SOA Consortium Insights

SOA Consortium December Meeting Podcasts Available: Sandy Carter and Judith Hurwitz

Not only did we have a great speaker line-up at our December meeting - Sandy Carter, Judith Hurwitz, Amit Sinha and Richard Soley - the speakers all graciously agreed to be recorded for public podcasts.  The first of those podcasts -- Sandy Carter on "IT Needs SOA Skills" and Judith Hurwitz on "Planning for SOA 2008 by Learning from 2007" are now available.

Sandy Carter spoke about the importance of fostering SOA skills.  In her presentation, she called out results from a survey conducted at IBM’s Impact conference that “56% of people say their biggest inhibitor is not looking at the value of SOA, or what SOA brings to the table, but it was looking at their skills.”

In respect to SOA skills, Sandy shared that the most critical, and most scarce, is the combination of technical and business skills. IBM has learned that the most successful SOA initiatives have individuals who can determine what process to start with, articulate that process, identify the most competitive part, make the translation to services and communicate with both the business and IT.

After sharing IBM’s work on SOA skills development – including demonstrations of Innov8 and a Key Agility Indicator Benchmark Wizard – Sandy spoke about how the SOA Consortium can help colleges and companies understand and create the SOA skills needed for the future.

To hear Sandy's presentation with audience Q&A, go here.

Judith Hurwitz regaled SOA Consortium members and guests with client anecdotes, lessons learned, observations, and predictions in her far ranging talk on planning for SOA 2008 by learning from SOA 2007. Judith set the stage with an observation from an insightful client: "In a few years, SOA won't be discussed as a technology strategy. SOA will just be the way business operates." From there, Judith spoke of the perils of a technology centric SOA mindset and path - thousands of unshared, unmanageable services with no business value.

During her talk, Judith emphasized that SOA success - the delivery of true business value - requires a shift in thinking away from web service interfaces and bounded applications to shared business services and business compositions.

For SOA in 2008, Judith sees business executives and professionals taking the lead in SOA - from organizational championship to business service definition. On the technology side, Judith sees organizations investing in practices and technologies related to scale - governance, quality, security and configurability.

No Judith Hurwitz talk would be complete without future predictions. At the SOA Consortium meeting, Judith spoke of information-as-a-service and the ties to cloud computing.

To hear Judith's talk with audience interaction, go here.

Gartner's Application Development & Integration and Enterprise Architecture Summits

Regular readers of this blog will know that the SOA Consortium last year negotiated a strategic relationship with Gartner; the core of this agreement is the inclusion in two of Gartner's key Summit events of sessions which are focused on the SOA Consortium and its members.  This key outreach tactic of the Consortium will be extended this year to include other Gartner summits (as well as other events); keep an eye here for announcements and information.  Immediate opportunities to hear more from Gartner on SOA Consortium-relevant topics are coming up at their BPM event in Las Vegas, the next Application Architecture, Development & Integration event in Orlando and the Enterprise Architecture event in Orlando.

The purpose of this post, however, is to report on the two SOA Consortium Gartner Summit sessions held in early December last year, in Las Vegas, Nevada.  I'm delighted to report that once again, Gartner has graciously allowed the audio of these two excellent panels to be available publicly and you'll find the pointers here in the blog.

The first panel was at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit.  Entitled "Lessons Learned in Advanced SOA", this session was cochaired by Gartner Distinguished Analyst Yefim V. Natis and me, and included a sterling cast of architects that have been there and done that.  They included

• Jeff Adkins, Integration Architect, Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation
• Siamak Amjadi, Head of SOA Centre of Excellence, Nordea Bank
• Aleks Buterman, Chief Architect, Lincoln National Corporation
• Ayan Mitra, Senior Enterprise Architect, Orange Home UK

Like everyone else, I do love a great debate, but there was quite a bit of agreement among this very diverse group for the several hundred people in the audience.  All report some level of success implementing the SOA business agility strategy in their organizations, with common themes around managing stakeholder expectations, engaging executive management in the transition, building a base of shared services across business unit silos, and developing a stakeholder-driven governance structure to guarantee success.  Thanks to Gartner, you can hear the entire panel from this podcast.

The next day, I was again privileged to cochair a panel at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit, this time with Distinguished Analyst Nicholas Gall.  This time the subject was, not unexpectedly, "SOA and Enterprise Architecture".  Nick & I wondered: would the participants think of "SOA" and "Enterprise Architecture" as the same pursuit?  As related approaches to solving problems?  As competitive approaches?  Our panel included

• William Conroy, Global Enterprise Architecture Executive, Bank of America
• Todd Biske, Senior IT Architect, Monsanto
• Sam Vetto, Enterprise Architect, The Hartford

Again lively discussion was the order of the day, though I can't claim there was a battle on the dais for the several hundred audience members to follow!  It was clear that the panelists considered Enterprise Architecture part of the mix necessary to achieve the SOA business strategy, but many other themes flowed through the conversation, including how to work with the business and prove value; managing incentives for business units to come to the process improvement table; keeping an opportunistic eye out for cross-enterprise initiatives (this one reminded me of the Federal Enterprise Architecture!); leveraging not only technology but process optimization ideas like Lean and Six Sigma; and integrating both legacy systems and BPM technologies into the solution mix.  And once again, governance structures were a major topic of discussion.  You can hear the entire panel from this podcast.

This year we're expanding our relationship with Gartner (in fact, next week I'll be at Gartner's Business Process Summit in Las Vegas -- just can't stay away from the plastic city).  We're also expanding the Consortium's relationship with the likes of SHARE, TechTarget, SourceMedia, OMG, and the events of our own Founding Sponsors (including IBM IMPACT and SAP TechEd, with discounts for SOA Consortium members).

As I said, it's going to be an exciting year, and that's just on the event front; wait until you see what we have to say about analyst relationships, podcasts and webcasts (especially from the quarterly meetings), and the expanding Executive Summit program!  Now is a great time to get involved, either as a Participant or to join our soon to be expanding group of Sponsors!

SOA 2008 - It's the economy...

This morning’s dismal US Jobs Report and the ensuing analysis  laden with the “R-word” reminded me of a conversation our community-of-practice had on our December 4, 2007 call that I’ve been mean meaning to post on. During that call, prompted by an earlier discussion with Surekha Durvasula, I asked our members the following:

“What does the ensuing (or on-going) economic downturn mean for SOA in 2008? Will the economic downturn and associated budget cutbacks drive organizations to, or away from, SOA in 2008?”

In general, the group on the call spoke of the need for a SOA approach to respond to changing economic (and political) conditions. However, they do foresee changes in implementation investment philosophies, particularly at the resource (application and infrastructure) layers. In respect to garnering investment in tight times, organizations need to approach SOA as a joint business-IT strategy, directly linked to business initiatives.

What follows are excerpts from our call. For member confidentiality, names and organizations are not included. 

Industry practice leader - “It depends on how critical the business direction is that would be inhibited by not doing SOA. In other words, if in order to succeed in the downturn there is a business direction a company has to take that they can’t accomplish right now because of way it is functioning, like it or not, expense or not, they are going to move forward… they might be more selective in how they manage the waves of work they need to do.

I expect to see SOA going forward. Because it is based on – or should be based on -- business value, rather than just technology direction.”

Chief Architect 1 –“In the government sector, a new administration is coming on board. So, a lot of change is coming on many levels. This will create increased spending in IT and SOA specifically.

In the commercial sector, the economic situation might be a downturn mostly from a consumer perspective. Businesses will be looking at emerging and overseas markets to diversify and respond to the dollar bottoming out – manufacturing and portfolio investments. That type of business change is ripe for the development of a SOA approach.

I think we will continue to see SOA. Instead of just composite application development, we’ll see more choreography as it relates to peer-to-peer business interactions. Organizations will open up infrastructure to allow business peers to develop and consume SOA based business services.”

Technology Director – “The financial industry is definitely cutting back. But, other industries, such as telecommunications with the spectrum auctions and Verizon opening its network will continue to invest. As well, enterprises are beginning a rush to Web 2.0 and social networks, similar to the ecommerce rush. With the growth of Web 2.0/Social Networks (Google, Facebook, Yahoo!), enterprises, especially in consumer markets, will need to catch up. Both of these will result in the implementation of SOA. SOA is the backend.”

Industry practice leader – “While SOA will continue to grow, we might see cutbacks related to transformation beneath the services  because that is expensive to do. It’s a bit dangerous. But, I suspect companies might try to limp along – putting services on top of old applications. Depends on how dramatic the requirement is to transform. Such as, is the platform going to die? On the surface there will be services, cutbacks might be lower level.”

Chief Architect 2– “If you are a company faced with global competition or cost-cutting measures, you’ll still be service-enabling. But, I can see a move towards the prior point -- that underlying resource investments (applications and infrastructure) may be put off. Although, that wouldn’t be my preference.”

Business Strategist – “From a business standpoint, I think the downturn and budget constraints may help the SOA cause. I believe that people will look harder at the benefits. From that perspective, people will start to believe in SOA more from a point of necessity.”

Industry practice leader – “In other words from a downturn people will have to be more creative, and will turn towards SOA”

Join our discussion. What is your view on economic conditions and SOA? Please leave a comment, or post with a trackback. Thanks!