SOA Consortium Insights

SOA, BPM and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man -- Hot Topics Roundtable Podcast Now Avaliable

At our Jacksonville SOA Consortium Meeting, we held our second SOA Hot Topics Roundtable.  This quarter, we explored the relationship between SOA and BPM.  I asked our invited guests, Ashwini Ahuja from SDG Corporation, Sooraj Balgobin from The SOA Monitor and Brian Erickson from Hitachi Consulting to speak to one of four aspects of the SOA-BPM relationship:

1. Business Discipline

2. Methodology

3. Technology

4. Human Element

Similar to our SOA Governance Roundtable, the insights and conversation was pitch-free.  After each thought leader shared his opening insights, we launched into a roundtable discussion with all meeting attendees.  Many of the participants will be familiar as they are leading SOA practitioners.

The entire podcast is a little over an hour, the roundtable begins about 25 minutes in, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is discussed during Brian Erickson's opening remarks.  I also shared the SOA Consortium's view that SOA and BPM are complements.

Go here to listen to the podcast, view the slides, or read the full transcript.  As always, let us know what you think. 

For our December Hot Topics Roundtable, we've lined up Sandy Carter of IBM, Judith Hurwitz and our own Richard Soley.  We'll be addressing CIO level concerns, such as talking SOA with the CEO and SOA skills identification and development.  If you have suggestions for a future roundtable topic, please drop me an email brenda at soa-consortium dot org.

Collective SOA Wisdom: A Consortium Experience - member guest post from Dr. Burc Oral

SOA-C member Burc Oral of Cell Exchange reports on the Fourth Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference:

The Fourth Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference was held on October 1-2, 2007 at MITRE. The meeting focused on information sharing environments for enterprise architecture, semantic interoperability, Service-Oriented Architecture, data and information architecture, and service systems.

The Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference was started as an outlet for the SOA CoP (Community of Practice) to align many Industry Advisory Council (IAC) initiatives around Service Oriented Architecture. The IAC brings industry and government executives together to exchange information, support professional development, improve communications and understanding, solve issues and build partnership and trust, thereby enhancing the government's ability to serve the nation's citizenry. The SOA CoP provides the AIC sub-committees and the federal government with expertise and coordination in SOA Reference Models, Specifications and Standards, SOA Governance and SOA Implementation and Testing.

This recent meeting was well attended by industry and government participants because of the successful promotion and exposure of the event by the planning committee, which had started in June. The event was packed with key note speakers, panels, demos, tutorials, and poster sessions.

I talked about the collective SOA wisdom and endorsed the SOA Consortium experience as an advocacy organization. You can find more about this presentation on the SOA eGov site. I shared our mission to promote and enable business agility via Service-Oriented Architecture for the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market businesses. I also briefed the community on our activities:

• Building awareness amongst the C-level executives on the cost, value, challenges and success factors of moving to SOA
• Establishing awareness and linkages between business operations and IT professionals on approaches for using SOA to enable business process improvement initiatives
• Enabling architects and senior development managers to sell, transition to, develop, and support a SOA in practice.

At the third meeting in early May 2007, the SOA Consortium was composed of two dozen companies. It was a great pleasure to report on the growth in membership to over 60.

There was great interest on our collective work which has been underway on three fronts: Promoting Business-Driven SOA, Generating Business Value from SOA, and Executing Business-Driven SOA.

Enterprise Architecture 2010: Questions for EA, SOA and Business Architecture Communities

Have you had a chance to check out our new released EA2010 webcast and position deck?  If you did, great.  If not, no worries.  You can still participate in the discussion.  In our work, we call out the importance of business architecture as organizations progress with service-orientating their business and IT operations.  (Yes, SOA as a strategy.  No, SOA as a technology.)

As you can imagine, we had a lot of healthy (and some circular) discussion as we were working on the EA2010 material.  In the end, we decided we would publish the frame, and use it to solicit feedback and insight.

Some of the questions we would love the broader EA, SOA and Business Architecture communities to chime in on are:

1. Do you agree that Business Architecture as an important emerging enterprise architecture discipline?  Does your organization already practice business architecture?  If so, formally or informally?

2. Where will/do business architects come from?  Are these business savvy technologists?  Technology savvy business professionals?  Today's business analysts?  Other?

3. Assuming Enterprise Architecture 2010 encompasses not only today's technology laden "enterprise architecture" but also Business Architecture, where will it report?  Is this still an IT function?  Does it report to a business executive?

Please share your thoughts with us, as a comment on this post, via a trackback from your blog, or drop me an email brenda at soa-consortium dot org.  If you have other thoughts on the EA2010 work, please share those as well.

Enterprise Architecture in 2010 Means Business

One of the working groups in the SOA Consortium’s community of practice is the “EA2010” group. This group of seasoned enterprise architects from industry, government, systems integrators and vendors, has been actively discussing and defining the next generation role of enterprise architecture. Specifically, what enterprise architecture looks like – organization, practices and people – in a business-driven, service-oriented world.

This week, the EA2010 working group published the first release of their view of Enterprise Architecture 2010 in a Powerpoint deck.  Here's a sneak peak:

In preparation for this release, I sat down with the EA2010 working group leaders, Ashok Kumar and Yogish Pai, to discuss their working group’s motivation, findings and next steps. That conversation is available to the public as an on-demand webcast or podcast.

During our conversation, Ashok and Yogish touched on a wide range of enterprise architecture concerns, including catalyzing business change, gaining business-smarts, shifting focus to business architecture, managing enterprise architecture, participating in strategy and delivery, and winning enterprise constituents.

After viewing or listening to the webcast, please share your thoughts with us. As we discuss in the webcast, this is a work-in-progress and we really want to hear from the broader enterprise architecture community.  Leave a comment here or send an email to brenda at soa-consortium dot org.

And yes, the full EA2010 presentation deck is available for download at the webcast location).  Feel free to discuss and use any and all materials in your own enterprise architecture programs.