A Few Busy Weeks for the Consortium

It has been a few very busy weeks for the SOA Consortium.  As I type this, the Consortium meeting is going on downstairs here at the Ottawa Marriott.  This morning we had presentations by David Butler of HP, Jim Johnson of The Standish Group, and very active member Melvin Greer of Lockheed Martin.  As I type this, new Consortium Sponsor Scott Morrison of Layer 7 is kicking off the afternoon.  As always, these presentations and the others from this meeting will be available as podcasts, announced here on the blog but also on the Consortium's Resources page.

Speaking of new podcasts, you can expect to see a few other new ones appear based on SOA Consortium focused panel discussions at two recent Gartner Summits. The first, a panel on Measuring the Value of SOA at the Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Orlando, hammered home the lessons of connecting business metrics to technical metrics, baselining performance so that metrics have meaning,  Business Process Management is an important piece of a succesful SOA, and moving to a metric-driven culture. Gartner's Dan Sholler and I led a stellar panel including Melvin Greer of Lockheed Martin, Mike Kavis of Catalina Marketing and Todd Biske of Monsanto.  The lessons are clear and actionable and I can't wait to post the audio from this event here!  In the meantime Todd's post contains the usual pearls of wisdom, but I'll add my favorite quote from the panel: "Agility is the ability to keep up with business change."

The fun continued later in the week at Gartner's Enterprise Architecture Summit in the same location.  This time Gartner's Samuel Joseph and I were joined on stage by the irrepressible Todd Biske, Maja Tibbling of Con-way, John Williams of insurer QBE the Americas, and Marty Colbourn of FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.  Our topic was a common one for the SOA journey, namely, Lessons Learned from the Trenches (in this case about the relationship between SOA and EA).  As Todd said, it was a terrific session but we ran out of time to deal with the flood of questions.  We're working with Gartner Events to get those questions up on a web site for the panelists and the community as a whole to address -- there are lessons aplenty for all of us dealing with SOA and EA (especially those of us trying to reconcile our SOA Centers of Excellence with our EA Centers of Excellence!).  Again we'll get the podcast up here as soon as Gartner is ready to release it.

Unfortunately a pair of panels at the TechTarget CIO Decisions  conference last week were not recorded.  Not only was the small, invitation-only, midmarket CIO-focused event held at a spectacular venue, but the two-part panel I had the honor to moderate was really terrific.  Three panelists (Fernando Gonzalez, CIO at women's and girl's clothing manufacturer Byer California; Erin Griffin, CIO of the world's largest entertainment worker's union the Screen Actors Guild; and Mark Davenport, IT Director of hair-care leader Bosley) shared strategic insights gleaned from the sometimes painful process of leading their organizations to a Service Oriented Architecture.  Some key ideas:

• even if the process-orientation "religion" is recognized first in the IT department, business processes have to be owned by the business.  The IT department can help map those processes, suggest optimizations for those processes, and of course automate parts of those processes, but if they're not business-owned, ultimately they're just overhead.
• while you're evangelizing SOA in your organization (even if you don't call it SOA!), don't forget that you will likely have to evangelize SOA in your IT department.  Don't take anything for granted.
• if you baseline your processes, you're much more likely to be able to show ROI from a more structured approach to optimizing processes and connecting existing services to form new business capabilities.  This was especially clear from several panelists' stories about mergers and acquisitions.  I was especially pleased to hear Fernando's story: when asked by his CEO if he could integrate Byer's back-end systems with a new supplier in 44 days, Fernando responded with a question of his own, "what am I supposed to do with the extra five weeks?"  The fact that the one-week time-to-market was enabled by a service-oriented approach wasn't lost on the CEO.
• finally, as an extension of the above, the "skunk works" approach really is the best way to start your transition to SOA.  Start small, focus on a real business pain point, deliver value -- it gives you something to point to when someone asks, "What's SOA?"

For now, back downstairs to the SOA Consortium meeting to catch up with the Planning Framework, EA2010 project and especially the SOA Case Study joint effort with CIO Magazine.  Don't forget to enter the contest and show the world what you have achieved!