BPM / SOA Consortium Insights

2009 Year in Review with Richard Soley: SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and more

SearchSOA’s Rob Barry interviewed Richard Soley, CEO of the OMG, and Executive Director of the BPM / SOA Consortium, on hot topics at the close of 2009, including SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and the future of information technology.  See what Richard has to say on 2009 and beyond in this 8:00 minute video interview.

@ Gartner AADI: End-User Panel: Cloud Computing in the Real World

The SOA Consortium hosted two end-user panels at Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit this week.  Notes taken during our Cloud Computing in the Real World panel follow.

Session Abstract: Is your organization considering cloud computing? Are you tired of hearing about simplistic (email and calendaring), enterprise irrelevant (Twitter, Facebook), and extreme (Google Datacenter) use cases? You aren’t alone. In this session, government and enterprise practitioners will discuss the cloud computing use cases they are considering, actively pursuing, and rejecting. In addition to the use case specifics, the panelists will share insights on financial benefits, true implementation costs, assessing and managing risk, governance, standards and their cloud computing wish list.

Moderators: David W. Cearley, Gartner and Richard Soley, OMG / SOA Consortium

Panelists: Clark Dorman of Next Century, Andy Lapkin of Kelley Blue Book, Joseph Larizza of Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust

Introductions:

Clark Dorman: Specific use case, analyst in DoD collects a lot of images, genetic algorithm to review images.  Use cloud computing to optimize processing.  Started with in 18k server, got output in 8-14 days.  Now, use Amazon EC2, 100 images at a time, 12 hours, get run done for $130.  There is an opportunity to parallelize further and reduce runtime in half again.

Picked EC2 because it is the biggest.  Clark mentions Eucalyptus as way to hedge against lock-in.  Use Appistry to orchestrate startup and runtime execution.

Andy Lapkin: Looking at cloud, on premise they pay for availability, not for use.  Build KBB.com to peak.  This is expensive, for off-hours, plus hedge against growth.  Sized for extra 25%.  Example of unexpected traffic was “cash for clunkers” program.  A second use case is in data management.  KBB has a lot of data not shown on website that is used to produce website.  Also, data provider to car dealerships, etc.  Data management work is done in batch.

KBB uses Azure and SQL Azure for their cloud computing environment.  KBB is a Microsoft shop.  Now, testing KBB.com failover site in Azure in SQL Azure.  Biggest lesson learned: Transition to cloud is as good as your application maintenance. 

Joseph Larizza:  Customers are high net worth individuals, mostly from financial services industry.  The IT budget is a shoestring, similar to community banking.  Joseph has big banking background.  Some providers Digital Insight, Rackspace.  Full banking site, portal to members, all in the cloud.  Core competency is banking, not data center management.  Cost is critical factor.

Risk Question: Look at it as risk ledger.  Responsiveness of provider vs. key employee risk.  Compliance can be provided by cloud, more effectively than if done internally.  Surprise, the amount of support you need to do, such as patching, backups, security.

Online banking application, could have built their own.  But, not core competency.  Could never keep up with feature/function of a Digital Insight.  Instead, use Digital Insight, which is an Intuit company.  Core banking platform is all in the cloud. 

Implemented single sign-on across these applications; does have Fieldpoint branding.

Q: Security Concerns?

Joseph: Rackspace compliance and security, third party providers, learn their procedures.  They are careful about what data is stored in the cloud.  Didn’t elaborate further on this.

Andy: Security isn’t biggest concern, given the type of business application.

Clark: VPN on their side, SSH into Amazon.  Data isn’t classified, but still don’t want to “leak all over”.  Data is encrypted on the fly.  No data resides in the cloud.  Data is brought up at startup.  Have very specific startup process.  (Again, use Appistry)

Q: SLA with Amazon?  Is the data really gone when the images are shut down?

Clark: Matter of trust, trust that policy and agreements will be adhered to.  Security isn’t a thing, it’s a process.

Q: Cost of moving the data, latency?

Clark: For this use case, 6-8 hours of processing, 20 minutes worth of data movement isn’t an issue. 

Q: What is your interest in standards in the cloud computing space?  Cloud interoperability?  Avoid lock-in?

Joseph: Very interested in the ability to move cloud to cloud, for risk management, and to move work closest to current customer base (time zone).

Clark: Want to develop application at highest level you can.  Make the lower levels someone else’s problem.

Andy: Not moving everything to the cloud.  Will always have a mixed model.  Will always have datacenter to fall back on.  The real issue is the operations work to move from running on one cloud to another.

Q: New job roles?

Andy: Monitor the same way as on-premise.  Use Keynote for monitoring. 

Joseph: Think about operations (backup and security) differently.  Can’t just stick equipment in the mix.  Don’t have control over the equipment.

Clark: Systems administration changes to cloud administration.  Don’t worry about hardware layer, but still need to manage the environment (to deliver the application).

Q:  Old wine in new bottles?

Clark – what’s new is dynamic nature, speed that you can do things, low costs.  8 cents for CPU hour. 

Andy: Spin up new instance in 6 minutes.  Scale, knowing you can serve 14 million visitors a month.

Q: What needs to improve in cloud computing?

Andy: Azure needs third party support for management tools.  Doesn’t want to write his own.  Needs tooling to sift through all the log data.

Q: [for Clark]  Your project is a proof of concept, if DoD accepts this product, will it remain in the cloud, or move somewhere else?

Clark: It is up to the government to decide.  The government does have a few clouds – NIST, DISA Race, and GSA Apps.gov.  This application could land on existing government cloud.

Q: [for Andy] Considered running base load on premise, then burst peak to the cloud?

Andy: Something they are considering.

Q: [for Joseph] Said want to get to zero servers, does that mean Opex will outpace Capex?  Is that ok?

Joseph: Not for their size.  In general, economic model is service first, no related employee expense, if not appropriate, have inside.

Andy: KBB uses SaaS applications to run business, such as CRM (Salesforce.com)

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: Ryan Gates, Appian

Session Abstract:

Ryan Gates, Senior Solutions Architect, Appian  on BPM Accelerated: Merging Technology and Methodology for Rapid Results

Modern application development approaches delivering faster and better business decision-making are a must across increasingly dynamic global markets. New IT models such as mash-ups, situational applications and Software-as-a-Service delivery are driving competitive advantage for the companies that can utilize them effectively. Business Process Management (BPM) provides the platform to harness this dynamic power. This presentation discusses how easily-consumable, secure and scalable software, along with a proven methodology for rapid deployment delivers results faster.

Ryan’s agenda is BPM: What, Why and How, plus a Case Study on SaaS based approach to BPM.

Ryan starts with a general definition of BPM, splitting out business process from business process technology.  Appian offers a business process management suite.  Ryan has components diagram up now, the center is the Process Engine.  Ringing the engine are: SOA, Business Modeling, Portal/UI, Case Management, Content Management, Events/Messages, Real-time Analytics, BAM and Simulation. Ringing those are templates and frameworks. The outmost ring was business focuses: optimization, and 2 things I missed.

Beyond Rapid Application Development, BPM enables:

- Common language between business and IT

- Increased flexibility of IT systems

- Less time on systems maintenance, more time on innovation

- Opportunity to better leverage and manage emerging SOAs

Who implements BPM?

- IT departments

--- Solve IT process workflows, such as governance, project management, change management

--- Rapidly deliver business solutions

- Lines of Business

--- Appian does have direct sales to Business Units, Business units want to model and automate processes

--- May, or may not, require IT integration

Accelerate BPM in Organization

- Business Case

- Identify right tools

- create team (people)

- develop and deploy (methodology)

- measure success – according to Ryan this needs to start at day one with goal setting

- repeat

How do you sell BPM in organization.  In 2009, CFO is king (same as Clay mentioned). 

Look for:

- Demonstrable bottom line value

- Process centric organizations are not built overnight

--- focused projects, incremental process centric expansion

- Increased consistency and efficiency

- Increased visibility

- competitive advantage

Customer examples: Concur, US Marine Corps, Enterprise Rent a Car, European bank – these were all “rapid ROI” examples

Three legs of stool for successful BPM: Technology, Methodology and People

Tool selection factors:

- On-premise or on demand (SaaS)

- Rapid prototyping, deployment, change management – how does tool manage change?

- Process and development ecosystem

- Real-time analytics -- “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”

- Ease of use

People – collection of IT developers, business analysts and end-users

Methodology – Ryan’s methodology slide has Center of Excellence in the middle.  Ryan says COE shouldn’t equate to specific group of people, the COE is a discipline.  The goal of the COE is grow organization’s process centricity.

Now, a maturity model.  Goes from Individual to Project to Program to Enterprise.  Ryan says the point is to continuously deliver value.  Don’t start big.  Start with value.  This ties to Clay’s talk as well.

Ryan is talking about “Worse is Better”, idea by Richard Gabriel in 1991, contrasting the “right thing” vs. “worse is better”

- Right Thing: correctness, consistency, completeness trump everything, at the expense of simplicity

- Worse is Better: Simplicity above correctness, consistency and completeness. 

Ryan mentions similarity to Cathedral and Bazaar.  I’d also point to the “Good Enough Revolution”.  His point, again, goes to value delivery.  You can’t know what ‘completeness’ is.  You can (should) plan for continuous change.  Work towards getting things more correct over time.  However, those changes shouldn’t (continuously) tear your company apart. 

Ryan says you need to pick your first project weighing process complexity and business exposure.  He flashed by a 4-quadrant chart up with some examples. 

The case study: Clayton Financial

Challenges:

- rapidly changing industry

- increased scrutiny on expenses

- limited visibility

- some more…

As well, needed something now.  Didn’t have time, budget for big IT initiative.  Led to selection of Appian’s BPM SaaS offering.

The case process revolved around the Financial Analysts.  Got a process up in 4-6 weeks.  Now, monthly releases.  Initially, no integration.  So, no IT required to start.

Lessons:

Lots listed on the slide, Ryan emphasizes Prototype Everything and Frequent Releases. 

Others: resist temptation to start at detailed level of process.  Emphasize reporting needs up front. Limited or no system integration in first release.  Focus on change management and process management early on.

Community Insights: Services, Business Solutions, Portfolios, Management Units & Clouds (continued)

Last month, I shared some of our Community of Practice’s work in flight regarding services, portfolios, management units, and the fit within the overall IT landscape.  At the time, the following diagram best represented our on-going conversation.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

Along with the diagram, I posed some questions for broader community feedback:

1.  Has your organization’s management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3.  Who manages the service portfolio?  How does this compare, contrast with the management of the business solution and IT asset portfolios?

Since that post, our group continued its discussion, which is reflected in this updated version of the Services, Portfolios, Management Units & Clouds diagram.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

 

The major changes:

1. Explicitly stated a usage relationship between the IT Delivery Value Chains and the Service Portfolio.
2. Assigned management responsibility of the Service Portfolio to the Enterprise Architecture group, and declared that the Service Portfolio is part of the Enterprise Architecture Portfolio. (answered our question #3)
3. Indicated the Business Capability map is one of many Business Architecture Artifacts, and that those Business Architecture Artifacts are managed as part of the Enterprise Architecture Portfolio.
4. Explicitly stated the business-driven relationship between Business Capability criticality and Project Portfolio prioritization.
5. Collapsed the Cloud Service view into the main diagram.
6. Noted the specific management policies at each portfolio, recognizing the need for federated policy administration, communication, and enforcement, or as Todd Biske would say, “governance”.

We welcome your feedback on any aspect of our evolved diagram, as well as your thoughts on the following questions. (Question #3 is new)

1.  Has your organization’s management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3. Is your organization using, or considering, ITIL V3 to manage the full service lifecyle from inception (business architecture) through development/consumption (IT Delivery Value Chains), operations (IT asset and runtime management) and product management (service portfolio management)?

Please share any thoughts on the post, and/or our direct questions, via comment, blog post, or discussion forum.  Just link to this post, we’ll find you.

Community Insights: Services, Business Solutions, Portfolios & Management Units

Over the last few months, members of the SOA Consortium’s Community of Practice have been discussing concerns, practices, tips and gaps related to creating and maintaining a vibrant service portfolio.  Discussion topics have included service investment, definition, reuse, rationalization, payback, governance, marketing, operations and asset management.

In recent weeks, these discussions have converged on the concepts of “management units” and “portfolio management”.  From our working notes:

“Taking a service-oriented approach fundamentally changes IT’s basic management unit from an application, to services, or a bundle of services that represent a business capability (component, segment, flow or function), and can be applied to many applications, business processes and/or domains. 

This unit shift ultimately forces changes to funding, project management and asset management practices.  Most notably, organizations will need to be deliberate in the realm of product portfolio management, understanding the business capabilities offered in the portfolio, how those capabilities are instantiated via software and information assets, and how/where those capabilities are packaged into products (applications, processes) that solve a business need.”

This week, I distilled our on-going conversation into the diagram below.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

As you can see, and probably expect, the diagram spans business architecture, IT planning, IT delivery, IT operations, and service portfolio management concerns. 

The arrowed lines show the connections between concerns.  For example “Business solutions provide business capabilities” and “Business solutions consume services”.

The purpose of this post is two-fold.  First, we want to share our in-flight work, particularly the diagram, in case it can be helpful as you enter into service management discusses across your organization.

Second, we have some questions that we’d love the broader community’s feedback on.

1.  Has your organization’s management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3.  Who manages the service portfolio?  How does this compare, contrast with the management of the business solution and IT asset portfolios?

Given the convergence of SOA and Cloud Computing, I did a quick extension to include consuming cloud services.  The extensions are in yellow.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

Obviously, an externally sourced cloud service is not an IT asset.  However, since the cloud service does instantiate business capability, it is a member of your service portfolio.  The question becomes which service portfolio management practices and policies apply to an externally sourced (and controlled) cloud service?  I’ll be thinking that one over myself, and would love to hear your thoughts.

Please share any thoughts on the post, and/or our direct questions, via comment, blog post, or discussion forum.  Just link to this post, we’ll find you.

David Linthicum’s Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide

Since our founding, the SOA Consortium has been exploring the relationship between SOA and other “hot” business and technology topics.  Over the last 2.5 years, we have looked into SOA & BPM, SOA & Event Processing, SOA & BPM & Green, and most recently, SOA & Cloud Computing. 

To begin our SOA and Cloud Computing exploration, we invited David Linthicum, SOA expert, blogger and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, to speak at our March meeting.  The distinctions and connections, according to Dave, are simple. SOA is something you do, an architectural pattern. Cloud computing is an architectural option.

Ever practical, Dave emphasized that cloud computing provides a way to leverage ‘other people’s work’ in your SOA.  This shortens the start-up time of SOA, which creates business value quicker.  The trick is to determine which services, information, and processes are good candidates to reside in, come from, the clouds.  And the place to start, is your architecture.  Understand your business drivers, information under management, existing services under management and core business processes.

In addition to understanding your issues, understand the early state of cloud computing, the portability and interoperability issues, and beware of the hidden costs, such as integration.

When we first published the podcast of Dave’s talk, I mentioned Dave had a SOA & Cloud Computing book coming out this summer, well that book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

If you are a SOA practitioner considering Cloud Computing, or a Cloud Computing practitioner considering SOA, check out Dave’s latest book.  He’s a welcome voice of reason in a sea of hype.

If you haven’t already, listen to the audio recording of Dave’s talk from our March meeting.

New Podcast: Dave Linthicum on Intersections of SOA & Cloud Computing

David Linthicum, SOA expert, blogger and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, spoke on Finding the Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC. 

Linthicum opened by sharing the distinctions and connections between SOA and cloud computing. SOA is something you do, an architectural pattern. Cloud computing is an architectural option.

The value of SOA comes from having an architecture that readily accommodates change. The more your business changes, the more SOA pays for itself.  However, the initial build-out of SOA, prior to business change or service sharing, is cost-ineffective.  By incorporating cloud computing in SOA, the time to value is shortened because you leverage ‘other people’s work’.  The trick, Linthicum shares, is to determine which services, information, and processes are good candidates to reside in, come from, the clouds.

To determine the right mix of internal and external services for your SOA, Linthicum emphasizes starting with your architecture. Understand your business drivers, information under management, existing services under management and core business processes. A common failure pattern is jumping to the technology prior to understanding own issues.

Beyond understanding your issues, understand the state of cloud computing.  While there are safe, reliable offerings, cloud computing is at an early stage. Linthicum warned attendees to factor in integration costs and to beware of cloud interoperability and portability limitations.

For organizations contemplating extending SOA to the cloud, Linthicum suggests three preparatory actions.  First, accept the notion that it's okay to leverage external services as part of your SOA.  Second, create a strategy for the consumption and management of cloud services.  Third, create a proof of concept now.

To listen to an audio recording of Linthicums’s presentation and view the slides go here.

Keep an eye out for Dave’s new book on the convergence of SOA & Cloud Computing, to be released by Pearson this summer.

This is the first of several podcasts to be released from our DC meeting.  Next up, Sandy Carter on Smart SOA approach in a tough economic climate.