New SOA Consortium Podcast: David Butler on SOA Transformation

David Butler, Worldwide SOA Director and Chief Evangelist, HP, kicked off the SOA Consortium’s June meeting in Ottawa with an information-packed presentation on SOA Transformation.

Setting the record straight from the start, David shared “In many respects the SOA market has lost its vision around what SOA is actually trying to do. Not provide a new set of technology, but provide a transformation focused on a design point called a business service. A business service drives measureable business outcome.” David then shared examples of business outcomes from a semiconductor company, a financial services firm and an insurance provider.

David pointed out that successful SOA transformation is more than implementing software. Transformation spans people, organization, process and technology. On the organizational aspect, David called out the criticality of business-IT alignment for proper business service identification and implementation. “…how we map business capabilities in a consumer-provider fashion, and map that into IT systems and technologies. A business person should be able to consume and provide capabilities without knowledge of the underlying technology and platforms, and do that in a changeable manner.”

David shared a 10-point roadmap for SOA transformation, based on customer experience, that covered business service definition, center of excellence, SOA governance, execution architecture and platform, quality and provisioning, service lifecycle, data center operations, IT management processes and line of business engagement.

In closing, David stated, "SOA is a business-oriented architecture". Following his presentation, David engaged in Q&A with the meeting attendees on SOA transformation challenges, including security, business service definition and granularity, service-engineering, service chargeback and economic models, and the changing role of the CIO.

To listen to, or download the audio recording of David’s presentation and view the slides please go here. 

David's talk is the first of several podcasts recorded at the June meeting.  Next up is Jim Johnson of the Standish Group on Trends in SOA.