the core mission. As a result, creating interest in SOA and dialogue around business transformation involving SOA is a very hard conversation to have, and healthcare vendors have been reticent to support SOA efforts.

In order to stimulate the dialogue, and ultimately the demand for SOA solutions, OMG and HL7 have authored "The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare." While the guide was written to a healthcare audience, the advice is equally applicable in any market segment. This is an informative document that attempts to answer the "now what?" question, capitalizing on the industry hype and name recognition that SOA brings, but casting it in an actionable approach that business leaders and their senior technology staff can use. This talk will present an overview of the "Practical Guide", talk to the business challenges that SOA can effectively address, and make the case for industry-vertical SOA standards.

Joseph A. di Paolantonio, President, and Clarise Z. Doval Santos, PMP, CTO, InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. lead an interactive session on SOA, Master Data Management and Software as a Service

An interactive session based upon a mindmap for developing a system architecture using Master Data Management (MDM), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) principles.  The goal is not to talk about having an enterprise mashup with salesforce.com, but how to apply these principles to internal enterprise initiatives.  We'll discuss the success, lessons learned and future of integrating MDM & SOA, and how this approach allows IT to provision business needs quickly through a SaaS approach to the users.  Bring your own experiences and ideas, as we'll be expanding the mindmap in the direction you want.  A PDF of the basic mindmap will be emailed to all members of the SOA-C and be included in the meeting handout.  Changes to the mindmap made during the session will be posted after the meeting.

Suresh Chandrasekaran, Senior VP, North America, Denodo Technologies on Data Mashups Accelerating the Delivery of SOA Value, a case study

This case study will examine how a CIO leveraged a funded SOA project to help create short-term business value through an Enterprise Data Mashup solution -- delivering real-time access to composite views of data integrated across internal and external sources. The mashup data services were initially created to enable a customer self-service portal, and then reused for internal call centers, partner extranets, and business intelligence applications.

On Thursday afternoon, we'll share and discuss outputs from our working groups, and leave time for an "attendees choice topic".

As always, the SOA Consortium meeting is open to the public.  If you have a business-driven view of SOA, want to connect with real SOA practitioners and enjoy your content marketing-free, this is the meeting for you.  To register, go here.  On site registration is available.

 

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]