SOA Consortium Insights

SOA Hot Topics Roundtable Podcast: Public Sector SOA

The final podcast from the Public Sector SOA day at our March meeting, is now available.  This Public Sector SOA Hot Topics Roundtable podcast features Victor Harrison from CSC, Bill Vass from Sun Microsystems Federal, and Kshemendra Paul of the Office of Management & Budget.  Keeping with our hot topic roundtable format, our objective was to generate a meaningful conversation between thought leaders and meeting attendees on the drivers, issues and available guidance for public sector SOA adoption and management. The podcast starts with brief opening statements from Victor, Bill and Kshemendra, followed by a facilitated Q&A with the audience. 

For the most part, my facilitation consisted of passing the microphone around.  However, I did get one question in, after observing the numerous similarities between public and private sector SOA.  No surprise, I found the biggest difference to be the predisposition for governance in the public sector.  On that theme, I asked the panelists "how do you balance governance with productivity, actually being able to get something done and out the door".  

In his response, Kshemedra Paul spoke to correlating the size, scope, complexity and impact of the problem domain with the governance structure:

"If you are trying to solve a big societal problem, then these formalities and these structures are important, because there are so many stakeholders, there are so many different levels and so many issues.  There are the technical issues, but also in many cases privacy/civil liberty-type issues, or security and protection, personally liable information, I mean, so many different considerations that come into play. And there are plenty of examples where somebody skipped a step or did not do the full due diligence, and it later on kind of came back and torpedoed the program. And forget about the waste of money, and time and effort, you are still not filling that societal need, right. So these structures, they have grown up through a need to have this level of control. And another thing I would add is that sometimes they can be your friend, right? If you can work within those processes, right, and then when things get to be mature like service-oriented architecture, we are able to inject them in the appropriate way through the governance processes and the establishment’s practices, then it becomes easier to get the broad-based adoption, because it is familiar to people"

Bill Vass shared an interesting governance tactic from his CIO days, in respect to managing a systems integrator relationship:

"I put the requirement in their contracts that if they did not follow those things [architecture and programming standards], I did not have to pay them, they would do the work for free. And that tends to herd them in the right direction. Another thing that we did is incentives for re-use...most systems integrators are going to be incentivized not to re-use... because they are time and material, to build everything from scratch that they can for each individual chance, and sell the same thing over and over again. So what we did is we built into our contracts that if a service was created that could be re-used, and it gets re-used, then they get a bonus. And then if they re-use a service, they get a bonus. So they make more money if they re-use existing things. And this changed the behavior within the governance model where they went out and looked in the universal business registry for a get-order status before they wrote it, because they got paid more if they re-used one, because they would have less labor and greater profit. And if they created the get-order status routine, they would generalize it enough so others could use it, so they would make profit off of that. And this herded the cats towards an integrated architecture over time without – again, people are always the problem. It is not the technology. So I would love to see the government look at that kind of incentivized capability inside their contracts."

Later in the roundtable, the topic of skills came up.  In his response, Bill provided one of my (new) all time favorite quotes from a provider of products.  Emphasis is mine:

"It is finding people who can abstract, even people who can build an architecture without putting a product name in it is extremely hard. It is not an architecture if it has a product name in it. I spent a long time explaining that, because architecture lives beyond that, right, and I think that is a challenge across the board."

To listen to the full podcast (54 min) and/or read the transcript, go here.

Next up, we'll be releasing the podcasts from day 2 of the March meeting, which was focused on Centers of Excellence. 

Mass Technology Leadership Council’s SOA Governance Event - Member Guest Post from Dr. Burc Oral

Dr. Burc Oral, one of our SOA Consortium members, shares insights from last week's Mass Technology Leadership Council event.  Feel free to leave comments or questions for Burc.  Burc's post:

On June 21^st, I was a panelist at the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s SOA Governance Event, representing the SOA Consortium. There were approximately 35 participants at this round-table like event.

Following a short presentation to IBM’s SOA Governance model by Mark Colan, our moderator, Walter Kuketz, CTO, Collaborative Consulting kicked off the panel discussion. Panel participants:

• John Bularzik, Program Management Office, State Street
• Dan Foody, CTO, Actional and Sonic Software
• Guy Loewy, Founder and CTO, WebLayers
• Dr. Burc Oral, Sr. Architect, Cellexchange (SOA Consortium member)
• Kevin Rodin, Former CIO, Iron Mountain
• Stephanos Bacon, Vice President, Product Development, Iona Technologies

Some key concerns and efforts of the audience about SOA Governance were:

• Creating a Center of Excellence
• Establishing a SOA repository
• Incurring costs
• Managing application level services
• Degree of SOA competency by seekers of venture funds
• Designing a governance model
• Promoting interoperability
• Organization of services and their granularity
• Transition to target architecture

We focused on the following topics

• Standards. State of the standards in the SOA space and their governance
• PMO. Challenges in project management in SOA Governance
• Predictions. What is the 2 year outlook for SOA Governance

Standards

I gave a brief review of SOA consortium and its efforts to harmonize the landscape of standards, specifications, and recommendations. I mentioned that Consortium has brought multiple standards bodies together and working to create dialogue. I also explained the efforts to establish a Standards repository by the OMG SOA SIG. I had to wait till the afternoon to see the very first SOA Standards Repository built using MDA at our OMG SOA SIG meeting. So, I could not tell about this fantastic tool.

Other comments from the panelists and participants were:

• Open source is yet another de facto standard
• There is constant vigilance on the user side to keep up with the versions of the standards
• Product and user environments often has a mismatch in the standard version
• Standards are another set of tools
• Defining corporate policy to clear out this mess is crucial
• Establish re-use early and create funding of the efforts
• There is mandate internally on the standards but this breaks down with the vendors supporting different version of standards
• Inward and outward facing standards—in some cases there is a distinction; in other cases the line disappears
• Different policies for Internal and External Services.
• “Yesterday’s external services are today’s internal services in the face of M&A”, Kevin Roden
• Center of excellence is a approach for SOA Governance
• Governance comes first in the incremental adoption of SOA
• “Business process modeling has to come first”, Kevin Roden
• Governance for Standards is necessary: which standards for what Purpose, exceptions, documentation
• Look at Governance early

PMO

On PMO challenges the panel and the participants talked about:

• Transparency
• standard design
• compliance
• aligning business properties
• governance for IT/Delivery/Operations
• put controls around services about its reuse to prevent from increase in usage volume—think scalability
• Incubation period may be necessary for services to be reused
• “When silos come down, there will be a hurrah!”
• Cannot guess how a service will be reused, so put processes around reuse
• Governance requires a significant cultural change
• Reuse but not so blindly
• Consumption behavior needs to be regulated
• Who owns the service? Creator or operator? We may have to establish a stewardship similar to data. Data model owners and the database base owners are different

Predictions

There was no agreement on the timeline for organizations fully establish SOA Governance. The panelists did not see a two-year time frame plausible. A five-year horizon seemed to be more achievable. We all agreed on the importance of Governance and that it will require significant business transformation. This, in turn, will require business process management practices pervasively established in the organizations.

I remarked that while some countries have democracy as their governance model others have despots or kings. Better yet, there are several flavors of democracy. Alas, the world is still spinning. Just like the governance models of sovereign nations across the globe dynamically vary, there will be multiple SOA Governance models. There are already several of them out there. Just like governments change, models for SOA Governance will transform into newer ones. As we embrace this diversity, it is up to each enterprise to choose a SOA Governance model which they feel comfortable but without any further delay.

Posteriori Observations

“It is a jungle out there” says the opening song in the TV series Monk. Whether we like it or not we are deep in the SOA jungle and earlier we start easier it becomes to navigate through obstacles. We need to keep reminding ourselves that SOA is not about technology but about business strategy and SOA Governance, a subset of overall governance, is all about order. Implementing SOA as a business strategy in an orderly fashion calls for business transformation and organizational change.

Ready and willing will clear out of the jungle and will climb Mount SOA. No climb is a solo journey, however. The rise of Web 2.0 and social networking stand as an excellent reminder for the wisdom of crowds. Increasing number of businesses and government agencies are choosing the SOA Consortium as a medium to collaborate to their mutual benefit in SOA, and specifically in SOA Governance (e.g., measuring effectiveness, controlling for compliance, communication to inform all parties, guiding with policies empowering for better decision making).